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[Question]
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I'm working on a class of tetrapods similar to mammals with warm blood. I am planning for their metabolisms to be quite high on average, among the carnivores especially. They range in size from two grams to twenty tonnes.
In reality, birds are some of the warmest animals with body temperatures around 40.5 degrees Celsius, or 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Ideally, I planned for them to at least have a body temperature around that of birds. Similarly to birds, they use a large amount of energy to maintain fast reaction times and movement, as those traits are what gave them an ecological advantage. They also have four airsacs in their unidirectional respiratory system.
They cannot sweat. They have never evolved the ability to sweat because of humid and tropical environments.
Due to the risk of their proteins denaturing, I have come up with some sort of biological cooling system to prevent them from overheating. If you have any different ideas from this, I would love to know. **Next is mostly a long explanation of my idea.**(TL;DR at the end)
After inhalation, the posterior airsacs will be filled with air first, then push air into the small lungs. After deoxygenation, the air will enter the smaller anterior airsacs. There is a system of air vessels throughout the body, mostly present in the abdomen, head, and larger parts of limbs. These are connected to the anterior airsacs. The anterior airsacs are bidirectional, as they push air both out of and into the vessels, or out during exhalation. A one way valve prevents waste air from traveling back into the lungs. The air brought into the body passes by a membrane that allows acetone from an acetone filled vessel to evaporate. I chose acetone because it is volatile and biologically attainable. The then acetone vapor filled air will be exhaled or recirculated for more evaporation. When not in need of cooling, the opening between the anterior airsacs and the body can close.
I made a diagram to better represent the original idea. There is a color key for many of the lines on it, and it is of course simplified. The arrows with a gradient represent evaporation of acetone.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JQboI.png)
**A step by step breakdown:**
1. Inhalation- the air goes to the blue, posterior airsacs
2. Oxygenation of blood- the air is pushed through the pink lungs
3. The air is taken in by the orange anterior airsacs and either exhaled or pushed into the body
4. The air circulates through the body, and acetone evaporates into it through membranes
5. The vapor is pushed back into the anterior airsacs where it can be exhaled or reused
**TL;DR:** I'm using acetone to cool a creature by evaporating it into exhaled air.
If there are any suggestions on what I should do to improve it or make it more realistic, they would be appreciated. Even if this would never work, please let me know why. I probably over thought it, but thanks for looking at it.
[Answer]
You can use this system without the acetone and it will work just fine. The acetone really offers no benefit.
The [avian breathing](http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/RITCHISO/birdrespiration.html) system is identical to your system minus the acetone, and it works just fine for a size range from [sauropods](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12542-012-0140-6) (35 tons+) to hummingbirds (1.5 grams), none of which can sweat, sweating is a mammal thing.
the acetone is an unnecessary addition, which will require calories and thus the production of heat to produce. Water can be easily replaced from the environment whereas acetone cannot meaning if your creatures are overheating and short on acetone they have to heat themselves up even further making acetone, which is extremely counterproductive.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sVmd2.png)
[Answer]
I am so digging this because of the hard biology and also the use of acetone!
As I understand it, you start with the bird air system of air sacs, and have added "air vessels throughout the body" and acetone.
Here is the bird system of air sacs for reference.
<http://slideplayer.com/slide/6985021/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xq95a.jpg)
I am a big fan of acetone and like the idea of using it for cooling. Water is also good for cooling and also contributes to evaporative cooling through respiration - this is how panting works. Acetone would be better than water for cooling as it is more volatile but also more energetically costly - you need to make acetone from food but water you can drink or make metabolically. When you exhale the acetone you are throwing away calories to get cool.
So far: an acetone panting bird. Nice.
I am not sure how the air vessels help. Water (blood) has a much higher thermal mass than air and so is better suited to transport heat through the body. Probably best to have heat travel with the blood, have the acetone organ in the forward (waste air) air sacs, drop the pressure in the waste air sac on preparing for exhalation to facilitate acetone evaporation and then vent / exhale the acetone vapor and waste air.
Last thing about acetone: unless these things had tissue capabilities we do not, they would sweat acetone. The body is one big lake to acetone - it moves easily across all tissue barriers and equilibrates in the tissue. Acetone would traverse the skin and evaporate off. In people with high acetone levels you can smell it on the breath and on the skin both.
[Answer]
**Seems possible at least, though a tough way to stay cool.**
Compare to human cooling via sweat.
Heat of vaporization KJ/g
Water = 2.26 Acetone = 0.55
Thus water is over 4 times as effective as acetone on the basis of cooling per gram of fluid.
An active human sweats about 1 liter / hour, so 80 kg bird would have to use 4 liters/hr of acetone for cooling when active. Remember that we can just drink water to replenish coolant, but your birds would have to generate their acetone, an additional resource drain.
Seems like a large amount of effort to spend on cooling, but perhaps not an impossible biologic burden (better than burning up). It would help if food sources were abundant to make the energy requirements easier to manage. Flying is also more expensive that typical human excessive, so the actual cooling requirements are actually somewhat worse.
The smaller the bird, the worse the numbers get though. I suspect birds in the 2 gram range are impossible. The smallest bird on Earth is about 1.6 grams, which is thought to be near the lower limit of viable designs. Throw in a noticeably more expensive cooling system and I doubt the design is viable. Without a bit of dodgy math, I could not expect to come up with a better lower estimate.
Using an internal cooler instead of sweating acetone seems like a bad design, thermodynamics and scalability are working against internal cooling.
Sorry, meant to add that 20 tons is one huge bird, the [largest bird ever](https://planetsave.com/2013/06/28/argentavis-magnificens-largest-flying-bird-ever-giant-teratorn-facts-extinction-wingspan-etc/) was supposed to be less than 0.1 tons, so this seems like a stretch too -- easier to believe if surface gravity was lower than Earth.
[Answer]
As many people have mentioned,the activity required to create acetone in the body will likely counteract any benefits from using it for cooling.
Taking out the acetone step, you have essentially replicated an air cooling system for your creature. Since the various air sacks are part of the respiratory system, they should be full of [alveoli](https://infogalactic.com/info/Pulmonary_alveolus), in order to have sufficient surface area for oxygen exchange through the capillaries. This is similar to why radiators in cars have fins, to increase the surface area for heat exchange.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uXfFO.jpg)
*Surface area is king*
So the huge amount of surface area and the flow of blood through the alveoli essentially replicates a radiator, and the creature can essentially regulate the heat exchange through control of breathing, and via automatic processes that regulate the flow of blood thought the lungs and air sacks depending on temperature and need (for example, the creature might start reducing blood flow through secondary air sacks as the exterior temperature cools and there is less need for the body to shed waste heat, while in active pursuit of prey, all the air vents or nostril equivalents are wide open, the body if rapidly pumping air through the system and the flow of blood is maximized). Piston engined aircraft had a series of vents and controls to modulate the flow of air over the radiators for the same effect
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tmoe3.jpg)
*Cooling system on a P-51 Mustang fighter, with details on the venting system*
So all the creature really needs to evolve is an efficient system to regulate air and blood flow through the lungs and airlocks in response to temperature changes.
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I'm trying to design a world for a fantasy setting where some disgruntled god decided to give the general population magic powers. However, rather than recite a spell or use sheer will to use magic, people use runes.
In this world to use magic you have to write the runes involved in whatever change on the item. Your intention also matters. For example if you wanted to start a fire you could write the rune for "Flame" on a sheet of paper and set it in a fire pit, and it would do nothing. But writing runes for "Bind Will Fire" (As in, bind it to you, effect will happen when the person or thing it is bound to wills it to happen, and the effect is fire) and setting the paper in the fire pit, then willing it to happen, will cause the fire to ignite converting the matter of the paper into energy to fuel the effect.
There are also some rules and restrictions. You can only perform magic on things that you have considerably more willpower than. Everything living and nonliving, but not things that were once living, have sentient or semi-sentient spirits, and therefore wills. So you cannot perform magic on the planet Earth, as the spirit of the Earth has a much stronger will than any person. You'll also find that magic on another person is very weak, as most people have around the same level of willpower.
My questions are:
* How do I make magic that works like this interesting in a combat situation?
* What do I call someone that uses this magic?
* If the first question is too hard to answer, what changes can be made to the system to make it interesting?
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EDIT:
* I have gone with Grapheiomancer as a name for someone who uses this magic. It came from the Latin word 'Graphein', which means 'to write'.
* When no power source is specified, the atomic bonds of the object the rune is written on are broken to release energy. If the rune is written on a tablet or something of that nature, it consumes the whole object, and any excess energy is released as light and force, unless specified otherwise by the caster. Otherwise, if it's written on something they have a stronger will than, or if what they're writing on consents to the magic being preformed, then it leaves a crater, with the same way of dealing with extra energy.
* A power source can be anything that stores or produces any sort of energy. A battery for example. For extrasensory magic, many Grapheiomancers prefer to use their metabolism as a source of energy.
* There are spirits and gods in this world, and most spirits are bound to certain parts of the natural world. These spirits have a strong effect on how runes are used. For example, you usually can't trigger magic written on the ground, or stone connected to the ground, because the spirit of the Earth would destroy the rune and send you flying for even trying. Plants also have spirits, but most people can overpower them. You can't perform magic of the wind, but you can ask the spirits of the wind to do things. This requires a special rune, which most Grapheiomancers have tattooed on the backs of their off hand.
* The tech levels of this world are from the 'Anachronisms because plot' era. This means it's got a dark age peasant vibe going in the commoners villages, but there are elements of gearpunk thrown in, and a guy who was pretty much Nikola Tesla caused an electrical revolution. So the gears are fading out and giving way to arcs.
* Runes have an effect and draw energy at the time of triggering, and can have ongoing effects as long as they have a power source.
* The runes are the language of the gods, so they are the only ones who can create new ones. They grant knowledge to those of their followers who they think deserve it. They don't get mad when the knowledge spreads. (Usually.)
* The magic format is Trigger-Power Source-Effect-Modifiers, and anything included in the modifiers can be omitted and left to will by masters, but if a novice tries to do it, they will most likely end up injured by runaway magic.
* Because of the spirits, some magic is stronger and weaker depending on where it's being casted. A fire spell in a forest will be dampened or disabled because the forest spirits don't like fire. (Understandably.)
+ You need to know what a rune does as you trigger it to actually use it. If you don't, then it just does nothing. Assuming you can even READ the trigger condition.
[Answer]
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> But writing runes for "Bind Will Fire" (As in, bind it to you, effect will happen when the person or thing it is bound to wills it to happen, and the effect is fire) and setting the paper in the fire pit, then willing it to happen, will cause the fire to ignite converting the matter of the paper into energy to fuel the effect.
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Regarding battles, the mage could cast a number of prepared runes in order to distribute amongst wielders in the battle. These prepared runes could be in any format, such as a scroll with a simple fire rune, or a heal, however these prepared runes can be 'willed' into activation at any point by the mage.
I propose the following situations: Catapults/trebuchets to launch runed jars/containers of explosive/flammable oils/substances which can be ignited by the mage. Alternatively, these could be wielded by a soldier/scout, thereby allowing a single soldier to do significant damage even after he falls.
This type of danger will lead to a change in battle tactics; looser squad formations, inclusion of anti-magic strategies (anti-magic runes? training to deal with various common magic effects, i.e. fire dousing?)
The limitations with this type of magic, is how/when do the runes consume power; Are they imbued at time of creation, therefore requiring nothing but will to trigger (meaning given time, one mage could wield enough power to destroy empires), or will they be the channel for the power of the mages magic, thereby limiting each mages effectivity to power/restfulness.
Also one must note that sieging of cities/castles would be completely different, and even ambushes would be a different affair. This would be due to the ability to lay traps that could be activated by the mage at will, catching opponents off-guard and potentially decimating his foes.
You must also decide how common these abilities are, how common the knowledge is and how one goes about developing these gifts (i.e. are they conscripted as battlemages? is there a group of these mages i.e. a guild?), and also are there any non-combat or indirect beneficial aspects to the abilities (i.e. light rune on an object for a portable light, wind/air rune on a boat so as to reduce journey times, etc).
More interestingly, is there a way for the runes to be triggered by one who is not the caster? In this you may have a way of 'disarming' traps or reducing the impact of runed projectiles. Or perhaps this will allow for non-magic beings to purchase and make use of runes, perhaps on a black market for offensive abilities, but other runes may be available (at a price) such as runes of healing, light, or effects to help civilian life.
As for the name of these mages, most likely candidate being Runemage or Runecaster.
The system is interesting in itself, however possibly the most interesting question that can be asked is; where does the runic power come from (i.e. the casters life force?, some resevoir of mana for the world (Is it finite?), do they require sacrifices?, etc.). The most interesting thing about magic is not what it can do, but what its limits are.
[Answer]
It's a neat system. I've been brewing up something similar myself. For my system the runes need to be rather specific. For instance, you can't just write 'fire', you need to describe the chemical reaction which should take place. The more abstract the spell the weaker that spell is. In this way the very best magic users are the scientists, using the latest research. Also those few gifted individuals who have excellent mental models on the way things really work.
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> How do I make magic that works like this interesting in a combat
> situation?
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The combatants need to prepare materials before combat that will be consumed in the fight. This would be similar to a wizard memorizing their spells and using reagents for them. Or using scrolls to cast spells. Clearly a user might want to keep a pen around to improvise with, but writing something down in the middle of combat would be a last resort kind of solution.
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> What do I call someone that uses this magic?
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You call them Runemasters or Runecasters.
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> If the first question is too hard to answer, what changes can be made
> to the system to make it interesting?
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It works well the way it is. It's not horribly overpowered. The requirement for preparation makes it interesting and requires the users to be rather clever (and literate).
[Answer]
I like the rune craft ideas. Runemaster and Runecaster are the traditional terms for it, though it's often referred to as 'scribing'...have had a lot of fun with it in the past. The 'Rifts' roleplaying game had some interesting runes. The biggest thing is creativity for it really.
Bind will fire is an interesting methodology...what do you think of these options?
* Bind will proximity barrier.
Person walks by a rune, which triggers the rune (proximity being the trigger there) and erects a temporary colorless barrier infront of them...a little prankish (same effect as a person walking into a glass window they didn't see), but it will also block an attempt to flee
* Bind will impact force.
The rune master wears this rune on their person on their cloak or armor. In combat it activates upon being struck and it forces the opponent that struck the rune back 20 feet with a rushing force. If you prefer, these can also be written on your own feet giving you a one time ability to trigger them for a 'force' assisted jump.
* Bind will impact fire.
Same idea as above, it's just written on the back side of a club. When the wielder flips the club around and strikes an opponent, the rune bursts into flames
* Bind will ice cover
Stepping on this coats the ground in ice for some slippery fun
Runes are really limited to the extent of the language they are expressed in...repair boat? cut beam (a wooden pillar cuts in half triggering a cave-in)? mend clothing (or change cloth color)? tree skin (cover yourself in bark for camouflage or additional armor)? If it can be expressed in the runic language, then it can be used to some effect.
As you can see, the main draw to this in combat is pure creativity. Runes can be put on a huge variety of things...more words, more specific of reaction, more time to write.
Combat now includes a 'home turf' advantage that it wouldn't have had in the past and the ability to 'choose' the field of engagement to be one that you've had the chance to pre-scribe becomes a game changer.
And yes, your average person has around the same willpower. Your basic runic Scribe rivals that of a trained Navy Seal, and your rune master makes a Buddhist monk look like myself when I'm craving a smoke. Training your will power (meditation? discipline?) becomes and end all of these people.
Adding a bit more:
There is usually somewhat of a standardization to Rune wording.
Activation rune - trigger condition rune - effect runes
An activation rune is simply the 'this is a live rune' statement. A bunch of runes written in a row do nothing until this rune is written infront of it. "Bind Will" appears to be your choice here, though it can take varied forms.
Trigger condition is what activates the rune. Be it impact (touching the rune), proximity to the rune, a muttered phrase, a particular time (in a runic calendar?), a particular person or event, or next to anything you can think of. Lack of a trigger rune usually refers to it being activated by the rune scribers will.
And of course the effect runes are your desired outcome when the rune is triggered.
[Answer]
One just has to be creative with the materials they have available.
A rune-wizard may scribe hundreds of small objects (with low willpower) with varying phrases in preparation for combat. They may be hidden about his body like ninja weapons so that he can rapidly grab an effective one.
Consider, however, a rune-dancer. I beg the question of "why do we need the paper in the first place?" The usual answer is that you have to sacrifice something. However, could one not perhaps sacrifice emotions to get the same effect. I see an image of a rune-wizard standing on one side of a platform ready to cast a traditional fireball, while on the other side, the rune-dancer holds an ornate brush in her hand. With a crack of a smile, she rotates out from underneath the brush, bringing it down and letting it curve back up, writing runes into the air with her smallest of flourishes. The rune-wizard procures a small clay arrowhead enscribed with a spell and wills a fireball into being, it collides with the rune dancer, only to find that she had scribed a fire protection spell into the air as he was casting it. Now he faces her attack as she scribes a call for lightning. It's not as powerful as the wizard's abilities (which were prepared beforehand), but it is custom tailored to the current situation. The lightning forces him to step backwards, but that's right where he needs to be for a large spell she's been preparing the whole time to come down. Now he has to deal with a spell that she was effectively casting for the last 10 seconds, and his counterspells are up under his collar - he'll never get them in time before the spell lands.
The rune-dancer twirls twice, as a sign of thanks for the gods of magic listening to her with enough clarity to vanquish this foe, then calmly puts the brush away.
[Answer]
Well the most interesting part of this to me personally is laying out the runes. You have to inscribe them in a certain way, a certain order, with certain intent, etc, etc. The way I see it, at least to make this style of magic interesting in combat, is that you would end up developing different styles of magic for each purpose in combat and different titles for each kind of magic user. For instance, you may have front liners with big rubber stamps that say "bind will fire" and aim stamp attacks onto enemy clothing, then will the clothes to be on fire. Artillery attacks get easy as well. You could enchant an arrow to say "bind will fire" or "enemy hit fire" or the like and any arrow that hits an opponent bursts into flames. Even into the modern day, you could inscribe shells with runes to tell the shrapnel to burst into flames on impact. In combat, it would probably just make killing people cheaper and more efficient.
More interesting would be the ability to effect the physical qualities of something. For instance, if I could tell a cinder block to be flammable and set it on fire, I would have a pretty efficient, renewable energy source for my witch burning fires or whatever I would want to use flammable cinderblocks for. And by that same token, I could burn random things for electricity in the modern setting. Pyromania would be very profitable.
And in this fiery bombardment universe, you would call the casters sir (or ma'am). I would call them rune-atics. They could be called epigraphists (after epigraphy) if you wanted to go that route.
[Answer]
I have a pretty close idea for magic myself. I came up with mine while thinking about computer science and programming so i likened it to programming. Think of a single script of code as a "Spell", and with that spell can change the properties, realities, the laws of reality to the Spell references too. That would of course be a very easy system to manipulate, a fight that makes sense would be very boring and easy. So I decided that the magic must be more structured to prevent anyone being to strong too easy. Whatever effect that is desired must be written and your life forces or something with energy would fill in the text. And once the spell is fully filled and written it is ready to execute with what ever "gesture" you have assigned it. For example, a snap or words, or a kick. theoretically anything containing your life "essences" could be used, like pee, feces, blood, body parts, sweat, spit, or just your energy.
The more space you use to write Magic will require more energy, so writing small, efficient, and smart are desirable traits. Also the objects that you effect or create will require more willpower/energy the more mass(something along those lines) its has. I also made non humans(Animals fairies, demons) just produce more magic energy than humans do.
so a spell to set a ball on fire could be
"ball = this
exe. statement is snap()
when exe. statement= present
set ball on fire,
or set ball temp BIG NUMBER"
Then when the script is filled you can snap\* and the ball is on fire
Like coding, referencing preexisting objects with their default variable name is probably than making your own object with properties the exact same as the default object just so you can call it all you own would take more energy.
so affecting something already preexisting is easier than making your own raw stuff out of magic.
I do agree with you that writing magic in another language is better, because no you cant accidentally write in magic.
so to answer your question,
1. Yours or my system are both prep intensive(not a bad thing), so direct improv, on the spot magic would be really hard not impossible. Because thinking is hard if someone's punching you. So most wizards would prep a bunch of papers before hand like cards books, essay :p as ammo for fighting. my favorite, wizards start writing magic onto the cloths for easy acess to magic on their person. They soon start wearing/ developing big clothes like hats, scarfs, and ties or just more clothes to write more magic.
you also have tattoos as an idea, cool. What if those tattoos were runes and magic text spells themselves that automatically charge as you live. so you could shoot lazers out of your hands, electricity fire, or more arms. Or an if/and statements on your lungs or stomach.
This way fighting can still be improvised but not as easily.
2.I didn't think of names. Other people here have a good idea from picking from old names of writing. If not wizards, Reality writers? script men, pencil dorks?
ANTI TRADITIONAL SCIENCE
3.your magic systems sounds really good and sound as it is. But with magic here, i think society would develop much faster if it were like us right? Now magic everything would be too expensive. But basic mechanical machines are too dumb and dont do anything cool, so if you mix both you can theoretically maximize efficiency. Like a combustion engine that keeps itself going by moving one piston on when one is off and in turn. a water filter or mask that litterly only permits clean things to pass through. if thats what you want.
I also made messing with life with magic like tattoos taboo and later illegal or heavily monitored.
Powers that come from god are very easily explained. But are just suspension of disbelief i believe. you could have them discover magic by accident and then through experimentation develop an organised language.
I wish you cool stuff, i feel bad I wasn't the only one to come up with this idea but its also kinda cool in its own right. I believe that this system possibilities are limitless as long as they make sense. soon Humans will amass enough ambition and power to become their own gods. Keep up the hard work.
[Answer]
If things has "spirits" and spirits has willpower, it also has a will. Maybe the will of the spirit of the flames is more arguable with you. Lets go back a step.
If someone is hurt, you write the rune of skin and health on the wound, on a person who as more willpower than you, BUT - he will allow you to heal the wound. It will either be the same or more potent.
So, if you are writing a rune of fire, binding it to someone and the will of the spirits are with you - the flame is more potent. That is also, if you write a rune on the the mother earth, and the earth spirits are with you in this case. The magic will be more powerful.
Now the question was to make it interesting?: Well when you write the runes that is affected by spirits. You really don't know if they think it is a good idea. So the main character will have to make friends with the spirits. Maybe if the spirits don't like each other, and you make friends with the fires spirits the water spirits gets angry.
This gives you diplomacy, a lot of chance, the will of an uncontrollable part and the spirits of different stuff. That is interesting.
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**Edit:** See bottom of the post for answers to some great questions I got!
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# The Short Version:
How do I make perpetual motion machines that utilize the following things:
1. Bundles of weightless energy that bounce around like pool balls,
exerting force on physical objects and disappearing after a while
2. Force fields of arbitrary shape that can contain these bouncing things indefinitely
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# The Long Version:
I'm trying to create a steampunk world where steam power has been replaced by a reliable and well-understood source of magic.
The name I've chosen for this magic is **chiros** (pronounced *KĪ-rôs*), and it is a supernatural force that mirrors some of the laws of electricity. I'm trying to figure out how it might be harnessed as a source of power for a world similar to 19th century England.
Here are the rules governing chiros! It's a little weird but bear with me.
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Chiros is typically found in two forms, which we will call **valent** and **core**. I'll explain both of these in turn.
# **Valent: Chiral Projectiles**
**The Magic:**
Valent chiros is the most common kind, and what I expect to be powering most of society at the time. It is a **boomerang-like magical projectile** that can be emitted from a device called an Azoth. It interacts with and can impact physical objects, transferring energy and causing damage. Chiral projectiles tend to be "sharp", and can cut skin if you're not careful.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CQGW5.png)
They behave somewhat differently from normal matter. After collision with an object, **chiral projectiles do not tend to lose speed in the way that a physical object would**. Instead, some of its energy is dissipated and it becomes a somewhat weaker force--the next thing it impacts will be hit less hard, etc. In a loose sense, conservation of energy is preserved but not conservation of momentum. We can assume here that the speed of valent chiros remains rather constant--a low-energy chiral projectile won't necessarily be going much slower than a high energy one. (I can be pretty flexible/hand-wavey on this issue though.)
A chiral projectile released into a room will bounce around like a pool ball knocking into things until it uses up all of its power and vanishes. We can assume the heat generated from this is negligible. It is not affected by gravity or electromagnetic forces.
**The Catch:**
**Valent chiros, unless it is dissipated, must always return to its source**. So when you "throw" it, it returns in an arc like a boomerang. You can "absorb" the returning chiros safely using a material called an Alkahest (which I won't go into here) but if you fail to do so properly it can hurt or damage who/whatever sent it out. It is thus not recommended you try chiral projectiles at home.
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# Core: Chiral Objects
**The Magic:**
The other form chiros is seen in is nicknamed "core". It's a **standing wave structure** formed by oscillating a steady stream of valent chiral projectiles through a source at ultra-high speeds, so that it creates a **force field similar to a solid object**. Unlike valent chiral projectiles, these chiral objects can be touched and handled like regular objects, but have no apparent mass.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RcRIm.png)
**Chiral projectiles do not lose energy when striking a solid chiral object.** They will not damage the force field in any way, and all collisions will be perfectly elastic--in other words, no chiral energy is lost.
This provides us with one useful way of **containing chiral projectiles**. "Cages" made of core chiros can trap fast moving projectiles for an indefinite amount of time. (Physical containers can be used to hold valent chiros temporarily as long as the object isn't worn down and the projectile doesn't run out of energy). Of course the valent chiros will still "try" to return to its azoth, but since it's trapped it'll just bounce around in vain. Poor little projectile.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MNxCf.png)
*(Note: Ignore the fact that the picture shows a hand instead of an Azoth device. The technology actually comes from creatures called daimons that can manipulate chiros with their bare hands, so that's what we're looking at there. I left my iPad at work so I cant redraw it right now.)*
Core chiral objects can theoretically be made into any shape, although there are limitations based on the geometric complexity, aspect ratio, and distance from the azoth.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ssfEb.png)
*(Ignore hand again)*
**The Catch:**
Chiral objects **must remain in contact with their Azoth core** at all times. You can think of the Azoth as a sort of accelerator that the resonating chiros has to pass through at every cycle in order to keep going.
Unplug the Azoth from its power source (human blood :D) and the chiral object will disappear. (In the first chapter, one of the main characters demonstrates this at the local Institute of Chiromancy by "unplugging" a core chiral box that is holding a bouncing valent projectile. The box vanishes instantaneously and the projectile flies free, bouncing crazily around the room and mildly alarming the students.)
The exact mechanics of how to make certain shapes is not explicitly given, but we can assume devices can be made that will reliably project a certain geometry.
---
Whew. Okay, you made it through. Here's my question.
# *What steampunk-like devices can be adapted to use chiros to power society?*
How might one make a machine that converts this force field / semi-perpetually bouncing energy into work or heat? I imagine you could make solid chiral push-rods that push things around (given you had enough blood to power them), but I'm no mechanical engineer and my imagination is a bit limited. Likewise, I know a projectile bouncing back and forth in a tube could drive a piston, but I'm hoping you guys can help me get a little more creative than that. Unless a piston is by far the most efficient way to do things?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8EN6m.png)
I imagine the core chiral generated power would be a lot like plugging things into an outlet, while the valent chiros could be like a little portable "battery". But how would this work with the mechanical-only technology of steampunk England? (Assuming the whole electricity thing never caught on because of all this nifty chiros.) **Are there maybe "impossible" perpetual motion machine concepts that can now become possible?**
Clarification: I don't mean that we are necessarily creating energy from nothing, since you are technically using up ichor, an intangible essence. However, assuming you have infinite ichor, I'm wondering whether removing energy dissipation from certain actions would help us use designs that would otherwise fail because of that pesky second law of thermodynamics.
Thanks for your help, and for making it all the way through this! I'd appreciate any resources you can give me to help more tangibly "build" this weird infrastructure.
---
---
---
## **Edit: Answering some awesome questions**
>
> **Is the emission of a valent chiros reactionless? Is the return of a valent chiros to it's azoth reactionless?**
>
>
> The emission of valent chiros and its absorption can be considered
> reactionless in the physical realm.
>
>
> **What are its inputs?**
>
>
> It's a bit complicated/hand-wavey. All chiros actually exists in two
> fundamental states: corporeal (tangible) and ethereal (intangible).
> Tangible chiros is what I've described here. Intangible chiros has no
> interactions in the physical realm, but is "bound" to either a daimon
> soul or, less perfectly, to a human soul. Daimon souls need no
> medium--they act as big chiral magnets--but human souls are bound to
> chiros with *ichor*, an element of human blood. If humans bleed, some
> of that ethereal chiros bleeds out of them.
>
>
> What the Azoth and Alkahest do, respectively, is convert ethereal
> chiros into tangible chiros and vice versa. They can be considered
> catalysts in that they are not consumed--they just facilitate the
> conversion. Daimons can be their own azoth and alkahest, but humans
> need to use special magic devices to make it happen.
>
>
> Now, the humans don't fully understand this. No one fully understands
> why an Azoth or Alkahest work the way they do. There was an unpleasant
> war between humans and daimons a few thousand years ago, after which
> someone discovered that a special material made with alchemy was able
> to emit the strange projectiles those daimons kept shooting.
> Interfacing with this and bending it to the human will with chiromancy
> took a while, especially since most of the humans died in said war.
> Nowadays, humans aren't even sure whether daimons really existed or
> whether they were just ancient peoples' attempts to explain this
> strange phenomenon. We're more focused on using it to make money and
> kill people, our favorite hobbies.
>
>
> **What are my options for automation? Can I just give it an instruction to continue emitting?**
>
>
> Yes. Especially if this could help me make cool machines!
>
>
> **Can I slow down the oscillation used to make a chiral object and rely on a strictly rotating output?**
>
>
> Great question! I could go either way on this, and the possibilities
> are interesting. So I think yes! Thinking about it, you would probably
> need to be able to exert some influence on its speed to use it
> properly, but there is definitely a minimum speed a chiral projectile
> can possess.
>
>
> **Can I preload blood into an azoth to maintain a chiral object?**
>
>
> You HAVE to! Azoths are usually powered by a blood tank/vial. How
> "good" the blood is as fuel is roughly correlated with how much, say,
> you'd want to use it for a transfusion. So old crusty dried blood?
> Nah, all the ichor is gone. I'm still trying to decide what to do
> about refrigeration.
>
>
> **Can I weld an azoth to steel?**
>
>
> Great question. The short answer is basically. One of the important
> things I glossed over is that the power to generate core Chiros can be
> "conducted" through materials much like heat or electricity, with
> different materials exhibiting a different chiral conductance. So
> Azoths are usually connected to a contact plate using superconducting
> metals/wires, and the chiral structure is projected from the surface
> of that plate.
>
>
> Valent chiros, however, is unlikely to be spontaneously transferred
> from the air into a material without the use of some special catalyst.
> The humans are still working on it.
>
>
> **Can I change the apparent size of the particle?**
>
>
> Yes--the size is roughly correlated to the power, although not
> linearly.
>
>
> **Can I make it emit more than one particle at a time?** Yes--this is how resonant chiral objects are made.
>
>
> **Can I change the direction it emits somehow, or do I need to put it on a turntable for that?** Sure! I'm not picky about this, so if it
> opens up possibilities then go for it. I imagine it's easier/more
> efficient to make something that shoots in one direction and then aim
> it like a gun.
>
>
> **However big is the smallest azoth? Does it's size affect it meaningfully?** That depends! I'm still building this world and that
> is a flexible parameter. I imagine there would be a size correlation.
>
>
> **Can I arrange to add energy to a valent chiros in flight, and if I do, can I make it go faster, or do I only get to add apparent
> momentum?** Only if it goes through the azoth. I guess you would have
> to have some way of making it go faster if resonant structures are
> possible.
>
>
> **...And either way, is it's size in lock step with that apparent momentum? Could I choose to transmit the force of a bullet as a slow
> moving pillow the size of a house?** Whoa! That is an awesome
> question! I actually laughed out loud at that image. I'll have to
> think about it, but my knee jerk reaction is no on that scale. I think
> higher energy projectiles will tend to go faster naturally, and there
> is a minimum speed at which they travel. I think we may go a bit soft
> magic on the specific technicalities of speed and momentum, so feel
> free to take some creative license.
>
>
> This is super helpful! One of the things I'm trying to do is figure
> out what parameters this magic force would have to have in order for
> it to be useful as a source of power, and these questions are really
> helping direct that. Keep them coming!
>
>
>
>
> ---
>
>
> **I need to know if the rate of blood consumption is affected by the return energy of the projectile. That is, does recapturing a
> projectile that failed to dissipate (say, because it's path of travel
> was extremely short) give it's spare energy back somehow, or is that
> undissipated energy lost?** Excellent question. I am pretty flexible
> about how efficiently such a transfer occurs. With an Alkahest
> chirally connected to the blood source some of the energy is returned
> but it is necessarily lossy. I am still trying to figure out a good
> rate for blood/ichor consumption. I do know blood can be purified to
> have a higher concentration of ichor, which helps make devices more
> compact, but I'm trying to find a balance where the technology is
> useful but not overpowered. A tank of blood? A vial of blood? How far
> will a smear of blood get you before it dries? I need to feel out the
> various repercussions before I can tune these parameters in a
> reasonable way.
>
>
> **If I mount a chiral shield to a physical object, can I still rely on that apparently massless object to pass force onto it's mount? Careful
> here, or your chiral box is easy to make fly out of control forever
> until it runs out of blood** Good point! The chiral object, when
> connected to a plate or source, acts like a physical extension of that
> object, so it would move when the plate moved and vice versa. Maybe
> massless is the wrong word for it--what I mean is that it's weighless,
> in that it isn't affected by gravity.
>
>
> If you didn't tie down your plate well and used materials too light,
> you would indeed have it be knocked about until it ran out of ichor!
> However, even though the projectile doesn't dissipate from mere
> contact with the chiral object per se, the energy transferred to
> making the whole object (and all its physical attachments) move around
> would in fact consume the energy. That would be effectively an
> inelastic collision.
>
>
> Hmm. Does that make sense from a physical point of view, or is that
> contradictory? There might be some loophole I'm missing here.
>
>
>
>
> ---
>
>
> **Does there have to be a closed loop? Do I have to have an alkahest to absorb the projectile, or can I skip having the alkahest
> altogether?** It doesn't have to be a closed loop, and you can skip
> having the alkahest. The purpose of the alkahest is to safely and
> conveniently convert the chiros back into a non-damaging form, but
> there are a few that decide not to use it because YOLO.
>
>
> In the absence of an alkahest, I can think of two possible options for
> how a projectile reacts with an azoth and haven't decided which to
> pick.
>
>
> * Option 1: Without an alkahest, some of the power/ichor will be transferred back to the azoth, but some damage will occur and part of
> it will ricochet off.
> * Option 2: A valent projectile will interact with an azoth just like any other physical object, causing damage. No energy is returned, no
> ichor is regenerated.
>
>
> **Does the alkahest have to be paired to the given azoth? If they don't have to be, could I pair them off by choice, or is it going to
> be heading back for the nearest alkahest?** Great question. I didn't
> draw it very well but the projectile/beam will always head back to the
> azoth it was released from, regardless if an alkahest is nearby or
> not.
>
>
> An alkahest however can be "paired" with an azoth by putting them in
> chiral contact using a conductor. In this connected state, they
> conduct their powers to one another act as a single unit, with the
> projectile being drawn to the center of chiral mass of the collective
> unit. I haven't yet come up with a good name for this conjoined
> device, so for now we can just call it an "Alka-zoth" for short.
>
>
> (Thanks to @SeanBoddy for these awesome questions. A true engineer!)
>
>
>
>
> ---
>
>
> **When an alkahest absorbs a valent chiros, does it convert that to energy, or does the chiros disappear entirely? Does an alkahest escape
> damage because it converts the chiros to an intangible heat, or
> because it is rigid enough to survive the impact — e.g. a bulletproof
> vest resisting puncture?**
>
>
> When an alkahest absorbs chiros, if it's chirally connected to the
> azoth's fuel supply, (most of) the energy will be returned to the
> fuel. The alkahest acts as a catalyst that absorbs the chiros before
> it can ricochet back. As for whether some momentum is transferred to
> it, i can go either way!
>
>
> **How is an azoth instantiated? Does it require an initial ‘sacrifice’ of blood? When that happens, will it continue to emit chiros, like an
> open channel, or will it need charged?** Azoths are the
> initiator that converts chiros into physical form. I can think of two
> possible ways to handle the charging thing, but am still waffling back
> and forth because I haven't thought of all the ramifications.
>
>
> * Option 1: Each release of chiros requires some ichor (an intangible substance found in blood).
> * Option 1: The Azoth is just a catalyst. Ichor (element in blood) converts the azoth temporarily into active form, but it will revert by
> itself over time so you need to regularly input blood in order to
> maintain a properly functioning catalyst.
>
>
> So one of these options uses blood kind of like gasoline, and the
> other one kind of like...motor oil, I guess?
>
>
>
[Answer]
(I apologize for the late answer, but I got a strangely inconvenient promotion that basically nuked all my free time from orbit. I know I was looking forward to doing this sooner.)
I wish I could have given you a perpetual motion machine, but sadly, without actually handwaving physics entirely, you wouldn't get perpetual motion with any real output. So instead I built a handheld drive unit that, if used properly, could accelerate you to relativistic speeds with very few problems and no exhaust.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gGBKD.png)
Pictured above is something that is going to be central to your chiromancers whether you know it yet or not. With your notes as given, allowing a small air gap to exist between the valent chiros and the azoth upon emission creates a situation where an alkahest can be paired right at the front of the thing, and the projectile has absolutely no chance of striking the azoth and causing damage. Given this layout, there is absolutely zero reaction from the back end, and if it is mounted correctly, it can impart significant thrust to almost anything with surprisingly few problems. Though not really working that way, one can imagine mounting them as anti-gravity units, but their pulsing nature would require careful timing control on the part of the chiromancer controlling it, or laying out the system. If you used several and tuned them correctly, this could enable personal flight, and do it well enough to put you in orbit. Of course, the flight applications - or any power output, really - depend on the conversion rate of the azoth turning blood into kinetic energy. The raw energy to make a 100 kilo person fly at 10 meters per second is contained within about 29 Nolan Ryan 108 MPH fastballs.
Momentum is conserved but depends on mass, so while I can't really describe the collision physics of your projectiles, I can say that each firing should impart a roughly equal amount of kinetic energy, and if this thing is a useful weapon, then containing it like this should be able to extert *significant* thrust, probably enough to (eventually) put a person into orbit depending on the conversion rate. So maybe give that some consideration when asking yourself how that works, and remember it's magic - sometimes someone can use something three hundred percent more efficient than it should be, because he's just that darn good.
But take another look at the core layout, and consider the implications of its shape. Chiromancers are going to keep these things on hand for several reasons. This thing is not only a thruster. If you open the end of the container, it is a cannon. If you manipulate the the core object to give you a handle, it is a very, very serious hammer. If you make the core object very wide indeed, it is a shield. If you turn it inside out and make the core object very long, flat and thin, it becomes a wildly sharp and virtually weightless sword with a gun in the pommel that can readily absorb valent projectiles.
The engineering implications depend on *exactly* how advanced your civilization is, but it shouldn't take them long to figure out that core chiral objects attached to flywheels make the *very best* clutches for engaging rotating loads. I can't imagine a better clutch than one that simply ceases to exist when it is disengaged. Also, the ability of a chiromancer to link outputs (size, frequency, overall kinetic energy) to inputs from the physical world can create some very, very cool things. Imagine a chiral core drive sequencer that runs a thousand or so of the pictured core drives in a very carefully managed output of thrust that depends on angle and velocity. That, my friend, is an airship. More specifically, it is a 'hammership'. You have my permission to use that.
See, I didn't really invent any of this stuff. You told me the rules, and I told you what that means. This stuff just exists in your world. If you want to get really very detailed, I could ask so, so many more questions. What materials are chirally conductive? Are there insulators? A chemist might be able to build a chiral semiconductor for you to enable direction control and switching, depending on how the conduction mechanism works.
I hope to see you post more regarding this. You've clearly given it quite some thought, and I found myself fascinated.
[Answer]
If I really understood your physics, which is quite similar to Photons, this method will turn a wheel. This is possible due to not loosing energy when hitting the walls of hollow core cube. Once they hit the regular matter, they will transfer the energy to it, pushing the arms.
Valent projectiles cannot escape the box and will loose all momentum, thus Alkahest is not necessary. Unless of course the device is destroyed while working, which will cause some mayhem. Here is the graph.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sctsr.png)
[Answer]
If you add one more type of chiros, a purely mechanical use becomes possible. What you need is a gravitic chiros which can change the direction of flight of valent chiros with no loss of energy or momentum. This would be similar to your core chiros but without the need for maintenance. With this additional form available, a simple chiros engine could be created...
High energy valent chiros are launched from an azoth, into a cylinder with a standard piston and drive assembly mounted at the top. The chiros would strike the piston head, pushing it upward, which raises a rod and turns the drive shaft through a partial rotation. Ricocheting off of the piston head, slightly lower valent chiros would race back towards the bottom of the cylinder but midway down, it would be caught in by a gravitic chiros which turns it around 180 degrees such that it slams into the piston head again. This repeats until all of the energy in the valent chiros has been transferred to the piston head. The chiros then gets pulled down by gravity past the gravitic chiros (it no longer has enough energy to turn around and fly back up) and there at the bottom of the cylinder, it either meets its alkahest or dissipates.
Now attach gears to the drive shaft and attach those gears to some real world mechanism as you would a spring or engine. The only remaining trick is to tune those gears so that they apply enough resistance to the drive shaft such that each valent chiros can turn the shaft 1/n complete turns, where n is the number of cylinders attached to the drive train. That way each cylinder consumes one valent chiros per cycle to turn the drive shaft a portion of a complete turn and all of the cylinders, firing in series, collectively turn the drive shaft once per cycle.
[Answer]
If I'm on to something here, leave a comment to that effect and I'll amend this answer. If not, also leave a comment and I'll delete this.
If there is even a chance that this answers your question, please: no bounties. I know that sounds like arrogance, so I beg your pardon.
**Edit:**
I also didn't see Cem Kalyoncu's answer, which resembles mine but is a much simpler design and doesn't require switching.
---
So, firstly, I recommend that you don't use the ‘chiral’ because that has a different meaning, quite possible in your context, and could be confusing. Use **chirate** or something.
What you are describing is, as seems to me, a group of junction points between two universes of sorts. These points are the souls of humans and daimons, and these azoths and alkahests, and the valent chiros.
We know nothing of what occurs in the other universe, but it seems like you and the daimons have a better idea — keep it that way! That's part of the fun of these magic worlds.
When an alkahest absorbs a valent chiros, does it convert that to energy, or does the chiros disappear entirely? Forgive me if you mentioned that in the question above, but I didn't see it.
Does an alkahest escape damage because it converts the chiros to an intangible heat, or because it is rigid enough to survive the impact — e.g. a bulletproof vest resisting puncture?
How is an azoth instantiated? Does it require an initial ‘sacrifice’ of blood? When that happens, will it continue to emit chiros, like an open channel, or will it need charged?
If it requires fed by the chiros in blood to produce free, valent chiros, then the short answer is:
**No. It would not satisfy the requirements for a perpetual motion machine.**
If so, then break; Elsewise, continue.
---
## My proposal:
Anyways, if the azoth emits valent chiros at a constant rate, we can use it to form a core chiros of a useful shape:
* e.g. a big torus containing a pinwheel.
* Have chiros orbiting around in this core, and then set the pinwheel turning.
* Use a mechanism attached to the pinwheel, e.g. a centrifugal governor, to control switching of the azoth.
* When the pinwheel slows, the core cage is dissapated, and the chiros impact the fins of the pinwheel. Because they are made of alkahest, the chiros aren't deflected but absorbed when they collide with the fins.
* If that absorbtion confers any kinetic energy in our physical universe, then these absorbtions will accelerate the pinwheel, which spins the governor and switches on the azoth again, generating the core cage once more.
[Answer]
You *can* make a perpetual motion machine!
Your chiral objects have inertial mass but not gravitational mass. So simply create this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WFbOL.png)
This is a flywheel with Azoth devices attached. Assume that the flywheel is massless and the Azoth devices have mass (both gravitational and inertial); this works the other way around or with any combination, but it's easier to explain that way.
Start the flywheel spinning a little bit; the rotation due to gravity on one side balances out the rotation due to gravity on the other side. Now turn on the Azoth devices so that they create Chiral objects... but only on the side of the flywheel going up. Keep swapping it so that the chiral objects only exist when they're moving upwards.
Since Chiral objects inherit their momentum from the Azoth devices that created them, or from whatever they're attached to (I'm not clear on the details, but both work), attaching a Chiral object to a regular object and then dropping the system will result in the combined object falling more slowly than it usually would. Throwing an object up in the air and then activating an attached Chiral object will make it fly higher than it normally would (since the Chiral object is "absorbing" some of the gravitational force applied only to the regular object), and disabling the Chiral object at the peak of its parabola would then result in the regular object crashing to the ground at a greater speed than that at which it was thrown.
This is hideously, hilariously broken. Farewell, Conservation of Momentum. Farewell, Conservation of Energy. ~~Professor Othello's occupation's gone.~~
This flywheel will feel a greater acceleration on the downward side than is felt on the upward side. It will rotate faster and faster. I believe that it will also feel a net force in the direction of gravity and in the direction that the underside of the flywheel moves.
This is really, really broken; it shows the true danger of Chiral objects, since any use of them could potentially have this effect. If not carefully balanced out across the planet, you could soon find the length of the day changing and the planet drifting closer towards or further from its star. (The orbital movement could present itself as increased meteor showers as the planet clears a new orbital path... but you'd probably all be dead by that point.)
This flywheel allows you to perform calculations to determine the minimum amount of energy a given unit of ichor must contain in order to prevent this from generating free energy. However... it's still violating Conservation of Momentum any way you look at it. It doesn't even take a professional physicist to see that. *This will exist in your world.*
]
|
[Question]
[
Giant winged beasts such as the [Roc](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roc_%28mythology%29) and the western dragon feature strongly in mythology. Is there a maximum size on a biological winged flying creature? How would an atmosphere different from Earth's change such a limit?
[Answer]
This depends on many factors. A scientific way, how to approach this problem, is called allometry. If we change some conditions, physical parameters more or less change with certain power of the change. For example according to [Kleiber's law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law), the amount of food an animal needs is scaled as $M^{3/4}$ with its mass $M$. This means that if human of mass 100 kg needs 1 kg of food per day, mouse of mass 100 g will need $(0.1 / 100)^{3/4} \times 1\;\mathrm{kg} = 5.6\;\mathrm{g}$. This fits quite well.
Similar laws can be derived for the flight, which allows us to estimate, how difficult it would be to flight in a very thin atmosphere like Mars has, or a very thick atmosphere of Venus.
### Power to sustain flight
According to the book Modelling the Flying Bird by Pennycuick, the bird's flight induces velocity change on air. This velocity is approximately calculated as
$$v = \sqrt{\frac{2 M g}{ \pi B^2 \rho} }$$
Here $M$ is bird mass, $g = 9.81 \;\mathrm{ms}^{-2}$ is the gravitational acceleration of Earth, $B$ is the wingspan, $\rho$ is density of air and $\pi$ is mathematical constant pi. This is not the velocity of the bird, but the velocity change of air induced by the flight! It is only important to calculate the power $P$ needed to sustain the flight
$$P = M g v$$
These three laws should be enough to answer your question in almost any environment. You can calculate how much power you need for flight and how much power is approximately available from the food for animal of given size.
Let us try to calculate things for [Quetzalcoatlus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus), the largest animal that ever flew. (Wingspan 10 m and mass 200 kg). According to the formula for velocities, v = 12.7 km/hour. Power necessary for that is approximately 7 kW, which is 10 horse powers. Given the animal is approximately of size of a horse, it seems reasonable and we see that the flight was probably quite a demanding task.
Let us try martial eagle (4.6 kg, wingspan 2 m). We get v = 10 km/hour and the required power would be 120 W. I do not have these information about eagles, but they seem reasonable to me. We can see that airplanes can flight with quite small wingspan, but only because they can use extremely large power output of their engines. Animals do not have that advantage and they need bigger wingspan. (This can become a problem, if a 20 ton animal required 100 m wingspan to get within reasonable power requirements - its wings are still from flesh and bones and it probably couldn't support the animal weight.)
### Dense atmospheres
We can also see that the flight on Venus (had it breathable atmosphere) would require 20x smaller power and much bigger animals could flight there. Maybe even more, because for very dense atmospheres, the Archimedes law will start reducing the animal mass, which will make the flight even easier. In very dense atmospheres, flight would be very similar to swimming and birds might be similar to fish.
[Answer]
I recall from long, long ago that someone had worked out that a length of about 5 meters was the upper limit (larger than that and either it couldn't fly or its wings would snap under their own weight).
I did, however, dig up [this](https://sites.google.com/site/anthonysgurps/dragon-physics) article on dragon physics. There's also [this article](http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?255007-Biomechanics-of-Flight-aka-Can-Dragons-Fly-!)
Oh, and just so we can skip it all together, a hydrogen balloon is not terribly buoyant (look up how much helium it takes to lift a human). [This post](http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=94450#p3163336) on the XKCD forums talks about it, if you're interested.
[Answer]
Gliding should be possible with much bigger sizes than a possibility to take off, land and live on the ground. During flight, the wings are supported by the air so need no bones and muscles strong enough to hold them stretched while standing in place. Like on a propeller plane, additional pair of much smaller wings may provide a propulsion if required. Also a plane needs most of its engine power during take off.
The creatures could take of from the land into the cruising altitude before being fully grown up.
]
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[Question]
[
In my setting there is a mad artificer making armored cars for the army. The cars have wooden frames with 10 mm of steel on every side, wooden wheels with metal plates covering them, and are propelled using two different methods (some have horses which sit within the cart and push it forward, and the others have slaves inside who use large handcranks to rotate the wheels). They have several wheels to get even ground pressure and all the openings (two vision slits, and multiple arrow slits around the vehicle) are covered with visors that can be closed. Some of the larger cars also have cannons mounted in them, which can fire forward, and others have small cannons (basically just oversized muskets) or magic machine guns mounted in a turret.
The infantry fighting the cars would need methods to face the cars both in open combat (meeting on the field of battle) in random encounters (infantry have no time to prepare) and ambushes (where the infantry have time to prepare)
With this information, how could people in a low fantasy setting with 1400’s technology and limited magic defeat these vehicles?
Edit:
After reading the input I have decided to adapt the concept for the cars. Lots of people have mentioned mud being a problem, and I do not know a fix for that besides wider tires and each wheel having it's own suspension so that they all touch the ground (and perhaps more wheels).
People have also mentioned the use of artillery against the car, and while that would be a threat I don't think that the weapons which would be used in this time period would be good enough to reliably take out the cars.
Something to mention that I should have before, the setting is very low magic. Someone having magic ability at all is one in a million, and the odds of that person also being skilled and smart enough to become an artificer would be incredibly rare. As far as the setting is concerned the artificer is the only person capable of making any sort of advanced weapon (like the magic machine gun).
Otherwise some of the answers have been very useful. The use of Naphtha (something I didn't realize was known about at the time) is especially interesting.
[Answer]
So, you ask how to defeat an army of that side with the artificer?...
Honestly, the description is so insane that best thing opponents can do is actually give that side a second artificer, to spend more resources on tanks.
A 3 by 3 by 3 meters box, small compared to modern tanks, would weight 4 tons. Thats 4 tons of high quality steel. That 4 tons could make at least 40 best equipped knights. Or 4000 lightly equipped militia.
Every single tank that this artificer convinces his commander to spend resources on is a huge win for the opponent.
There is absolutely nothing that can spend as much resources as wastefully as this artificer, so the prime goal of the opponent is to make and send them another artificer, or convince that side that this artificer needs to make more tanks.
For this best option is to stage whole battles, never use trenches and molotov cocktail, never use uphill territory, never use any sort of soft ground for a battlefield selection, never force these tanks to go across a river, especially not by bridge. Never ambush these vehicles, never jump on them, never set up traps, never push branches between its wheels... you get the point.
You absolutely must use this extremely rare opportunity to force your enemy to believe that this contraption works. Retreat when tank comes. Give up whole villages. Dont even bypass the tanks, take the battle, make it loud, make them think the tank has any meaning on the battlefield whatsoever. Build only very weak and not angled walls that this tank can barely push over. Send spies that will tell the opponent that your side is afraid of more tanks. That these tanks instill fear in your troops. Make sure that the tank factory is working well. Send spies to actually protect the tank factory. Yes. Every danger to the tank factory is a danger to you, tank factory must work. No action in this scenario is anywhere as beneficial as protection of opponent's tank factory.
Keep doing it while opponent spends more on tanks than he gets from conquered territory. Help your opponent build roads - this is also super important. Make sure his allies lend him money to buy more resources. But keep in mind to destroy any other army that he has, other than tanks, so that he wouldnt even think switching strategy.
Then, depending on how far you can retreat, in about 3 years with good roads and a thousand of km, just stop pretending. Thats all you have to do.
Even medieval farm people have enough imagination to completely destroy a tank army. They fought knights, they know that pointy sticks are good for preventing knights from moving. Same works here. Just a man with a stick has a very good chance of immobilizing a tank of this sort. It will be hard to keep all your men from doing so, but it is worth to win the war, rather than just force opponent to switch to another army early on.
Why are men with sticks enough? Because even modern tanks have problems with them. Even with heat-vision, opponent can sometimes get close to a tank. Even against automatic weapon and wide angle cameras. Slots for view and muskets that reload a whole minute? Three men moving from all sides are almost guaranteed to immobilize a tank, even with no commanding, no great plan, just farm people acting alone.
If you think you will need some sort of army to defeat these tanks, I still suggest just militia with shovels. Even a shallow trench will stop such a tank. If you make a trench, tanks cant cross it, not enough power. If you put an angled sticks, that also was extremely popular at that time against cavalry, tank cant push it. Basically even a knee deep irrigarion channel, that is useful for farms, will be a great wall against such tanks.
If you are absolutely certain that even that wont work, well, then use superweapon of the medieval time - fire. Just hide in a trench till tank comes close, then throw a bottle or even a bag of something gooey and flamable, cooking oil is good and is known for millenia. Alcohol with not much water or lighter oils or wood distillation product soaked in paper or dry leaves for ease of fire distribution. A flint and a little of gunpowder for ignition, or even just keep a small set of glowing charcoal if even a few grams of gunpowder per tank is too much. It works even against modern tanks. Sulfur, pressed vegetable oil, oil from the ground, animal fat, all work and are known for millenia. If even that is too high tech, well, then even a weaved basket of leaves will do. Yes, they dont burn as hot, but they provide smoke. And then just keep adding flamable stuff on top of a tank till its well cooked.
This is a combination of tactics that were used against knights and in sieges of small towers. Both are very well known and anyone from that time will be able to understand it, and probably lots of farm people already did it and have an experience with it.
Repeat that for every tank, lose less people than opponent has tanks, and you are good to go. Collect all the valuable steel and use it for the industry, because it is absolutely useless as a low power tank, in a world with sticks, walking away, trenches and fire.
The most expensive part will be to use high quality spies that will make sure that opponent doesnt change tactics.
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A mud pit is more than enough to stop it. Wooden wheels, even when plated with metal, do not have that much of a grip, and once they are sunken into thick mud it's a real hassle to free them up.
Being the wheel the source of traction, since you mention that somehow the horses or the humans convey torque to their axles, this means that as soon as that torque cannot be discharged to the ground the vehicle will be stuck.
By the way, mud and water is also effective at stopping modern tanks, since one of the first worries of the Nazis while invading the Netherlands during WW2 was preventing the Dutch from breaking their dams and flooding the countryside.
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Honestly pretty much any obstacle will do the trick. Remember that original tanks were pretty much just a metal box with tracks and huge engine, that could go through the barbed wire, little to none offensive capabilities, that was their primary objective, to be hard to be stopped. If it could be easily stopped, it would not be a useful machine.
The trick to being hard to stop, is horse power and tracks. Even the earliest tank (Mark I) had somewhere around 105 hp at its 28 tons weight and tracks. Why is that important? The track offer you traction which means that the power of your engine will propel you forward. And powerful engine will help you go even if something is trying to stop you.
* Your tank has no tracks and very little horsepower.
* Ditch stops you,
(to be fair large enough ditch will stop even modern tank, but even a
small ditch will suffice for yours.),
* Mud stops you, because your
wheels lack the traction of the tracks.
* Damp tilled soil will stop
you because your wheels lack the traction of the tracks.
* Tree logs
will stop you, because the horsepower will be insufficient to move or
surmount it. Boulders will stop you because the horsepower will be
insufficient to move or surmount it.
And once you are stopped, a medium sized fire will deal with the people in your tank.
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# Molotov Cocktails
**Advantages**:
* Within the technological capabilities of the time
* Simple construction, soldiers can make their own easily
* Easy to carry, small, and lightweight
* Fast to deploy, soldiers already often have lit fire with them (eg torches)
* Can destroy or render inoperable an armored vehicle
The main disadvantage that your armored vehicles have is that they are vulnerable at close range and/or without infantry support. Yes, there might be a cannon, and yes there are arrow slits that the people inside can shoot out of, but arrows and cannons can only be shot so fast. There's little stopping someone from running up to one or getting close enough to chuck a bottle with a flaming rag in it.
**Effectiveness**:
Molotov cocktails, despite how simple they sound, are even capable of disabling modern battle tanks, by being thrown through open hatches. Your armored vehicles, despite being clad in metal, still doubtlessly have gaps where burning liquid can pour in, and even if the burning liquid misses and hits the ground, it's going to take a lot to convince the internal horses to walk through fire.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/abxSN.png)
[Article (warning Paywall)](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/1498969/Soldiers-tell-how-torrent-of-burning-petrol-poured-into-their-Warrior.html)
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## By going round it
It's not a castle, it doesn't have to be defeated. It's not mobile, not in the real world before good roads\*, so that aspect can be ignored. Ultimately the way to defeat it is not to engage it. It's one of those great ideas that's more useful to the enemy because it's too expensive and unwieldy to actually use.
Transporting it over any distance would slow down the army considerably. It's not actually any more useful than field guns on wheels. If you're not having a [pitched battle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitched_battle) you'll never have the thing set up in time to field it anyway. It'll have to be transported as a kit of parts after all.
I suggest you pay more attention to those magical machine guns you mention, those really will be a game changer.
\**The gound is going to be too soft or too rough for it to actually move with that drive system and that weight.*
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To understand how to counter any threat, you must first determine what the threat is capable of, what it is used for, and what techniques your enemy will use to achieve thier goals. What you should not assume is that that these tanks will be engineered to specs that make no logical sense, or that they will just charge into any situation like mindless drones. To effectively counter any enemy, you must first assume there is atleast a basic level of intelligence behind your enemy's actions.
## First, let's look at how a smart enemy would engineer these tanks.
A lot of answers so far speculate about the mobility of these tanks, but I will try to go more into actual numbers to solve for if you CAN make a reasonably mobile medieval tank. I will go with 2 draft horses because a 3-4 horse tank will not be able to maneuver around the sharp turns you find in many medieval roads, and a 1 horse tank is far less efficient, and would have a very hard time moving the weight of the tank even on paved roads.
To enclose 2 horses, and leave them enough room to walk, you will need a box about 300x200x400cm for the body of your tank. Which is roughly 3,500kg of steel. You will also need a turret which will need to be about 150x150x150cm to seat a single gunman and a driver. This is another 850kg. A Gatling gun with ammo is about another 100-150kg. Your wheels and wooden frame is looking like 600-1000kg depending on how many wheels you go for. Your 2 riders are another 125kg
Add this all up and you are looking at a tank that weighs roughly 5175-5625kg.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6tg5V.png)
The maximum sustainable wagon load on a paved road for a pair of draft horses using historical wagon design and road paving techniques is about 10-11 tons; so, we can speculate that these tanks can travel on paved roads just fine, but medieval warfare often means traveling over unpaved terrain.
When you take a 2 draft horse team off road, thier wagon pull capacity drops down to about 4-7 tons on mostly flat dry dirt or grass and 1.5-4 tons on poorer terrains such was muddy, uneven, or sandy terrain; so, the only places these tanks will really be able to travel will be on roads and generally flat, dry, solid terrain.
## How to make these tanks more practical
That said, your 10mm armor speculation is way overkill for most of what you need. Most medieval weapons (bows, crossbows, etc.) could be blocked by 2-3mm of steel. Even the muskets of the time could not pernitrate more than about 4-5mm of steel... that said, you may occasionally need to face [swivel guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swivel_gun) which could require closer to 20mm of steel to block. Larger medieval cannons than this are no threat to a tank because they could not be aimed well enough to be used on anything other than large stationary buildings or naval ships.
With this in mind, consider that nearly all tanks throughout history have not had uniform armor thickness; so, neither should these. Instead of a consistent 10mm hull, you should rate each face to deal with the most likely threat you'd face from any given angle. To this end, I would suggest rating the front of your tank against cannons with 20mm armor (or perhaps 10mm of steel backed by 50mm of wood for the same weight more like a mini ironclad warship.), the flanks against heavy muskets with 5mm armor, and the top and back just enough to deflect muskets hitting you askew and to stop a melee attacker from breaking in with 3mm armor.
So, instead of ~4350kg of steel, the tank could defend itself pretty well against all probable attacks with only ~1475 kg of armor.
Also, adding more or wider wheels will not help because it is the co-efficient of friction you need to overcome here, not a lack of traction. In fact, in most cases, adding more wheels will actually slow you down because horse drawn wagons do not work on the same principles as a self propelled vehicle; so, 4 wheels will likely be best since they will reduce friction and weight compared to a more tank like wheel setup. [This related answer goes a bit more into detail on this.](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/215717/57832) Fewer wheels means you can go with the lighter frame estimate of 600kg instead of the heavier 1000kg I mentioned before
This reduces the total weight of your tank to ~2300kg making it able to travel even in "poor" terrain. If you go for this more realistic armor distribution, then the tanks could join your army in a much wider range of battlefields. This would put the weight of your tank at less than a typical, fully loaded, medieval supply wagon meaning anywhere a typical army can go, so can your tanks.
## How Would Medieval Tanks be Used
A lone tank is an easy target, but a if supported by infantry and field engineers, they would be almost unstoppable. The initial use of tanks would probably see tactics emerge that are somewhere between using elephants and war wagons. Warwagons were very tank like, but they did not protect the horses because they needed the whole internal space for solders, this made them static defenses on the battle field. These tanks however only need 1 gun man so you can put the horses inside the wagon allowing it to move around while fighting; so, they could advance during a battle to break up enemy lines like a war elephant. Ideally, they would move in advance of your infantry (no need to charge at full speed risking unseen traps, etc.) while shooting up the enemy's front lines. Chances are this would make any medieval army break on its own, but if the enemy are very disciplined and try to encircle your tanks looking for some weakness to exploit, your infantry can then move in and easily dispatch those enemies since thier battle line would be broken.
As for when the army is on the move, you would keep your tanks in the middle of any troop columns. This way obstructions, traps, and ambushes can be identified and removed before your tanks even reach them.
## How Would Medieval Tanks be Countered
Medieval armies were not good at countering war wagons to begin with. To up-the-anti to machinegun wielding, mobile battlements... it it unlikely that any medieval army would stand much of a chance at all. You could flood terrain or try to make traps to kill the horses, but even when fully stopped, a few magic machineguns could still control the battlefield just as much as war wagons did... only better. Also, killing the horses is only a temporary set-back. Horses can be replaced much more easily than the tank itself. You can try to fire bomb them, but again, those machine guns, plus the support infantry would make getting into range for this VERY difficult. You could try to shoot them in the backside with muskets, but this also means getting past the support infantry.
The only real counter would be to build bigger, stronger, aim-able cannons able to overcome any wagon's front-side armor. In our history, Pivot guns (larger cannons that can be turned to aim) did not come into play until the late 1700s, and did not become common until the 1800s...but in our history, we did not have a huge need for them. The threat of tanks may very much accelerate the development of such a weapon system. So to answer your question, no weapon or tactic actually used in the medieval period would prove an effective counter to tanks... but special anti-tank cannons could likely be developed to meet the need.
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Caltrops would lame horses and are easily scattered on the ground. Sturdy stakes well embedded in the ground would be impassable as would even the most modest of ditches and any form of gradient or remotely rough ground would present a serious challenge.
So such vehicles would be unable to tackle any kind of raised fortification or fieldwork and would be vulnerable to catapult (eg scorpion) fire at close range to the wheels they would also be vulnerable to rolled stones, logs and fire weapons or covered pits.
They would not be able to operate in any kind of woodland or scrubland or marsh.
The only difficulty they might present would be in totally flat open ground where an enemy was surprised and unable to prepare. And even here they might still be overwhelmed by massed infantry (at some cost) whilst cavalry would be able to out run and avoid them in such a situation.
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Nobody so far mentioned **fire**.
In version a) of your vehicle, the horses move the car, so the car is open at the bottom for the horse legs at least. Throw a couple piles of dry straw in the way, light it on fire when the tank crosses it - horses panic, get burnt, and the people inside the tank get roasted.
In both versions, putting tar or something else both flammable and sticky on the outside of this thing is bad news for those inside, because metal conducts heat very well, and will radiate it into the inside, slowly cooking everyone.
And if you can get the wooden frame or wheels to start burning, maybe by magic, it's also game over.
Fire-based weaponry was used since ancient times (google "Greek Fire") and any medieval army will have a selection of such weapons at hand. Depending on the weather, this can even be improvised on the spot as torches and lamps were the primary illumination, so most soldiers would carry some means of making a fire.
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Depending on the weight of the vehicles, even **felled trees**, rocks, or debris can be used as anti-tank obstacles.
With sufficient forces a path could be cleared for the 'tanks', but those forces would have to expose themselves.
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If they are used in battle lines, ditches or berms would be able to stop them. The edges of the cart will get high centered. As already stated in another answer, mud would stop them.
Once the vehicle is stopped, you just need to get some fire on it. These things won't have air conditioning or any other cooling. It becomes an oven once lit. The infantry would be issued clay pots with naphtha or something similar that sticks to the metal and burns. Artillery facing them would also be set up to throw projectiles that burn as well.
[Answer]
**Cannons, catapults, magic machine guns, gunpowder**
If one side has armored vehicles with cannons and magic machine guns, then other side must have large cannons, catapults (Onager, Trebuchet or Couillard as explained [here](https://historyplex.com/catapult-history)) and machine guns. Trebuchets were able to break thick stone walls.
Gunpowder can be used to make explosives to damage the vehicles.
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Have the high ground!
Considering the weight of the device and the rather low power output of its "engines", it will move very slowly on flat terrain, even slower on a slight slope, and not at all it if has to go up a hill.
If the people inside cannot briefly carry the weight of the device to lift it off the ground and turn it around in another direction, it will be prone to get stuck on pretty much anything. And if they can lift it, it won't be armored enough.
In addition, it will be pretty difficult to spot obstacles through the viewports.
This tank is not a defensive weapon: the defensive version is simply a bunker, castle, or whatever stationary structure that protects people inside. This has unlimited weight so it can be very tough, and it can store any amount of ammo.
So this is an offence weapon, but since it will move slower than a man walking, it can only attack stationary targets. Because it has low power and wheels (not 500hp and tracks like a tank) it won't be able to really go offroad, so its purpose is to attack a target that's basically on a road, which means... the enemy fortress' door.
That sort of stuff was indeed used in medieval times ([link](http://medieval.mrugala.net/Armes%20de%20siege/Belier.htm))
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9oJyX.png)
There's a ram to smash the door, with protection for the people handling it. If you have black powder, the ram could be removed, and the "tank" would serve as protection for the poor guys handling the barrel of black powder while defenders on top of the walls pour burning stuff on top of them.
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# A small hill or creek
If pushing a few tons of steel and wood is difficult on a level road, it's going to be hell pushing it uphill or through a river. A moat or dirt wall would be sufficient to defend a fortified position.
# Running (or walking) away
Again, this thing will be a nightmare to move. If you're not defending a structure, simply walking some distance away will render the whole contraption useless. It's powered by living creatures who will get exhausted.
# Fire
Fire, even if it doesn't damage the vehicle, it would damage the occupants. Bonus points for oil fires that are very smoky.
# Tar
Or mud. Basically make a hard job even harder.
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## Landmines and Oil fires
Before you tell me that Landmines weren't existent, The first explosive mines were successfully used by the Ming Dynasty in China in the 14th-century, utilizing gunpowder and tripwires. So theoretically, if a "tank"would run over the trap, it would explode from the bottom, therefore destroying the "tank". But this would only be used in an ambush because of the time required to set it up. So If you used **Oil of any type,** you could stop the vehicle in its tracks, and light it on fire. Therefore destroying it in any situation.
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I think it mainly depends on how this vehicle is used. Is it intended to roam around a battlefield, like a modern tank? I think that's unlikely given the technology of the time. Most of the answers above handle this case.
But what if it has a very specific purpose, a special operations vehicle, which is to survive long enough for the troops inside to reach some point and accomplish some task. One example would be driving up to the castle gate or wall, and, protected from the shower of arrows and spears and whatnot raining down, a crew inside punches a hole through the wall. Another example would be a quick raid through enemy lines to destroy the enemy supply dump.
For these cases, I think defeating the vehicle would depend largely on two factors. First is the element of surprise. If the enemy has never seen it in action before, they will have to scramble to figure out where the weakness is. Second, how much time does the crew inside need to accomplish their task? If defeating the vehicle takes longer than the crew needs to punch through the wall or to destroy the dump, then defeating the vehicle doesn't matter.
Assuming the element of surprise is achieved, the speed of the vehicle might be the biggest success factor. If it's too slow, then even the dumbest enemy will eventually figure out that dropping a tree or shooting a horse on the road will block it. It has to be fast enough and the distance to cover short enough that the enemy has no time to think up and mount a defense.
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There are several major issues with these tanks that would prevent them from being the juggernauts you want them to be.
The first, and most glaring, weakness is that these are very heavy vehicles with wooden frames. That framework is going to break if you hit a large bump. It's going to crack and shatter when the armor gets hit, even if the cannonball doesn't penetrate. There is going to be massive stress on your axles and wheels.
Second, 10mm of armor isn't actually as strong as you think it is. For example, WW1 and many interwar light tanks had armor of around that thickness, but made with higher quality steel. The armor on these real world tanks could be penetrated by heavier infantry rifles. Many 14th century cannons could certainly penetrate it. On top of that any tank made with 14th century steel would have a horrible spalling problem. What that means is that even if the cannonball didn't penetrate the armor it would still hit with enough force to cause shards of steel to break off inside the tank and go bouncing around. Those horses and slaves that are powering you tank are going to get sliced up pretty quickly. It's not something people tend to think about with tanks, but it's a very real thing. T-34s had a horrible issue with this and thousands of them were disabled because their crews were killed while the tank had never had it's armor penetrated.
Finally, as people mentioned, these tanks are going to be really, really slow and incapable of crossing rough terrain or driving over ditches or up even mildly steep inclines. Any defending army would have plenty of time to set up defenses against something like this. Digging a simple ditch effectively stops the tank. Setting up a grid of concrete block sized rocks stops it. Putting up a wooden variant of the czech hedgehog or even just angled wooden poles stops it.
For these tanks to be a huge threat they're going to need to be faster and tougher, and that really can't be done with real 14th century tech. So you might have to give them magically enhanced armor. You might also need some kind of a magical engine or some fantasy super beast to power them.
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Just [kite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_video_game_terms#kiting) it.
Poke at it from a distance and get it to chase after you. Have multiple small squads alternate attacking from different sides, always staying as close as possible to the edge of the tank's effective attack range. Agility is on your side, so play keep-away while forcing the tank to cover as much ground as possible.
The tank has a few key limited resources, and your goal is to exhaust one or more of them. The first is ammo. The tank is an enclosed environment that cannot be resupplied, so force it to fire at long range (where accuracy is minimal and shots are easiest to evade) until it has exhausted its ammunition supply. At that point, the tank becomes far less deadly and can be captured by a small party.
The other key resource is energy. The tank you describe will be *heavy*, almost absurdly so. You don't have a diesel engine powering the thing, you have animals or people. Force that biological engine to run until it is completely worn out and collapses from exhaustion. Your tank becomes immobile at that point, meaning you can stay out of attack range and ignore it, lay siege to it, etc. Forcing the tank to stop and start frequently will accomplish this goal faster, since accelerating a large, heavy vehicle from rest is considerably harder than keeping it in motion.
You can also just swarm the thing. Your primary advantages are in agility and in numbers. The tank cannot turn or change directions quickly, its windows and arrow slits are in fixed positions, and it has a fixed number of attackers who have a limited attack speed. Assault the tank from multiple sides at once, keeping your forces in a position that minimizes the number of arrow slits that have a line of sight. An expert archer can fire an arrow every 5-6 seconds, but your cavalry can cover 500+ feet of ground in that same time. For tanks that don't have artillery, the [testudo formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testudo_formation) would protect your attackers almost completely. You'll likely lose a few soldiers if they have an artillery turret, but your mobility and sheer numbers mean that most of your attackers will reach the tank. Once in close range, disable the tank by [chocking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_chock) the wheels and dislodge the occupants as if it were a small building. These tanks would be great for assaulting a fortified position, but would not be effective at all against a mobile, distributed attacker.
If all else fails, hide in the forest and attack from behind the trees. A modern tank can drive right over smaller trees, but you don't have that kind of horsepower. A dense line of trees would be an impassable wall to your tank while providing cover for your attackers. Emerge from the forest in a different spot, snipe off a few ranged attacks, and retreat back into the trees.
]
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[
# Introduction
I want my story, set in the modern day, to have a unique architectural feel. Part of my strategy - no skyscrapers.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper#Definition):
>
> The term *skyscraper* was first applied to buildings of steel-framed construction of at least 10 storeys in the late 19th century.
>
>
>
Hmm, we don't want to rule those out... let's try something slightly different.
# Task
What is the *latest*, and *the least fiscally and culturally disruptive*, divergence from real history needed for no *skyscrapers as we know them*1 to have been constructed in 2020?
## Criteria
In no particular order:
* To repeat, a *later* and *fiscally and culturally less-disruptive* change is favoured.
* **Urban population density must still be of the order of 15,000 per km2** (cf. 19,718 per km2 for [urban Edo in 1725](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Japan_before_the_Meiji_Restoration#Urban_population_2))
* In moderate detail, please specify the alternative city-building route this other timeline should go down. Air, water, noise, light and heat pollution are disfavoured. Visual similarity to pre-1850 architecture is favoured.
+ For the purposes of this question, you needn't consider trying to change land prices.
* Don't curtail the development of skyscrapers, prevent it.
* Your suggested change needn't prevent skyscrapers with certainty; just satisfy reasonable worries.
* The point of departure has to be a single event or a collection of tightly coupled, interdependent events (credit - [Q: change required for Axis victory](/questions/30758)).
* Whilst staying realistic, **be as creative as possible**.
1 Steel-and-glass architecture above 100 m (328 ft) should be strictly minimal, preferably eliminated.
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## Restriction for religious and political reasons
No building should be higher than the local religious, historical, political or symbolic buildings.
Such restrictions existed in the past, be it for religious, political or esthetic reasons, and there are still examples in today's cities. And it doesn't prevent you from a high density.
A good example is Paris: population density is about 20.000 per km², and in the center arrondissement, the tallest buildings are not skyscrapers but churches, palaces, or buildings such as Arc de Triomphe or Tour Eiffel. The typical habitation building is Haussmanian style flat, no more than 20 meter hight, while still giving high density
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mNaqX.jpg)
In fact, aside neighbourhood such as La Defense, there are few buildings that fit your description, more than 100 meters, steel and glass buildings.
There are even counter-examples, such as New York, famous for its skyscrapers, but that still have a much lower population density than Paris.
Density does not mean skyscrapers, and skyscrapers does not means density. Therefore, religious, political, and cultural reasons after a while, could prevent construction of them, just because we can make a city without them.
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**Change the ground**
I once heard it said that skyscrapers represented the mountain beneath your feet. What that meant was that skyscrapers require rock-hard bedrock in order to be built, or at the very least, requires a foundation hundreds of feet deep. Basically, the deeper and more solid the bedrock, the easier it is to build skyscrapers. Consequently, should there be no bedrock on which to sink your foundations into, then skyscrapers will be more difficult to build.
True, this isn't enough to *stop* skyscrapers from being built. But it is enough to make it very difficult, and that's good enough if there's an easier solution. In other words, when it costs more to build a skyscraper than it does to buy more land and build the equivalent amount of space and building on a less-tall scale, then no developer will choose to build skyscrapers.
Still, you might have the odd tower or so, built by someone who really didn't care about the cost, or perhaps someone who wanted it to serve as a monument, but by making it more difficult to build skyscrapers than to do otherwise, you'll have eliminated a great deal of them.
[Answer]
**How do we make the impossible, possible? We begin by explaining why it's impossible.**
WB sees a lot of questions of the form, "how do I stop X from ever happening?" X can be a technology, or an historical event, or a lot of other things. When it comes to a technology like tall buildings, there's a critical issue you really need to understand.
Technology happens. I know that sounds trite, but *stopping* technological development is whomping hard if not down right impossible. We're standing atop a pyramid of knowledge and experience and you're talking about taking a chunk out of the middle somewhere. It shouldn't surprise you that it will either (a) not have an effect or (b) prove impossible because *all the other chunks around it are still there.* In other words, you could say that steel wasn't invented or concrete wasn't invented or anything else, but in reality, that's simply not believable.
So, we need to begin by admitting that the moment someone knew how to rivet, weld, bolt, or otherwise bear weight — we made the prohibition against skyscrapers impossible. Every pyramid the Egyptians built, every leaning tower of pisa, every bridge over the river kwai, supports the obvious and incontrovertible development of skyscrapers.
Therefore, from a technological standpoint, it's impossible to the point of unbelievable that skyscrapers wouldn't exist in a modern world with the population densities you're talking about.
*And before we continue, please bear in mind that as of the 2010 census, the United States had [only four (4) cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density#Incorporated_places_with_a_density_of_over_10,000_people_per_square_mile) that are as densely populated as you're suggesting: Guttenberg NJ, Union City NJ, West New York NJ, and Hoboken NJ, all of which are part of Metropolitan New York City. So what you're basically asking is how to have the population density of New York City without building up.*
**Why do we have skyscrapers in the first place?**
Because they're *cheap.* But what drives that idea?
* It's cheaper to build up than to build down. Fundamentally, once you hit bedrock, you're done for all practical intent and purposes with delving into the earth. Cracking bedrock is anything but easy, despite the benevolent use of high explosives. The removal of dirt means that dirt must be put somewhere, and while you could use it to expand your coastline (some cities like New York and Tokyo have actually done this) the reality is that it's expensive to move dirt around if you don't need to. On the other hand, given infinite technology, the sky (or, more accurately, the exosphere) is the limit.1
* Humans, generally, don't really like the dark. We like sunlight, which means we like windows. Windows are cheap! Creating illumination conduits to bring honest-to-goodness sunlight into an underground room is really expensive! And if artificial illumination was all it was cracked up to be, we wouldn't make houses with as many windows both to save money and to save heating/cooling costs. etc. Yup, we like sunlight. Millions 'o years of evolution, there.
* The shift from an agrarian society to an industrial society meant we needed a *substantial* increase in workers-per-square-foot of factory. Shipping those hound dogs in from a long way away is *expensive,* so skyscrapers were an obvious way to keep the workforce reasonably local. It didn't hurt that it also helped with the economy of scale for supporting industries like groceries and retail, and reduced the overall costs of policing, fire control, and other emergency services. In fact, it allowed for really big hospitals (which now can't use skyscraping techniques... that might be a problem) which meant less expensive and more available health care.
* Finally, and kinda building off that last bullet, the beauty of skyscrapers is that it means you have access to *everything!* You have access to great shopping, entertainment, culture, education, because it's all nearby and therefore less expensive to access.
**OK, so is it possible to build a modern culture without building tall buildings?**
***Assumption:*** I'm assuming that it's NOT OK to build down. In other words, a 100 meter building is a 100 meter building whether it's lifted to the sky or pushed into the ground. You don't clearly indicate whether the issue is the vertical space consumed by the building or simply the skyline you're trying to restrict. I say this because one way to meet your expectations is to dig down, but not carry away the dirt. Just spread it around, thereby raising the average ground level of the city, and thereby lowering the average skyline of the city. Maybe I even bring in extra dirt. I'm left with, say, a 500 meter building, but only 100 meters are showing above ground. It's still a "skyscraper" because the altitude above sea level of the roof is the same whether I covered the exterior walls with dirt or not.
And the answer is no. It simply can't be done. It's not enough for something to *force* builders to not build tall buildings because everything in the world would be pressuring them to build them: public demand, economy of scale, yada yada yada. Besides, your population density restriction ***absolutely demands tall buildings.***
Look at it this way: the average thickness of the Earth's crust (land area, not ocean) is 30 Km. That sounds like a lot, but every foot closer to the center you dig, the hotter it gets and the more pressure you feel on the sides of the building that I've already assumed can't exist.3 But even if we can build "infinitely" down, you can only go so far. Think about the problems you'd have with earthquake abatement codes. And now, instead of slowly dropping sewer tank-to-tank,4 *you're pumping it to the surface.* You're pumping the CO2 up, too, because it's heavier than oxygen. And let's hope you don't need to deal with *radon.* Jeez, this is getting expensive.
So, unless we invoke [TARDIS technology](https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/doctor-whos-tardis-bigger-inside-how), there is no possible way for your civilization to achieve that population density without building up. Can't be done.
**But, what if we weren't restricted by population density?**
However, there is an option: cheap and fast transportation! Remember, the biggest reason those skyscrapers exist is economy-of-scale: you can get a lot of people where they need to be cheaply and easily. Business can access the workforce cheaply and the workforce can access business, shopping, entertainment, and education cheaply. If you made transportation cheap and easy, they could live anywhere and you could simply pass building ordinances restricting height, "for the beautification of our world and the enjoyment of the people. Allowing the setting sun to cast her joyous rays upon as many as wanting with minimal interference from artificial shadows."
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1 *Technically, given infinite technology, building beyond the atmosphere wouldn't be all that hard. However, the cost of a foundation for a building of that size, earthquake control that must compensate for the actual rotation of the Earth, the cost involved with pumping oxygen (and water) to those heights and carbon dioxide (and sewer2) down from those heights would probably sway the costs away from that height. So, for no better reason than I like the word "exosphere," I'm gonna stop building at the exosphere. (Sing it with me children!* Exosphere! *)*
2 *Yes, you'd need to pump sewer! Or, more accurately, you'd need to stop its flow periodically or end up with the proverbial sub-fusion amount of pressure at the bottom. We must deal with that today with modern mining, where water can't simply be put in a pipe and dropped a couple of thousand feet straight down. The pressure at the bottom would break any pipe and kill everyone nearby. It must be staged in tanks every couple of hundred feet or so to avoid that problem. Of course, you could have recycling every couple of floors, but now your costs just went up (no economy of scale). And just to make my point, I want you think* really hard *about the complications involving sewer solids at thousands of pounds per square inch of pressure....*
3 *You could change that with a clarification, but there are so many problems with digging down that it's really hard to believe it could replace building up. Wood rot, water seepage control, insects that evolved to dig through hard things, plant roots... It's easy to fix a broken building that's above ground... but fixing one that's below ground? Expensive! I wouldn't doubt that your story is basically built on the idea of subterranean buildings — but you might need to just "make it so" and stop worrying about how to justify it.*
4 *If that statement didn't make sense, you skipped footnote #2.*
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## Catastrophic Failure
In the early 20th century, airships as a means of travel were on the rise. That is, until the fateful crash of the [Hindenburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster) shocked the world. This marked the abrupt end to the airship era, and is why you rarely see blimps at all anymore beyond small ones for advertising at sporting events.
Imagine if something similar happened in the early 20th century - mankind had just invented the type of steel that could support the construction of grand towers, and the first one had just finished construction. Tall and proud, hosting hundreds of people's office space...
Built in New Orleans.
This being the world's first skyscraper, mankind is not aware of the need for solid bedrock, or is horribly misinformed.
Then one day, a fire breaks out. A news reporter catches the entire thing on film, as it collapses onto the houses below.
From that day forward, insurance companies are reluctant to sign on to any building project over 10 stories tall. Laws are passed making future skyscraper construction impractical. The technology for it still exists, but the fear of that one fateful catastrophe discourages all future constructions.
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This likely won't be enough to deter skyscraper building forever - if it proves useful enough in crowded urban environments, people will make technological improvements to make them more viable. But it might delay their growth long enough to get the types of shorter cityscapes you're looking for - and might pair well with another answer to provide a more long-term reason why they went out of style.
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**Restrict elevator cable length or car speed.**
Back in 1905, during the early development of elevators, cables had a limited length due to some silly reason. Perhaps there was a crash...or corruption. That length and/or maximum car speed was enshrined in regulation long ago, and folks got used to limited, slow elevator travel. Even if the regulation were relaxed (gosh, maybe it was), folks still don't trust long or fast elevator trips and they pass on that distrust to their children.
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Before the culture learned to mass produce steel, there were a series of terrible fires in tall wooden apartment buildings. Being more humane than the Roman empire, the rulers reacted by decreeing that all multi-floor buildings must be stone or brick. At the time, those were the only non-flammable structural materials they had.
That law was deliberately made difficult to amend, and in any case is defended by the powerful masons' guild.
In addition to limiting building height, this prevents steel and glass construction for even buildings under the limits of masonry construction, helping to preserve an earlier look.
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The skyscraper craze in real life started almost entirely because of the discovery of the [Bessemer Process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process). Steel couldn't be produced in large enough quantities to make tall buildings economically feasible. Without cheap, plentiful steel, you're limited to masonry for your construction materials, which puts a fairly hard limit on how tall you can build. The taller your brick building is, the thicker the walls of the lower floors have to be in order to support the upper floors. Build tall enough and the lower floors end up mostly wall, not living space. So there's no point in building much higher than about 10 floors.
So if there's no Bessemer process, there's no cheap steel, and thus no good material to use to build skyscrapers.
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## High seismic activity.
I can answer your question by providing example of my home city.
This is Esentai tower:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EAvrq.jpg)
This is highest building in my city. It is about 170 meters. If you compare it to other cities like NewYork or Chicago you can see that it is really small building.
All buildings in this city are built to cover big area rather than big height. The main reason is **high seismic activity**, because of it, its really dangerous to build very tall buildings.
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Most real skyscrapers are commercial buildings, either owned by a single company or leased out as office space to a variety of businesses. This is a consequence of two peculiar needs of commercial businesses:
* To concentrate employees in a single area so that they have joint access to company resources, and can be managed effectively as a group
* To locate near the commercial center of a town, where space is most limited, as a matter of status and reputation as well as access to commercial services (banks, lawyers, notaries, messenger services, stock exchanges, etc).
Residential buildings are rarely higher than eight stories, for practical and economic reasons. Larger buildings require larger investments and upkeep, which suggests higher rents; but those who can afford such high rent apartments generally prefer more spacious properties in suburbs. Lower income people will tend to move outward from the city center in a kind urban spread, seeking lower rents at the expense of longer commutes. And really, who wants to trudge up ten flights if the elevator is being serviced?
With that in mind, the simplest solution would be to have local governments outlaw buildings above eight stories, for whatever reason you like: aesthetics, safety concerns, religious proscriptions, large-scale acrophobia in the population... If prohibited from building skyscrapers, corporations will adapt, finding more modular or distributed structures for their offices, with very little effect on population density at all. If it helps, you could kick off the information technology revolution earlier, to facilitate distributed networks. Commercial districts would still exist, but center-city offices would be management nodes rather than concentrated workspaces, and company buildings would compete on aesthetics grounds, not sheer imposing size.
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## Building codes
Expanding on Kepotx' answer, building higher than around 20 meters is dangerous because in the event of a fire, the ladders of the fire brigade can only reach so high. If the fire gets out of control, collapsing buildings can damage surrounding houses if they are too tall (or not far enough apart). High buildings also make the streets less attractive because they block the sunlight and hinder air circulation.
Or at least these are the commonly given reasons why most older residential buildings in Berlin are not higher than 22 meters + some meters for the roof.
You could still build higher for places where no people live and few people work, especially if the risk of damaging surrounding buildings is small, e.g. church towers in the middle of a city square.
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Instead of having a bunch of skyscrapers, you could build arcologies. This is basically a city that is one big building. So instead of having your population packed up high in skyscrapers, you have your city lower and wider, and your population more evenly distributed among the arcology. So your city becomes more spread out, individual residences become more tightly packed together, and you no longer have wide open spaces between the individual buildings, since the city is just one big building.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tbBfs.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YLTQC.jpg)
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## It's already occurring: Sustainability and energy efficiency regulations are now affecting and limiting the height and size of buildings
There is already a very strong trend towards more sustainable and energy efficient buildings, both by desire and by necessity. As an architect, I can see these are starting to drastically **change our urban environment already**.
Three very large changes (of which are **already legislated** in many local government laws) universal around the world that affect tall building design are:
1. **Watts / square metre energy caps** : for both heating/cooling and lighting
2. **Northern light retention**: to both your building and *neighbouring* buildings (or Southern light if you are in the northern hemisphere)
3. **Minimum insulation requirements** : which limit the area of windows.
These all have the cumulative effect of reducing area and height in buildings. It is easy to envisage with only more **stricter controls in these three areas that you physically cannot build a building higher than 100m**.
So why would these affect height? Let's go through them one-by-one:
1. Watts/sqm energy caps: Sound good in principle however what they do is limit the ability for large spaces / floor areas to be cooled or heated. This means:
* Skyscrapers usually need glass on all sides of the building to maximise minimum daylight requirements. The heat load and loss through glazing is enormous and requires massive A/C plants on the roof. Power allocation is now limited and may **prevent the ability to heat and cool the building enough to be habitable**.
* Lighting is now limited - meaning daylight must be taken into account to adequately and safely light buildings. As power allocation drops, there is a danger buildings may **become uninhabitable for minimum safe lighting** at the floor plate area they currently are at.
2. Northern (or Southern) light retention. The purpose is to increase energy efficiency and wellbeing, but this also:
* In apartment building design, there are now a minimum number of apartments that are required to have Northern (or Southern in the northern hemisphere) light requirements. Offices now are often being considered. If there is a building close by, you *cannot build in its shadow*.
* You **cannot build a structure that will overshadow a neighbouring property**. This automatically limits height of your structure, even below plot ratio limits. It does not matter usually if there is or isn't (nor how large) a structure is - councils usually assume there will be one there. Because of widths of blocks, sometimes you cannot even build 3 storeys:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mtTVZ.jpg)
3. Minimum insulation requirements. To comply with natural light and daylight requirements, skyscrapers are usually clad in glazing systems / curtain walling systems. However, **glass has almost/virtually no insulative value** compared to insulated walls. This means that eventually we would be unable to build walls only of glass, meaning **skyscrapers would no longer be able to comply** with other requirements.
You don't need to take my word for it: for Australia review perhaps the Design requirements or the latest NCC2020 requirements and you will realise skyscrapers are becoming outmoded by more medium scale development. Performance solutions often exist (workarounds) but developers need to invest much more funds to enable this, and there is no guarantee governments would continue to allow performance criteria in future.
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It's going to be a societal factor most likely.
In the UK, skyscrapers are much less common than in e.g. the US. Why? We don't like living in them. We like owning houses; a flat is largely seen as a 2nd rate option, but a big block of flats has a significant stigma attached (largely due to connotations to social housing). My city has only 3 blocks of flats, and Brits hate them, and hate living in them. They're mostly populated with people of other nationalities who don't have the same stigma attached to big blocks of flats.
How to create the stigma?
* Could be a strong desire to own freehold on the land
* Could be a strong desire to have a garden
* Could be a stigma attached to them such as a connotation of social housing
* Could be a tragic fire like Grenfell on the first block created has meant that people now don't want to live in them (cf to airships in our world)
* Could be that pandemics like CV19 mean people don't want to live at such a high population density.
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# Acrophobia\* Pandemica
Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that is infamous for removing rats' fear of cats. Because the parasite can only reproduce in cats, it has evolved a neurological effect to draw its hosts to cats. It also can cause mental issues in humans. And studies have suggested that the change in the rats in permanent, even if the parasite is later removed.
You could introduce something similar to your story. Maybe make it a virus or bacteria, instead of a parasite. The infection spreads through birds, but needs something ground dwelling to reproduce or spread. As a result, it drives the birds to fly closer to the ground or even walk.
Once this spreads to humans, the end result is intense Acrophobia. Being more than a certain distance above the ground causes severe anxiety, nausea, and vertigo. And before they realized it was happening, a substantial portion (if not all) of the populace was infected. So if eighty or even seventy percent of people can't handle being more than say thirty meters above the ground, there is little point in building structures that tall.
\*Acrophobia is the fear of heights.
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Plenty of good, logical answers already, so let's go for something fun and crazy!
Birds.
Oh, not the small kinds of that we know. Big ones. Large flocks. Quite commonplace everywhere (luckily, they don't shit that much). And with a weird biology totally unsuited for skyscrapers. Let's say that our Megabird only looks down when it's high in the air. It can crank it's head to look around while it's ascending/descending, but while it's at cruising altitude, it doesn't bother looking ahead because there's never been anything tall enough to obstruct its path. Except, well, their brothers and sisters, but they hear each other very well (maybe even in ultrasound), so no problem there. All sight is focused downwards where the interesting stuff is.
As a result, any building taller than about 5-10 stories (you pick) will have major casualty rates among Megabird populations. We're talking about clearing dozens of mangled corpses daily, many of which are still suffering while they draw their last breaths.
Nobody wants to deal with THAT. It's both cruel and messy and frankly pointless when you can just keep your buildings low. So - no skyscrapers.
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One way to avoid skyscrapers is to have a culture and legal system that focuses on ownership of your home/business. Renting real estate is not allowed, and neither is having different people each own separate parts of the same building. You either own (and use) the entire building, or none of it. Perhaps this was a knee-jerk reaction to abusive landlords, or part of the early 20th century transition that saw the last remaining monarchies replaced by representative governments.
This would significantly limit the scale of buildings because very few people or companies would be able to use a building that large on their own, much less afford to build it in the first place. Modern skyscrapers are built by investors and then leased out piece by piece to hundreds of individual tenants. If that business strategy didn't exist, skyscrapers would be prohibitively expensive and largely pointless. About the only use case I can think of that *might* still be able to make use of a skyscraper would be a big hotel. Even then it's unlikely you'd see anything remotely like our modern skyscrapers. They'd be too garishly different than all of the other buildings around them.
Technology overall is unaffected, so this wouldn't restrict special-purpose structures like lighthouses, antenna masts, rocket launch scaffolding, etc.
A side effect is that you wouldn't have apartment buildings in this sort of system. Instead, you'd have dense blocks of narrow row houses or townhomes. They'd most likely have several floors above ground plus one or two below. Low-income housing might not be more than 5-6 meters wide. This will limit your population density somewhat since you'll need more roadways per capita.
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**Otis never invents the safety elevator**
"The safety locking mechanism [Otis demonstrated at the World's Fair] had worked, and people gained greater willingness to ride in traction elevators; these elevators quickly became the type in most common usage and helped make present-day skyscrapers possible." - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis#Lasting_success>
This should have minimal to no effect on the rest of reality, I believe, and cities would grow out more than up because everyone has to use the stairs or risk the potential deathtrap only used for freight.
This probably also means that those buildings that do exist with more than 1 or 2 stories (but under 100 m, per your question) would probably charge lower rent for the upper floors since you have to take 3+ flights of stairs to get there. Or charter a helicopter flight.
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Possibly there are no skyscrapers because there are no longer new individual buildings in cities. Instead new construction in cities is entire neighborhoods covered by a single building.
Imagine a building built like many individual identical neighborhoods stacked one on top of the other. Every house, store, or other building would have an identical house, store or other building on top of it, and another identical one on top of that, and so on. So the steel framework could go up story after story, after story of identical buildings. Each road and sidewalk would have an identical road and sidewalk above it on the next story of the gigantic building.
The utility lines which would be overhead or underground in a typical city could be between the upper and lower parts of the hollow decks between stories of the gigantic building.
Vehicles would travel between levels via long straight ramps or circular ramps as in parking garages.
At the edge of the giant building there could be vast powered windows that open or close via commands from the control center, based on weather conditions. Internal buildings close to the edges of the giant building could be built more sturdy, in case the outer windows break in a storm, while internal building deeper within the giant building could have less sturdy curtain walls and thus bee cheaper to build around their steel frameworks because they would be more sheltered from any storm winds that broke into the giant buildings.
the giant buildings would probably be much easier and cheap to heat and cool per unit of cubic space than individual outside buildings would be.
And other vast buildings could be like entire neighborhoods of apartment buildings connected by large corridors or internal roads.
And other vast buildings could be like entire neighborhoods of office buildings connected by large corridors or internal roads.
If it is desired that no buildings be above 100 meters or 328 feet, that leaves room for at least ten levels in each of the giant buildings, which should make the population density where peoples live in houses at least ten times greater than it is in single level cities and suburbs.
Of course 100 meters or 328 feet in giant office buildings would be a lot lower than many skyscrapers in many cities around the world today. But even the skyscraper districts of many cities contain a lot of separate buildings lower than that and often some empty space. and since the average skyscraper is much less than 1,000 meters or 3,280 feet tall, having to build the office district a bit wider for the same amount of office space would be more than offset by being able to make the residential districts cover only ten percent as much ground as otherwise.
The various giant buildings in a city could be build 100 meters (328 feet) tall or less, and at least 1,000 meters (33,280 feet) wide. In the residential districts they can be built in steps like Mastabas:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastaba>[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastaba)
or like ziggurats:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat>[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat)
or like Mesomaerican pyramids:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_pyramids>[3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_pyramids)
with each stage being narrower than the one below it. Parks could be built on the roofs of each stage, or maybe rich people would build their houses outside on the roofs of stages to have a more traditional lifestyle and pay more for heating and cooling.
So therefore it would be possible for a city to be built and rebuilt to be mostly covered with tall buildings that were much wider than they were tall and without having any individual tall narrow skyscrapers.
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Another answer has already pointed out that most skyscrapers are, and have always been, commercial buildings. I'll expand on that a bit: early skyscrapers emerged in the 1880s-1900s, and they were, like the [Masonic Temple Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonic_Temple_(Chicago)), the [newspaper buildings in Park Row, NYC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Newspaper_Row,_1906.JPG) (so located so they could be close to City Hall), the [Woolworth Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolworth_Building), the [Flatiron Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatiron_Building#Original_tenants); even the building housing the [Triangle Shirtwaist Factory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Building_(Manhattan)) was part of a pattern of upper-mid-rise buildings built to be factories, more efficient & centralized working spaces.
But population density doesn't depend on the density of working space. In fact, in the massive prewar Eastern European immigration period, the same period as these early skyscrapers were being developed, the Lower East Side had incredibly high population densities--almost all of which were in tenement buildings not exceeding six stories in height, built without elevators in the 1860s-1880s. We're talking [375,000 people per square mile](http://demographia.com/db-nyc-sector1800.htm), or about 145k per square kilometer, ten times your target population density--which I recall (but don't have a source for) being the highest population density ever achieved. All in low-rises.
Obviously this density was not sustainable; it meant whole families of 5-6 people living in two rooms, and people decompressed as soon as there were bridges and train lines that gave them more space. But families of 2-3 in a slightly larger amount of space would still easily meet your population density requirements.
What was the big factor? In my opinion, it was that [there was no separation of living and working space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop#/media/File:Sweatshop_in_Ludlow_Street_Tenement,_New_York_cph.3a24271.jpg). (That's someone's apartment they're working in.) The late-19th-century Lower East Side garment industry was dominated by small operators who would work out of their own apartments, perhaps managing a few others. Unlike the modern practice of traveling 45 minutes to an hour every day to sit in a different box, leaving both home and office empty half the day, these people were actually using the whole built environment all day long.
It's worth pointing out also that these were largely pre-transport communities, where commercial/retail markets, as well as the central retailers for the garments produced, had to be located within walking distance--thus distinct from the Somerville example mentioned elsewhere, it wasn't a bedroom community dependent on commercial concentrations elsewhere.
So, ultimately, one way to inspire this type of development is to encourage people to travel less and work from the home more. Some sort of strong mores of independent business ownership might suffice; and today's times give us all kinds of examples of ways to motivate people to use their homes more and work from home as much as possible... though obviously regular pandemics would just militate against population density at all, not merely skyscrapers.
Ultimately what you need is a way to have enough transport to have concentrated distribution systems for goods, without providing incentive to bring office workers and manufacturers together into a centralized location. Provide easy means of coordination without in-person face-to-face contact (for the office/knowledge workers) and find some way to reduce the payoff or capital-goods intensity of manufacturing processes (so that smaller home operators can keep up) and you just might be able to get by without the skyscrapers.
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>
> To repeat, a later and fiscally and fiscally less-disruptive change is favoured.
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Not entirely sure what this means so apologies if my answer is off-mark.
# The Cost of Steel
In the age of autonomously-piloted cars, one could consider why all asphalt roads aren't just torn up and replaced with rail systems. A series of cars following predefined paths is Silicon Valley's reinvention of the train.
We have found that commercial/infrastructure-grade steel is expensive to produce, especially at scale. It costs a lot of money and environmental consequence to mine and refine, destroying the air and ground in the process (you did want to shy away from "pollution"-related reasons but did not specify if that was as a result of the skyscrapers existing or because of what it entailed to create them).
Other posters have alluded to shaky foundations preventing development. What better way to ensure mushy terrain than having (literally) undermined the integrity of the earth beneath your feet to the extent that such structures cannot be supported? Fracking was discovered in the 1800s, which, if sufficiently exploited by some Carnegie/Rockefeller-type, could have lent itself to a future state of arrested architectural development...
# Airspace Concerns
...and the demand for such oil/gas could have been instigated by advances in aerospace engineering. Instead of everybody owning a Cadillac, perhaps some advancement allowed us to jump straight to everybody owning Cessnas.
Much like the American road infrastructure, if we became too-entrenched with our ability to freely hop in a helicopter or biplane to bounce over to the grocery store, infrastructure that could not be flown over by a 16-year old with a learner's permit and a crop duster would never have been developed. Skyscrapers would pose a threat to both our physical safety and our way of life.
# Impact of (not on) Climate
We generally ignore such consequences, but in an alternate universe perhaps we put more thought into this:
In colder areas, and especially with angular fascia, ice accumulates, thaws, then falls to the ground below skyscrapers as either large rocks or sheets with predictable and messy consequence. This happens in New York and Chicago every winter; if you don't live in a cold city you are likely unaware it even happens.
In tornado-prone areas, aside from the initial damage following one, glass and other debris will continue to fall on pedestrians well after the fact. Atlanta learned this the hard way a decade or so ago (while also finding replacement glass in short supply).
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For everything that is normal today there was one point in the past where it was built, done or thought for the first time. So before that moment, it was normal not to have the thing, or the idea.
While humanity has been building very large structures for at least 5000 years, the skyscrapers you talk about started around 1885 in Chicago.
Several things came together to make them possible:
- the desire to have a large number of people concentrated in a small area, driven by industrialisation and its need for workers.
- the possibility to do so, powered by the means to transport food, water and sewage, driven by millenia of handling such problems, plus steam engines and the railway, and steel.
- The availability of steel, to enable the building of tall structures
- the availability of electricity.
- The availability of space to build the skyscrapers in.
Electricity is necessary because while you can build a skyscraper without it, it cannot reasonably be used. You need elevators for the inhabitants to move between the many floors. No skyscraper is feasible without an elevator.
But the part that might fit your requirements best is the availability of space.
The great fire of Chicago of 1871 destroyed some 17.000 buildings in the city of Chicago, thus creating the need to provide a lot of housing and office space in a short time frame, as well as the opportunity to do so, since a lot of building plots were suddenly vacant. Without the fire, buying the land to build even one of them would have been a lot more difficult.
If you move the great fine some 30 years to the past, no electricity, and no Bessemer steel (which was invented in 1855) would have resulted in a rebuild of Chicago no taller than 5 storeys.
Without that inspiration, but with the knowledge of this devastating fire, other cities might have adopted building codes that prevented larger fires there. Plus, in this time, when cities were growing rapidly, it is conceivable that cities would have developed less around one center, but more around several sub-centers in the cities, thus reducing population densities and pull-factors, while spreading the cities ever wider.
Notably, that is pretty much what Berlin is: a very wide cities that until some 30 years ago had hardly any tall buildings, With berlin, though, the reason is the ground it's built in, which is basically a drained swamp, that simply wouldn't support tall buildings in any feasible way.
And once it is normal to have low, wide cities, it is quite conceivable that the idea never really catches on.
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# Higher Gravity
The strength required from the bottom of a building to support those above it rises exponentially with each additional floor. If you have an increased gravity on your world, it's like multiplying those costs. Very quickly the whole bottom floor is just building materials, with no floor space. Monuments like pyramids will still be possible, but no skyscrapers. All technologies can still proceed as normal, like the invention of the Bessemer process for cheap steel, but the building height limit will be much lower than on Earth.
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Buildings taller than 100m tend to be used almost exclusively for knowledge or information based business activities, not housing. If you want to get rid of them, get rid of business.
Perhaps not the *least culturally disruptive* change...
# A full-blown, world-wide Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist revolution, circa 1920
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The Bolsheviks in Russia get lucky, and their particularly crazy-go-nuts brand of Communism spreads to the west, inciting revolutions in the US, UK, France, Germany... which somehow succeed. From there, the dominoes fall until no country of any economic significance is left with anything short of a full command-based economy. All businesses are absorbed by the state, and all profit motives disappear. Decisions on where economic activity occurs are no longer based on what the costs of moving labor are, or the benefits of knowledge transfer between workers in similar occupations. Skyscrapers are expensive to build, especially when there is plenty of land that no one is using. Just build the facilities for whatever economic activity (be it a factory, or a farm, or a software engineering office for cranking out digital opiates for the masses) out in the middle of nowhere, throw up some houses around it, and volunteer the workers to move there.
Even if the communist states collapse without the external pressure of (giving the appearance of) keeping up with a capitalist US, there won't be a massive capitalist market to serve as the default importer of goods from the collapsed states or invest in their economies, so economic recovery will likely be quite slow. Imagine East Germany trying to recover post-Communism, except there's no West Germany to help.
The towering skylines of cities like New York and Tokyo would never arise. Even China's skyscrapers are largely a product of its hybrid command-market economy, which itself is a product of learning to take bits and pieces of ideas from market economies, for which there would be no examples in this alternate timeline.
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You can fudge a little bit on the timing here, but not much. You need the Bolsheviks for this, they basically represented the most extreme form of Communism ever proposed. Any other brand of Communism and you don't necessarily get the complete destruction of free enterprise and the degradation of the people to the same status as livestock. If you go too much later, the tall building craze really picks up. In 1920, the tallest building in the world was the Woolworth Building (241m in New York City), and it kept the record until 1930, when the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building (283m, also NYC) was completed.
Around 1920, you'd have a bunch of older buildings (churches, cathedrals, etc) that are > 100m tall, and a few skyscrapers. If you really want to get rid of them, the Communists could tear down the monuments to religion and capitalistic greed with the judicious application of high explosives. They'd likely make a public spectacle out of it: demolishing the Woolworth Building, toppling the Eiffel Tower, blowing up Ulmer Münster Cathedral... all the better to demonstrate to the People that the capitalist bourgeois state is well and truly relegated to the dustbin of history.
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How about wind? It would have other effects on the world, but perhaps if there was a constant, very strong wind with speeds increasing rapidly as you rose in altitude, it could make skyscrapers very expensive to build.
Let's say there's constantly a wind of 40 kph at ground level, and as you move up in altitude, it quickly gets stronger and stronger. In such a world, it may become more economical to build down, digging into bedrock, rather than building up.
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I would suggest having bacteria as the reason for why building higher than a certain amount would be built. In the air over a certain amount of height, long standing buildings built by steel would be affected heavily by the moisture and that would those earlier unknown bacteria woulds more or less eat the steel at these levels (Steel thermites). And even if other materials was tried there where simply too weak.
Airplanes would also be affected, but they could be washed and cleansed regularly but treating materials inside the for this type of corrosion just was too expensive and just not smart.
This could allow for the odd steel tower for tourism, but a whole city would be unpractical.
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I think the solution to this is actually pretty simple. Some idiot back in history decided they owned the air and made permits for building over 3 stories or 45 feet above ground level impossible. Yeah, globally. And laws being laws, the only way anyone could stop this was a brutal legal system that's designed to be unnavigable and cost more than it's worth. Kind of like corporate laws now.
So how could this happen? Because it is already happening. Maybe not with this exact scenario, but human kind has a wealth of historical moronics that effectively made laws based entirely on the notion of "cause I said so." And minus the oppression that resulted in revolt and revolution, we still tolerate, ignore, and blindly accept these laws as though they shot down straight from the sun itself.
And while it may be boring to blame this on laws, it opens up some interesting concepts in alternative construction. We can't go up, but we can go down. If we did go down, how would tech and energy have evolved differently? Going down has problems just like going up, so anything making building down prohibitive would have been seen as a similar obstacle which we would have eventually overcome. And it doesn't impact the needs of your story's population.
And if you don't think such laws would fly, consider we still have royalty. Such a preposterous notion is so unbelievably asinine it's embarrassing the human race allows the concept of inherited power to persist. Not only that, but half the world loves it! Now suppose the owner of all the air was King Richard the 2nd or something (dont quote me on that) And somehow this was persisted and passed through some global power treaty and casually buried beneath a mountain of nonsense, this law or ownership continued to be inherited by the royal family to this day. Written in such convoluted legalese like the 2nd amendment of the US constitution in such a way that nobody knows how one would dismantle it.
Human laws are axiomatic only in the eyes of those willing to obey them. Some are logical, some are the exact opposite. But if people slip up and let one fly, especially for too long, it surpasses law and becomes tradition, then history, then legend. Gone too long and getting rid of some inconceivably unfair and idiotic law like the queen of England owning all the air over 45 feet may be just as hard as convincing israel and palestine to just merge and occupy the damned promised land equally together and shut up already. It is a solution to your problem so irritatingly simple it's a wonder how it isn't happening exactly as you require in our modern world now.
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In London for centuries no building was allowed to be taller than St Paul's Cathedral.
In a more devout world, that prohibition might have applied everywhere and up until the modern era. Anything taller than your cathedral is offensive and arrogate, and, in some people's eyes, blasphemous.
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I have been trying to come up with some kind of small arm that could be used in a science fiction setting with the following two characteristics:
1. It is designed so that it won't put a hole in a spaceship's hull and vent all the air.
2. It is still capable of killing people wearing armor.
Unless the answer is that ships all have hulls that are an order of magnitude thicker than anything a human could actually wear, this is a tough one. Because if a weapon were designed to not damage common hull materials at all, people would just wear armor of the same materials.
So far the best I've got is some kind of 'lightning gun' which electrocutes people through their armor. Though I suspect armor might act as a Faraday cage.
Is there some kind of particle beam or spectrum of radiation that can kill someone through metal quickly to be practical without damaging the metal?
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**Kinetic impactors**
Imagine a knight in armour. You have no weapon capable of penetrating the armour. What do you do instead?
You beat them to death with a big hammer.
The human body is squishy even if it’s inside an invulnerable tin can. If you accelerate it fast and hard enough all sorts of unpleasant things will happen to internal organs as they ram up against bone, the armour, and each other.
So your gun basically launches a little missile (self propelling to protect you from recoil) that carries a lot of momentum but is made of a material that will elastically deform on impact. Imagine a beanbag round, but filled with lead and with a rocket on the back.
The aim isn’t to penetrate the armour. It’s to hit the opponent *so hard* they fall unconscious or die even though their armour is unscratched. As cricket and baseball players can attest: getting hit in the face by a relatively lightweight object moving at subsonic speeds hurts even if you’re wearing protective gear. Now imagine it’s got a missile on it and it’s a bag of lead pellets. No matter how tough your helmet is you won’t be getting back up.
But if it impacts the hull of the ship? It might make a dent. At worst the munition explodes and fires pellets everywhere that are harmless on their own.
Oh, and if you make it right you can even recover and re-use your ammo, or make it a drone capable of incapacitating multiple opponents. Give it a mythical code-name. Shape it like a hammer. Maybe ‘throw’ it for personal propulsion in space...
Wait...
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Well there is the [Neutron Bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb#Effects), which was a nuclear weapon variant designed specifically to kill tank crews while limiting the physical blast damage to the area. I suspect it would be theoretically possible to build a gun designed specifically to fire neutrons at great enough intensities to harm humans... but it would be a really awful way to kill someone, because while it will incapacitate, it won't kill the target immediately. Death will take hours or days to set in.
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**microwaves**
Put plastic or ceramic in a microwave and it is just fine.
Put metal in a microwave and it sparks but won't be to worse for wear. You can dissipate heat in the metal to reduce the chance of burning.
Put a human or an animal in a microwave and you get a dead person or dinner (or both if you are a cannibal.) The armor will be fine, but the human inside will be roasted.
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# "Gravy gun".
(The name **gravy gun** comes from the [*Schlock Mercenary*](http://schlockmercenary.com/) webcomic; the description below matches the [description](https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/Gravy) and technical glimpses disseminated in the webcomic)
Once you have artificial gravity, weaponizing it is reasonably straightforward. Point a gravity plate against someone, and they'll immediately feel a force towards the plate (or in the opposite direction). Due to the well-known `F=ma` relation, they will also be accelerated in the same direction.
Invert the polarity of the plate; the acceleration will be reversed.
Nothing whatsoever happens to the target because (*and only as long as*) it's completely immersed in an isotropic field.
But if you can achieve spatial anisotropy (using several parallel beams of different polarity) or temporal anisotropy (using wavelengths of the same order of magnitude as the target's size), the target will experience a violent shaking, against which nothing (except an accurately countermodulated grav field of the same local intensity) will work.
"Violent shaking" can go from disturbing, to more or less permanently incapacitating, to [lethal](https://www.healthline.com/health/diffuse-axonal-injury). At the same time, the effect is much less dangerous on inanimate objects.
# ...and, immobilizing foam.
Used as boarder-repeller, the foam gun shoots what is essentially fast-setting superglue. The foam has some additional features though: it expands very much, resists to very high temperatures, and is thermally insulating.
This means that people in power armor cannot free themselves, and remain encased in a substance that, in a comparatively short time, will cause them to pass away and even die from heatstroke (with no way of getting rid of extra heat, the enclosed volume's temperature will just go up and up). The victims' situation can be monitored from outside using microphones, and the appropriate solvent administered to capture the victims once they are well and truly incapacitated.
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**Sonic weapons**
Although Infrasonic weapons seem to have been [overhyped](https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/chem_background/exsumpdf/infrasound_508.pdf), they can still cause enough of a disturbance to incapacitate you momentarily. With enough power (>200dB from memory) a regular sound wave can also kill you, by increasing pressure in your lungs and either bursting them or causing an embolism.
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**It won't work but - Gamma Rays**: will penetrate several centimeters of metal will relative ease. So a gamma ray laser (if one could be built it would be enormous) firing from one ship at another would have that effect i.e being lethal to humans but leaving amour intact. But;
1. In the process atoms in the targeted amour will undergo transmutation into highly radioactive elements. So while you could kill the crew and capture the ship you would have the long term effects of radiation poisoning to deal with - at least in those parts of the ship directly impacted by the beam.
2. Did I say they were huge? there won't be anything such as a hand held gamma ray gun you can use. Not realistically anyway. See the excellent '**Tough SF**' and '**Atomic Rocket**' web sites for some of the complexities.
**If you want to incapacitate but not kill armored enemies then-**
a weapon for boarding actions in a direct firefight could be a combination of lasers (to ionize the air between you and the target) or particle beam weaponry to fire a 'pulse of electrical energy. The key I 'think' would be to penetrate at least the outer surface of the armored suit so that current and EMP effects can fry internal circuitry and doesn't discharge harmlessly outwards.
Alternatively just go with something like a high tech **smart projectile or grenade** designed to deal with the kinds of armor you know the enemy wears i.e. a relatively large but low impact weapon that sticks or attaches to the target, drills in and discharges.
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>
> Because if a weapon were designed to not damage common hull materials
> at all, people would just wear armor of the same materials.
>
>
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There is a bit of a logical fallacy here since a hull is designed to protect against the hazards of space whereas armor is designed to protect against the hazards of weapons. This means that your body armor is likely much better at stopping the weapons it will encounter from a boarding party than the ship's hull, not just using the same materials. So, creating a situation where they both have good reason to be made out of the same thing actually gives your hull the best chance of holding up. IE: if a soldier's armor can't be thicker than 1" but the ship's armor is 3" thick, then the ship can take hits that the soldier can not.
A good guideline when it comes to worldbuilding is to assume that if you are going to give one side a ubiquitous weapon system that the other side will adapt to defend against that type of weapon. So, considering many of the weapons proposed so far, many of them either have simple countermeasures, or the counter measures would make you have to scale the weapon up until it becomes a threat to the hull itself:
* Kinetic Impactors can be countered by [Reactive Armor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_armour) meaning any slug strong enough to beat reactive armor will be devastating to a non-reactive inner hull surface.
* Cyber attacking can be made impossible by using closed systems and single
purpose chip sets; so, would not make for a reliable primary offense
* Chemical Weapons can be countered by [MOPP gear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOPP_(protective_gear)) which as it turns out, your standard space suit already functions as pretty darn well.
* Gravity/Sonic resonance weapons could be countered by armor that can create an inverted resonance much like noise cancelling headphones. So, the power sources between weapons and armor would escalate until you have a ship breaching weapon.
* Electrolasers can be countered by a well insulated and grounded suit of armor or by purposefully venting the room; so, they would not make for a reliable primary offense.
* By the time you are looking at nanoswarm technology, the idea of infantry will be completely obsolete which I think defeats the OP's intentions. So, while nanobot bullets have some cool factor, why not just flood the ship with grey goo and leave your people at home?
The list really goes on and on, so for brevity sake I will move on to what I think the most reliable class of infantry weapons will be here: **Thermal Weapons**
The biggest advantage of thermal weaponry is that a ship's hull already considers thermal survival a primary objective. A general purpose starship must insulate itself from solar radiation, the cold of space, and atmospheric re-entry, meaning that the hull should already be well designed to survive your stray fire. As your armor and weapon tech escalates, so too will your ship's hull.
But more important than this is the relationship between how hot you need to make the hull to melt it, and how hot you need to make someone's armor to kill the person on the inside. People die from heat at much lower temperatures than most metals melt; so, your hull and outer layers of body armor may have a melting points in excess of 3400°C, but if you heat up a suit of armor to just a fraction of that, then the person/electronics inside of the suit will be very quickly killed/destroyed. So following this logic, your ship's hull can even be a bit even thinner than personal body armor and still resist a stray shot.
>
> Is there some kind of particle beam or spectrum of radiation that can
> kill someone through metal quickly to be practical without damaging
> the metal?
>
>
>
## High Energy Lasers (HELs)
There are many ways to make things hot at a distance, but High Energy Lasers are perhaps the most controllable. Recent advances in solid state laser technology are proving that kilo-watt ranged hand-portable lasers will soon be a thing; so, the tech to weaponize HELs at infantry scale should be reasonable for any space-aged civilization.
Much like Joe Blogg's answer, the key here is to spread out the area of effect, but lasers can do so in a much more controlled manner. A highly focused laser will cut right through metal killing someone very quickly, but in a ship boarding operation, your lassers could have a setting that increases the spread of your beam; so, instead of heating a single point to thousands of degrees; you could heat a large portion of your target to hundreds of degrees. This will not damage the metal but it will result in an instantly debilitating and relatively quick death for the person on the inside.
HELs are also a really good foundation for future ubiquitous weapon systems because the same weapon can be adapted to many situations, not just the one you are asking about. A wide beam gives you a safe boarding weapon and a more forgiving target area (like how a shotgun can still hit a target even if your aim is a bit off). A narrower beam can give you better range and accuracy more like a riffle. It's power level can be scaled up or down without swapping ammunition/gun barrels. It can be used to cut through or weld shut metal doors. You can even rig one to second as an electro-laser giving you a stun setting.
It's versatility outside of just being able to be used in a boarding situation will probably make it the main weapon for most space infantry forces.
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Depending how "hard" your SF setting is, consider a weapon that remotely "scrambles" matter. It produces a fairly narrow beam (a few millieters diameter ought to be enough) within which matter is randomly redistributed, like scrambling an egg. Since this happens on an atomic scale, it will have little effect on a metal hull -- the metal will simply reweld when the beam shuts off. A composite material will be weakened, because the fiber strength will be compromised, but this would only cause leaks in things like fuel tanks and pressure vessels, not (usually) catastrophic failures.
But in a living body, the scrambler beam will kill *and homogenize* the cells in the beam. This isn't just a hole, like a through-and-through bullet wound, though; since the beam and body can't be kept perfectly still with relation to each other, the result will be a slash of dead tissue. with all its structural integrity destroyed -- so if it passes through any blood vessel, the blood pressure will force its way out along the scramble channel. A shot to the head will be like a stroke. A heart or arterial hit will be near-instantly fatal, a spinal shot -- well, you get the idea. It's like a bullet without the ability to be blocked by material shielding.
Now, *enough* matter will absorb the beam's energy, so a ship hull will generally protect those inside from a hand-held scrambler, but one of these is deadly through any armor that will fit through normal corridors and doorways, at least until its power cell gives out.
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The hull of the ship is made of material that quickly self-heals any small holes punched in it, preventing full de-pressurization events. Humans could wear this material as armor, but it wouldn't help, because while the armor will heal, the human inside would also have a hole in them that is much more difficult to heal, if they're not already dead.
The explanation for the self-healing property could be many things. Or you could just not explain and let the reader wonder. It could be nanobots, or it could be material that swells/expands when distressed, so the material around a newly-torn hole will swell up and pinch the hole shut. This would be a very useful property for spaceships to have in general. It also explains why ships aren't being destroyed by high-speed collisions with micro-meteorite debris from previous battles.
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Incendiary grenade
More generally, anything that would warm the surface of the armor anywhere between 300°C and 1000°C would kill the person inside, but leave the armor (and the hull) mostly undamaged.
It would also probably fry the electronics of a robotic soldier
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You are thinking in entirely the wrong sort of categories if you're thinking of rays and projectiles.
Best approach would be a cyberattack hacking into your opponents control systems and causing them to suffocate/freeze/boil/over-oxygenate etc. This will work through armor- in fact, the more sophisticated power armor they have the better - or spaceship hulls without necessarily damaging them.
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For every physical mechanism you can imagine, some sort of countermeasure can be created. We see this already in armoured warfare, tanks are encased in heavy layers of composite armour, often have reactive armour over top and more recently have active defence systems to attempt to spoof or shoot down enemy weapons inbound. To overmatch these systems anti tank weapons are now some of the most powerful systems on the battlefield, APDS-FS rounds travel at velocities of 1200m/sec or more, and HEAT warheads are so powerful that the secondary effects of the explosion are considered useful ways to eliminate enemy infantry or even light armour and improvised fortifications (HEAT-MP rounds).
Whatever gets through the protection surrounding the tank will destroy the tank itself and have an almost 100% chance of killing the crew as well. Spacecraft will have similar issues at much greater scales: kinetic energy impactors can be moving at tens to hundreds of *kilometres*/sec, and in space, laser weapons could be powered by immense systems (imagine a Free Electron Laser with an accelerator a kilometre in diameter, powering an X ray laser capable of vapourizing metal, ceramic or carbon fibre in milliseconds at a range of one *light second*. If I have to defeat layers of armour and protection, I'll eventually be carving up your spacecraft like a turkey, regardless of the advantages of taking it whole.
Cyber warfare and ECM are possibilities, but any halfway competent force will already have taken this into account, and will have strong countermeasures in place. So we have to look at a different avenue of approach.
Why are we fighting a war? Von Clausewitz tells us "War is the continuation of politics by other means". Military writing, philosophy and even fiction as far back as the Iliad tell us the ultimate goal of warfare is to impose *your* will on the adversary. But do we need to use kinetic means to do so?
Consider the idea of "4GW"
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> "Fourth-generation warfare (4GW) uses all available networks -- political, economic, social, and military -- to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency. Still rooted in the fundamental precept that superior political will, when properly employed, can defeat greater economic and military power, 4GW makes use of society’s networks to carry on its fight. Unlike previous generations of warfare, it does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy’s military forces. Instead, via the networks, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy’s political will. Fourth-generation wars are lengthy -- measured in decades rather than months or years".
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"[The Sling and the Stone](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B00FIA7P9G)" Col. Thomas Xavier Hammes USMC (Ret)
Modern day Russia and China have spent a considerable amount of time looking for ways to disrupt or defeat adversaries without the use of large scale armed conflict. The Russians have developed what is known as [Hybrid War](https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/hybrid-war-old-concept-new-techniques), while the Chinese have a somewhat related concept called "[Unrestricted Warfare](https://www.amazon.ca/Unrestricted-Warfare-Chinas-Destroy-America-ebook/dp/B074V69MWM)"
Consider Hybrid Warfare
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/D85MW.jpg)
The Russian commander can pick one, several or all of these actions as he sees fit. Unlike Western concepts of warfare, there is no need to "stage" or synchronize effects, there is no expectation the economic actions are followed by anything in particular, the commander may choose whatever effect he wants.
Chinese unrestricted warfare goes even farther, essentially weaponizing everything possible. Stock market trades and currency manipulation can be equally valid as assassination or engaging in "lawfare". Current events where Chinese nationals attempt to influence people in education through "Confucius institutes", or the 2015 Chinese "hack" of the OPM Database which identified every American with a security clearance or Australia's passing of laws to restrict the influence fo Chinese companies on Australian politics suggest a very insidious, long term process indeed. You might not even realize your nation is under attack, and one of the principles of "unrestricted warfare" is to ensure any individual action falls well below the threshold of triggering adversary actions, especially military action. It is death by a thousand paper cuts.
So if I want to take your spaceship without damaging it, I should be preparing the ground well in advance. The crew should be confused or demoralized about the mission, and unable or unwilling to take effective steps to prosecute their mission. Going even farther, the ship might never set out, as the dockside is paralyzed by lawsuits preventing it from being outfitted, or political scandals overthrow the "hawk" faction of the ruling political party.
Victory is mine, and the amount of shooting I had to do was minimal (there will be a few hold outs here and there).
So I got the spacecraft *and* neutralized the crew - by attacking their will to fight.
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**Chemical weapons.**
Your ship won't care about mustard gas. Your enemies will be long dead by the time you finish betting on how many live in there.
You don't need to kill all of them.
Mow down enough of the enemy crew and you can seize the ship with ease.
The survivors, who managed to get the suits and gas masks in time, will surrender....or get into the reactor and try to blow it up and take REVENGE!
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**Neutron gun.** The Neutrons can pass right through metal, but totally destroy living tissue. They are absorbed heavily by water, which human bodies are mostly made of.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_radiation#Health_hazards_and_protection>
>
> Neutrons readily pass through most material, and hence the absorbed
> dose (measured in Grays) from a given amount of radiation is low, but
> interact enough to cause biological damage.
>
>
> ...
>
>
> Consequently, in living tissue, neutrons have a relatively high
> relative biological effectiveness, and are roughly ten times more
> effective at causing biological damage compared to gamma or beta
> radiation of equivalent energy exposure.
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In the *Empire of Man* series by John Ringo there is one weapon specifically designed to kill people in powered armour:
>
> Powered Armor - ChromSten made armor that offers even better ballistic
> protection and camouflage capabilities that chameleon suits and are
> susceptible to damage only from heavy energy weapons such as plasma
> rifles and cannons or the last-ditch, contact-range weapon called a
> **"one-shot"**, which delivers a shock wave through the armor to the
> plasteel matrix supporting it, causing a scab to break free and
> ricochette inside the armor, killing the person inside.
>
>
>
However, it will not work on starships. There are few things to consider:
1. Main problem for a starship is spontaneous explosion - that is, since inside it there is an atmosphere and outside there is not, then atmospheric pressure constantly threatens to break out. So there is from the start the need for significant hull structural integrity. This will render any weapons like one-shot almost useless.
2. Warships are expected to be damaged, that is why they're armored. Of course this causes significant increase in mass (depending on your FTL method it may be a factor), but increases surivability. Space warships would be armored with multiple layers, to boot.
3. In addition, while interplanetary space is mostly vacuum, even 99.99999% of non-vacuum is a serious problem with high enough speed. Also. it is filled with all kinds of radiation, most of it lethal. So right off the bat you have hit a snag if you want to use, for example, neutron-based weapons (ray weapons, as bombs are of limited use: you have to be pinpoint precise and best in contact with starship hull for it to have good effect; which is very, very hard to do). This difficulty stems from the fact that you want to shield crew from that interplanetary radiation soup...
4. What's more: different materials work well for different types of attack: kinetic projectile will punch through - for example - ceramic composite designed to stop coherent radiation beam, as well as through EM shield, but will be stopped dead by composite layered matrix like good-old Chobham armor (US and UK MBTs), if not big/fast enough.
Too many variables depend on tech you want to be available in your world you're building. However, the one thing that comes to mind that will have highest probability of success is still the same: boarding.
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**Nanomachines**
It is an answer too easily given. These machines however aren't the replicate forever kind. They are made to maximise the energy they have into the armour.
Where normally you would hope a bullet would use all it's kinetic energy to pierce the armour, it can be stopped, deflected by said armour as well. Even if the bullet is piercing the whole body, you lose energy, as evidently the bullet is still flying after it exited the bullet. Now imagine that you have slower moving pellets. The pellets hold nanomachines with huge amounts of stored energy. The machines start digging on contact, expending the energy as efficiently as possible into a target.
Starship hulls and armour are likely to have different properties, even if it's made from the same metal. One is created in such a way it can support the stress of moving through space and possibly atmospheres. The other to withstand a direct or indirect attack. The machines can be intelligent, only activating if the armour kind of material structure (or flesh) is found.
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Energy weapons such as those featured in Star Wars suit this criteria very well, more blaster fire hits the walls and inanimate objects than any characters and very rarely decompressive events occured.
* Energy based weapons as a trope allows us to stretch physics in an acceptable way for the audience, it doesn't have to make a great deal of sense in reality because its tech that is operating in a way that is too high tech for the audience to comprehend, we just accept that it is.
* Energy force could be dialed up on down on the weapon, in pressure sealed environments the wielder could adjust their weapon for personal safety reasons.
* Energy Shielding could be used on hulls or objects making them impervious to or able to dissipate smaller levels of energy blasts. Yes it would be possible for a person to obtain energy shielded armor, but they should need a significant power source to maintain this constantly or for long.
As a general premise, the hull of the ship will be significantly thicker/denser than personal body armor, so even if both were made out of the same materials the body armor should be significantly more vulnerable, meaning that small arms weapons could easily be designed to deal enough force/impact to overcome some body armor without negatively affecting the hull.
Even in Star Wars, with the use of energy weapons, the same weaponry was used to engage other vessels, it was just on a larger scale. So it doesn't matter that the same tech could theoretically affect the hull of the ship, just that at the scale required to package it into a small arm we can deal enough damage to get through some common armors but not rupturing the hull.
>
> Designing and wearing armor is always a trade off between availability/cost/weight/agility. So we don't have to consider that no armor *could* be made that is impervious to your weapon, only that it would take a lot of money and access to rare resources to do so. Bilbo's Mithril chain armor in LOTR is a good example (even if magic plays a part there) where it absorbed or reflected extreme force while leaving the wearer generally intact. Just as there is always going to be better an more improved armor, so to it can be possible to create a greater weapon.
>
>
>
You should also consider that most personal body armors are a collection of panels or layers that are held together so as to allow movement, where as the hull of a ship is generally a solid material. you can exploit this in a number of ways, there will be weak points, the armor could be commonly worn inadequately or the force of the impact only needs to be enough to overcome the force holding the armor in place...
If your energy weapon is able to excite the panels in the body armor, causing them to move apart or vibrate violently without deteriorating this could internally pulverize the wearer...
[Answer]
If you don't need a hard-SF, plausible-in-detail method, just appeal to some unspecified ultrasonic vibration that affects nerves to, e.g., paralyze muscles or induce sleep/coma. Like, e.g., telepathy, it's a common enough SF trope, even if there's no real-world explanation for how this could actually occur.
[Answer]
A more unconventional method is using a superfluid: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluidity#:~:text=Superfluidity%20is%20the%20characteristic%20property,that%20continue%20to%20rotate%20indefinitely](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluidity#:%7E:text=Superfluidity%20is%20the%20characteristic%20property,that%20continue%20to%20rotate%20indefinitely).
You fire weapons with high-temperature superfluids at your enemy. Once it hits the target it will seep into the fabric of the ship, there's only theoretical materials that might be able to stop this but any opening at all will allow the fluid to get inside, even an airtight bulkhead wont stop this. Large enough quantities would probably start clinging to occupants and suffocate them, seep through the suits they wear and into their body where they'll poison the occupant, and that is assuming the liquid doesnt seep into any airlock and cause it to malfunction and open.
[Answer]
You basically want radiation weapons, specifically many kinds of radiation weapons in conjunction.
X-rays and gamma rays are shielded against by having lots of *heavy* elements in the path of your rays.
Neutron radiation is shielded against by having lots of *light* elements in the path of the radiation.
Highly charged particles (like electron beam) causes emission of x-ray bremsstrahlung ("braking radiaion") when it passes through matter of any kind, ie. the hull of the ship itself becomes the radiation source even if it stops the particle beam.
You may notice that these are highly *conflicting* requirements, so to defend against all three kinds at the same is extremely expensive, and probably mass prohibitive, because what works well against one, works much less well against the other. So basically you have to double your shielding, and then take into account that your shielding itself becomes a radiation source (neutron activation and bremsstrahlung) which you have to shield against even further.
How you generate this radiation is up to you. They could be beam weapons (x-ray, gamma, particle beams), plasma weapons (charged particles), or even nukes detonated near the hull (neutron and gamma and some charged particles).
Plain nukes themselves don't have much of a blastwave when detonated in empty space, so the main effect would be the radiation effects without some other secondary augmentation of the warhead. So you get that by default with nukes without massive structural damage. But you can augment nukes (such as adding a heavy matter jacket around the nuke that becomes plasma that is blasts into the hull) to also get massive structural damage when you need them to have such effects.
[Answer]
Lightning
That's it just use lightning. Ship hulls are usually metal which distribute electrons (as present day planes do), but even a small current across the body can cause defibrillation of the heart. You could explain that to allow people to move quickly they use kevlar / ceramic / non-conductive armor.
Regarding your particle ask. It turns out different wavelengths of light are absorbed or reflected differently. Light is transparent through glass, but it absorbs infrared wavelengths. You could establish a new wavelength which is reflected by the metal on your ship, but is far too heavy to wear (think wearing uranium / lead blocking X-Rays works, but is not practical). You could have some "tank" troopers which do wear such metal, but they are easily killed by lightning grenades which is why armies no longer use them.
[Answer]
**Iron Extraction** a harvesting tool that works as a weapon.
In *[Triplanetary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplanetary_(novel))* by [E. E. Doc Smith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Smith), there's a highly developed aquatic race called the Nevians. They have managed to harness the atomic power of iron and have an enormous desire for the metal to generate energy, but their planet has virtually no iron reserves.
So they scrounge up enough Iron for a single space expedition ( 9 kilograms total from memory, more riches than the entire planet yearly output ) and launch toward Earth because it had indications of Iron in spectroscopy. Captain is told "return with iron, or don't return"
On arrival they find iron in abundance, and deploy their iron-extraction systems to pull every atom. Any spaceship caught is de-ironed but since the hulls are made from (something exotic without iron) the only indication of the cause is anaemic dead bodies because their haemoglobin had been stripped of all its iron. Later the Nevians attack Pittsburgh, because, why not?
**Upshot** - a vessel made from composite materials, with copper/aluminium wiring and silicon computers, ceramic rocket nozzles, and titanium frame would have minimal iron in it.
Could you imagine space ships completely devoid of iron, steel, or stainless steel, in your world ? If other elements suit your plot, perhaps Calcium, or something more biological like Vitamin-C.
[Answer]
**An Age Old Problem: I Want to Kill the People in That Spacecraft, But Only a Little Bit**
My preliminary (a month late?) analysis indicates that smart projectiles may be what you're looking for.
I'll start off by grounding us in an existing example: the [Oerlikon Skyshield](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DAYDS7NjIY) measures the muzzle velocity of its projectiles as they exit the barrel and programs them to detonate immediately prior to an intercept point relative to their target. This is done for the purposes of maximizing hit probability with sub-projectiles, a secondary consideration in this case.
For your purposes the same technology could be combined with a range finder in the targeting optics/visor of your hypothetical space commandos, and the weapon could program (near-field or physical contact, so no hacking) each projectile with an acceptable "detonation envelope" based on the distance to the target; projectiles would be fitted with an electronic impact fuze that runs the following (haphazardly pseudo) code:
```
time_start_det_check = 5
time_end_det_check = 10 //NOTE: don't shoot anything until we implement these
flight_time.update //update flight time from the internal ticker
//timer goes live, let's get some
while (flight_time > time_start_det_check and flight_time < time_end_det_check){
if (impact = true){ //check for space pirates
fuze = boom //send 'em down the river
}
flight_time.update //update from ticker while we're in the loop
}
if (flight_time > time_end_det_check){ //check for end of envelope
fuze = never //we missed :(, render inert so you don't kill us all
}
```
Calculation distance could be as straightforward as using cameras internal to the visor to detect eye position and triangulate distance to the target; jamming such a system would entail rendering the shooter sightless/unable to focus on their target, in which case they're not going to be doing much shooting anyway.
You'll want the projectile to be relatively low velocity to avoid any kinetic damage from misses. Your warhead can be a shaped charge ([pencil-thin jet of molten copper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge)) or HESH ([explosive modeling clay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_squash_head)). If I were you I'd go with the shaped charge; though a lump of plastique going off next to your chest would really ring your bell, armor or not, it would also tear a much larger hole in a spacecraft hull should an accident/edge case occur. A nice small shaped-charge shaped hole can be patched easily/will leak less atmosphere in the meantime.
I'll assume weight is at a premium/gas propelled is a no-go. That leaves electrical ([coilgun plays nice with low velocities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun)) or chemical. [The undeniable allure of rocket-propelled projectiles notwithstanding](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Bolter), acceleration of the projectile during flight would throw a spanner into our flight time/distance calculations, so rocket-propelled is out. Standard firearms will generate/retain quite a bit of heat in vacuum ([among other issues](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmslug.php)), but since this weapon is designed explicitly for atmospheric environments we can dodge that concern.\*
\*The dual use cases open potentially interesting possibilities for switching between ammo that's rocket-propelled (when you need to gunfight outside the spaceship in the morning) and hull-safe (when you need to move the party inside for the afternoon).
**Recap/Advantages:**
1. You don't need exotic technology, and there are no shortcuts for your enemy to protect themselves from bullets filled with explosives (reactive armor works, once--keep shooting).
2. It's effective at point blank range (self-propelled projectiles are not), so you won't be up a creek in narrow passageways.
3. You don't need to alter reality so fighting is unnecessary.
4. To finish by grounding us in another example, the weapon you're looking for (minus the on-the-fly range calculations) more or less already exists. It's called the [XM-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_CDTE), and it gets brownie points for already looking like it belongs on a spacecraft:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mAyBo.jpg)
[Answer]
**Inertia**
We are talking about a spaceship (a tin can) full of enemy in armor (smaller tin cans), and presumably the "space" in spaceship implies that it has the ability to travel at extremely high speeds. If that is true then your enemy has already provided you with a method of annihilating them which will simultaneously leave the ship whole and mostly functional.
All you have to do is wait for a moment when the ship is going really, really fast...
then stop it. The result will be that all of the smaller tin cans will rush ballistic-ly towards the front of the ship (which having been designed to impact micro-meteorites at high speed, is tough enough to take the resulting collisions). Inside each of those smaller tin cans, each enemy will experience potentially fatal g-forces during the moving part of their ballistic journey, followed by jellifying impact with the inside of their armor upon impact.
The best part of this method of mass homicide is that each of the jellified corpses comes wrapped in an easy to clean up tin can. So you are saved the gross job of getting all the enemy goo out of the nosecone.
So your handheld weapon simple needs to create a short-lived microscopic black hole directly behind the advancing ship. The hole's mass and resulting gravity should be carefully calculated based on ship mass and momentum so that the ship stops. Too little hole mass and the now-unmanned ship will continue on its current vector forever. Too much hole mass and the ship will slide backwards into the hole and be spaghettified. The hole's decay rate also has to be carefully calculated because if it lasts too long, again it will eat the stopped ship.
So, as tasty as a serving of jellified-enemy with a side of spaghettified spaceship sounds, the poster requested an undamaged hull. You will need to get the black hole mass calculation and decay rate perfect. As with all military maneuvers which involve black holes... Be careful!
]
|
[Question]
[
Node is the last active city of the lizard people. Node was built to be a self-sufficient city and a nexus of an interconnected bunker system. It was a vanity project from the peak of the lizard empire, so they designed Node to be as spacious as possible.
The problem is with the pesky supporting pillars, necessitated by the ~500 m ceiling-floor distance and the fact that the city being bombarded was a possibility. They're obstructive and break the illusion. Since the designers positively and absolutely didn't want their magnum opus to look like something out of [*Girl's Last Tour*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF5MKNwbRhg), they had to find a solution.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/92Mfz.jpg)
**The question is then, just how could they create the illusion of a large, open-space without compromising the pillars' function?** I'd normally try to find a solution by creating models in Minecraft, but I deemed that to be too time-consuming.
They have access to any scientifically possible technology (so CNTs, robots, etc..).
However, you can't wrap metamaterial around the pillars to make them invisible, you can't make the pillars invisible, you can't drug/mind-control/indoctrinate the populace into thinking there are no pillars, and neither can you redefine what a pillar is. I won't allow you to do any of these.
Also, lizard people have very similar personalities to humans, meaning that if humans on average find something soul-destroying (mass-produced apartments and concrete), then so do lizard people. Simply put, you can apply "space-saving" tricks here from IRL.
[Answer]
Mirrors, greenery, sculpture and waterfalls.
You can’t hide these things. The best you can do is make them more easily ignored or more pleasant to look at.
Mirrors provide the illusion of space and openness in architecture. Fully mirrored surfaces can seem to ‘disappear’ on suitable days, and even if they don’t trick your eye into thinking they’re not there they will trick the eye into thinking there’s more space between the pillars than there is.
Greenery makes humans feel happier, and so I assume it will make your lizards feel happier. Deck out the bases and capitals of the pillars with hanging gardens. You may need artificial lighting.This won’t hide them, but it will make people see them as enhancements rather than obstructions. Plus points if they’re public parks. Everyone loves a nice park.
Waterfalls from high above provide cooling effects and also obscure the pillars (while looking pretty). If your lizard men are cold blooded but also work in warm places they might be glad to have some cooler areas to retreat to at the end of a working day. Use with caution: drainage may be an issue.
Finally you could sculpt on or around the pillars. “You say this is an obstruction? Nay! This is a symbol of the might of the lizard empire, behemoths of stone and glass holding aloft the very sky itself!!” - of course, this very much depends on the aesthetic tastes of the imperial lizard folk, so might not be good long-term. “Jormungandr striking a pose” might not translate well from classical to modern tastes!
[Answer]
**Build skyscrapers around them**
If you can't hide, camouflage. Turn the pillars into the city's skyline by building a unique looking skyscraper around each pillar.
[Answer]
[Catenary arches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary_arch)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5JSkh.jpg)
<https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1c/82/bd/1c82bdf9a6060f96566a9c00c2349ddf.jpg>
The catenary arch is the strongest arch. It has been used to hold up ceilings for centuries. Substitute arches for pillars. This opens up the space between and the space under the curve looks more open.
[Answer]
Your pillars should already be invisible already.
How are they able to see the pillars in the first place? Your under-city should be pitch black. Just don't put lights on the pillars.
If there is enough artificial lights under your city your people can see the pillars, all you need to do is mount low power lights on the pillars so they blend in with the background lights.
Keep in mind you will have some truly massive power needs to actually light your under-city enough to even see the pillars in the first place.
[Answer]
**Place them off-grid**
Placing the pillars more organically and not in a grid, covering them with greenery as per other answers, and camouflaging them among trees (nurtured by artificial sunlight) would give the illusion of being in a dense forest rather than underground.
[Answer]
Your biggest problem is that
### Smaller pillars will collapse under their own weight
Assume your pillars are made from the surrounding rock, and that for reasons of practicality that rock is sandstone. (Strong in compression, relatively easy to quarry.) In the real world, we have sandstone pillars such as the [Old Man of Hoy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_of_Hoy). That's only 137m, but it's about 10-15m wide. It is one of the largest free-standing pillars in the world, and probably the largest with near-vertical sides. Interestingly, that gives it similar dimensions to the tower of [Ulm Minster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulm_Minster). Both of these only need to support their own weight, not the weight of any ceiling above them, so any supporting pillar made of stone would necessarily be larger than this. And both these are still only a third as high as your target. Width tends to increase by the square of height, so you could reckon on your pillars being 9 times wider. And they still can't take any extra load yet.
Based on this, we simply can't escape having enormous pillars if we're leaving them in place from the quarried rock. Even reinforced concrete won't give us substantially different performance to solid stone.
The only answer then is
### Make the pillars out of something other than rock
Skyscrapers such as the [Burj Khalifa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa) certainly exceed this height, and the actual top floor of the Burj Khalifa is about the height of your ceiling. (The rest is just a spire.) Skyscrapers use a steel framework, so your roof pillars could certainly use a similar principle. You could even construct them as skyscrapers, making the pillars somewhat wider but using them as residential/office space to increase the living space available. This would be a logical use of the volume of the cavern, instead of building structures from the cavern floor. Alternatively the pillars could be made smaller than a skyscraper width if all you wanted them for was structural strength.
Conceptually, the volume of the pillars could be reduced further by using more exotic construction materials such as Kevlar or carbon nanotubes. (Maybe the Lizard Empire have technology which we don't have yet.)
As an aside, I find the idea that the population would just live on the cavern floor is boring, unimaginative and frankly also naive and unrealistic. I wouldn't buy into that as a worldbuilding concept, unless we assume a "City of Ember" scenario where the whole place has reverted to semi-barbarism. Living space is about surface area, and there's a *lot* of surface area up those pillars and inside the pillars. Also up the cavern walls (like humans, lizards will not respond well to fully-enclosed apartments, but apartments looking out over the cavern would be cool and even desirable), and even in the cavern roof. And with three-dimensional living spaces and more advanced technology, we could also assume three-dimensional transport systems, with high-speed cable-cars running between pillars at different heights along a web of transit cables. Build a world which fits the technology and space. Show us something new. Don't just give us yet another copy of 1930s Manhattan underground.
[Answer]
## Option 1: super-large tensile support structures
It may be possible to distribute tension through specially designed structures. If the dome is high enough then the ceiling's weight may be offloaded to side columns.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2PaOC.jpg)
<https://www.hisour.com/history-of-modern-period-domes-32124/>
But this solution doesn't properly communicate the sheer awesomeness of the Lizard people. Therefore...
## Option 2: Put the pillars outside. Inverted. And falling towards the sky.
The Lizard scientists are really, really crafty. They anchored what would eventually be the roof of Node to extremely resilient tethers, and tied these to a captured asteroid placed in orbit - now a ballast to an inverted support system.
As a bonus, they gained a [space elevator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator). Cheap space exploration, anyone?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jopph.png)
[Answer]
The pillars have the same electroluminescent coating as the ceiling.
With ordinary paint, the colours would match but the pillars and the generally artificial shape of the sky would be made obvious by the different amounts of light hitting different parts of the pillar/ceiling structure.
But if the paint itself glows evenly all over, then the whole thing looks more like a sky (albeit maybe a cloudless, sunless weird alien twilight sky, probably not the exact colour of a real sky) and the pillars and the shape of the roof are much less obvious.
[Answer]
**Physical Pillar-Replacement Systems:**
*Dome:*
A massive arched dome can be constructed in such a way that forces press against each unit of the dome all the way to the ground. Check out [Geodesic Domes](https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/geodesic-dome2.htm).
*Laser Suspension:*
If the lizard people have an abundance of energy, they can suspend the dome through [laser light](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/190574/does-a-laser-beam-generate-an-equal-and-opposite-force).
*Magnetic Suspension:*
Magnets can also be used to exert a force. This will, of course, have significant consequences on electronics and magnetic applications. But it is possible.
**Biological Systems (my favorite):**
You're working with lizard people. So do some homework on lizards and learn all about them. Lizards don't see or think like humans. Lizards are highly visual communicators and can often see in the UV spectrum. (see article [here](https://animals.mom.me/lizards-see-colors-5023.html))
*Thermal Cloaking*
If the lizard people are much like snakes and not lizards, the pillars could emit low levels of infrared and mask their appearance.
*Pillars as Lizard Communication Devices*
Lizards are far more visual than auditory/olfactory (like humans). They would likely have large, tall, visible communication methods. The lizards in my backyard get on top of my fence or even roof and fan their colorful [dewlaps](https://animals.mom.me/red-thing-under-lizard-neck-4539.html) to threaten males, attract the ladies, and defense.
It seems reasonable that the lizards would use these tall places to communicate.
Moreover, if the lizards have any visitors, they may make their pillars (or perhaps only certain pillars) communicate in the UV spectrum to allow private or lizard-people-only communication. Humans may even bring translator devices to see these messages.
*Build Vertically:*
Lizards in real-life use three dimensions to get around. They aren't afraid to get high up or low down. You may want to build your city up so, even in an hierarchical way.
**Camouflaging Systems:**
As mentioned in other answers, mirrors, greenery, carvings, and other artwork can work. We use look-alike [trees](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3612114/How-tree-mendous-100-000-cell-towers-America-concealed-blend-forests.html) to mask cell towers. A similar system could be used, but mimicking other natural sights (giant stalactites, for instance).
**Environmental Means:**
The roof of the cave could be obscured through heavy steam or smoke. The obfuscating gas could be natural or artificial. The pillars could be camouflaged or utilized as previously mentioned, but their tops could be obscured.
[Answer]
Since it's an artificial environment anyway, scrap the open-sky motif. Make the ceiling of your warren resemble the canopy of a forest, with the pillars positioned and designed as the trunks of great trees. You could even expand your city that way by giving the pillars 'branches' that provide a multi-level cityscape.
[Answer]
If it's possible (and I assume it might be, considering the Lizards are able to make such grand feats of engineering), I would suggest quantum levitation with superconductors. I'm no scientist, but the basic gist of it is that if you super-cool superconductors and put them over magnets, they can be suspended in the air. This way, you would be able to substitute pillars with gigantic magnets holding up the ceiling. You'd have to clear the area the magnets are placed for safety reasons, but other than that, you have a very open space, and no pillars!
Here's a video of quantum levitation in action:<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA>
Just scale this up a million times, and there you have it!
[Answer]
**Use a single, giant pillar in the middle of the city**
Something vaguely similar to Midgar from Final Fantasy VII. Remove the grid-placed individual pillars. The single pillar could then be crafted into an appealing shape (arched at the top and bottom), and could be made into a tower block to house Node city hall and high end apartments for the rich lizards. The exterior could be covered with foliage (grow lights would be needed for living plants), faux green grass/ plants (no need for water or lighting), or textured brown cladding to make it look like a tree trunk. It would need to have a large diameter, which in this case is a good thing.
This would depend on how big the "roof" is, of course. If it's more of an oblong shaped canopy, you might need two large central supporting trunk/ tower blocks.
What are the pillars supporting? If it's an above-ground city or something with considerable weight, there may be a need for pillars along the edges as extra support, which could also be crafted into tower blocks. These could then be crafted in the same way as the central pillar (albeit on a smaller scale); arched shape, nature-themed exterior foliage or faux trunk cladding. They could also contain smaller suburban apartments. Steel support beams could then run from the main trunk to the smaller trunks around the edges.
This would then give the aesthetics of natural-looking structures, the usefulness of residentail and office space, and would leave large open spaces. It would also be less susceptible to bombardment than the original design as there would be fewer supporting targets to hit.
[Answer]
## Lattice structures
The only reason columns need to be thick is to avoid buckling. Many small struts keep each other from buckling while letting light through. This helps them blend into the background, especially at a distance.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6E7gp.jpg)
<https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Astoria-Megler-Bridge.jpg>
Lattice structures declined in popularity during the 20th century, because increasingly large industrial equipment made monolithic structures more economical.
## Guy wires
Only one vertical member of a lattice structure absolutely needs to be in compression. The rest could be replaced by wires anchored to the ground (or ceiling).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VEYDt.jpg)
<https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guyed_Delta_Transmission_Tower.jpg>
## Tensegrity structure
If guy wires to the ground and ceiling are unacceptable, then a pattern of wires and compression members can form a column. It’s easier to show than explain:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZGOsY.jpg)
<https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KrollerMuller_ParkSculpture4.jpg>
[Answer]
Build them into the landscape.
Even lizards can appreciate beauty.
**Pillars? What Pillars?**
Gardens by the bay, Singapore:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KAthe.jpg)
**Obfuscation with mirrors** need not just be to mask vertical lines
Also Singapore Gardens by the bay
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iRkpN.jpg)
Add walkways, roadways, cycle ways, residences, facilities, gardens.
Guess where
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iJtXL.jpg)
Architectural features
Mosque, Brunei
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yXh4K.jpg)
[Answer]
**Make them invisible**
Just make the pillars invisible.
It's possible in reality, so your civilization should be able too.
<https://futurism.com/the-byte/watch-invisibility-cloak-military-use>
[Answer]
Maybe make a domed city, with the dome being carved out of solid rock instead of built up out of smaller pieces.
A vast domed space could be cared out of solid rock under a mountain and possibly a very strong geodesic dome might be built under it to catch any falling rocks and to make the false sky look hemispherical instead of the probably taller parabolic shape of the outer dome.
I don't know how large the city is intended to be. If the buildings in it are multi storied then it can have larger population in a smaller area than an ancient or medieval city could.
My answer here: [How can I prevent the invention of skyscrapers?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/174613/how-can-i-prevent-the-invention-of-skyscrapers/174671#174671)[1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/174613/how-can-i-prevent-the-invention-of-skyscrapers/174671#174671)
Involves entire neighborhoods in buildings thousands of meters wide but less than 100 meters or 328 feet tall. Without that height limit requirement from that question those buildings could be built several times taller and thus could contain larger populations.
Of course with such buildings the occupants would not see the fake sky except when they went onto the roofs of the mega buildings. But using such mega buildings the city could be much narrower than a single story city with the same population. And of course the city could contain many domes hollowed out of the mountains and connected by tunnels.
[Answer]
# Don't!
The mistake here is thinking that an underground city will look like a city. It will probably have several types of areas.
In the living/working/shopping areas, what you actually want to do is have buildings the size of skyscrapers, but horizontally. In these, you probably want to follow the mall layout: no large unobstructed views at all. In this case, structural supports are wherever and whatever they need to be, and nobody even realizes they are there. Tramways and elevators deal with moving longer distances.
The recreation areas... These **are** domes, sculpted to look natural. Here, you want to hide supports, or make the dome small enough that it has no interior supports. Different domes may specialize: a forest, a meadow, a set of soccer fields, a playground, etc.
The food growth areas... Probably resemble large greenhouses, using artificial lighting and maybe some hydroponics. They need to be designed to get harvesting equipment in and out. You harvest every single day, somewhere in the complex. They are probably located in the outskirts, or spotted through the complex.
Manufacturing areas... would probably be either a large chamber or a series of smaller chambers, with good connections to the transportation system.
Resource management areas (water storage, waste reprocessing, mining, etc...)... Except for the reservoirs, these would probably be larger areas with lots of supports, and lots of activity sorting, composting, or whatever. The water reservoirs would be large dark tanks, being carefully monitored to ensure nothing goes wrong.
I'm sure I've forgotten a few areas...
This type of design also means that a catastrophic failure only takes out a small part of your city.
[Answer]
What pillars? Those are sacred giant redwood trees. Hey! Stop trying to count the rings. Didn’t I tell you they’re sacred? No you can’t climb them either. Do I need to report you?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/g5k22.jpg)
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How about the beauty of natural underground caverns?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lq7F5.png)
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Turn them into an architectural feature, a point of attraction. They might be all the same, or each one might be unique, or they might be different types.
Some might contain level upon level of balconies or viewing platforms.
Some might be indoor waterfalls, fish or other fauna optional.
Some might be vertical gardens covered in lush vegetation of different types.
Some might be giant galleries for lizardfolk artworks
Some might be religious, with giant sculptures of deities or other suitable beings.
Some might be memorials, catacombed with thousands fo resting places for revered lizardpeople
...basically, each one can be a different type of tourist attraction. The rest of it is just the dully boring space between the interesting pillars.
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Big natural stone pillars in an open space holding up a massive ceiling are beautiful in their own right:
<https://www.bonneterremine.com/gallery>
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I would suspect any pillars of an underground city would be used as building space.
That way, rather than being in the way, they are put to good use.
In order to do this, the structural design of the pillars needs to be made to be hollowed out into a complex of many pillars and struts (i.e. a trellis structure) and have additional structural support for building inside and outside of them.
Thinking as the engineer to build such a structure I would build their core from the stone the city is carved from, and reinforce it with a variety of materials including concrete plaster, metal, fiber-based materials.
The aesthetics architect in may says that these should look like skyscrapers that go all the way to the top with arches branching out at the top like a forest canopy to widen their support on the roof. They would be covered with lights every so many floors of the floors with markets, shops and offices that never close due to no fixed day/night cycle and people rotating their sleep schedule for maximum efficiency. This would create brilliant lighted trunks all through the sky that are an addition not a detraction like the pillars of a cathedral.
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This is basically an extension of the idea of the smart gun, a gun that will only fire when in the hands of its biometrically linked owner, but two steps up.
The idea is that someone won't dare to steal your gun or loot your corpse, unless they want to be blown to bits. I originally wanted to go for a high voltage electric shock, but I feel like someone tech-savvy could workaround this dangerous countermeasure and reprogram the weapon for themselves.
Having the gun literally explode with the parts composing it serving as the shrapnel, would guarantee that no one would want a part with trying to reprogram it for their own purposes.
This raises the question though: wouldn't this practice be resource-wasteful? My setting isn't unlike real-life where the military has exorbitant amounts of money and resources, but having all of their issued firearms become deadly explosives when out of the hands of their owners would be costly. Do the means appease the end?
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A smart gun which only fires in the hands of an authorised individual -- which may include any soldier in your army -- is a useful and practical concept. It may have issues when transferring weapons between units, if someone's fingerprints change etc.
A weapon which explodes in the wrong hands is a dangerous liability. It means all a captive has to do is try and grab a gun to kill their captor (and themselves). It means whenever the ID system glitches, due to a change in fingerprints (wear, injury), someone may be injured or killed. And it opens up a huge vulnerability to cyber or other attack.
It would also have plenty of opportunity for accidents --
"Take those weapons to the quartermaster" BOOM! "Oops, didn't realize he was a civilian contractor."
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There are cases where you want someone to handle the gun without firing it.
Just to name a few:
* the legitimate holder has lost the gun and someone returns it to them
* the legitimate holder is dead but a comrade can still use the weapon
* the gun has to be serviced/inspected
* the gun has to be handed over in custody
Moreover, having the explosive gun would give to anybody a hand grenade. Forget about allowing carrying a gun with no ammunition as a way of preventing accidents.
I think you are creating more problems than you are solving.
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I once read somewhere that you should not bring a smart gun to a gun fight. In a world where weapons are commonplace and cheap, you are already [at a terrible disadvantage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_gun#Potential_disadvantages) if your weapon glitches, or requires time to boot and become ready.
Supposing you are suicidal enough to turn your piece into that kind of explosive, you have two extra problems:
* Since electronics can glitch at any time, at best you have a weapon that can "soft jam" at random. At worst you're carrying a Schrödinger grenade.
* Depending on the type of electronics and explosives you use, your weapon may explode when being hit by a shot, when it is exposed to high temperatures, when exposed to certain electromagnetic fields etc. And while these things are rare, you are exponentially increasing your chances of being referenced in a new [DumbWays2Die](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7lZ_iOz3NhA6krGfILerQA) video.
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OK, I'm going to take a slightly different approach to frame challenging this, because other answers have covered why making it explode when someone other than the owner picks it up is a bad idea.
There are two big issues here:
### Smart guns are actually not as amazing of an idea as people make them out to be.
Conceptually, it's awesome, only you can use the gun. I've even seen some concepts where you can remotely lock or brick the weapon. The thing is though, nobody who advocates for these considers what happens when this tech fails. You either fail unsafe and the gun operates as if it weren't a smart gun (at which point you're just protecting against casual usage by spending a *lot* of extra money, possibly worth it for someone with kids in the house, worthless for law enforcement and the military), or you fail safe, and the gun stops working.
Failing safe is the only option that makes sense given the main reasons most people who advocate for smart guns are advocating for them. The problem with this though is that when you *need* a gun, you need it to work, period. The importance of reliability is why Kalashnikov rifles, and Uzi SMGs, and Glock handguns are all so popular, they're damn near impossible to kill, no matter how badly you treat them. A weapon that you do not know for certain will work is actually worse than no weapon at all, because most people will assume in the heat of the moment that it will work, and acting on that when it will in fact not work is more dangerous than acting as if you did not have a weapon in the first place.
There are then the numerous engineering problems inherent in trying to fit all the required electronics into the gun and making sure the impact loading on the parts resulting from the weapon firing does not break things. All of those engineering issues are technically solvable at this point in time, but they are far from cheap to do right.
### For your specific case, you couldn't actually get enough of an explosion to do anything more than destroy the gun.
As mentioned above, there's not much 'free' space in a gun. On top of that, you couldn't safely pack most explosives into the gun anyway because of them being heat sensitive (firing a gun produces a *lot* of heat, which has to be dissipated somehow). That leaves you with the powder in the ammunition itself, but the reality is that that's not actually as dangerous as it sounds. Without the chamber to support the casing, a single round of most small arms ammunition detonating just kind of pops. The bullet doesn't really go much of anywhere, the casing *might* fragment if you're unlucky but probably will stay mostly intact (but end up very distorted). The biggest hazard is really the risk of the heat from the combustion of the powder starting a fire (and this is a very real risk, the combustion temperature of most modern smokeless powders is high enough to ignite paper or cardboard and sear wood). Even if all of the rounds go off at the same time, all it's really going to do is damage the magazine and probably the gun itself.
This leaves you with only one realistic possibility: the barrel gets sealed while someone other than the owner picks up the gun. One of the few truly dangerous failure modes for a modern firearm is when the barrel gets blocked. If you're *really* lucky, firing a gun with a blocked barrel just destroys the gun. In most cases though, it causes serious injury to the person trying to fire the gun, and potentially to those nearby as well, but it's really *not* an explosion in the sense most people would think about it (it's more like a pressure cooker with a blocked pressure relief valve detonating), and while it usually doesn't cause serious injury to anybody other than the person holding the gun, shrapnel from the detonation can easily fly quite a ways away and still be dangerous.
The problem with that though is that it makes it even *more* dangerous to have one of these than a smart gun that just disarms itself when it would not be active, because *there is no way to make it fail safely* (and of course the reasons that others have pointed out).
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# It's cheaper to lie
The other answers explain why it's a bad idea to make all of your firearms explode when touched by the repair guy. I just finished the book [Active Measures](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45892235-active-measures), which has me thinking about military intelligence and counterintelligence. There's a long history of armies inflating the capabilities of their forces (it's described in *The Art of War* and other famous texts). You could develop the technology and release training videos featuring a soldier firing a rifle and then handing it to a dummy that explodes when its hand is lowered onto the sensor. Whenever there's an explosion on a base with casualties (which tragically does happen sometimes) blame it on somebody trying to use the wrong rifle and causing an explosion. Train your quartermasters and troops that all rifles must *never* be used by anyone else. Then send rifles without any explosives to your soldiers. They can still have a fingerprint recognition system but no explosives.
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For soldiers, the attack surface is just not that big in the first place. Maybe in a large, complicated battle with a well-equipped foe, you might have enough pockets of troops being overrun that some enemy troops will have the opportunity to grab your guns and use them against you, but how many of them will actually care? (Apparently their weapons aren't bad, since they managed to overwhelm your position.) Picking up and using a new weapon in the heat of the moment isn't that big of a game-changer.
The bigger potential is stealing your weapons to use them *later* - replacing their own worn-out or lost guns, building up their forces, sort of thing - or stealing weapons out of your supplies. In either of these cases, though, they have plenty of time to tamper with whatever anti-theft devices you might put in place.
I'm not in military appropriations, but putting in a complex, expensive device that poses a constant threat of blowing your troops into little bits to avoid a handful of incidents of stolen weapons seems like a bad trade to me. An extra grenade or a few dozen rounds of ammo to keep the enemy off you would be a more prudent investment.
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Others have noted the many reasons why it would be a bad idea to have this on a gun. It means no maintenance, accidents, no sharing weapons, no imprisoning soldiers, no capturing people. That said, it could be useful in a narrow range of situations.
What you want is something that can only be used by particular people. Insert login genes to your soldiers, a barcode on their wrist or such, and so long as they hold it the gun is safe. They can swap it, use it on others, do lots of things. It can be set to different loadouts. If you are policing civilians, you probably don't want it exploding. If you are on a special forces mission where you are a deniable asset, the gun exploding if someone takes it is good, as then they can't steal your tech.
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# Bluetooth Bracelet
Instead of an unreliable, slow, fingerprint scanner (which fails if the shooter is wearing gloves, etc.), add a Bluetooth (or equivalent - should be something reliable but short-range, and hopefully not subject to jamming) syncing device to the weapon, paired to a bracelet worn by the owner. This bracelet should be locked so that it cannot be removed without the key, which the soldier should not carry on their person.
When the gun needs maintenance, or is being transferred or sold to another person, the key is acquired from the base (these may be kept in a secure location controlled by a superior officer, much as ammunition often is on modern bases), the bracelet is removed, and both are given over to the repair shop/new owner.
The bracelet is set to trigger the gun's destruction if removed forcibly, such as by killing the soldier and/or severing their arm to get it off. (It can check the owner's pulse, so you can't just carry around a severed hand in order to keep the bracelet synced up.)
Most of this is possible with existing technology - the only exception being the self-destruct. It might be more feasible to simply prevent the gun from firing when not synced up.
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*wears gloves while handling gun*
Gun: BOOOOM
Its far too risky to use that kind of technology in your weapons. Dirt, gloves or something else like the hands being very cold can make identification difficult. Weapons as a rule are also build to be as sturdy as possible so they can handle as many cycles as possible without damaging itself. Adding internal layers of explosives is going to mean you'll need to service your weapon more often as a failure is going to be a lot more catastrophic. I find using this kind of technology to lock a weapon to be the limit, as a momentary malfunction just means a momentarily locked weapon, not shrapnel all over your hands, arms, face and chest.
Then there's the already mentioned things like
* maintenance,
* the need to give fellows your weapons to borrow for whatever reason,
* mass-transport of weapons and supplies before distribution, just imagine having to key everyone's biometrics before combat or someone keyed his biometrics and put it back in the box...
* instructors and team leaders who should be able to handle your weapon,
* what battle damage does to your weapon (I dont want to walk around with a bomb in my hands because I had to swim/crawl through mud/the weapon got hit by bullets or shrapnel/wear and tear).
* lifespan of the explosives versus average lifespan of a weapon
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## Depends on the weapon
Most small arms are not worth the risk of accidental collateral damage. In general, there is nothing so special about a pistol or a rifle that national security would be compromised if an enemy faction got thier hands on it; so, such tech would have to be reserved for something so advanced that it could completely change an enemy's technological threat level.
1 - Self aiming firearms: These have been around for a few years now on civilian markets, but when you make this concept military grade, it's not enough to just hit a person from 1000m away. Can it work with IR scanners to hit a person who is hidden by a smoke cloud? Is it's shake compensation good enough to fire while running? Does it work with bullets that can corse correct after leaving the barrel or shoot around walls? Can it read body language to fire at someone before you pull the trigger if they look like they will shoot 1st, or vise versa, not fire at someone who is unarmed even if you do pull the trigger? There are hundreds of features a military grade smart gun could have and risking the life of the soilder carrying it may be worth making sure the enemy never gets those same abilities.
2 - High Energy firearms: In a recent question, I brought up that the US military now has the technology to make lethal hand portable lasers by scaling down [HEL beams](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/181187/57832), but if one were to be stolen, that means that enemies could replicate the technology and scale it back up to make all sorts of pretty bad-assed weapon systems. The military implications of what a HEL beam could do are so numerous, that it's probably worth the risk of putting a biometric bomb on them... assuming you even have a reason to give a soldier a hand held kilowatt laser rifle to begin with...
3- Things bigger than small arms: Tanks, missile systems, fighter jets, etc. are all very dangerous and full of military secrets. So let's say an enemy seized a SAM truck, and tries doing some test launches to record its exact capabilities, exploding on the launch pad would be a VERY good thing for your county, because if they know exactly how your weapons perform, it becomes a lot easier for them to design systems that are optimised to counter them.
**As for addressing safety concerns:**
There are a lot of ways to verify a user, but biometrics is probably not the best. Instead I would give each soldier a chip in thier hand with a personal activation code. The the weapon system can be keyed to any number of those codes so a single rifle might work for anyone in your squad for example. To prevent any issues, you store your weapon in a case or holster or behind a panel that verifies that both your chip and the weapon are working properly before you can open it. If YOU can't get the weapon out, you go see the armory to see if you need a new chip or if the weapon is malfunctioning. But if any enemy can't open the case, holster, or pannel, they do the next logical thing and cut it open. Then at that oh so rewarding moment they think they've gotten past the hard part, it exploded when they go to pick it up/use it.
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All you need to do is have a smart gun that is biometrically locked to a given user or group of users. If someone else tries to use it, the smart gun refuses to work for them.
No need for silly gimmicks like high-voltage electric shocks or horrendously dangerous explosive devices. Guns are dangerous enough, do keep them idiot-proof too.
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I'd say auto-disable is better than auto-detonation.
Otherwise, lost or discarded firearms will have to be treated the same way as IEDs, landmines and unexploded ordnance. Which would result in a lot for FUBAR for ordinary infantry, the logistics train, and inevitably the bomb disposal unit that has to be called just to "safe" a smart gun.
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If you want a pistol for an assasin that destroys itself after the assasin is dead, you have a few options other than explosions:
1. The whole gun can be made out of a material that slowly decays or melts [even ice ... for something like a railgun f.e. ]
2. Instead of explosive packs inside the gun that detonate it, you can always trigger acid that disolves the material.
3. If for a suicide attack, you could have the whole assasin detonate instead only his gun lol.
4. Consider the option to remotely trigger the explosion rather than have it linked to the heartbeat / fingerprints of your Assassine. Remember - YOU want to have control over the gun, it should not be triggered randomly because your guy has dirty hands / got zapped and burnt his rfid implant. The downside with this is it could get hacked
Also: we already have smartguns these days. What's the point in including explosives when you just can tape / stick a bit c4 on the weapon and add a simcard and an Arduino Nano....
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AFAICT no one else has mentioned this countermeasure yet:
Mix tiny skin flakes from your side (easily acquired) into a sticky aerosol substance and blow clouds of it at enemy encampments whenever the wind is right. Some of it lands on their guns or their hands. The next time they touch the trigger...
BOOM.
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There are actually 3 questions:
Is it useful? Is it practicable? Will the gov or military fund it?
For the last one the answer is yes. No matter how silly it looks, there is a high probability that they will fund it.
For the rest:
Who has to identify the owner? The seller?
Is it a trivial task for the owner using the manual?
Is the task trivial enough to be done by a thief?
How long does it take to identify an user? Is it virtually as fast as a standard gun?
Or are your security force dead before "identification complete"?
How does that work with gun in the street?
Does cartel have to keep a clear list of peoples, ADN, and guns?
How does privacy work?
Do we have to reset the gun before dumping them in the river or does it retain the identity of the one that fire the gun?
How does security work?
How far do I need to be from the gun to reset the user, invalidate, or simply send the wrong information to the identifier? Could it be done with a drone flying over the base? Could I jam it and prevent any gun use in the area?
Maintenance?
Is the mean of identification durable enough to be used in a war situation? Is changing it hard?
Does it suffer from a lack of electricity? (Sorry, my gun is loaded)
How does it work if:
I have a glove? I am covered with oil? I am covered in mud?
I am covering in others people blood?
Do you have to register all my fingers?
How do you identify your gun in a bucket of guns?
In case of emergency, people rush out of the room, picking gun in the rack, now people have to call the roll and carefully check the serial.
How do you define legitimate use?
Could my wife use it to shoot at me, and claim that I'm the only use so it's suicide?
Can she use it in a home invasion situation?
For selling purpose, could you design a situation where it will be more useful than a simple gun. Peoples trained with normal gun will re-act the situation, and you are not the one that paid them.
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To misquote *Jurassic Park*: you spend all that time wondering whether you can, you forget to ask whether you should.
## Is it realistic?
**In the realm of possibility.**
Electronics manufacturers have forayed into biometric locks for a while now. There is no reason that couldn't be adapted on a gun.
Of course, the mechanisms you find commonly on phones and laptops have dubious degrees of reliability (at least my allegedly-smart phone does), so the technology most likely needs to mature more before it is reliable enough to be sold. But if it was a legal requirement, you can be certain the technology would catch-up.
The explosive charge itself would be more of a challenge. Many have noted there isn't much space to make a big enough boom to reliably kill someone. Still, you only need a charge big enough to send tiny pieces of metal flying. Even if it doesn't kill you, it's nothing to sneeze at and certainly not something you'd want to try your luck with. But if won't be nearly as cool as you envision it.
So while current technology may be lacking, it shouldn't be an unsurmontable obstacle.
## Should it blow up?
I'd answer that with another question:
**Are you out of your mind?**
While there is some merit to disabling a gun, making it blow up is a very bad idea indeed.
Beyond the fact anybody can use the gun to blow you up if they're willing to blow up with it, or issues with false-negatives, I'm not sure that adding an explosive charge in a tool *which uses explosions as its main propelling mechanism* is a particularly sane idea to begin with. The worst case scenario for any malfunction (e.g. jam, misfire, overheating, current surge) now become "self-destruct charge triggers". You don't have to be a physics major to know this has bad news written all over it.
You also have to imagine that if there is any chance that it could be triggered remotely (e.g. an electromagnetic signal that induces current in the mechanism, or something funny like that), you know you positively don't want it. You should be less worried about a malicious actor exploiting such a weakness than finding it out when your troops start exploding when they microwave their dinner at the base.
In general, keep in mind that if you are ever considering putting a self-destruct mechanism in a device, you have to compare the probability and impact of the worst case scenario (i.e. the gun blowing up unprompted) vs the probability and impact of the device being intentionally misused (i.e. somebody stealing your gun). Here, it's very much more trouble than it can ever hope to be worth.
## Should you even lock a gun?
**No.**
I said above there is some merit to it, and that's mostly for civilian uses. Actually, it's just for one case, to prevent kids from shooting themselves accidentally. I dare you to find a more useful and practical case for the technology. But that is of course 9000% negated if the gun blows up instead.
For law enforcement or military use however, it is supremely pointless. Assuming reasonable reliability, you cannot guarantee a false negative, which would be problematic in a shootout. Even if the gun doesn't explode, a gun that doesn't fire is the very definition of useless. And for all narrative purposes, this would obviously always happen at the worst possible time.
Even assuming perfect reliability, you have to ask why? If someone is in position to use your gun against you, there's a good chance either A) they have their own gun they can shoot you with, or B) they are in a position to beat you up with your biometrically-locked gun and that's arguably even more humiliating.
If a force can collect enough dead soldiers and unattended weapons, you also have to question whether they are really struggling for weapons to kill you with, or whether your troops are competent enough to win at all.
Ultimately, in your case, the only thing the lock prevents would be adding the insult of being shot by your own gun to the injury of being shot at all, which is of very little comfort. Even with an overblown budget it'll be a hard sell.
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As others have pointed out, it is a dangerous idea for many reasons. For equally dangerous reasons, it makes for a nice plot device. The [Lawgiver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dredd_(character)#Weapon) from Judge Dredd is one such. Another is the MP-35 from Scalzi's [Old Man's War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_War) series. Part of the permission & firing system in the Old Man's War series was a computer embedded in the operators skull (the "BrainPal").
A similar concept was used in making [Permissive Action Links](https://www.cs.columbia.edu/%7Esmb/nsam-160/pal.html) for nuclear weapons. These were built inside nuclear weapons to ensure *Always* and *Never*: they must *always* go boom when intended (and authorized) to work, and they must *never* go boom when unauthorized. PALs were built into the "physics package" in such a way that removal is impossible and that if you stole one such weapon, you would need to effectively rebuilt it completely (the only way to use a stolen weapon would be to be a nuclear power able to build your own).
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Malcolm dreams one night that he can levitate and wakes up to find that he is still able to. He teaches others to do it and it becomes a world-wide craze. Soon nearly everyone can do it and Malcolm finds he is no longer the centre of attention. Can he or anyone else find a use for this levitation other than for fun?
**Basic facts**
Almost any human can learn to levitate to about 1 cm above the ground. The actual height is given by **H = WP/M** where H = height, M = mass and WP = willpower. Willpower can be measured by psychological tests.
Lateral movement is possible and almost frictionless but requires some form of propulsion - it obeys Newton's laws. On a slope you will **not** accelerate downhill but instead move at a steady speed according to the angle. If the angle is steep you may still be touching the ground. If it's too steep, watch out!
Skating doesn't work because of the lack of friction in all directions. *(Edit: As has been pointed out, you could de-levitate, push off then levitate-and-glide. What I meant was that you can't push off with your feet while levitating)*
Levitation is quite exhausting. The world record is 20 minutes and 2.3 cm.
If you fall from a height, your momentum will overcome your ability to hover so your injuries will be almost the same.
**Question**
Is there any conceivable application for this ability? (EDIT - Specifically in a way that would most benefit local populations or humanity in general. This could be measured in economic terms or in terms of, say, how the the invention of the wheel changed everything about civilisation.)
I exclude scientists developing an improvement in the future. I want to know if there is an application *right now* under the above conditions.
**Answers to comments (ongoing, I will treat them one-by-one in no particular order. Remind me if I missed yours)**
MonkeyZeus - If you are wearing shoes with thick soles then you will not rise unless you manage to levitate right out of your shoes. This is because the insoles of your shoes count as the ground while you are wearing them. The world record was achieved with bare feet and virtually naked.
Chronocidal - If you try to levitate whilst lying down, your head will rise until you are upright and then you will levitate the normal distance. *Note: I've had to change this for consistency - I don't think it invalidated anyone's answer.*
Dewi Morgan - An equal and opposite force on the ground does occur. It's just as though you are standing on it with your feet although more spread out as if you were standing on a large soft rubber ball.
Nuclear Wang - You do not *accelerate* down a (gentle) slope but you do move down it at a constant velocity (Think Lenz's Law). I have to check but I think the speed is proportional to the sine of the angle. When the slope gets beyond a critical point, you cannot maintain a small enough vertical distance between you and the surface. At this point a catastrophic failure occurs and you begin to accelerate.
Kamil Drakari - The only friction in a horizontal direction is from the medium you are levitating in. You cannot use will-power to move laterally. Otherwise it's just like standing on a very slippery surface except that you automatically remain upright.
Dewi Morgan - In a train, when the train starts to move you will tend to remain stationary so hold onto something. On a plane's wing you would simply be blown off unless you are fixed to it.
You can levitate over a liquid but it will be pushed downwards and away. You can 'float' over dense liquids (such as lava) once you have displaced your own weight.
M.Herzkamp - Yes it is definitely more exhausting to levitate a higher mass *to a given height*. You can compensate for a large mass by levitating a smaller distance.
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I wonder how this would work for those with physical disabilities. Say someone who cannot use their legs is able to levitate. I assume levitation of a centimeter still applies to your feet even if you normally sit in a wheelchair. So someone who normally has to sit at half of their normal height and wheel around to move would now be able to levitate at their full height and move around even without using their legs.
Levitating instead of walking for even only a few minutes would be revolutionary for those who normally require a wheelchair/crutches/etc. to get around.
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It seems to me that it would be pretty easy to take a run, start levitating and skid along rather than walking.
The benefit over roller skates is twofold:
1. It requires no equipment, so anyone can do it whenever they like.
2. You don't accelerate down hill. so presumably you don't slow down going up hill?!
Even if we disregard the conservation of energy loophole and take into account that it's still tiring to do. I think you would see a huge change in the way people got around.
This might seem a small thing at first, but after a while we would see huge changes in urban planning and environments to accommodate the change from walking to 'skidding':
* pedestrianise city streets as people can travel further to get to car parks, bus stops etc
* 'skidways' introduced to allow fast travel without crashing. Vertical poles to grab and swing around when exiting or cornering
* crashpads on walls at corners for people who go too fast!
* electromagnetic launch strips to start you off super fast!
* various skid-assisting devices, can you push yourself along or steer with a walking stick? Bags with wheels so you don't have to levitate them too.
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**High speed transportation**
Think mag-lev for humans, but magnets doing the pushing and the person doing the repulsion. Even with 15 mins of levitation time, this is plenty sufficient for moving people around the city.
Alternatively, small portable propulsion means could be provided for off-roading experiences, obviously with less oversight and control so therefore more risk of dying.
**Free energy generation**
If you don't accelerate going downhill, then there is missing potential energy somewhere in the system. Harness it.
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It seems that ground level is all in your mind, hence the failure to accelerate downhill. This should allow you to perform some interesting rescue feats.
* Little Johnny too close to the edge of the dangerous cliff? Levitate out there to get him back without putting pressure on the ground.
* A sheep stuck on the side of a mountain? Again you won't accelerate down the hill so you're safe holding position without risk of falling.
* Little Johnny is a pain and he's fallen through thin ice this time. Again you can get out there without taking any great risk yourself.
* Horse trapped in a swamp? Again you're good to go.
Many of the difficult or inaccessible areas that once required specialist equipment or significant risk are now accessible.
We're not reinventing the wheel in the short term, as you've said it's exhausting in a way that riding a bicycle isn't, but we are reinventing the dangerous area rescue.
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**Traverse the minefields**
You could also play "floor is lava" game but getting across area that may contain landmines is probably quite useful application. Use small electrical propeller to provide thrust.
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## Military and Police applications
### Quick and quiet movement
Ever tried to move quickly and quietly as you approached a cults/terrorist/suspects bunker in the middle of the woods to rescue some hostages? Probably not, but as you can guess it takes a lot of time and a lot of work to make sure you are not *heard* as you get into position. Floating would would prevent a lot of noise when sneaking up and probably take near the same amount of effort. Even if it was only as far as someone could push you from the perimeter - time is a huge factor in this.
### Less worry about landmines and IEDs
The actual procedure from exiting a vehicle in Iraq, involved checking the ground to make sure you would not get blown up as soon as you put your foot down. Getting blown up by IEDs or landmines would be a lot less of a worry (and worth the effort) if you could hover. Even for just a short 5 minute area check, esp. if you were transporting a VIP and were only the first part of the team or in a police situation when approaching that same bunker from the first part.
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**Note:** this is based on a previous version of the question, where the OP did not clarify some aspects which were assumed in the writing of the answer. The clarifying edits were made after the answer was posted.
* **Cross bodies of loose consistency/poor grip (calm water, marshy ground, snow, ice, etc.)**
When you now need a bridge to cross a river or a lake, or some kind of support to go on ice or snow, you can simply step on the surface and, while being above it, simply paddle or propel yourself on it. It saves the money needed for building pedestrian bridges, in the case of lakes/rivers.
* **Perform actions on surfaces which cannot be walked on**
Think things like maintaining a zen garden where you don't want to leave footprints or inspecting the 10 meter diameter mirror of a telescope without putting your boots on it.
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It *feels* like, because of the curious no-downslope-acceleration rule, like we should be able to make a perpetual motion machine, but I'm not sure how that would work.
Essentially the hovering is just fancy rollerskates/maglev, apart from this one thing.
Normally, if you push something on rollerskates up a hill, it takes more force than pushing them on a flat plane, because you are storing potential energy in that thing.
And if you push it back down, it's easier, and you're recovering energy.
In this case, however, you gain no energy pushing someone downhill. That implies *there's no gravitational force affecting you while you hover*.
Consider a tramline, or cable car. One car goes up, one down. In the "up" car, people are requested to levitate. In the down car, they are requested not to. The down car will be "heavier", so the system can work indefinitely from gravity, so long as there are people wiling to help out.
However, since this takes work on the part of the passengers, and since infeasible amounts cannot be lifted this is no different in practice to a cable car that has pedals and asks people to propel it by pedalling.
[Edit: with clarifications, the universe doesn't act as if the mass is *cancelled out*, just that the reaction force is separated from the sole of the foot, as if on a small pedestal or stiletto heel. So the absence of acceleration downhill isn't due to no force; just that the force is *vertical*, with no tangential component. So, this cable-car thing doesn't work: the force is applied to the cable car just as if you were on rollerskates in the car.]
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However, to continue the hypothesis that this essentially makes the person immune to gravitational effects within a short distance from local-ground... this could make space flight vastly cheaper, depending how it works.
Immediately obvious is that the mass of the astronaut does not need to be taken into account when accelerating, if they can levitate.
Far less obvious is that if the user essentially has no mass, and changing their local ground does not require force and hence a momentum change (which the no-slope-acceleration thing kind of requires in order to be possible)... then you can now launch astronauts at *insane* accelerations. You can subject them to explosive forces and they'd be invulnerable to them. The limit of acceleration would no longer be the squishies, but what the equipment could withstand. That means concepts like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion> become reasonable.
This would of course introduce risk to the launch - what if the astronaut's levitation lapsed, even for a moment? They'd be a thin paste on the floor before they could blink.
[Edit: Again, the clarified mechanism means there's no protection from acceleration granted. Rats!]
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More interesting yet, though, is what this implies about physics. The in-universe H=WP/m means that the units of willpower are the meter/kilogram, and every physicist on the planet will be looking at a way to make that unlock the energy of that mass.
Rearranging, you get m=WP/H. Combining with e=mc^2, you get e=WP \* C^2 / H. At very low heights, you potentially have very high energy indeed.
[Edit: this bit remains. For a start, on a smooth and hard enough surface, you can lift near-infinite masses.
You can lift twice the mass, at half the height. In theory, if you can lift your weight by an inch, you can levitate a thousand times your own weight to a thousandth of an inch.
The downside is, the force is probably applied at your feet. In reality, it will work no better than a pair of rollerskates with a lift capacity of a thousand bodyweights: you can't pick up and carry that weight, it would crush all your bones, so having mental rollerskates that strong makes no difference to your *real* lifting capacity.
But the units of willpower being meters/kilogram (from distance = WP / mass) does mean that in any expression that involves mass, we can see if replacing it with (WP/Height) to try to exploit that exponential power of the distance. Again, though, I can't see a sane way to do it. It doesn't break physics in any way, and it doesn't achieve anything that a magnet or a wheel can't do for longer and cheaper.]
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Skimming the answers, but it appears so far no one has thought of the obvious:
* Hold on to a car, levitate just as it drives off - there you go at high speed. This could be transport, or it could be **sports**
* Speaking of sports, kids and adults would invent a lot of new games and sports that involve levitation. Rotating sticks that you hold on to, then let go. For distance, direction, whatever.
* Take a long stick with you, levitate, push yourself off the ground or a nearby object with the stick - free movement.
+ Instead of personal sticks, you can add handholds to walkways to people who are levitating can pull themselves along to add speed.
+ and finally you can put the handholds on rotating poles so people don't even have to pull themselves anymore, just hold on and be pulled, then let go. Can be used for direction changes as well.
* Avoid making footprints, avoid slipping on a wet floor, avoid dirt on your new shoes - there are many instances where you would levitate for a short time to cross a terrain that you don't want to touch with your feet (or shoes).
* 1-2 cm is sometimes all you need to reach something on the top shelf.
Since it is an ability anyone has at any time anywhere, the main uses would be **situational**. It's like having a thumb - whenever it helps, you just use it without thinking much about it, the rest of the time you forget how special it makes homo sapiens.
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A rather more domestic option - laying carpet or painting or washing floors. These tasks are often a hassle when you have to ensure that you work towards the exit or box yourself in. Potentially much easier when you just levitate out.
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I think it might have some limited possibilities in creating a sterile work environment if you don't have to touch the floor while moving around.
Also potentially theft and murder, being able to enter and leave somewhere without touching the floor would leave very little evidence and leave someone unsure which directions you moved in.
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This would be fantastic for the elderly. Especially for elderly women. Now people wouldn't have to worry about falling down and breaking bones. You say that this power won't prevent damage from falling from height but what most of these people need is just a little help with balance. This effect is boosted by the clarification that your head rises first when laying down. That means people who are off balance will be set up on their feet.
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OK the way I understand it is that levitating is like someone has put a thick invisible mattress beneath you. The downside of the mattress is sticky and sticks to whatever surface it's attached to. The top side is slippery like ice but it's where you're standing. The top side is also perfectly horizontal, hence no movement without propulsion. So far, not much violating of any physical laws (except the existence of the mattress itself).
So the question is - what applications would benefit from you not touching the ground, although force is still applied to the ground?
Well... I can immediately see applications in sports and entertainment (like ballet). That's cute but not exactly world changing.
Hmm... how about firefighters? Would it be a great boon to be able to float over ground that is too hot to walk on otherwise? Come to think of it they already have thick boots, and if the floor is too hot even for that... But maybe there is some application there.
One more idea - this could find use also in common everyday scenarios, like getting over big puddles or spills. Kids would use this while playing. Builders could use it to get over areas that should not be stepped on directly.
Hmm... what about rescues on ice? How big of an area does the weight get distributed on? Maybe this can help rescuers to get closer to someone who has broken ice and fallen in water.
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**Levitation without upwards motion.**
H = WP/M implies that energy is spent only once a mass is off the ground. A much more common application would be to reduce the weight of walking individuals while leaving them on the ground. A 250 pound person who effectively weighed 60 pounds would be very fast. Walking would become possible for people with weak legs who were effectively paraplegic at their normal weight. Morbidly obese persons or those with bad arthritis could get around much easier.
Even easier, one could levitate select parts of the body for improved appearance and cosmetic effect. This would otherwise require either plastic surgery or special garments.
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Could you levitate over water? possible uses for coastal indigenous culture who was adept at would be for advanced fishing and hunting.
In a more technological culture, you could use it to avoid detection by pressure pad traps.
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# Fantastic intercourse.
That would be the overwhelming advantage.
Also, if it's possible to do this form of levitation in your sleep, you could finally avoid the discomfort of beds - wrinkles pressing in to you, never being comfortable, etc.
# New forms of dance.
The society in question would pioneer fantastical forms of low-altitude dance.
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Hauling things in constrained environments. You need at least two people, perhaps more depending on what you want to lift. Each person has special "shoes", they have no sole at all but a beefy top which is exactly matched to the wearer's foot. There is standard attachment point on the top of the shoes.
A contraption is clamped to the object to be lifted, it's resting on each person's shoes. It levels itself and lifts until the object being supported is no longer on the ground.
Note that the formula has no upper mass limit other than imperfections in the floor if they are not levitated high enough to clear them. The operator's strength is likewise irrelevant as no muscle is involved. Thus the amount each person can lift is limited only by how much pressure can be applied to the foot without causing damage--and note that since the support is perfectly conforming this will be considerable. (Yes, circulation will be cut off as the heart won't be able to pump against the load. For a short period this will not cause harm.)
Once the object is levitated it's pulled with a rope.
Sure, this is nothing that a crane couldn't do--but cranes need a lot of space. This can be done anywhere people can stand.
]
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[
God in this verse is similar to a super-computer, a very large power source that continuously feeds on human souls to sustain itself. All human souls come from God, and remain connected to it through a metaphysical umbilical cord. A person is born with this cord, as it is transferred to them from its mother. When that person dies, that cord draws that individual to God, allowing it to subsume the soul. It then eternally feed on it like a living battery. Every human instinctually feels this connection to their god throughout their life, confirming his existence to all.
The human deity is in an arms race with multiple gods (orcs, elves, etc). Souls are power, and the more souls of a race exist, the more that particular god benefits when they go to it after death. When gods create the first batch of their race, it takes a sufficient amount of energy. However, as that race produces offspring and creates more of itself, the return of investment increases, giving the god access to more power. Therefore, gods desire their individual races to expand as far and large as possible, creating the logic behind the command "be fruitful and multiply".
In our verse, most religions have a version of hell which exists to punish those that God sees as evil, usually reflecting primal fears of that culture. Souls which fail to follow the tenets of a faith spend eternity here suffering for their sins. In this world, gods cannot afford to send souls to a separate place of torment because they depend on the collection of souls to increase their power, and discarding them would be a waste. However, as souls are very valuable, there would be no reason for people to follow the rules of faith and remain "in good standing" with their god, as everyone is going to have the same fate of being absorbed into their deity.
How can this religion rein in humans without the promise of an afterlife?
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>
> All human souls come from God, and remain connected to it through a metaphysical umbilical cord. A person is born with this cord, as it is transferred to them from its mother. When that person dies, that cord draws that individual to God, allowing it to subsume the soul. It then eternally feed on it like a living battery. Every human instinctually feels this connection to their god throughout their life, confirming his existence to all.
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Given this information, I can think of one thing. People who do not follow a "path" that is deemed right by their god would feel bad, an interior force that would make them feel worse and worse the more they participate actions that are against their god's value (they could still do it, they'd just feel more and more uneasy).
Think of someone walking out their dogs on leashes. The human follows a defined path. Some dogs may hate on each other and will either fight or stay away from their rivals. Some dogs may love each other, getting close and running around each other, entertwining their leashes. If a dog wants to go somewhere the human isn't going, it'll eventually feel a "pull", as the leash won't be able to extend all the way. The more the dog tries to go where the human doesn't, the more powerful the pull will get.
If the dogs want to be able to walk at ease, they will have to learn to walk together in the same direction as the human walking them. However, if too many of them try to follow another path, the human might feel pulled towards them and will diverge from the original path.
You could think of the metaphysical umbilical cords as the "leashes" and the values of a given god as the "path" taken by the human. The more someone strays away from their god, the more they feel an uncomfortable "pull" towards the right path. Each god is different and might not follow the same path (each of them is walking out their own "dogs"). You could also use the fact that some leashes might entertwine with each other as people spend time together (relationships, mortal enemies, seller/buyer, families, random encounters, etc.), to draw their lives closer and closer together, making them feel the same kind of "pull" when following a different path from one another.
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There are two parts to any religion. There's the god bothering, heaven and hell bible bashing aspect, and then there's the community. Religion isn't just about god and belief, it's also about community, identity and belonging. This is a very powerful aspect that should never be underestimated.
It's really the community that controls your behaviour over and above what the rules actually say. You'll see this when you look closely at any religious group and compare their day to day behaviour with what's written in the rules and scriptures.
An example of this would be some Christian groups, where aspects of the old testament are quoted as the basis for holding certain positions on behaviours such as homosexuality, when the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross technically absolved them of any requirement to follow the rules of the old testament.
So why? because the community has said that this is the course of action to follow. To be a member of the group you must behave like this. The people they identify with behave like that, and so they do too.
The real enforcers of the rules are the gossiping curtain twitchers watching your every move, not what's written in the book. The punishment for failing to follow the rules of the group is expulsion from the group, social exclusion. The city dwellers among us think nothing of this, there are plenty of other groups, but in a small town or village, places where everyone is a member of the same church, it's a serious punishment.
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The premise is that fear of hell is sufficient to deter evil-doing. I'm not sure I buy this premise, at least in the long run. You're probably thinking of Christianity, but the Christian narrative doesn't support this premise either. From a Christian perspective, the Old Testament narrative is something like this:
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> God: Hey Israel. If you do these good things then really good stuff will happen. And if you don't really bad stuff will happen.
>
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> Israel: OK. Sign us up. We'll do the good things.
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> God: And just so you know, the things that will happen if you do the bad things are really bad. Like you'll end up eating your own children. (see Deut. 28)
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> Israel: We know. It will be fine.
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> [Israel does some bad things]
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> God: Um... Israel. Remember that thing we agreed on?
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> Israel: Oh right, shoot. Gonna be good now.
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> [Israel does some worse things]
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> God: Um... Israel....
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> [Israel continues doing some bad things (e.g gang rape, recapturing freed slaves, child sacrifice) ]
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> [Bad things eventually happen like God said they would.]
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Even though the bad things did not quite equate to hell, when you read about them (Deuteronomy 28) it sounds sufficiently terrifying that you think it would be an adequate deterrent. But it seems that high punishments and rewards, while they may pressure people to behave in certain ways in the short term, are insufficient to actually make people refrain from evil.
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Let's first begin by addressing many of the misconceptions that this question seems to be stirring:
* Not everyone believes Hell makes people avoid doing evil; so, to prove or disprove this, you need a measurable effect of religious beliefs. While not every society follows the same idea of what evil is, certain crimes are nearly universal such as murder, robbery, etc. So to answer this question: Of societies where people believe in some form of an afterlife, the inclusion of Hell does statistically lower crime rates as seen in this study: [Divergent Effects of Beliefs in Heaven and Hell on National Crime Rates](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0039048). Therefore frame challenges that Hell is not relevant to human behavior are erroneous. This study also shows that belief in a Heavenly afterlife without Hell correlates to increased crime rates suggesting that answers that hinge on a fate of divine reward in lue of divine punishment are unlikely to work in practice.
* On the topic of divine reward, the OP also states that "everyone is going to have the same fate". This suggests that an answer to this question should not hinge on any of the many other non-hell variants of divinely sorted afterlives such as Nirvana through reincarnation, Limbo, Purgatory, the many mansions of heaven, etc.
* I also see a number of misinterpretations where the OP askes, "How can religions without a hell discourage evil-doing?". This question is not asking if people can be avoid evil without Hell. Of course people can avoid evil on their own, we do it every day. Instead it is asking if religion still holds the power to discourage evil without Hell. This means that answers that cite atheism, community, or other forces that exist without religion aren't really relevant either. They establish the baseline of how much we do evil left to our own devices, but ignore the actual question of religions' effectiveness in changing that baseline.
So considering the actual confines of this question, it stands to reason that any answer to this question probably lies squarely in the punishments and rewards religion helps people experience here in the mortal world instead of in death.
Examples include:
**Your Goodness Supernaturally Affects your Legacy**
Luke 11:11-13
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> Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a
> snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?
> If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to
> your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy
> Spirit to those who ask him!
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Here, Jesus acknowledges that even evil people favor moral behavior towards their children. From this it can be inferred that without Hell, the legacy you leave for your family could become the primary motivator toward how you live your life.
If you also consider the old adage, "You are what you eat", then this lends itself to a strange relationship between god and man in which mankind strives to die in a state of being good and kind, because it makes their god good and kind. This would also lead to a whole new perspective on rehabilitation where no one wants anyone to die while they are still evil because it adds to the malliciousness of their own existence. In essence, Heaven and Hell still sort of exist, but they exist here on Earth as the consequences of our ancestors actions, and the lives we mortals live determine if our own children get to live in a state of Heaven or Hell.
**Your Goodness Supernaturally Affects your Present**
Matthew 5:7
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> Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
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Your God's personality might be affected by people's character while they are still alive due to their devine teether. If your wants and needs become a part of your god's wants and needs, then people would seek to purify themselves to improve how their god will treat them. I suspect this would probably be a stronger motivator than the first solution but encourages a more dystopian system of ethics than the first. Instead of people wanting to redeem their sinful neighbors, they may seek to kill them before their negativity can be reflected back into their world by their god. This fear of a harsh god could itself turn their god into a very harsh judge himself. The end result would be a significant decrease in evil though.
**A Divine Relationship**
John 14:15
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> If you love Me, keep My commandments.
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For some believers, the simple call to love their god and maker is all the reason they need to avoid evil. If people care about their god, and are thankful for his gifts, then they will feel more inclined to "pay him back" in whatever ways they believe are righteous. Here religion can serve the purpose of telling people how to direct that gratitude into good deeds or the avoidance of bad deeds. Moreover, you mention your people can feel their connection to their deity; so, if your religion were to foster a direct relationship between the living person and the divine being, then if their god asks them nicely not to do something wrong, then they would be about as likely to avoid the bad behavior as if your close friend or family member were to ask you the same question.
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**Honor and Shame**
Well, evil can be discouraged in several ways without necessitating a negative afterlife, though it is expedient to have one. However, it is not necessary, as evidenced by the ancient Semitic religions which had no real conception of the afterlife beyond a shadowy rest. For instance, most ancient Near Eastern cultures were very strict honor and shame cultures; societally negative actions, which can generally be called evil, were dishonorable, and led to ostracism in the community.
People could be driven to good by what is essentially divinely sanctified peer-pressure; the natural human instinct toward social acceptance, and the desire to be seen as a valued and worthwhile member of the community can encourage altruistic behavior.
The honor of the religion and the honor of the God could be linked via the religion's holy texts to the behavior of its adherents (and even without the explicit connection, outsiders will judge the deity's honor by the behavior of its devotees). This would lead to the genuine adherents wanting to demonstrate honorable behavior.
Obviously, and honor and shame system would not "keep" everyone "good," as there are always those who have no honor, and thus no shame. However, the wider religious community should be able to defend the honor of their God from these rogue elements.
I have found that writing practical examples of honor and shame cultures is difficult, because, as a U.S. citizen, the general culture is very different from any extant or previously existent honor/shame cultures; however, I don't doubt their strength. For instance, in modern Japan, families will distance themselves from deviant family members to protect the honor of the family.
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What is "evil" from this God-battery's point of view?
It values large soul counts. So anything which brings another soul into existence is good and anything that gets in the way of new soul creation is evil. Promiscuity and drunken Bacchanalia are good. Chastity, planned-parenthood and "headaches" are all evil.
Murder which is classically considered evil doesn't actually interfere with soul counts. It just harvests an already existing soul before its time. Murder of a female of childbearing age however is the ultimate evil act. Sinners who perpetrate this most unholy act should be harvested in some lengthy and excruciating way.
Such a definition of "good" and "evil" actually makes the religion's task of encouraging "good", very easy. Promiscuity and the defense of females is hardwired into our genes. No heaven or hell would be needed to keep us virtuous within such a moral code.
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>
> How can religions without a hell discourage evil-doing?
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The same way *you* discourage *your* children from doing evil: a combination of
1. Moral teachings/parables,
2. examples of the temporal and spiritual rewards that one receives for Good Behavior,
3. examples of the temporal punishments one receives for Bad Behavior, and, finally
4. temporal punishments for Bad Behavior.
Whether those temporal punishments are enacted by the religious authorities, the secular authorities or God Himself is up to you.
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# Lie.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RO1SY.png)
All the souls are gonna be God-Chow anyway. They die expecting heaven and instead get eaten.
So why not let them expect hell for sinners as well?
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In Mormonism, they have different levels of heaven. A lower level doesn't necessarily mean hell, just not as prestigious as the highest level. Similarly in Norse Mythology, some people go to Valhalla to be waiters/waitresses for eternity. Obviously someone would rather be served then the server, but by no means is the Valhalla Server's life hell.
A solution of combining these thoughts with yours, might lay in the level of fuel each follower provides the God; followers would make themselves the best they can be to provide the best fuel for God, allowing them selves a sense of purity on earth and accomplishment in death.
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I am presently reading Shashi Tharoor's book 'Why I am a Hindu', and this very question is addressed: Why should someone behave without the threat of hell?
Hinduism's main concept is that everyone's soul has a body. This may seem like a subtle difference with the Abrahamic faith's conception of a body having a soul, but it's an important one. The soul moves on a winding path through multiple lives, inhabiting various physical forms, towards leaving the earth and joining with the cosmic spirit (Brahman; creator God essentially).
Hinduism is a reward driven system. There are many Hindu books (Bhagavad Gita, etc) which contain many stories about righteous behaviour and moral duty (dharma). And if one serves their dharma well in this life, it improves their karma, which one could think of as sort of spiritual credit.
If someone generates good karma, it means they will be reborn in a better form, and thus move closer to the eventual endgame of joining with the cosmic spirit. But if they have lived a sinful life, and generated plenty of bad karma, then their next rebirth will be a physical form which pushes them further away from their end goal.
The point here is that hell is not necessary (or even something a creator God would do; the concept is regarded as immoral by many Hindus). Hindus have a strong storytelling tradition and mythology drenched in moral and philosophical problems. Ultimately, Hindu behaviour is driven by a desire to achieve the end goal of unity with God as quickly as possible. Their behaviour is reward driven.
It's possible to elaborate on this, and argue that essentially for Hindus, and for Buddhists especially, the cycle of rebirth and life itself is a sort of self-imposed hell.
Hindus generally consider that the pursuit of happiness is good; accumulation of wealth, status, romance, sex, family, etc, is fine and indeed part of a fulfilling dharma (if done righteously). In contrast Buddhists tend towards a rigid and unsentimental understanding.
For many Buddhists, it is precisely emotional attachment to the physical realm which inhibits spiritual progress towards nirvana; ending their soul's recycling and endless rebirth. This leads many Buddhists to adopt ascetic principles and practices, attempting to create distance between themselves and their desires. For Buddhists the concept of hell is not really intelligible, because endless rebirth is a sort of sewer-like hell when compared to a state of final enlightenment.
There is however a hell-like concept in some Buddhists sects, but this is tied to the Chinese conception of hell rather than something fundamental to Buddhism itself.
So... what this means for your idea hunting is that hell does not need to exist as it does in Christianity or Islam, because life itself is hell already, or because the soul of the individual is motivated towards a spiritual endgame, and immorality will repeatedly push the individual's soul further and further from this objective.
Perhaps the tether between individual and deity is a little slack? The speed at which the soul returns is changed by their morality somehow. Or that the strength of the tether varies, and in worst case it could end up being bounced into a new body instead. Perhaps, the quality of the soul's 'charge' depends upon their righteousness in life, and perhaps, in worse case, a wicked life will actually accumulate no charge and so cannot be pulled back to their God.
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Let's for the sake of argument pare our putative religion down to the one known thing nearly all human religions share: [The Golden Rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule). For variety, I'll give you a form of it from Jainisim:
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> A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would
> be treated
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This, without any concept of a "Hell", proscribes behavior that causes evil to others. So someone who does evil to another, is simply not following this religion.
As with any religion, being shown to not be following it can have all kinds of real-world repercussions upon the miscreant, typically including some kind of ostracism from the community. If that's a community which is important to you, then there's lots of incentive to act right.
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There already exist Christian religions that don't believe in Dante's vision.
A God that would punish and torture people for all eternity is not the loving God of the Bible. For these believers, the Bible's hell is simply a name for the graves where totally unconscious bodies lie awaiting the resurrection.
At the final judgement, people will either be transformed to spiritual children of God, or will be permanently destroyed, burnt to ashes, and exist no more.
Followers do the right thing because they believe it *is* the right thing, not because they believe their behaviour will *earn* them a reward, and not because they fear punishment. They have hope of their eventual spiritual fate, but they don't fear the alternative of permanent unconscious death any more than an atheist fears being dead.
Note that **I'm not evangelizing or trying to convert anyone**, but you might get some useful ideas from these examples of booklets and articles on the subject:
United Church of God: [](https://www.ucg.org/bible-study-tools/booklets/heaven-and-hell-what-does-the-bible-really-teach)
Philadelphia Church of God: [What Is Hell?](https://www.thetrumpet.com/8021-what-is-hell)
Living Church of God: [The Truth about Hell](https://www.tomorrowsworld.org/magazines/2015/july-august/the-truth-about-hell)
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Your deity's long term goal is to have humanity prosper and thrive so that the maximum souls are collected over the long term, the very long term. Thus, the religion should be very concerned about viable communities, long term stability, be fruitful and multiply, all that good stuff.
People, being people, can be short-sighted, greedy, or go dancing on slippery slopes. The solution? Peer pressure. Break socio-religious norms, and your family gets shunned. You have trouble finding a mate, your kids (or nieces/nephews) (\*) get shunned, your line does not prosper, if you are far enough out of norms your family **changes their names** so that your name dies out and your contribution is lost.
Think about the current social movement to stop saying the names of mass murderers, to deny them fame and their measure of immortality. Now extrapolate this to a whole society where your value is in how you are remembered a hundred years from now.
(\*) Infertile? Queer? Maybe you won't have DNA children, but you can still make an impact on your community, you can still inspire people to take your name, can still get your name on statues and plaque and history books, can still have people tending to your grave hundreds of years after you died.
[Answer]
**Frame challenge 1**: You do not need a hell to deter humans from evildoing. Humans are genetically wired to be compassionate anyway: You suffer if you see a peer suffering (if the suffering being is "none of us" this is greatly reduced, that's why de-humanizing and ostracizing are the first steps on the path to mass murder).
**Frame challenge 2**: There's also the question what exactly constitutes "evil". For humans, it is make somebody suffer; for Orcs, it may be something different.
For now, I'll simply define "evil" as "not following your god's commandments", whatever the god or the commandments may be.
**Answer**: Assume that evil-doing sentients are less nourishing to the god. So the god will send commandments that make their souls more nourishing.
A really evil person might have negative nourishment value. So the god severs the tie, to avoid being poisoned by that evil.
Hell, then, would be the state of being disconnected from your god. Either because being disconnected is horrible in inself (makes you permanently and irrevocably depressed, delusional, or whatever). Or maybe because there are other, ungodly supernatural beings that feast on disconnected souls.
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As Renan suggested in the comments, your god could set things up like the Hindu or Buddhist system, where the criminal dead get recycled into lesser beings until they get it right.
Instead of lesser beings, the reincarnation would be into less fortunate circumstances for evil doers and more fortunate circumstances for the good and pious. Only those who mange to do sufficient good to break out of the wheel get a permanent place with their god. Everyone else gets drained and sent back for another round. Rechargeable batteries: cheaper in the long run.
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Fear can be overcome with greater fear. Fear of hell in the distant future can be overcome with a greater fear of losing something precious in the present. The worst part being, the greatest fear is fear of the unknown, because people will fill the lack of information with their worst nightmares. The moment you define it as hell, it is no longer an unknown, but a well defined entity. And though some will fear it, others will not. Especially if it's going to hell after death.
Thus the best way of discouraging evil doing would be to simply enforce an instant punishment of some kind. Like implanting a multipurpose spell in their souls that would punish them when they commit sins and reward them. The spell can be inherited or gained from baptism.
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1. Group shunning can work this can be we don't deal with you directly
or it may mean they don't deal with your entire family causing them
to all hate you as well as you brought this upon them. Depending on
how far removed you are from stuff and if you don't have survival
skills already learned then you might be in a very hard spot you
can't trade, get food easily, prepare that food, ask for guidance,
go to the doctors, get medicine someones going to die given enough
time. Not to mention your family may just stop helping you too and
banish you from them.
2. For some religions the hell is the grave not something to be
tortured. To be absorbed back to god or not in this case is
something similar. Don't you want your gods love? Don't you want to
be taken care of in their loving embrace not left to fester and
suffer through lack there of? In this case you have abandonment,
implied pain, implied suffering, implied missing out sure this won't
sway some but for others it could also be enough. The hell here is
not being connected to the god do you have stories were they're
swallowed by evil or their abandoned soul unconnected to the god is
eaten and abused by something dark or demonish.
3. Making people ill by loosing their connection maybe a rot and
derangement settles in the mind no one wants this fate.
People are told of this illness that is linked by the loosening of
the connection between the deity and the person then people don't
want to get sick and those embarking on the lessening path (non
belivers, those loosing faith) will become sick to the point of
personally worry they don't want to die in such a horrible manner
and know that is what is coming to them if the continue to press
onward.
They will then be faced with continuing to attempt to unbind
themselves from the god and go mad or else try to steer back this is
of course considering one can't adopt a new god one more suited to
their own personal tastes and abilities to worship but some people
just can't put themselves to worship anyone or anything so in this
case they can only go insane and become ill which would be horrible
for them.
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As much as I agree with lots of the answers stating various reasons as to why you would not need a Hell to stop people from being "evil", and that "evil" is a very, very difficult thing to define, I'd like to give you an answer that to me feels quite logically (you still should look into the philosophical/theological problems with the question).
**No access to heaven**
Simple as that, in general, this concept could be fleshed out and be a big part of the explanation as to why some races do the things they do.
There are gods, all are different and all have a different race they created (at least in my understanding) if there are more gods than the more similar the gods are the more similar the races that they create are. Every god has a different code/idea as to what is "evil" and what "good".
As all beings are connected to their god, they also feel their desires and power. So someone dies and gets absorbed, all bystanders feel and "realize" what is going on. If someone defied their god, their absorption would feel "wrong" to the living, somewhat off, forcefull and overall not pleasing (this is the way the living get to know that that person was a sinner and that sinning, whatever that is in that case, is probably not a good idea).
Their soul is still getting absorbed but their memory gets erased which does not allow them to reunite with their ancestors within their deity.
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First of all whether hell exists is irrelevant, all that has been argued is that **belief** in hell deters crime. Priests in your setting have the exact same ability tell people they will go to hell as priests here do. That it makes no sense for your setting also doesn't really matter, religious belief is not limited to what makes sense. Many people prefer their faith to be more than the sensibility of this world and are even proud of it. And I have to admit they do kind of have a point.
It is not like people who believe in Hell here have **or need** evidence to support that belief. Science requires beliefs should be backed by some evidence, religion doesn't. Religion is about choosing to believe despite lack of evidence.
Second it is not strictly speaking belief in hell that is the deterrent. It is belief that there are rules of what not to do set by a higher power that will be enforced without fail. "Can I get away with it?" is an important question for any wannabe bad guy and if the answer is "Never, God sees all and he will make you pay for it sevenfold." that is pretty good deterrence.
The point is that you can replace hell with some other mechanism. Karma and reincarnation have been used. Generally hell is scarier and better deterrent but "scary" is matter of perspective. An active God with mortal servants can make bad karma very scary if he wants to. If the inquisition finds evil doers without fail by following the taint of bad karma and punishes them, hell is not really needed. God can also simply curse people who annoy him. In a stratified society being reborn or demoted to a slave or unclean caste can be scary enough. Especially since this invariably results in people belonging to such groups being treated very badly. They deserve it because of the things they did after all.
Last the gods do not actually need to do anything. Leaving this to the mortals to sort out will work just fine. Governments and religious organizations will try to keep order without divine intervention being required. Their solutions to the problem will evolve over time to match the actual need. Specifically if belief in hell is needed, they will tell people hell exists and believe it themselves unless the Gods directly intervene to prevent that.
If you want to stress the lack of hell some purely secular method might be preferable. People might simply watch each other and use social pressure to enforce compliance with social norms. This is fairly natural and effective in small groups but you could extend it cover nations if it is organized by the state religion. Remember that the point is that there are rules, and somebody is always watching, and punishment follows. Who is always watching and who will punish is not important. A big brother style society would work just fine and you can get it at low technology if everybody is part of the system. Might actually work better that way.
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You could add that consumed souls from brave and faithful people can be redeployed again.
So people are promised a better and second (or third, fourth, ...) life, if they behaved well.
For other people to realize that, the reborn people have to somewhat differentiate from a new, "first life" soul.
So people will look up to other people in the community that have gone through multiple rebirths.
[Answer]
A person's religion is his relationship with his Creator. When he continues to seek and maintain this relationship, his purpose in life is clear and he has an extraordinary passion that drives him to excellence amidst any and all circumstances to fulfill that purpose.
In this so called civilized era that we are living in, we may consider it a grave sin to kill another human being. However, if you read history, all the greatest warriors and mighty kings who ever lived on earth attained glory only by killing and destroying other nations and making them his own.
Once we start accommodating people, communities, views and philosophies other than the ultimate pursuit of God himself, we tend to lose focus and lose our way. Heaven and hell, good and bad, purity and sin will all then unwind before your eyes when we as creations are truly in sync with our Creator. We are all spirits here on earth (yes, I know that sounds quite scary! The Bible gives a lot of clarity on this in case you want to dig deeper). A spirit that has a physical body and a soul. The spirit within us longs for its Creator. Sin is anything that keeps us disconnected from God.
Matthew 7:7,8
7: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
8: For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
We live in the "Dispensation of grace" where we have access to God through Jesus Christ if only we would seek. A scientist once said that he would be more than willing to give up his own life to save that of his child - but God in his great magnificence gave up his own son to die on a cross so that you and I while yet sinners could be saved through the blood of Jesus. Jesus Christ is the Savior we all need.
Paul writes in Romans 8:38-39
38: For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,
39: neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Concluding on this note that "It is not hell that can discourage evil-doing but the experience of the love of God that can stop all evil-doing in this world"
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Your verse already has divine beings with power beyond mortal ken. They just have to use a little of it (as little as possible) to keep their people in line.
If awareness is relatively cheap, your Human Deity could simply Be Aware and then do something relatively minimal to let everyone else know what they did. Different sins could be associated with different smells, for example. Then let the human authorities deal with the punishment.
Or perhaps its relatively easy for some portion of the clergy to pray for awareness of someones misdeeds. Grant that order of your clergy the secular power to punish the guilty, and you have a Very Effective police force. So effective that being caught is all but certain.
]
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[
So within my world there exists a faction of monks on a secluded mountain whose scientific and philosophical knowledge outstrips the outside medieval world. And with these monks being famous more for their mastery of martial arts in all their forms than any other of their achievements, it follows that they are most famous for what outsiders call the "Steel Eating Sword". So how would a mostly non-modern society go about crafting a sword that can cut through normal steel armor and weapons?
So the characteristics of this sword are as follows:
* Able to cut through steel, e.g. through a sword raised in defense or plate armor.
* Made like some kind of saber for cutting (based off of the nodachi, zanbato, or dandao) .
* Made with "mysterious" materials and craftsmanship that confuse all smiths
* Rarely needs to be sharpened.
* Isn't affected by water or air exposure.
* Hard to break, snaps back into shape.
As for the skill base of these monks:
* Turn of the century level of technological knowledge (with some exceptions of more or less advanced)
* Capable of electrolysis
* Unified society (ample hands for labor and minds for thinking)
* Logically based society with no constrictions based on culture or taboo.
I'm thinking iridium, tungsten, titanium, diamond integrated metals, etc.
So since my world isn't far enough into development for rules to be hard-set I do have a lot of wiggle room.
**TL;DR**: how to make a sword that can cut through steel armor?
[Answer]
[Frame challenge:](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7097/a-proposal-for-helping-users-understand-frame-challenges)
## You can’t, at least with the limitations imposed
You are asking for too much, some of your points contradict each other or ask for something that's far beyond what a sword could do:
>
> Able to cut through steel, i.e. through a sword raised in defense or plate armour.
>
>
>
Firstly, asking to cut through a steel sword with another sword is hard enough. The problem is if you raised your sword and I struck it with my own, your sword is going to flex and move away. Your arms may also move to absorb the blow, further reducing the force on the sword.
Second, that's not how you fight with swords anyway. It's not as simple as “swing the blade as hard as you can and cut the person”, it has more finesse than that. I won’t bore you with all the fine details about sword fighting, but I will give you the basic concept of “overly strong strikes”. Basically, if your opponent is swinging with a lot of power (as they would be if they were trying to cut through your sword), it is futile to try and match their strength with your block, if they hit the tip-end of your sword, it will move out the way anyway and you’ll be cut. If however you instead *let them* knock your blade aside and you step out the way, you can redirect your sword with the momentum they gave you and strike them instead, using their strength against them.
>
> Made like some kind of saber for cutting (based of off the nodachi, zanbato, or dandao)
>
>
>
None of those swords you listed are ideal for a duel between sword fighters, as they don’t have large enough guards. A strike is more likely to hit you as you have very little protection, crossguards, when used correctly, protect your entire body, not just your hands. I would recommend something like the Kriegsmesser, since the blade has similarities to those swords you mentioned but the crossguard is far larger and there is a “nail” that sticks of to one side, offering even more protection.
>
> Rarely needs to be sharpened
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>
>
It will need to be sharpened often, there are no two ways about it. You are striking a fine edge against solid steel, you will need to sharpen it if nothing else but to remove the damage to the edge of the blade. Also, even the *air* causes steel swords to dull and require sharpening. In short, your swords will need to be sharpened fairly regularly.
>
> isn't affected by water or air exposure
> Hard to break, **snaps back into shape**
>
>
>
No idea what “snaps back into shape means”, if you’re referring to the damage of a sword being repaired easily, I would just like to point out that it will always be weaker than before it was damaged.
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**However, steel swords could cut through iron or bronze swords**
All this being said, it is still possible to achieve something similar to what you want, though not against steel. Both iron and bronze swords *can* be cut through with a steel one, there are a number of accounts of this.
If you were to change what swords everyone else was wielding, your answer becomes “the monks use steel swords”. Steel smithing was a “mysterious” process during the Bronze Age, it could cut through iron or bronze swords, could easily be made into any sword design you wanted, wouldn’t need sharpening *as much* as iron or bronze and the process of making steel stainless makes it resistant to water and air corrosion (though, to clarify, you’d want stainless spring steel or stainless tool steel, not the stainless steel cutlery, cheap pocket knives or training swords are made out of).
Here are some videos which talk about steel swords and why steel was used for swords historically:
* [The oldest STEEL sword in the world, Vered Jericho sword of Ancient Israel RECONSTRUCTED](https://youtu.be/BG7YKl7tSfY)
* [Super cutting swords, are they needed?](https://youtu.be/_VR16SV47II)
* [The riddle of steel: How people made it by accident for millennia](https://youtu.be/wrgK-9nNzow)
[Answer]
You won't be able to cut a sword as if it were paper, cloth or a bamboo, not with your constraints. Mainly because metal blades are not made of fiber, so even for a medieval sword you would need a laser for a proper cut.
What you can do is make the enemy's blade snap. Blades will snap if you bang them hard enough against hard objects. To that end, ancient chinese developed the *bagua zhang dao*:
That thing does not have a sharp edge, and that is by design.
Modern ones for martial arts training weight up to 2kg (~4lb), but my fencing instructors told me ancient ones could weight up to 10x 4x that. You wouldn't swing those blades like a regular one; you'd have to keep it in constant motion, switching arms and using your torso as a counterweight. The point of using that weapon in battle was that if your opponent wielded a regular 0.7 to 1.5 kg sword, blocking your blade with their own would mean their weapon would break.
And if they were using armor, taking a blow from a 4-8 kg piece of metal with a very thin profile may be lethal. The armor will bend and press your body into an unnatural shape, breaking bone and tearing ligaments. If the armor is brittle, it may not stand the reshaping and tear open.
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Edit: After talking to one of my instructors, he said 10x was a gross exaggeration. Most bagua sabers wouldn't be more than 3 or 4 kg heavy, and only some (maybe ceremonial) ones would reach 8kg. Still, we broke a lot of swords when we sparred with smaller, lighter blades; it just happens that in ancient times, a blade would hardly last more than one or two battles, depending on the kind of blade. I know for sure that a 1kg sharp one parrying a 4kg blunt one will probably be damaged beyond usefulness after not too many direct hits.
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Another edit: I learned some moves that I used to practice with a wooden one (which was on the light end of the spectrum, probably 1.5 to 2kg). They look like [this](https://youtu.be/fY-JZ3vZqMw), but are not exactly the same. The most similar part is the vertical swing followed by a low swing at 0:20.
[Answer]
**Ceramic swords**
We have [ceramic knives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_knife) today, much harder than steel (8.5 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, compared to 4.5 for normal steel and 7.5 to 8 for hardened steel). They keep their edges far longer than steel blades and never rust or degrade, even in very harsh conditions. They are also resistant to acid.
Ceramic blades are, however, more brittle than steel, so real-life ceramic swords will not live up to your last requirement. Your monks may have solved that problem through a secret process. In Miyazaki's *Nausicaä* manga (picture) and anime, the heroine wields a ceramic sword that slices through steel blades, so there is a fictional precedence.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rFaBY.jpg)
[Answer]
**The monks are master swordsmen.**
>
> through: moving in one side and out of the other side of (an opening,
> channel, or location).
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>
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The monks know swordsmanship. To people who fight them (or actually people who have talked to people who have seen the monks fight), it seems as if armor and swords pose no barrier to the attacks of the monks. Their swords cut right through. If my offense comes through your defense, possibly I have shattered your defense. Or possibly, with my sweet monkish skills, I have sidestepped and bypassed your defenses and come through that way. As @Liam Morris points out, sword fighting is very much about skill; it is not just chopping down a tree (which also requires a modicum of skill).
The swords of the monks cut through steel defenses not because the monks are alien material scientists, but because they have such sweet martial arts skills.
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The monks do not discourage the "magic sword" idea. They actually have some wild looking glass swords and other strange relics displayed in obvious places around the monastery. If you ask one of the monks about these swords, he will nod and smile.
[Answer]
You have another problem:
Suppose you had an infinitely sharp edge with no thickness: You still need to separate the molecules of steel from each other. This imposes a certain minimum energy per area cut.
Probably you can get a first-order approximation to this energy by looking at the power used by metal shaving equipment.
Suppose that it turns out to be 1000 joules per cm2 (Number picked out of my a... air.)
If your weapon weighs a 2kg, and you get it moving at 10m/s it has $\frac1 2 mv^2 = 100 J$ And so it would cut 1/10 of a square cm of steel -- roughly a 1 mm deep cut 2 cm long, with tapers at the ends.
I have zero faith in that 1000J/cm2 figure.
[Answer]
Your problem is physics, not metallurgy. Steel is tough, even if your sword is perfectly rigid and takes no damage during a hit, you'll push the armor wearer back.
To puncture the armor, you need a lot of force concentrated in a very small spot, but then armor thickness of a plate mail is laid out to resist such stabs.
A much sharper material won't help you much since it won't improve the muscle power of the fighter. Lighter materials also don't help, since you actually want the weight of the blade to transfer momentum, and tougher materials also don't help, since that makes your blade prone to shattering.
[Answer]
### A different [framing challenge](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7097/a-proposal-for-helping-users-understand-frame-challenges): why specifically swords?
@LiamMorris has given a really good framing challenge on [whether steel swords could be cut](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/147578/a-steel-cutting-sword/147592#147592) so I want to give one on the idea of using a sword at all (or as the saying goes: *"perception is reality"*)
In modern times, Unicorns invoke an image of a white horse with that spiral horn but early on people thought these were real creatures. It has been theorized that the myth and reality of unicorns came due to far-away or obscured views of giraffes and rhinos. Indeed, the term unicorn was also used to describe rhinos in Europe and in Japan the kirin キリン (Japanese for a mythical creature similar to the Unicorn) that was presented to the Emperor [turned out to be a giraffe](https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/mythic-creatures/land/unicorns-west-and-east).
What does this have to do with swords? Nothing except that:
* appearances can be deceiving
* second hand accounts (esp. if based on a 1st hand account that was given by a person in shock) are not the most reliable
* people who write histories (especially ancient ones) are not always 100% accurate
## Use a club
So given the other referenced framing challenge and the other answers based on cutting steel: *if we try to "cut" through a a steel sword it's just not going to work*. However, if we have a blunt force weapon that looks like a sword, it has a chance to actually break (not cut) the sword. If an onlooker is:
* Fighting his own battle and in a high adrenal (fight or flight) state & only catching glimpses
* Staying far back to avoid getting drawn into the battle
* Hiding under some kind of cover or concealment which can obstruct the view
and then sees our monk use his club to break the blade at all (even if just bends the blade or break means it knocks the blade from the tsuka or handle). There is a good chance he would think *"Holy \*@!\*, did that guy just snap that other guy's sword in two with his own?!"*.
Add a few re-tellings and you have the "**Legend of the Monk's blade which cuts through steel**".
## Japanese "Sword Breakers"
If there is a Japanese weapon, that already has a legend and nickname attached to them that relates to this it is the "sword breaker", the [jitte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitte) or Jutte:.
Standard Jitte vs. Naeshi (no hook) Jitte
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bz6ZVm.jpg) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZzX6Rm.jpg)
With the above you could strike a katana1 and cause its blade to break or bend if:
* it was cheaply made
* had a defect
* was not taken care of properly
+ damaged due to lack of skill
+ the tsuba not properly being attached after a cleaning
+ never cleaned because bandit doesn't know he needs to
* other story reason here
History is fuzzy on if these were actually used to break swords but I've personally knocked the blade from the tsuba on a cheap (<$100) katana with my baton so I know it is at least possible that this had happened before2.
### Or maybe these monks had contact with Europeans? The Bar Mace
Another excellent example, thank you Liam, is the Bar Mace (picture from *"European Weapons And Armour"* by Ewart Oakeshott):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FGKNn.jpg)
Beyond the fact that someone seeing it from the side in action could be all like "*What kinda crazy sword is that?!*" due to edges, profile, and usage. The fact that this example is described by Ewart as an *Italian example from the 13th century*, would also add to the mystery as **only the monks have a weapon like this** (and maybe they occasionally speak this weird *magic* language using words like "pasta").
## Then let the Legend grow
So all you would then need is someone to start telling the story of how they saw these monks fight these bandits armed with katanas (which are actually very cheap and/or poorly maintained but the peasant wouldn't be able to tell that), where one of them broke the bandits leader's sword into two pieces when he struck it with his own *"sword"*. Soon the "[telephone effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers)" will start and its turned into how he "***cut the sword in two with his magic sword***".
*1: Note, with the hook variety: you would not catch the blade with the hook, rather you would block with the "blade" then hook the katana blade or, more likely and safer, catch the attacker's arm/wrist/cloths with the hook to apply control techniques. This is very likely the real reason they were named "sword breakers" they "broke" the sword's attack but the legend was attached and its basis in reality contested to this day.*
*2: It didn't even break the blade just knocked it from out of the tsuka (handle) due to it only being attached with a very small tang. Still heard people say the sword (blade) "broke in two" despite this fact.*
[Answer]
As far as I know, no sword was really able to cut through metal armor. It's common in fiction, but probably even when shown on medieval drawings: it was an exaggeration to show the might of a king/famous knight and so on.
Most of the cuts found on skeletons by archaeologists on old battlefield/post-battlefield mass graves are found on hands and legs since they were often not covered by armor.
You may find some YouTube videos showing cuts going through the armor, but they are executed on very thin, low-quality objects, being held stationary.
In a real fight you would require so much force to cut through something that hard, that even if you had enough strength and sword that wouldn't break in the process, you would firstly push your opponent, since they wouldn't stand stationary, waiting for the sword to go through, force of the hit would push them (and probably also slide off from the initial point of impact), instead of pushing blade through the layers of steel.
Swords breaking on each other were a thing, but doing so on purpose not so much. Especially that again: if something is pushing at your blade strong enough to break it, your hands will bend or break first.
So: I don't think you can find any historical precedent or very down to earth justification of something like that occurring. You will need some magical mumbo-jumbo, but it probably should contain a mix of superhuman speed, so cut goes through faster than body/sword is able to move out of the way, that would force sword to go into the armor instead of pushing target away and amazingly hard steel (that would also make it preserve its sharpness), so it won't break or shatter in the process. And, because the blade slides off the target whenever it can (seeking for the path of least resistance), a fighter would have to land cuts on ideal angles, so the blade won't end up laying flat/sliding off.
[Answer]
Let us take an example perfect edge. An edge is a mathematical line, at the intersection of two planes or curves. The perfect edge is perfectly straight and perfectly thin, that is, with zero width. Any deviations from straightness or thinness make it worse at cutting.
An atom is the thinnest width that a physical edge made of atoms can have. That's at the atomic scale. A medieval sword might be a million atoms across or worse, with a broad, blunt edge pressing and scraping across whatever you want cut. Already we are losing cutting ability.
The perfect edge is made of perfectly strong material that never wears away (chips, burrs, or cracks). In the real world, it must be made of atoms, which have bonds of limited strength to their neighbors. When that bond's strength is overcome, the atom is ripped away or shoved away from the line, distorting the straight edge. Chips, burrs, and cracks appear in the line. We are losing more cutting ability.
If you want to cut through steel armor (or another sword), you would need a very thin, unbreakable line for the edge. In science fiction, Larry Niven's Variable Sword is appropriate. The Variable Sword is a handle, a little glowing button to show the end, and between them an invisibly thin unbreakable stiff thread. It wielder cuts through most objects without effort.
A real-world sword is made of atoms, which support each other and form the 99.9% of the sword that isn't edge. (99.999999...) The atoms must be bonded together so that the sword doesn't wear away quickly. But materials have several different measures of "strength": compressive strength, tensile strength, hardness, how far the shape can bend and still return to its original shape, etc. The melting point is important, too, as well as characteristics as the solid heats up, because a hot sword is easier to bend.
Medieval crafters don't have the materials science to define good steel, let alone create good steel, let alone create a large amount of good steel repeatedly. If they somehow got their hands on an excellent non-steel material, they would have a very hard time putting into the shape of a sword, let alone putting an edge on it.
Let's imagine they isolated ten pounds of tungsten (it's almost thrice the density of iron). They would need the materials science to make a ceramic mold that could withstand its tremendous melting temperature. That makes a sword-shaped object with a blunt edge, and they have to put tremendous amounts of time and effort into sharpening it. And still, its edge would be a million atoms across, and still, using it blunts the edge.
Other very hard elemental metals have similar problems. Some of them are quite toxic as well.
Let's imagine they acquired a sword that is a single crystal of diamond. Nice and light, but it will chip and shatter easily. Also, the carbon gets absorbed into iron and steel it presses into, so the edge will quickly be ruined.
Long story short - steel is used for swords because it's the best compromise known of all the problems known. A society needs science to be able to define better materials. Better materials are frequently just more-precisely-understood steel with vanadium, tungsten, molybdenum, etc. And it's still not going to cut through armor or other swords without blunting.
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Steel is not a simple thing, it can be engineered to have a range of different properties, and in fact, many of the tools used to work with steel are made from different kinds of steel, e.g. tool steels <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_steel> and high-speed steels <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_steel>
To make plate armor, you'd instead want relatively malleable steel that could be beaten into shape. Thus a sword (say a Japanese katana) made from hard & tough steel could cut the armor if wielded with sufficient force. Likewise, if the other people's swords are made of such steel (because they don't know the secrets of the "magic" steel), then it might well cut a sword used for parrying. Though that would really be an inferior technique...
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I don't know how SuperTech you wanna go, but if you want something lightsaber-ish but not a lightsaber, you could have a very thin ceramic heating element, heated up to around 10eV (115,000 K), not a sword, but a very very Hot... Rod.
OK, so your HotRod emits blackbody radiation at a peak of several eV (hard i.e. ionizing UV and soft x-ray) so it doesn't glow in the visible spectrum, but it will ionize and thermally excite air out to some distance. Depending on how hot you want the HotRod to be, this glow could be confined to a few mm from the rod (lightsaber-ish) or it could be spread around a 10 m radius sphere (The monk appears cloaked in a nimbus of strange and whirling lights.) The Monk wielding it is definitely going to eat some Rads, but 1) Monks are already head-shaven, 2) Monks might have a vow of chastity (don't start the HotRod next to yer jimmies!!!) and 3) Monks might have some advanced medical tech or secret herbal tea that heals radiation. A captured HotRod is effectively a cursed item to a non-monk, who promptly contracts a strange wasting disease upon playing with his monk-toy...
OK, so what happens to a struck sword? Assume a straight-bladed sword with a diamond-shaped cross-section 3cm x ½cm, and the strike affects 1.33 cm of blade length (this works out to 1 cc) with the steel blade having a density of 10 g/cc (high for steel, which is ~8), a thermal conductivity of 50 W/mK and a specific heat capacity of 500 J/kgK (All of these are reasonable numbers, Thanks Google!). When the 1 cc of steel blade comes into contact with the HotRod at 115,000K, it will suck heat at a rate that will change its temperature by 34,200 K/s. After 50 ms of contact (basically instantaneous as far as human reflexes are concerned), the assumed volume of steel blade in contact with the HotRod will heat up by 1710K, from a starting point of, presumably, 290K (room Temp), this means that the portion of the blade struck will be 2000K after a twentieth of a second, and steel melts at 1650K. So your HotRod just turned a portion of steel blade into slag, with 1 solid portion falling away and the other still attached to the handle, it's medieval owner looking like a sap...
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Your monks, through going into battle with a pre-wound motor, are now able to make their blades vibrate at the right frequency to have the motion do the cutting, not whacking the blade (it is now a very fast saw). If they are advanced scientifically, they can make a motor with an uneven weight on the end, powered by a rotational spring (or spool of string for short engagements).
Some drawbacks:
1. It will not cut through like nothing is there. You have created a saw, not a lightsaber.
2. Vibrating motion, for an extended period of time, will number their hands, or at least be uncomfortable. They may be able to withstand this through monk discipline.
3. It would not work for extended engagements where many strikes are needed, as your motor would run out of preload.
4. The blades would have to be thinner than normal blades. This would make them more brittle unless your monks are better at treating steel.
I don't know how realistic you want this to be, but maybe these monks offer up a special prayer to Combat God, and use the power granted to vibrate swords for an extended period of time. Although, at that point, you might as well have them pray for a lightsaber.
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**You are after the old-style Damascus blades made from Wootz steel.**
To make a long story short, about 2000 years ago a certain type of steel came out of India known as damascus steel (not to be confused with modern damascus). This steel was renowned as far stronger, held an edge longer, and handled flexion better. You can read about it on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel).
It was known to be able to cut through other steel, shear stone without blunting and had a recognizable pattern across each blade.
Essentially the art of making it was lost as the blacksmiths died and modern attempts to recreate it have failed. Although in examining the blades modern science has uncovered carbon nanotubes inside them, (carbon nanotubes are approximately 100x stronger than steel and harder than diamond) which is incredible as carbon nanotubes are a relatively recent scientific discovery.
I feel like you could quite easily incorporate this type of steel into your world and the real world story behind it fits in very well with what you are trying to create. Sorry that I don't have more details but a google search should provide them.
The main thing is not to confuse modern damascus steel with the historic version. Modern damascus steel is just pattern-welded steel to try to recreate the pattern, and while it can sometimes be stronger than other steel, it does not bear the same properties as the historic version.
[Here](http://www.ancientpages.com/2017/04/05/ancient-secrets-damascus-steel-legendary-metal-used-crusaders-warriors/) is another article on it.
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There are some wonderful answers here, mostly explaining that steel sword on steel sword is a tough nut to crack because of good ol' physics and metallurgy. There is another way to do it though....we can cheat with the power of narrative convenience and swipe some ideas from old sci-fi stories.
Your Monks will, of course, come from Shambala or some other mystical mountain fastness. It always has perfect weather, just the right kind to make things grow, to ward off violent storms, and so on. This is because it is the home to the Legendary Quantum Weather Butterfly (Thank you Sir Terry Pratchett) This butterfly can alter the weather by flapping its wings this way or that way because the edge of its wings is fractal, and therefore infinitely long. The good weather is only a bonus though. The real key is the silk produced by the caterpillars that eventually become the mature Quantum Weather Butterfly.
The interesting thing about this silk is that it is not just really fine, but that each strand is, in fact, mono-molecular. The real skill these monks have is not in making steel (they aren't slouches though), but in being able to handle the raw silk and using it effectively.
What the monks do is craft a mediocre steel sword with blunt edges. Then they wind the silk around the tip and the handguard. They then run a single strand from tip to guard, getting it as taut as they can maybe as much as 1mm away from the actual blunt edge of the blade. Given that the strand is one continuous molecule, it will have the same strength as the bonds between its individual atoms, so the thread itself is nearly indestructible by normal means. Also, since it is only one molecule thick, it will be able to cut through just about anything like a wire through a block of cheese.
Anyone observing these blades in action will be astounded at how they seem to shear through inferior steel weapons and armor. The cut will seem to begin slightly before the blade makes contact with whatever when seen up close.
The second point is that through their martial arts training, they are actually going to be striking the enemy weapons weakest points. The haft of the spear or mace, the handle of the axe or sword, the straps or joints of the armor.
The swords themselves will probably have significant wear after a handful of battles. but will just need to be rewound with fresh silk.
So the monks provide a safe place for the butterflies, and the butterflies give the monks awe-inspiring weapons, cool clothes, and the kind of weather where you don't mind not having hair.
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In reality, you cannot break a sword with a sword, and it very hard to pierce armour with one. With some reasonable metallurgy skills and a design which is essentially a club with one sharp side, you could likely break some swords and smash some armour, and you would not really have to keep it sharp since it is basically a blunt force weapon. You could make it superficially resemble a sword and the monks could spread rumours that the club is a sword.
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<https://youtu.be/vrCJlrQZKxg>
<https://youtu.be/UZmCmG5JC10>
<https://youtu.be/4PfC4S559MA>
<https://youtu.be/j0_Z2gC97ZM>
<https://youtu.be/mU_Wft2kH-U>
<https://youtu.be/TUR9YtvSAkw>
<https://youtu.be/B9nJmfBcmBw>
<https://youtu.be/Qzhs1Z8Rwnk>
The thing to remember when we attempt to answer this question isn’t can they break a sword? Because we have them doing that on camera, and a verity of other similarly impressive feats on tape. They usually break swords with there head. I found the guy who was bending and deforming high grade stainless steel with his kicks to be highly impressive. What we are looking for is something less like a sword and more like... the worlds least destructible metal, (mythril, adamantium) and what shape does that need to be... to allow them to focus that energy. We need a thing to focus energy. Cause their head, wrists, fingers, palms, They diffuse and spread the energy out over a wide surface area. Cause the guy who is practically kicking socket wrenches in half. He’s already applying sufficient “un-focused” energy to cut it in half. The guy who can throw a needle thru glass, the guy who can cut a B.B. in half fired out of b.b. gun. With a katana, The guy who can smash a rock by poking it with two fingers. The guy who can smash 4 bricks by slapping them. These are feats they can actually do, in modern times and by people of a high skill level for them, but not the highest. It then becomes very reasonable to think a supremely gifted natural prodigy in ancient times would very much be able to destroy a sword, rather easily by smashing it with his head. He can do it. There is no problem with his ability to do this. Our question is with all the massive amount of knowledge at OUR disposal can we craft something that is sufficiently close enough to +3 enchanted dwarven mythril to withstand the force and energy this monk is going to channel thru it. His ability to focus the energy is just fine. I think we need to think less along the lines of a sword and more along the lines of a metal bar that looks sufficiently like a sword, has similar properties and proportions and may well be able to perform the same functions as a sword, this is still less a sword and more of indestructible metal bar. It’s functional in the sword regard perhaps, but were thinking more along the line of physics, rules of motion simple machines, ect. I think the monks are keenly aware of these things. In particular i think there keenly aware of the limitations of there physical body which they have turned into a living weapon. We don’t as people have “edges” that would make for the ideal transfer of focused energy to the blade. They can still break blades with there head and such, but once you equip them with an indestructible edge, that they can channel their energy and force thru. The question is can WE make that. Scientifically, what is the best, metal, shape and forging process that would allow the monk to focus the energy into a specific place. Cause that should break the sword. And if not then he will head butt it and break it. HE can do it. Can we put the thing in his hand that works better then his skull? all we have to do is better then his skull. But if we fail, we fail. This guy can already break swords without out help. Can we give him a tool to help him break a blade better then can with his own skull. We just have to beat or do better then a skull. He’s already breaking blades just fine without the aid of a tool. Can we create for him a tool or are WE inferior. Because he has ancient eastern martial arts abilities that allow him to break swords. Without us. He’s already doing it with just his body. If we can’t use modern science to make a tool that can help him do it better that doesn’t mean HE can’t do it. Were just failures in creating a tool. The monk is already able to do this without OUR help. Food for thought. Also i am believing the angle of a bandit with a poor sword. I don’t think any bandit would have much luck against a monk of the highest skill level amongst all the temples of that region. Grand masters would have been un assailable against people who weren’t trained from birth to compete against people of that skill level. They would literally be a chump holding up a thing for the monk to break. It’s not like a life or death battle at that point. It really is something like want to see something more impressive then break your sword with my head? Sword destroyed by metal bar. They generate the energy needed for doing this. It’s the object in his hand to deliver that energy into a small, thin, surface area that needs the work. Imagine they CAN do it. What do you give them to do it better? :) 
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I have been building a 'magic' system in a fantasy setting and have a number of ways a human can gain power.
Most of these are limited to who can access them by royal bloodline, being god's chosen, intense study, rare ability or immoral choices.
However I have another method where a human can essentially train physically and improve until they can perform superhuman feats, leap buildings, throw boulders etc.
This option would be open to every human so now I need a plausible reason why every human isn't a walking juggernaut and also why people would choose the alternative methods of gaining power.
In short, why would someone choose to not gain these powers, and why would someone choose alternative methods of magic when this option is available?
Edits for clarification:
Once power is gained, it will not decay outside exceptional circumstances so maintaining strength isn't much effort. The time and effort required is exponential as it increases but starts quite easily.
Examples from the setting
- Character A is a town guard, who deals with petty criminals who sometimes have their own powers. Due to his job and arms practice, by age 27 he has specialized in speed and can maintain a flat out sprint for around 2 minutes and cover a mile.
- Character B is a warlord, in his late 50s, has served in multiple wars and trains every day since his teens. His body has adapted to split each of his arms into two at will, and then wield a conventional 2 handedsword in all 4 at once. His specialization is muscle mass and strength, but he isn't much faster than a fit human.
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Consider why you personally cannot run a 10 minute mile, or lift 200 lbs 10 times, do a backflip and land on your feet. Or why you are not expert with the bow and arrow. Or expert at throwing darts. Why can't you play bass guitar? Why didn't you learn to speak Kazakh? None of that is magic. I do not know you, but I suspect any of those things are within your power now. There is nothing stopping you.
Answer: **you were busy doing other things**. Like going to school, earning a living, raising a family. All that stuff is a lot of work and for what? If you have nothing you particularly want to shoot with an arrow and nobody around who understands Kazakh, why spend the time to earn those skills? Your example guys are guards and soldiers who can use those fighting powers but what if I grow vegetables and raise chickens?
Now: it would be very, very cool if I could train and get superpowers that were useful in my job of raising chickens, or tailoring tight pants, or singing songs for people at bars. People would actually do that. And it would be fun inventing superpowers that had not been previously seen on DragonBall Z.
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Make it hard or undesirable.
If I could give you the ability to lift a boulder, and all you had to do was train 24/7 for 20 years, would you do it? What if you didn't have all that many boulders to lift 20 years from now? Don't you just want to sit down and answer questions on WorldBuilding.SE instead of spending your life training?
We don't live forever. We often forget this, but it's important in times like these.
Also, not everything is about power. Power can't buy you love.
Really, all you need to do is create a system where people actually have to expend something they care about (like time/effort) in order to gain capabilities, and *then* start balancing.
Consider options like:
* Building power by training is slower than gaining the power by other means
* Power gained by training erodes slowly. The more you trained your power, the more you have to keep training to keep your power
* Power isn't all it cracked up to be, especially if you can ask your resident god-chosen to open the pickle jar for you
* Not everybody want superhuman powers. There's an entire sub-genre of literature covering the extra responsibilities that come with such power. Not everyone wants those.
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EDIT: *I put the Resources/Extra Food another question of yours but thought it fit here as well.*
**Resources/Extra Food**
You can also take a page from Novas in the Aberrant game. They are meta-humans that can often do incredible things--one of the side effects of being "super" is that you need much, much more food than an ordinary human to live. In the Aberrant setting, which is set in modern times, this wasn't a big deal or even stressed that much, but in a more Fantasy/Medieval setting, an elite needing 2-5x as much food will be a much bigger deal. This means that it will limit the poor a bit as far as becoming elite. So, if a Guard in a city, for instance, is determined to become elite, he might live in a poor neighborhood with no amenities, just so he can supply himself with the food he will need, because he could not afford rent otherwise.
**Time.**
Time and experience. Others, like Will have covered that. There's also--
**Danger**
You have to go in a certain direction. Certain jobs, I'm sure, will be more likely to make you go meta-humanish. If you put yourself in harm's way, you still might die even if you are good at certain things.
The people who do train might be elite guards or something, who will also have to face down other elites, but you don't have to deal with all of that, if you just keep your head down. You want your kids to survive, you teach them not to go meta.
**Social Pariahs**
Being an adventurer-type can lead to some people being "murder hobos." Ordinary folks know they won't be able to handle it.
Ordinary people may indeed cringe when they see meta folks come into their town, as it generally means a whole LOT of property damage.
They don't want to anger them, but at the same time, they really don't want to be welcoming. They might pay metas to solve problems other metas have caused them, but they would really love to never see another one again. They may be bad-mouthed a bunch more than you would think.
Community members might be accepted, but any meta strangers would be met with suspicion.
**Not Needed**
So, if you want to be a farmer, you just do the same thing every day, and you don't train harder and harder each day. Why bother? Or if you're a watch maker, or a stock broker or..or...or. A rich man can hire meta-body guards.
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In your world there is a terrible distraction readily available.
In the early years of the internet people talked about how humanity would improve because they would have the ability to learn anything by themselves with all the information a click away. Instead people spend all day on social networks.
People prefer to have fun instead of working. They will only strive to be good enough to fulfill their obligations. More than that is against our instinct to spend as little energy as possible.
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**The learning process is not well-known.**
I think something interesting you can also think about is how develop skills today. Through experience *over time* we've discovered that:
* Most people learn best by doing as opposed to watching or reading.
* Practice makes permanent as opposed to perfect.
* Practice in smaller parts as opposed to practicing the entire motion (i.e. for piano, practice right hand then left hand and then together)
* etc.
Evidently, this is also very closely related to the issue of not having enough time, but more over a generational perspective. The idea is **if the global society that you were building was very old, they would have found better and better ways to develop the body** (i.e. like the *recent* rise of the low carb, high protein, high fat diets). But maybe, for one reason or another, perhaps due to some bad science, a belief(s) in religion, some mutation in the human genes, etc. makes it such that **the learning process is not well-known and/or developed**.
So in your world, there could be many people like the guard. They're faster than the average human in our world and that would actually be "normal." (Consider all the running public education has you do. Or at least I had to do..) The guard would just be "normally" faster than the "normal" human (or you could make them slower and donut eating...). *But for people to figure out how to develop 4 arms, that requires a very specialized learning process, one that perhaps is even a secret to the general public, maybe like some secret MMA today.* Because of that, people resort to other forms of magic.
So I guess to anwer your question: **People wouldn't be able to gain these powers because they don't know how to learn it. Therefore, they resort to other more well-known forms of magic.**
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The techniques used to train could be really painful ?
When you build your muscles, you destroy them and repair them to make them grow.
So you would need a really strong motivation/mind to bear the pain to get such strenght.
And obviously the more powerful you are, the more painful it beacomes to become stronger.
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Maybe some people get better results for their effort. It might be genetics/bloodline or it might be through expensive supplements that they can take. It could be for both reasons. Those with good bloodlines and who were rich would have much higher levels than ordinary folk.
This is common in Chinese novels like you find on [Wuxia World](http://www.wuxiaworld.com).
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Another alternative could be that you only can gain from training if you have actual legitimate motivation, as opposed to will. You see that as a plot device in some anime sometimes I believe. Since we're already altering how the brain\physics work to make this world possible, this doesn't seem too much of a leap.
Thus the life stories of your guard and your warlock could quite reasonably naturally motivate their interest in these skills, but you wouldn't have a million guys going around doing these trainings just for power purposes (we'll say a person isn't able to find the same motivation\brain chemistry by doing it for power as one being motivated out of honest interest\love\necessity).
Is that really all that different than the real world once again? Some are brainy people from their youth, others grow a passion for physical activities, etc. It's just honest realty you're more likely to find a kid one considered gifted in elementary is now skillful in engineering skills... and the all pro linebacker probably was pretty physically active even as a young child. But certain life progressions can get most anyone into these types of skills, and other drives like love or survival can be enough to get many learning new things.
So be it in this world. There's still a bit of predisposition, but at the same time, anyone truly can.
If you wish, you could still perhaps even allow some development by simple resolve... just make it unpleasant and difficult to get into it enough. So a few dedicated people can will themselves to new interest paths (perhaps guided by pulls of power, greed, perfectionism, altruististic, etc style purposes). But most just aren't driven enough to get past the hump, just as it is in our world with things we don't find ourselves very good/interested/needful at.
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Let's assume for the moment that physics, biology and chemistry are not all down the pub getting smashed on dwarven sprits, even if they might be a bit distracted in your world.
When humans train in physical tasks they build muscles that work well for those tasks - white muscle for speed, red muscle for strength and endurance. The more muscle you have the better you perform at tasks that use those muscles... at least until the muscles themselves start getting in the way.
Besides the strength and speed you get from those muscles you also get a whole bunch of other effects:
1. Increased energy usage
Everything you do, including breathing, now takes more energy. That energy has to come from somewhere so you eat a lot more than you used to. This means more time spent eating and more money spent on buying food... or more time hunting your next meal, depending on the setting.
2. Extra Heat
The bigger your muscles and the harder they work the more heat your body generates. Human bodies are very delicate about their internal temperature so your body needs to get rid of that heat somehow. Mostly this involves increasing the blood flow to the skin and then sweating to cool the skin down. As you increase in mass your volume increases faster than your surface area, so eventually you're going to hit a breaking point where your skin area isn't high enough to provide enough cooling to balance your muscles. Either you stop before you hit that point or your move to a glacier to continue your training.
3. More Waste Products
Every time you flex a muscle the body uses ATP, glucose, etc. to make the cells contract. The waste products need to be moved out of there pretty quickly or you will get to enjoy all the fun effects of things like lactic acid buildup. Your body's ability to deal with those metabolites tends to increase as your improve your fitness, but the waste products still need to be filtered out of your blood and eventually out of your body entirely. And we haven't even started talking about the effects of all that extra food...
4. Bone Strength
Human bones are fairly strong, and they do tend to get stronger as you bulk up. But there are limits there too (unless you remove them) and it's possible to build muscle strength faster than bone strength. In human body builders today you still hear the occasional story about someone who bulked too fast and broke a bone during a lift. Admittedly there are probably some contributing factors like steroid abuse going on there, but it happens.
5. Sheer Mass
Ever meet a really big body builder? You know, 6'5" and built like a human-shaped bulldog? Ever wonder how much they weigh in at? It's not unusual for an average height human bodybuilder to reach as high as 270lb, and some of the taller ones can get up around 300. Ronnie Coleman weighed in at about 297 lb at his peak. That's about twice the weight of the average slim guy.
Now imagine 300 lb pushing down on an area the size of your foot. OK, maybe bigger than *your* foot, but think it through. You'd tend to find the weak points in any floor you walked on by the simple expedient of falling through them. And when you run the impact force is much higher.
6. Size.
I had a friend who did competition body building, and when he bulked for competition he had trouble with normal doors. He had to turn sideways to get through an average house door. He had trouble finding a vehicle that he fit in properly without modification. Dude was *big.*
7. Health
With great size comes great... well, joint pain for one thing. Extra stress on the heart - which I presume isn't a problem here because it's just another muscle - and other organs. Hormone imbalances from the excess musculature. Intestinal problems from the massively different diet. Damaged cartilage, tendons, nerve sheaths... there's a lot that goes wrong for big, big guys. And that's just the stuff the natural body builders suffer from. Wait 'til you see just how screwed up the chemistry is inside a 'roid head. That stuff is *crazy.*
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Actually there's more, but I think that'll do for now. Most of it comes down to one thing: the Cube-Square law.
If you want some more ideas I suggest an online series called DeathWorlders. One of the ongoing themes is using alien pharmacology to train human soldiers to absolutely absurd size, strength, speed, etc. One of the main characters "Warhorse" is frequently compared to The Hulk in size... and he's still growing.
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> I have been building a 'magic' system in a fantasy setting and have a number of ways a human can gain power. Most of these are limited to who can access them by royal bloodline, being god's chosen, intense study, rare ability or immoral choices.
>
>
> However I have another method where a human can essentially train physically and improve until they can perform superhuman feats, leap buildings, throw boulders etc.
>
>
> This option would be open to every human so now I need a plausible reason why every human isn't a walking juggernaut and also why people would choose the alternative methods of gaining power.
>
>
>
Well, intense study seems to be much the same as physical training, only granting -presumably- mental powers, or esoteric knowledge of reality bending rituals and such, rather than para-physical prowess. Work hard, earn power, profit. But just because anybody can, doesn't mean everybody does. Hard work is *hard*, even if it *might eventually* give you superpowers.
Instead, indeed, why not choose to be of royal blood? Why not choose to be chosen by god? Why not choose to have rare ability? Uhm... These three of the alternate methods don't seem to be entirely electives. People *don't* choose them.
"Immoral choices" on the other consideration, does seem to be the option for people who seek more power than they are given without putting in the effort.
So then the options are:
(0) take it easy and don't get magic powers,
(1) be bestowed great power by birth or divine favour,
(2) study or work long and hard to gain some power, or
(3) villainy.
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how about the need for food and money? how about the need to actually work for the betterment of the society? or how about earning money for the family and even taking care of the family?
and to fit your story, if you want the ones in magic want to keep their power, you have two options:
1: a branch of the government that tracks anyone who gets too strong. there could be a limit to how strong you can legally get, and anyone who passes that limit can be killed on sight.
2: The magicians could have magic specifically to handle these types of super humans, who have super power, but are weak to magic.
as per option 2, one would prefer magic to physical power as only by spending time to understand the power of magic, can you gain resistance to magic. and the world could have dangers that no amount of strength or agility could handle- but are weak to the weakest of magicians.
Also, these dangers could have a death aura that would kill anything that comes within their range and does not have any resistance to magic.
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I'd also like to add another component to the other answers - unless you altered it, the training and power of a parent is not passed on to children - ***Everyone starts from scratch***, and so there is no passive power increase over time and generations. Yes there are propensities for skills, but those aren't always pursued, don't always come to fruition, and (in RPG terms) are just a high base stat roll with a limit (translated to real life).
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Basically,
# Facebook
(At least in principle)
So today, more than ever, if you want to learn anything, do anything, there are probably really good instructions on the internet. In a first-world country, you most likely have the time to train.
But it's really profitable for Facebook, or Hollywood, etc, for you to *not* learn any cool skills, but instead be looking at a screen all day. They've engineered the poop out of this—how to stimulate your brain, giving you enough dopamine that everything else seems dull and too much effort.
So maybe in a world of magic, having computers/social media might not work, but the concept of "I could but I can't be bothered, because X" is there.
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E.g. say there's a common drug-esque thing, like coffee, alcohol, smoking, kava, etc. It's socially accepted, and everyone does it as a way to relax. Train for hours every day? Even if it makes you the hulk, it just doesn't seem worth it. Only the monks in the mountains do that kind of stuff.
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Demigods are special humans that are born partly divine. These individuals have been extremely rare throughout history, and always have various significant effects for the world around them, leading to important changes for their time period. Demigods are marked by their exceptional beauty, amber colored eyes and golden blood, symbolizing their divine status. They are also human characteristics amplified, and are far stronger, faster, and more intelligent than average.
However, there are a number of problems relating to their development. A demigod coming into existence is very risky for a human mother to carry to term. During their fetal stages, they require significantly more resources from the mother, and grow at a quicker pace. In addition to that, a mother carrying a god-like fetus would likely suffer serious injury when the fetus begins to kick. All of these conditions would likely kill her.
How can a mortal woman successfully carry a demigod to term?
[Answer]
The demigod baby shares the blood supply with the mother, during this time, she also shares the divinity, the strength, and the partial invulnerability. Think "Mirror syndrome" but in a positive way. Instead of a shared illness, it's a shared invulnerability.
[Answer]
# Do not make a problem where you do not have one
Demi-gods have been born by fully human mothers in hundreds of myths all around the world for thousands of years without anyone ever making an issue out of it, so you do not need to make an issue of it now.
In fact if you do make an issue of, you are more likely to **hurt** your work than help it. This is because the corollary of [Chekhov's Gun](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChekhovsGun) applies here: if you do not intend to have this "issue" be important to the story, do not make it part of the story. You do not need to explain it unless it is relevant to the narrative.
## "But..."
No, you do not really want to go there because of the immense amounts of [**squick**](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Squick) this implies.
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> *Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the **awesome** power of God's true voice. Were you to hear it, your mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest; we went through five Adams before we figured that one out.* — [Alan Rickman as Metatron in Dogma](https://youtu.be/pTOeAcGHKms?t=174)
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So let the audience assume that **it just worked out**, as they have done for — quite literally — thousands of years without anyone raising as much as an eyebrow about it.
On the contrary, the human mothers of part- or fully divine figures seem to be able to conceive, carry to term, and then give birth in remarkably carefree ways...
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> *"Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When his mother, Mary, was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost."*
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> Yes, and the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold and got her with child. The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother's flank. Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree watered by the blood of the slain Agdestris, and laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis. The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia. For some reason, many religions force themselves to think of the birth canal as a one-way street[.]
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> Christopher Hitchens — [*God Is Not Great*](https://books.google.se/books?id=Lm9VdHv0OWEC)
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[Answer]
Same as for normal living beings.
Natural selection: only demigods who manage to not kill their mother in their fetal stage get the chance to be born and pass their genes to their descendants.
All others are simply subject to Darwinian selection.
If you want to sprinkle some divine intervention in the picture, than the deity who impregnated the woman will also put some abracadabra to ensure she can bear the fetus until a suitable age.
[Answer]
## A demigod's powers only manifest after birth
While in the womb, the demigod is, for all practical purposes, a normal human child. This requires no additional resources and incurs no additional risk upon the mother. This also creates a brief time of vulnerability in which the demigod can more easily be killed: either by killing it in the womb (usually killing the mother as well) or very soon after birth, before the child's abilities become more than human.
[Answer]
Fat mothers.
Fat provides nurishment as well absorbtion of shocks (4, 5). Fat is present internally and also around organs, so much so that some people who look thin may be suffering from obesity health issue's without knowing it (1). Having a fat if not obese mother seems to be the most likely way to guarantee survival, even if the mother will be battered and bruised. Obesity also has a risk that could be a benefit in this case. Being obese can reduce the amount of baby movement, which is normally a healthrisk to the baby. In this case the baby is a demigod and more likely to survive, while the lowered movement will increase the survival rate of the mother (2, 3). This could easily expedite the demigod's status as in antiquity only rich and powerful people would get enough food to get fat. So expect the best teachings and equipment available.
* (1) <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/dec/10/medicineandhealth.health>
* (2) livestrong.com/article/555337-baby-movement-in-obese-moms
* (3) <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470566/>
* (4) meetgraham.com.au
* (5) cprcertified.com/blog/what-happens-if-ribs-break-during-cpr
[Answer]
If your demigod foetuses come to term faster, requiring more resources in order to grow at a quicker pace, that may (in some way) be helpful for the mother. Rather than having to endure nine months of internal bruising, if the foetal development is complete in, say, three months, then perhaps she won’t need to deal with prolonged pain.
Also, in order to provide for a fast-growing foetus, it might be preferable for your mother to have ready access to as much food and drink as she requires (i.e. she’ll probably have to be quite wealthy, if this is a historical setting).
Also, the other thing to remember about demigods is that they are half-human. While they may benefit from accelerated healing, growth, intellect, and so on, it might be that during pregnancy, they simply act the same as a normal human foetus, just in a shorter timeline. Once they’re born, and exposed to the outside world, that’s when their godlike powers begin to kick in.
It also make sense that the gods who impregnated these women in the first place actually have a vested interest in their offspring. If they don’t care about their child (or the mother), they’ll do nothing to aid the process. However, if they *do* want to ensure the safety and survival of their child (and also the mother), then cue some divine intervention. They could perhaps imbue the mother with a secondary womb-lining/placenta, one that acts both as a shock absorber, and feeds the foetus the godlike nutrients they need.
Another idea is that maybe the mother has to ingest god-food (nectar and ambrosia) - ordinarily a human couldn’t tolerate it, but given the nutrient needs of her foetus, and the non-human behaviour it exhibits while she’s carrying it, it serves to strengthen her enough (and provide the baby with the divine nutrients it needs).
[Answer]
**Magical Placenta.**
As you've framed the question, it's not really logical. If demi-gods commonly killed their mothers/hosts, there wouldn't be many demi-gods around.
It is not possible for a fetus's kicks to be so strong that they cause actual internal damage to the pregnant woman without also rupturing the uterus and/or causing placental abruption. Both of these things are usually quickly fatal to a fetus and often to the woman too, unless they are immediately in surgery (and sometimes even then). (In real life, a fetus can't kick that strongly, though those two conditions are very real.)
The placenta is the only human organ that we create out of thin air, as it were. It is the pregnant woman's organ, not the embryo's/fetus's, but it is a place where both blood supplies come together.
If the demi-god fetuses contribute to the creation of the placenta and make it,
* Cover the entire inside of the uterus (real ones only cover a portion)
* Able to subdue the strongest kicks (in a way that the amniotic sac also does not get damaged)
* Unable to be dislodged or damaged in any way
* Magically recede from the cervix during the first stage of labor so that the fetus is able to exit the womb unimpeded
If you want the woman to survive the birthing process, add:
* Easily come away from the uterine wall after the birth and compresses small enough to exit the vagina.
[Answer]
How about having the fetus develop outside the mother? Perhaps after the egg is fertilised, a few weeks later the bundle of cells is extracted and placed into an 'egg' which holds all the nutrients which it needs to develop and survive. This allows the child to carry genes from both the mother and the father, while not being inside (and destroying) the mother's body while it grows. The baby could be removed or the egg could 'hatch' when the child is ready to be 'born'.
In the case of a female demigod, they would likely be able to carry to term without issues anyway, so this solution is only really needed for cases where the mother is fully human
[Answer]
The obvious answer would be that the mother herself is a demigod. This could be used for example by making the ruling dynasty a dynasty of demigods.
Also, I would expect the deity who impregnated the mother to probably want the child to be born and therefore use some magic or divine juju to protect the mother.
[Answer]
To take a rather prosiac solution, the god in question injects the mother with a tranquiliser of sorts, which limits the baby's specs to human range within the womb. Each dose is good for, let's say, 6 months, so a dose at the end of the first trimester is usually enough.
It also explains how they did the deed in the first place...
[Answer]
The demigods strength comes from a resistance to change in the world they incept within. This 'strength' is not something that can be specifically characterized, and 'tests of resilience' should be observed from the standpoint of how an entity maintains a state of existence. A demigod could be made of butterfly parts but the way the flow of power is in that world you would never be able to touch it, you may even be devoted to protecting it. Also memory isn't always something that can be relied on, actually its usually **not** something that can be relied upon.
Regards,
Stockmetaphysicaldarwinian
Professional NPC Entity
[Answer]
Three options:
1. The father protects the mother. Switches or blesses her food, making it the food of the gods/ambrosia. This gives her a temporary invulnerability that allows her to survive the pregnancy and/or/maybe not the child birth. The god, wanting to ensure his child's survival, has a vested interest in keeping the mother alive.
2. Same as above, but followers of the God, cult members, or some shadow group find the mother and protect her through some method. Maybe a group formed by other demigods. The father doesn't care, but other mortals do for various reasons, good or bad.
3. The child, being divine, has godly knowledge and strength and will power that a human child does not, and simply knows enough not to kick, even as a fetus. Cause magic.
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[Question]
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I am building a world in which technology has taken an enormous step back due to an apocalyptic event. For one reason or another guns no longer exist in the world and I would like to have a reason why they could **not** be created/used again, even given enough time for technology's advancement once again.
I would like to leave the atmosphere alone but maybe remove a resource that would in-turn make the production of guns impossible. I wouldn't mind if ammo was the cause of guns not being used instead.
I don't know much about firearms so I'm not sure if what I have explained makes much sense but any help is greatly appreciated! Cheers
[Answer]
The Japanese Samurai were enthusiastic proponents of firearms. One of the most dramatic scenes in a Japanese movie is the ending of [Kagemusha](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080979/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1), which recreates the [Battle of Nagashino](https://infogalactic.com/info/Battle_of_Nagashino), where the [Takeda](https://infogalactic.com/info/Takeda_Shingen) clan was essentially destroyed as a power by the effects of volley fire by [Oda Nobunaga](https://infogalactic.com/info/Oda_Nobunaga)'s troops.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/POjpb.jpg)
*Volley fire isn't fun if you are running into it*
So if firearms were so effective, why did they essentially disappear from the Japanese arsenal during the Tokugawa shogunate? The reason is cultural.
Samurai, like European knights or Ottoman Janissaries were highly skilled warriors who started their military training in boyhood and were not required (indeed forbidden) to engage in trade or crafts. With a lifetime of training and the ability to practice their arts on a daily basis, they were fearsome warriors who could defeat any opponents who were not skilled or equipped the same way they were. Peasant armies were little more than rabbles or (at best) spear carriers who could form a line to slow down opponents as you got organized or regrouped.
Firearms were the key to the "Infantry Revolution" which started in the mid to late 1400's, as weapons and tactics were developed which let large numbers of unskilled men take to the field and effectively fight against Samurai, Knights, Janissaries or others who's prowess depended on long training and practice. Firearms swept away Knights and Janissaries in Europe and the Middle East, but Japan, being much more isolated and insular, was able to block the importation of firearms and forbid the local manufacture, allowing the Samurai class to retain its power and not fear being overthrown by a peasant revolt.
So in your setting, there must be some cultural reason to fear or forbid the manufacture or development of firearms. If the apocalyptic event took place and required large numbers of people to shelter in makeshift structures for protection from the environment, then there might be a well founded cultural fear of firearms, since using firearms in a flimsy shelter could cause a breach and allow deadly radiation or whatever other environmental effects caused the apocalypse to enter. After several generations, any pre existing firearms would probably have deteriorated to the point they don't work anyway, ammunition would have decayed and no one in their right mind would even consider recreating them.
So the point isn't to create some sort of mind bending alteration of the laws of physics (preventing the chemical reactions that cause explosions probably means invalidating the chemical reactions needed for life to exist), but to explain why people *don't* make firearms anymore.
[Answer]
**That is a hard one.**
The problem is that a shotgun is actually very easily to build, very poor people in the brazilian slums have build them from *pipes*. Take a look at [break action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break_action) shotguns, you need essentially only a pipe, shotgun munition (a primer with propellant and lead/steel balls), a breech face (a surface on which the munition can explode) and a trigger.
Rifles are much harder to produce because you need rifling, a helical groove which must be cut by tools into the steel. I daresay that a sniper rifle needs such a precision that it cannot be done.
Some proposals:
* The apocalyptic event, a war, happened after a time when most of the easily extractable natural resources were declining. The war was making extensive use of neutron bombs which have irradiated cities and most places which contained metals, making them unusable through neutron activation (The radiation may now have ceased, but people retained an irrational fear of everything metallic).
* The formula for the propellant got lost / there are no known natural resources for it. The thing is, you cannot use explosives as propellant, it will only destroy the gun. What you need is either gunpowder, guncotton or cordite which have low brisance and are more pushing than destructive.
* Humanity dumbed down and/or overspecialized themselves. If computers/roboters are producing better quality with less prices and no payment, humanity in future may use their day to f...play board games with each other and party. Who knows currently how a television functions and even if you know it, could you build one? Or future humans are much too overspecialized: You need an alloy expert, a drill head expert etc. etc.
[Answer]
**Change the laws of physics**
In order to make guns impossible, you need to not only remove the capability for any matter to explode (Which has some pretty serious impacts elsewhere), but you also need to remove the capability for doing things like compressing air. There's also things like Coilguns and Railguns, which use magnetism as the propulsive method.
Honestly, changing the laws of physics to limit the speed an object can go before "Bad Things" happen would be better than making explosives, electricity, compressed air, and however many other things that can propel a bullet impossible.
There won't be a *good* explanation for guns not working, so simply saying "The laws of physics changed and now guns don't work" is probably the best. In fact, this could be part of the apocalypse in itself. S.M. Stirling's *Emberverse* uses exactly this scenario, starting from *Dies the Fire* electricity and fast chemical reactions like explosives and propellants don't work. No electricity, no guns, no engines, everyone ends up using medieval technology.
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Perhaps because **guns make a loud noise**? But this completely depends on your world.
For example, in a zombie-apocalypse world, it is not specifically good to use loud guns.
Or when a superior force is monitoring the world, for example, the apocalypse was initiated by beings from space, and even though they presume nothing survived, apparently some did. But somehow, using guns will attract their attention.
But the disadvantage of this is that explosives should not be used either.
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Maybe there are just way **more effective ways to kill** someone with the given resources.
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Another reason can be that **people don't dare to kill each other**, because there are not many left, and therefore the human race itself is in grave danger. But I'm not sure where you're heading with your world without more context.
[Answer]
**Make gunpowder 10x more volatile**
By exaggerating the sensitivity and power of the reaction, you could make gunpowder too dangerous to be practical. Only alchemical specialists and death-seekers would ever chance slapping that stuff together and lighting it up *in their hand*.
There are a couple ways to accomplish this.
1) **Scale down every one and every thing:** By jacking the square-cube rule, you can make everything in the world seem physically stronger and more intense.
2) **Too much static charge:** Whether it be home-grown or cosmically sourced, high radiation can produce excessive amounts of static charge on anything dry, which causes disasters for anyone making or using many forms of gunpowder.
3) **More reactive environment:** As easy as raising the oxygen content in the atmosphere. Perhaps some atmospheric nitrogen has been converted to nitrous oxide, which increases combustion reactions while not being flammable itself.
[Answer]
Instead of making guns 'un-creatable', why not make the use of projectile weapons in general be too inaccurate to bother with for any real purpose?
The way I'd propose that, is that your hypothetical apocalypse has altered the weather patterns so severely, that there is a constant gale-force wind blowing, which changes it's direction frequently and without notice.
In a world with constant high wind, no rifleman etc would be able to land an accurate shot, and pretty soon people would seek alternative methods to kill each other. Sure, you'd get the occasional defensive position with a machine-gun perhaps, where accuracy doesn't matter. But in a hunting situation or an assault situation where accuracy is important, even the heaviest of projectiles would be severely deflected in say a constant 80-100kph gale.
[Answer]
In a post apocalypse that shattered society but didn't destroy the refined metals, one could build a firearm from the scrap metal of destroyed buildings and vehicles. Black powder is easy enough to make: charcoal, sulfur, and ammonium nitrate that can be found in animal manure.
Even in an apocalypse that destroyed all technology and refined metals, just the knowledge that a firearm can be built from raw materials insures that they will be built.
The materials to build firearms existed in pre-firearm times. What they didn't have was the knowledge that such a device was possible, and how to build it.
So, your apocalyptic event would have to wipe out not only the technology, but the accumulated knowledge of the possibility and construction of a firearm.
And even then, humans would eventually figure it out.
[Answer]
**Never bring a gun to a bow-and-arrow fight**
A post apocalyptic society may be an anarchic one without any sort of major population centres or organisations - and so large organised industry as a whole might no longer exist.
So now, while you can create a firearm using the Brazilian pipe method from Thorsten's answer, I imagine these guns are not too accurate at any appreciable range, and slow to reload - compared to say, a well-crafted bow in the hands of a skilled archer. Remember, early guns were basically just good enough to blast a large shower of metal balls at a row of men and hope to hit as many as possible to reduce the size of the shower of metal balls they were going to blast back at your row of men - an individual shooting at another at a decent range was a more difficult matter. But in the post-apocalyptic scenario, large groups of people simply don't war with other large groups of people.
Now, with farms, supermarkets and fast food restaurants all wiped out by the apocalypse, we've gone back to the age of hunting (assuming a lot more wild animals survived than humans - maybe in the jungles previously uninhabited by humans which were therefore not targeted by the apocalypse) and we've all become good at archery, and blade type combat, making home-made guns a lot less effective.
[Answer]
**Make guns out of date at the time of Apocalypse**
If everyone used energy weapons that were abundant and had clear advantages over guns, then guns could have been quickly phased out. Example: Lasers that can be pass through various types of mater and take out someone makes amour and cover irrelevant.
If those weapons become dominant for long enough, they total eclipse combustion firearms. Guns go the way of the crossbow. A novelty that has no business on a "modern" battle field. With that the collective populous forgets the details of how the produce firearms. I assume laser making requires far more advanced infrastructure the the apocalypse can provide.
[Answer]
You're obviously not a StarTrek fan. In the original series, Kirk mixes some sulfur, coal, and (I think) saltpeter and makes black powder on a world created by god-like beings to test his intelligence (or some such thing). As already answered, you will have to change the Laws of Physics to eliminate guns. In the movie No Country For Old Men, the "bad guy" uses compressed air (and projectiles) to kill people, so you can't just eliminate gunpowder and have your people gun free. At close range, cross-bows are as accurate and as penetrating as small arms. And then there's sling shots and atlatl... I'd say you're out of luck; rapid motion can result from too many processes to be eliminated in anything similar to our Universe.
[Answer]
Instead of removing explosives (there truly are too many ways to make explosive pressure), what about removing the manufacturing materials?
Virulent bacteria that attack refined metals. If iron and steel cannot be relied on for their strength, making safe firearms would be very difficult. There are materials that could possibly be used, but none with the strength to weight ratio of steel. Brass cannons would still be possible, unless the plague was extended to them as well.
Of course, this has pretty extreme ramifications. Anything made of steel would collapse, this means bridges, buildings and other important infrastructure. Even wooden structures using iron nails would fall apart, assuming the bacteria can get to them.
Blades would need to be made of stone, glass or ceramic. Armor would be wood, leather and bone. If humanity retained the ability to make plastics, or to recycle existing plastic, then armor and gear could do well made from that as well.
[Answer]
I think that the only real way to get a whole world without guns is to regress to the point where you don't have the means to really make them. Remember that basic gunpowder is not easy to make (the process is complicated), but that the ingredients are not hard to get hold of.
So I can see a few possible contenders for the NOGUNS scenario:
## Guns are possible, but they're future-tech
This implies that yes, we can make guns, in theory. However, we don't have the practical means yet. We may not have the population centers to get the division of labour required to kickstart the gun trade, the metallurgy may not be there just yet (and what little good steel you *have* been able to make is needed *right* *now* for other needs, like say, maintaining a large dam that's essential for your agriculture, keeping a bridge up or what have you. This is in my opinion an interesting opportunity because guns are now a possibility, your intrepid rag-tag band of heroes may at some point come into contact with guns, etc.
## Guns are possible, but they're unaffordable
This means that there are people with guns, but these people are few and far between, guns are really expensive, and anyone making them without license are clamped down upon. Imagine The King's Guard having rifles, and nobody else. A point to remember here though is that while muskets are not that hard to make, proper modern rifles are impossible without precise machining and measurements. This will give you a setting where there's a reason why there aren't any guns around. Do you want to fight the King's Dragoons riding out to slaughter your entire village because someone went bird-hunting with a shotgun?
## Guns are possible, but people don't know how.
Basically, yeah, you come across Hjemmeladeren, an immense bible about loading your own guns. It tells you exactly how to load, what pressures to use for each bullet, etc. If it's about putting gunpowder into a holster and using said powder to propel a small bit of metal into people/animals/others, the book has the best recipe for the purpose. Only problem is, it's in Norwegian, and your society don't read that language. Of course, if you could, you'd know that Raufoss Ammunisjonsfabrikk refers to what's today called Nammo A/S and in your post apocalyptic world would be a smouldering ruin. (Actually, the smouldering is optional.) So even the knowledge you *do* find is of little use. This would be a temporary solution, so you should set it to happen relatively early after the apocalypse has passed. This also assumes that the sort of people who would know how to make gunpowder from scratch is gone, or if they're still around, are not talking to the heroes. They may in fact be very insular people living in fortified compounds and have little to do with the outside world. (This does give you a Deus Ex Machina if you need it. Chekhov's Prepper Compound?)
## Guns are impossible because resource lack
This means that there's none out of one of these:
* Charcoal
* Sulfur
* Salpeter
Because that's how you make blackpowder. It's simply ridiculous. People have also made cannons out of wood and stone. If everyone lives on a boat, then yeah, I can see this being a theme. But if they're on mainland? Can't really see it.
## Guns are impossible because laws of physics
I really don't think that this is a good solution. Basically there will be a bunch of unforeseen consequences from this. A *lot* of unforeseen consequences. If everyone is bigger and stronger? Why do they have horses? How do they get enough food? Etc. I think it's kind of a cop-out.
## Guns are impossible, but nobody knows why
At least here you're kinda being honest about it. There's a reason and you totally have that reason planned out, promise bro. But you're not going to tell anyone because it's a plot point. It informs how the story is told, so telling people gives away some of the story. This is a common one to use if you're GM'ing. Just tell them straight up before the game starts that stuff like guns don't work, and that there's a reason for it, but your characters would have no way of knowing that reason. You can admit OOC that it's because it messes with the story you want to tell, but that's fair. Now everyone's on the level.
But for like a written story? It's kind of unfair, I feel. But I'm not the boss of you know, I'm not the boss of you know and I'm not so big~~~
Personally, I'd have to ask myself why I wanted no guns. If I wanted to tell a story with no guns, but would be fine with guns eventually (after the story was conveniently over) reappearing, then any variation of guns being possible but aren't there yet will do the job, and give you more possibilities.
There is however, another question. WHY do people want guns?
Well, guns are really, *really* *really* useful. Big guns, such as cannons can hit fortifications further away than catapults etc. can. They're easier to transport. They are easy on your logistics. (You need to bring gunpowder, you don't need a separate team of skilled carpenters to make sure the catapults work.)
If your enemy clumps up, you can smash a lot of them with cannon-fire. If your enemy disperses, you can clump up and smash them. If you're at sea, cannons are simply better than anything else until we get to the modern era. Arquebuses have a longer effective range than bows (as amply demonstrated by the Imjin War), and they're much more deadly, and are harder to armour against. And as armies start to get larger and thus you need to shoot more people, it's important to note the logistical aspects of bows: You need a well trained man, who's trained a lot with a bow, to get an at-all effective archer. You then need to get him arrows. Arrows are large, expensive creatures.
Look at them!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/op9E6.jpg)
That's a huge piece of wood, and you need to get a good craftsman to make a whole bunch of these suckers.
Meanwhile, an early bullet is just a small lead ball. You also have some gunpowder. Both of these are cheap (lead is inexpensive, steel warheads on arrows are not. Then there's the wood, feather and craftsmanship in addition...), and the package is much smaller than an arrow is per shot. yes, you need wicks for your gunners, if you use that type of firearm. However, bowmen need to have strings for their bows, and crossbowmen need a bunch of tools for their weapon too. It's not a close competition. In addition to that, you don't need as much raw strength to wield a firearm. So your pool of potential recruit is much larger. You can use the big lads to smack your enemies with big sticks instead.
While yes, a well drilled gunner will be much more effective than a relatively fresh recruit, a fresh recruit with a gun will be more effective than a fresh recruit with a bow, all things being equal. (Which they often were not, since a lot of peasant hunted with bows.)
Finally imagine being besieged. You won't be able to get more supplies, so you think yourself lucky that you have gunpowder based weapons, since you can have more ammunition that way. If the enemy brings archers, they cannot engage your gunners, because your gunners can easily stand ready and fire on a moments notice, which the bowmen cannot. In a siege, firearms are ridiculously overpowered.
In other words, as soon as someone manages to figure out how to gun, there will be guns.
[Answer]
Well, start with "what is a gun?"
In its most basic form, a gun is nothing more than a pipe bomb with one loose end cap. All the explosive force gets directed one way so it's controllable. There were certain early gun designs that were pretty much exactly this. Think "Roman Candle" only optimized for mounting on a stick and hurling a shower of red-hot metal fragments.
Knocking people's knowledge down far enough that they wouldn't know how to build one would be pretty easy. Even among the people who know the formula for black powder off the top of their heads, how many of them actually know where to find the ingredients and how to refine them into something pure enough to not have all kinds of reliability problems? And figuring out something strong enough to contain an explosion but still light enough to be mobile would also require a lot of experimentation.
Getting it to the point where someone with enough time to experiment *can't* develop one though... You basically have to do something drastic. Change the laws of physics in some subtle way, and manage to do it without causing everyone to die... It's not easy... But here's a few ideas that mostly focus on "won't":
1. Keep the tech level high. Society's a wreck, the world is a mass of warlords fighting for supremacy, but just prior to the apocalypse humanity discovered how to make personal shields, and they've managed to scrape together enough infrastructure to continue building them. They reliably stop small to medium objects travelling at more than 20mph. Bullets are no longer effective weapons except for hunting animals. Warfare consists of shielded and armored warriors hitting each other with big, heavy objects.
2. Make the atmosphere full of explosive gas pockets. This won't prevent all use of guns as some types won't be hot enough to ignite it, but it will make using any kind of fire dangerous and expensive which will keep your society quite primitive.
3. The aliens saw the flash from all the nukes and are going to make sure humanity does not take their aggressive nature to the stars. They don't interact with us in any significant way except to watch us from orbit and throw lightning bolts at anyone with weapons more advanced than the Roman era.
4. The apocalypse wasn't a war, it was the invention of a technology that made metal practically useless. Some small, portable, cheap machine that could turn metal into the consistency of clay and back again. Metal became easy to work, but could no longer be used for critical tasks because crazy people could just puttify all metal within a mile radius. The ancient roadways are still lined with the slowly-sagging remains of vehicles, abandoned by their owners and destined to ooze themselves into puddles over the next several centuries. The metal softening machines are long-since lost, but there's still a strong cultural taboo against using metal for anything other than decoration. Without metal, guns are possible, but very, very dangerous.
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Edit for more clarity:
I think that there are various options but they are not all so equal when it comes to basic human behavior and needs, or setting consistency:
* Actually, if I was a guy meant to mess things up, legends advertising the dangers of firearms wouldn't deter me using these in any way, all the opposite way actually. So culture is out. Remember some people just want the world to burn, even if they have to immolate to start this.
* Bacteria or tech eating metal won't prevent guns being made from ceramics or stone pipes? (I read some early cannon barrel where made in stone and as some pointed out, there was bamboo)
Chemistry change would be prejudiciable against life.
An alternative here would be something acting against explosives, but that would be quite strange to have some many varieties of compounds to be targeted. Plus, you have to take into account "explosive like" compounds. They are not explosive per se; not displaying enormous heat and flammes and so on, but they can generate high pressures modifications. And that may be done by disrupting various compounds to generate N2 for example:
<http://sciencing.com/can-create-nitrogen-gas-8121054.html>
<https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/chemical-reaction-between-n2h4-h2o2-produces-595660>
(granted, reactions here are exothermic, but not to the same extent)
Also, we have to expect people to find other means. Explosive are not the only ones to help pushing bullets. You could expect having remnants of army armed with railguns soon after if that would help them wiping the enemy forces. We also have to know if you also want siege/vehicle gun weapons to be impossible.
It leaves physics or magic, or shelter settings as some answered (which is quite sensitive answer), with maybe the twist it could be enforced (think Computer Friend in Paranoia RPG;)).
* Physics could be changes in laws of motions (or their parameters; for some reason, gravity change that makes you sensitive to reactions of guns. Reason you won't use it into space for example). That won't make guns impossible but impractical.
* Magic could be related to the apocalyptical event. I read a book where the world of faeries had stopped living with the invention of powder, but then it was back with a vengeance...
In the "not impossible but impractical", we could imagine that the "common opponent" would not be sensitive to guns, or that it would be dangerous to use guns on them (spreading diseases by bullets wounds, for example, still in this case, forget chopping and smashing too. Don't do like Pacific Rim, where they say using weapons frees dangerous compounds, then proceed by mincing them with giant chainsaws...)
Or that there would be some esoteric reason for which gun use would put some curse over you; and being cursed would be something bad enough for you not wanting to tempt the devil (not like "you will go to Hell when you dire"; which rings like "yeah, sure", to players, because they don't care about what happen to their characters once they are dead, they care about what happen to them when they are playing). Like hordes of demons wanting to eat or mutilate them and make them miserable -hence ironically participating to peace in the world-).
* There could also have technological reasons: making them mostly useless.
Like outdated by other weapons, or something like "all people are immune because of some tech". That would not prevent using these against unarmored people or objects, though (if the solution is of removable armor nature), but still that could be interesting. close combat weapons could use some "anti armor" tech that can't be adapted to ranged/gun weapon because of some reason (extreme sensitivity to shocks/explosions, for example, which would also make for interesting parameter to manage related to close combat weapons).
This reason could be adapted to a magical context (demon pacts guarding you against bullets, just like in Elric. With the twist that can't be done against regular weapons because of the functionning of the magic). There would be a balance between users of both sides but that would make it usually impractical, except for hunt maybe?
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Eliminating all guns might be impossible, unless everyone who knew how to make black powder also died. However, reducing the world to muskets... maybe that's simpler. Modern weapons depend on remarkably precise metallurgy and manufacturing. No computers, no guns. No electricity, no computers.
Check out this [timeline of gun development](http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/technique/gun-timeline/) to see how far back you must push technology to have or remove guns from the mix. Basically pre-1300's if you want them completely gone. But that's guns.
[Canons go back further](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cannon#Development_in_China), to at least the 1100's. Gun powder will pre-date canons. So you might be looking at having to reduce the world's technology to around year 1,000 A.D.
Regrettably, basic gun technology isn't that complicated. If an Encyclopedia Britannica is laying around, you'd have guns in your communities within a year.
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Guns are too easy to make in a culture that remembers the basics of their construction, the chemistry behind modern firearms' propellants etc... and the engineering needed to create cartridges etc... aren't though. I'd suggest that as ammo either runs out or goes off with age there will be an inability to keep modern firearms in use. That coupled to the dangers inherent in older models, especially old school black powder, which would cause people to lose fingers and faces when using makeshifts means that firearms just stop being viable for a time. Later as engineering capabilities, both physical and chemical, come back reliable guns are doable again but by then people have gone off the idea and don't pursue it.
S.M. Stirling has done some interesting work at both ends of this equation; the Nantucket Series, starting with *Island in the Sea of Time*, looks at what it takes to maintain a given level of technology when cut off from modern supply lines, and the Emberverse books, starting with *Dies the Fire*, looks at how a world without guns, and without any way to make guns work, evolves in the decades after the failure of energy dense technologies.
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I don't think you can completely eliminate firearms given enough time, but you can delay their "reinvention" for a very long time. Firearms require a projectile, propellant, and a tube capable of containing the explosion of the propellant. The machine is just too simple. If you can make the production of one of the elements economically prohibitive, however, folks aren't going to look for a solution like firearms for a long time. In the interest of keeping the physics less twisted, lets make the most common propellant hard to make.
Have your apocalypse do 2 things:
1) Make it volcanic in nature. Enough so that elemental sulfur becomes very rare. Have all volcanoes that exude sulfur become dangerously active. It's hard to make gunpowder without it. Even though it's still out there, the incentive to harvest it is going to be greatly reduced. That will push back explosive developments for a while.
2) Have it kill off all birds. Entire wars were fought over islands that were covered in guano. The guano was a source of "saltpeter" and prized for it's usefulness in the production of black powder. There are other ways to get saltpeter like harvesting your own urine, but this is a slow and uncertain way.
This isn't going to stop the development of firearms, but it will make it not economical to develop them and it will slow their wide adoption down. Their is a reason why Black powder was so widely in use for so long. It was relatively cheap and easy to make and the black powder formula was pretty reliable. So make black powder expensive to produce.
Many answers have pointed out that there are many alternatives to Black powder. This is quite true. But there is a reason it took a while for "smokeless powder" to catch on. The metallurgy had to keep up. Put smokeless powder in a musket designed to use black powder, and you run a very real risk of having the thing blow up on you.
So you can settle for a scenario where the Bow and Arrow, atl-atl, or sling is just much more economical.
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Because anyone who tries to make a firearm dies in a mysterious explosion.
Lateral reason: The post-singularity AI that caused/was-caused-by the Apocalypse has scattered spy nanobots everywhere. [Rods from God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) are in orbit and the AI arranges to launch new satellites every so often to replace depleted launch platforms. Any time someone gets close to making a new firearm -- pop -- 11 tons TNT equivalent occurs at the site of potential innovation. (And anyone "nearby" who survives describes a truly astounding peal of thunder to go with that "lightning".)
Having described an AI with this much meatspace agency, there's no reason to assume it can't eliminate firearms innovations in otherwise difficult to reach spots by other means.
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Okay here's a rather strange answer that just popped into my mind before anything else. This answer assumes some sort of governing regime that rules the survivors of the catastrophic event that happened.
You could have some sort of artificial intelligence chip embedded into people's minds at birth. What that chip does is detect any patterns or ideas regarding manufacturing certain weapons or designing systems that can manufacture weapons themselves. And the moment it detects such a thing, it prevents (harms maybe?) the person in some way.
I know it's a rather wacky idea and that we are talking about a post apocalyptic world where such ridiculously advanced technology would not be present. But maybe it's a technology whose remains survived the "apocalypse".
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**Don't get rid of them - make them useless!**
I don't think that you can make them "uncreatable" and it doesn't make any sense to try warping the whole environment around this sole concept.
Instead, I would make them useless, so that it doesn't make any sense to put efforts into creating such devices. In order to achieve that however, a more advanced forms or means of defense/offence must be introduced (that is of course, if you're not creating a Heaven there).
Not sure about the beings that are roaming this world, but they might have some psychic powers or something, that could just protect them from offenders. This in terms would make crimes avoidable and possibly predictable and if you don't introduce crimes - I don't even know what's going to be happening in this world :-) Don't get me wrong - I'm all pacifist and sh\*t, but "breaking the law" is one of the most exploited concepts in general.
Another thing is to introduce air drag into the atmosphere (making it out of a substance, much like Newtonian fluid, but in a gas form), so that speedy projectiles could be slowed or even stopped at the moment of take off so much, that they can't cause harm (the question remains for close contact weapons //insert quote from the previous idea about more advanced weaponry//). As a side effect, no one could be killed after jumping from a skyscraper, no speeding (no collisions), but also - no speedy means of transport, which would require something like the Hyper-loop to be built, which of course would increase the murder rate within this contraption :)
It might as well be a combination of the two ..
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It depends on how far back you want their technology to go, but [Horizon: Zero Dawn](http://horizonzerodawn.wikia.com/wiki/Horizon_Zero_Dawn) offers a very good example of how this can be done. In order to have technology regress by a considerable margin, you have to destroy all current human knowledge, and I mean *everything*, including any and all knowledge repositories and backups. Fry every piece of electrical equipment on the planet, remove all humans from the equation (possibly by killing all or most of them), add enough time (At least 1,000 years) for anything physical to have completely eroded, and then reintroduce humans to the equation. In this example, they will have regressed to the point of tribal collectives, hunting with arrows and spears.
You can adjust the amount of devastation caused by your cataclysm, as well as how far it spreads, as necessary to destroy / preserve as much technology and knowledge as you want.
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Like "Revolution", you could have nanobots that permeated everything and have a destructive effect on explosive compounds, they eat them or otherwise break them down so they won't work for long after manufacture. This does not stop compressed air guns from being built.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)>
Like Frank Herberts' "Dune" you could have a technological reason why non-explosive-projectile weapons are nearly pointless. The small wearable energy shields that people wore repulsed fast-moving objects like bullets. But that isn't likely in a post-apocalyptic setting.
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You may change the consistency of the gasses in the air to make the explosions produced by guns too dangerous to be used.
This could be because of the consistency of the dusts on the ground or for some gas exhaled by plants.
If one shots, the air near him will explode burning the gun owner.
It has other interesting implications also.
I'm not sure if this should be included in "atmosphere alteration", I don't think so.
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Because your apocalyptic event made a whack-a-ton of particles in the air so:
1. the visibility is 5 feet
2. air itself is flammable so any spark will result in chain reaction explosion
3. atmosphere is acidic making anything metal rusting within seconds
And also - people don't have thumbs.
And general Deus Ex - because the Book said so.
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**Magnetic Fields**
So what about magnetic fields? If there were strong, magnetic forces, they should render most bullets useless.
The downside is that other metallic objects would be useless too. And weapons like Bows would still work.
The cause of those magnetic forces could be a seal inside of the planet that has been broken, due to the same thing that caused the apocalypse in the first place or an alien force, that deploys technology wich is able to create those magnetic fields on the planets they conquer.
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A society in space without "shields" would have to develop some other weapons besides guns because as the first comment sais "A single errant shot" can end everyone. That is a culture likely not to use them. That being said, you cant possibly expect projectiles in general to cease to exist. All a gun is a projectile thrower. In general anything moving fast is dangerous to anything not moving at a relative speed to that object. That means in order for your civilization to not have projectile weapons you get to have nothing and you will never progress to anything past the medieval era. People could throw knives in the space ship cor-doors, and inevitable someone would use rubber hosing to catapult a knife or rock or whatever and that kind of cancels out the whole lack of guns thing. Not to mention your spaceship could be interpreted as a bullet.
The best case scenario for your society without guns that somehow has projectiles and does not use them for violence ever that is also sustainable realistically is a society on a planet or moon like environment. In this society one step out of line from anyone could result in the death of everyone. Everyone *has* to have a place and cooperate. There is no room for chaos at all. Additionally because it is the environment enforcing this culture and not a totalitarian government, this society is not necessarily oppressed. It would have a whole "us against the world" mentality, which could potentially bring out the best in people.
On a side note they would probably just use darts as enforcement tactics. You cant have the police engaging in fistfights and/or swordfights (Which are terrible ways to die/kill people and significantly more inhumane than guns), and you also cant just "expect" every single person ever born to conform to your societies rules forever. There will be a chaos factor no matter how reduced, and there needs to be ways to overcome it without undo effort.
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Global warming causes the apocalypse or the apocalypse causes extreme global warming, this leads environmentalists to produce a plant designed to rapidly harvest CO2 from the air and convert it into O2.
BUT the plant spreads out of control like a weed and starts pumping out excess O2. Life can still survive because it loves O2 but that O2 is extremely explosive... which means that anyone firing a gun causes the surrounding air to explode encompassing themselves in fire as well.
Meaning people would stop firing guns because they'd know how bad of an idea it was. Would also make cars and some other commonly used things, possibly even anything electrical that could cause a spark, to be dangerous.
I prefer the first but 2nd scenario, similar idea:
Could potentially be some other chemical that is spread worldwide intended to destroy the enemies weapons supply by causing spontaneous explosions of gun powder that causes the explosion... which lingers and leaves people unable to fire guns.
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Magic space bats with devices soak energy out of extremely high pressure systems (only on Earth) and harmlessly dissipate the heat. Internal combustion above certain pressures and gunpowder just doesn't work.
Ubiqutous nanobots who eat explosives and gunpowder. Organic living life has counteragents; gunpowder doesn't.
Reptile invaders who listen for gunshots, and destroy whomever does it.
Biowarfare agents that eat explosives and gunpowder to cripple the opposing side leftover from the last war.
"Humans" are simulated beings in a computer system whose environment mirrors the real world with safety systems to prevent use of guns.
Distopian anti-gun government genetic engineering during the fall of civilization implanted a genetic phobia of guns.
We don't know, they just don't work.
Post-singularity AI biometalic implants prevent construction of tools that are pure weapons by engineering a blind spot in our conciousness.
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John Ringo did a couple books that I can't remember the name of in which he applied the concept that traditional firearms no longer worked, then kicked off a major war/apocalypse. In short we had developed a master computer and nano tech to the point that it was capable of near instantaneous energy manipulation and teleportation. Somewhere along the line it was decided to program the computer to defuse and disperse any source of energy/pressure significant enough to fire a projectile or cause structural damage. To the point that it was commented that the computer was able to contain the super volcano under yellow stone when it started to erupt and most of the world didn't notice anything had happened.
When the apocalyptic trigger occurred and society lost the ability to instruct the computer, it continued on automatically enforcing the rules it had on file. So as the war spools up, the characters are trying to figure out ways to recreate old tech like fire arms and the internal combustion engine. The best they can come up with is low powered steam, and bows & arrows, because anything more the computer/nano tech defuses before they can get any use out of it.
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Weaponized nanobots from last global war, designed to set off powder and explosives spread world-wide and are self-perpetuating, but no technology exists in post-apocalyptic world to neutralize them. You also could add nanobots preventing electricity generation and/or semiconductor electronics, if so required by your story. Granted, nanobots are a somewhat handwavium device, but, on the other hand, at this point we don't know what they are truly capable of.
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Pretty self-explanatory. Could a spaceship use a "ClF3 Mortar" to fire copper shells at enemy vessels? At first glance, this seems like a good weapon: it can burn even in space and can set fire to metals, and even glass and normally flame-retardant substances. Best of all, it cannot be put out by venting atmos, as the only way to put out a ClF3 fire is by flooding the area with nitrogen or noble gases, a nearly impossible proposition in space. Thoughts?
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No no no no no no no no no. Bad idea.
[Chlorine trifluoride is one of the most horrifying substances on Earth.](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time) Sure, it can kill people and destroy equipment. But it can also kill the people trying to use it as a weapon. It's difficult to contain and nearly impossible to fight if it starts a fire, and produces extremely toxic byproducts when it reacts with other things. The smallest error in handling it could quite easily kill everyone nearby.
Now, sure, you can handle chlorine trifluoride safely . . . but in a lab, where you have plenty of time to check and double-check and triple-check that things are being done right. You can afford to go slowly. The same isn't true in a war zone, where speed is of the essence. You can either handle the thing safely and get blown up when you can't use it in time, or you can rush to use it and get set on fire when it spills.
Let's look at some of the worst-case scenarios for using this thing in space:
* There's a small leak in a storage unit, and chlorine trifluoride reaches a nearby surface, immediately starting a toxic reaction that will kill many people on the ship because they're trapped in space and have nowhere to hide.
* The fluoride coating on the storage chamber or in the weapon being used to launch it develops an imperfection, and the substance chews through and destroys the equipment.
* The spaceship gets hit by something, causing a breach that releases chlorine trifluoride and unleashes hell. Even a small piece of space debris could cause problems if it hits the weapon in the right place. Also, there are people around you trying to make your spaceship explodes. Even an indirect hit in the right spot could be . . . bad.
The Nazis tried to see if it could be weaponized in the years leading to World War II. They did produce it in non-negligible amounts, but it became clear that using it as a weapon would be a terrible idea in much the same way that mustard gas in World War I was a bad idea: It can turn on the soldiers attempting to deploy it.
The thing is not simply worth the risk.
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>
> Chlorine Trifluoride as a Space Weapon?
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>
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**Not really. Indirectly useful? Yes, for disinformation.**
* Convince the enemy that you've found a way to effectively weaponise it. Contrive for them to "find" semi-destroyed plans for a weapon prototype in a way that they can't help but believe is real. (A courier ship on a desperate run carrying "plans" fights a desperate battle to protect them, not surrendering, finaly self destructing in a desperate sacrifice yada, yada etc. only a scrap of plan/data left)
* On making them fall for it, they will gather their top chemists, materials scientists, top engineers and technicians in on place with what is the most uncontrollable, uncontainable, volatile, corrosive, poisonous substance a deranged chemist ever came up with.
Watch for the fireworks. Rejoice, in your enemy's gullibility and that you just cut the head off their science division barely getting your own hands dusty.
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Your question can be generalized as "oxidizer weapon". Oxygen or ozone shells would do same thing, although not as intense. You write that
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> it cannot be put out by venting atmos
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>
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but actually it could. What you're trying to do is to create CIF3 atmosphere to burn enemies, but venting it to space would vent it like any other atmosphere. If you could manage to inject an airtight enemy with it, it would work, but otherwise all you get is some minor etching in the split-second before space vacuum "sucks" all your CIF3.
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As others have pointed out, there are some problems with this idea.
One that I want to point out is that for this weapon to be effective you must first hit an enemy with the shell.
This will be accomplished by mounting your copper vessel in a magnetically accelerated slug or self-propelled missile. Connecting with the enemy ship is the hardest part. Engagements are likely to take place at pretty extreme ranges, and ships will probably have decent avoidance maneuvers.
Once you hit the enemy, the shell must be strong enough to penetrate the hull and deliver the payload. When you compare the chemical energy stored in your ClFl3 to the kinetic energy required to accomplish the above, we don't really add much.
Yes, a ClFL3 fire in a critical area would be devastating on a ship. But so would the exact same impact from a traditional chemical munition, or even just an inert kinetic impactor.
If your shell is too weak to get through the hull, it would splash against the armor, react with a small amount of the hull material, be explosively ejected by its own reactive byproducts, and disperse into the vacuum of space with minor damage done.
It doesn't look much better if your shell breaches the hull in a shallow manner either. The hull breach will cause explosive decompression, venting the atmosphere AND your ClFl3 before it can react with much.
Well made ships will have self sealing compartments to deal with hull breaches, so you might do some damage to the area directly adjacent to the impact site.
The shell would have to detonate in the middle of the ship for maximum effect.
A design to accomplish this could have an armor penetrating exterior, then detonate and scatter a bunch of smaller sealed copper spheres like a shotgun blast that would ideally breach the inner walls and then combust.
Overall, there is little to gain from conventional munitions with this approach.
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ClF3 is surely a very destructive thing. Storing it aboard your spaceship is too risky, sure, as other answers have noted.
The space, however, is made of space, lots of it :) So typically, there will be quite a bunch of space between you and your enemy, be it spaceship combat or orbital bombardment. If some ClF3 happens to destroy your enemy, most likely it won't affect *you* at the same time, since it's all far away, and there's not enough of it to cover the distance. You just have to stay safe from it *before and while you apply it*.
So the obvious solution is to **drop a machine producing ClF3** upon your enemy. Even the nukes do their job via a nuclear reaction, but that reaction isn't run at our military bases, ships or planes; a projectile starting that reaction when it arrives is used as a weapon instead.
Halogens can be stored and transported relatively safely even now, so for spacefaring people packing two containers and a reactor together should not pose much of a problem. Of course, the enemy can try to destroy the bomb before the reaction has even started, just like missile defense this days tries to stop ICBMs. And countermeasures similar to those of ICBMs can be built into ClF3 factory-bomb (decoys, antiradar measures, etc.)
The real question is whether it's all worth using. What ClF3 can do to an enemy spaceship that a good old atomic bomb can't do? Surely the nuclear reaction has more energy than any sort of oxidizing, no matter how intense or quick. So it apriori will do more damage.
But things get even worse for our nasty chemical, if one thinks more. Space requires a lot of energy, so if it's at larger scale than us earthlings going around the Solar system, a spaceship has access to some energy source probably more powerful than nuclear or thermonuclear. What chance has any oxidizer to compete with the annihilation power scale?
So space warfare will resort to ClF3 only on some specific circumstances:
* Nuclear and more powerful stuff is effectively countered by the enemy. Shields, atomic suppression, or anything else in the same vein.
* Or it's just banned by acting rules of engagement.
* Or it's used intentionally as a nasty disgusting weapon that people normally don't use to shock the enemy.
* Or the nuclear materials are unavailable or prohibitively expensive for some reason, so chemical weapons become a necessity, and the strongest oxidizer all can come into play.
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The only thing even less practical is to whip up a batch of [FOOF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride) and attempt to hit your enemy with it before your own ship is consumed. Maybe a kamikaze run?
Seriously, with *1960 era* technology scientists were contemplating compact nuclear devices which would project star hot plasma at a small fraction of the speed of light ([Casaba Howitzer](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-nuclear-spear-casaba-howitzer.html)). We now know how to make electromagnetic rail guns, reliable laser weapons, "Third generation" nuclear weapons (imagine a HEAT warhead designed to crack open a mountain), non-nuclear EMP devices...
The greatest danger I can think of for my ships crew is they will be distracted by their hysterical laughter once they realize what you shot at them. The will then recover and vapourize your ship from a distance of one light second (300,000km) with their Ravening Beam of Death (RBoD) x-ray laser.
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**This would make for a fantastic story...**
As I sit here pondering the issue, I wonder about, "what if you have two or three chemicals that, when mixed, produce ClF3? Put those in a warhead" and "what would happen if you used this stuff in a mine field, assuming some unobtainium even it couldn't react with?"
HDE 226868 is absolutely correct, it would be the height of insanity to use this stuff in space combat — but that doesn't mean it wouldn't make one whale of a good story.
* Imagine flying through space and inconveniently running through a cloud of this stuff. Imagine doing that from some ancient battle in a "million-to-one chances happen all the time" Star-Trek-ish sort of way. The stuff would rip the hull off your ship.
* Imagine a missile that happened to impact with a ship using water as its primary radiation shielding. Flash of fireworks, ship shell floating off into space, crew subjected to the horrors of radiation.
* Imagine the innumerable failsafes, the unending training, octuple-redundant computer monitoring, and still some idiot (usually the new guy) slips on his own spit and happens to knock off the adamantium valve in one of those "[Dang! I dropped the wrench and blew up the missile!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion)" moments.
Granted, your story had better be a horror story, and there are obviously great reasons in reality to *never ever ever touch this stuff under any conditions lest the Olympian gods return and invest you with some never-to-be-completed task...*
But the stuff would make for a great story. Really, how often have we heard the "but mutagenic weapons have been banned by all civilized species!" trope? This stuff was designed from the foundation of the universe to fulfill that trope!
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If you've watched Godzilla and Pacific Rim you know what a Kaijuu is.
Kaijuus are monsters of epic proportions, as tall as the Empire State building or as large as 3 supercarriers of the USA.
I'm currently writing a short story about why monsters from "Another Dimension" keep attacking Earth.
Currently I have these reasons:
* Prevention - Some super advanced alien species deemed humans way too destructive and periodically sends their monsters to cull the human population.
* A viable world to live in - Kaijuus are living organisms as well, they have deemed Earth as a good place to stay and see humans as pests.
* Conflict - Some hub dub story of a god siring 2 species, one of them are the Kaijuus who inherited the power, and the other are the humans who inherited the wisdom of the said god. Ever since, they are at war.
* Emotional Negativity - They are attracted to the emotions of humans, particularly negative emotions.
As you can see it's rather short and I think the above reasons are rather superficial or not sufficient enough for Kaijuus to try annihilate the human race.
Are there any other probable reasons why a Kaijuu would attack humans?
Or are the reasons above sufficient enough to explain why Kaijuus are killing humans?
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They don't need one. Let's say you take a walk. You're killing millions of microorganisms every time you breathe. You might step on ants and hardly notice. *Crunch* a snail when you aren't looking.
Essentially, they aren't *hostile*. They just don't notice the little creatures scrambling around, running away. They're annoyed these little stone things are in the way.
They're in essence a walking force of nature and they don't need to *intentionally* want to hurt us.
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# Don't Rule Out Politics
Just because the Kaijuu and intergalactic beast monsters doesn't mean that they aren't intelligent, or exists in complex societies with unforeseen political pressures. Maybe the Kaijuu are attacking Earth because some Kaijuu monster politician with a bad toupee who ran on a "Humans are Evil" populist platform just was elected President.
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Kaiju are aggressively active critics of bad architecture. See it, don't like it, then knock it over. Note that creatures the size of the Empire State Building like Godzilla preferentially attack cities, power stations, and high-tension power lines. Either knocking them down or melting them with their radioactive, thermonuclear bad breath.
Humans aren't their true target. They just get in the way of demolishing cities and get crushed when the building come down or burned up or plain old-fashioned stepped on. Humans shouldn't take it personally.
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## Petty revenge and escalation.
It's pretty easy when you consider humans as the equivalent of insects to the kaiju. There is no need to model the kaiju as a force of nature, they can be completely intelligent and human-like, yet their desires would be *[completely inscrutable](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality)*
Imagine a group of 6-year old schoolboys playing in the park, when they stumble upon a hornet nest. Being schoolboys, they poke the hornet nest and therefore get stung by the hornets. They then run away, crying to their friends about the hornets.
The next day, they bring the baddest boy of the school to try to destroy the nest. He brings along a lighter and a bottle of insecticide and tries to [flamethrower the nest](https://youtu.be/k2sC29_XR88?t=38). Unfortunately, he only destroys part of the nest and is once again driven away by the hornets' stings.
The story usually ends in two ways: The exterminators are called in and the hornet nest is professionally destroyed, or the parents tell the children to stop poking the hornets' nest.
**Now, imagine the story from the point of view of the hornets**:
Day 1: A number of 100m-tall kaiju rampage through their city, destroying a few city blocks and killing hundreds of helpless children in their nurseries. A swift decisive defense is mounted and the 100m-tall kaiju is driven away with significant friendly losses.
Day 2: A 200m-tall kaiju approaches, breathing fire and leaving terrible infernos in its wake. All who try to stand up to its flames are completely annihilated. It incinerates the better part of a suburb. A massive defence is organised, involving 50% of the population fighting for their lives and their home. They finally manage to repel the kaiju, but 30% of the population of the city lay dead at the hands of the kaiju.
Day 3 (a): The kaiju mothership arrives, wreathed in an impenetrable white forceshield impervious to all known weapons. It exudes neurotoxins and smog, instantly killing everyone who as much as touches it. The entire city is destroyed. The kaiju mothership then summons a moon-sized spaceship which rips the city right off the land and engulfs the obliterated remains of the city.
Day 3 (b): The kajiu threat was repelled, and the citizens start their arduous journey of rebuilding. Even though a few kaiju are sometimes sighted by scouts, they never think of threatening the city ever again.
[Answer]
Other reasons might include:
* Food:
Kaijus are carnivorous creatures and humans, being abundantly available in all places, are naturally their first pick for an easy meal.
* Rare elements:
That is somewhat relevant to the first point, but not the same. Kaijus have some rare elements in their bodies, which are hard to come by, on Earth, but are found in relevant abundance (few hundred parts per million versus few parts per million in the soil) in the human body. Kaijus kill and consume humans to replenish their rare elements' requirements.
* Humans started the conflict first:
This is all too common a cliche. Like the belligerent, egotistic, messing race we are, we discovered some Kaijus in some far off region and immediately considered them a threat, taking them down with fighter jets and tanks. This initiated a violent response from the previously docile giants and now they are rampaging all over the globe.
* Indirect carnage
The Kaijus don't *directly* involve in killing humans (as in, they don't step on, or swat at those pesky little worms) but the way they interact with their environment ends up killing swathes of humans. Consider a Kaiju kicking off a man-made building out of its way because it is an obstruction to it. Although not intended, hundreds of humans would die as a result. Some crunched within the building and others die as huge blocks of debris fall on them.
* [Pheromones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheromone)
In this case, the Kaijus are sensitive to a lot of pheromones that humans release. In most cases, these pheromones incite the Kaijus to violence. If human and Kaiju pheromones overlap in this manner, Kaijus would be hostile murdering machines only in places where there are large human populations (large cities) releasing huge amounts of pheromones, affecting Kaiju behavior in their vicinity. Kaijus present/living in or around small towns or villages would be docile and peaceful.
* Natural hostility
This is what makes a cat kill rats. In the long course of evolution, certain species got to be perpetually hostile to other species (dogs-cheetahs, lions-hyenas etc). In this case, Kaijus were an ancient race which evolved alongside humans and both species developed animosity against each other. In those times, the Kaijus were about the size of elephants. However, for reasons unknown, Kaijus apparently disappeared from Earth dozens of thousands of years ago. Now that they are back and huge (how they are back, it's upon you), the ancient animosity has flared up again and they are on a kill spree.
[Answer]
**Entertainment:** the whole scheme involves televised events, where the "super-advanced alien race" has design contests for new kaiju to be sent in against some randomly selected (or maybe voted upon) city, with bets placed on how long the kaiju lasts or much destruction takes place before the humans finally take them down, or what method the humans finally use to beat them. Sort of like gladiatorial games for the ancient Romans.
(Invulnerable kaiji would get boring after a while, which is why it's always possible for the humans to defeat them.)
(*We* find it entertaining to watch movies of giant monsters destroying cities, after all.)
[Answer]
With a range of tones:
* "I would like to say that the humans worship [deity], the same way we do. I'd like to, but ... they're doing it wrong. And, as we all know, the only compassionate choice is to kill them all."
* "Professor, we have finally determined why all of our interpreters become psychotic. It seems those little human insects's brains broadcast thoughts so violent and depraved that our psychic colleagues lose their minds."
* "The brains are just so damned tasty!"
* "Once we've eliminated the vermin overrunning the planet, which, get this, they call "Earth", a synonym for dirt, we'll be able to retrieve the buried creche without infecting our young.
* "And, as we can clearly see in our telescopes, there are no creatures sufficiently large to be 'life'. Therefore, this wet, blue planet will be a perfect remote home for our criminally insane."
* "We used to call it "the common cold". Now we call it Mad Kaijuu Disease: 'MKD', also expanded as 'massive killing and destruction' in the popular lexicon."
* "It's taken us a century of painstaking science, and the death's of several hundred indigenous species, but we have finally determined that it was the rays of the yellow sun that were causing our first settlers' violent mood disorders."
* "Thou shalt not abide the tailless to live."
* "While mild mannered at the somewhat lower[higher] atmospheric pressure of our own habitats. When we sent Steve down[up] into that much thicker[thinner] atmosphere, we discovered he is susceptible to nitrogen narcosis at those pressures. We'll miss Steve, and the millions of recently discovered local inhabitants he inadvertently stepped on and stumbled over."
* "We seek to capture and reimprison our most accomplished identity thief, most likely disguised as one of these rectangular pebble sculptures."
* "Aw, Mom, if we'd thought they were sentient, we wouldn't have knocked their hives over."
* "*That*, Timmy, is why we do not let our pets off their leashes outside of our home."
* "They said I was *mad* to develop this germ line of microcephalics. But we'll see who says I'm mad, now that I've worked out the kinks via direct conflict testing on this backwater planet."
* "They told us this portal would just disintegrate our criminally insane. We would never have used it if we had known it went somewhere."
* "We have seen this 'Jersey Shore' and our wisest minds are in agreement: You must be destroyed."
* "We have seen this 'Lost' and our wisest minds are in agreement: You must satisfyingly wrap up all the loose ends. Or else."
* "Of course I'm allowed to stomp all over this city. I have my letter of marque right here."
* "The license says I'm allowed to kill up to 8 million, when they're in season."
* "It's my homestead and the law says I can clear varmints from my land any way I see fit."
[Answer]
**It's their Super Bowl.**
The short and sweet of it is your aliens are not that mature or empathetic and watching two lesser species fight to the death is entertaining.
[Answer]
The Kaijuu are the spirits of the fire and power of early Earth. God wanted to put life on Earth so (s)he banished the Kaijuu to another dimension in order to make Earth suitable for other life. After millions of years the Kaijuu have cracked the wall between dimensions and are coming through. They see life on Earth as their replacements so they try to destroy it and return Earth to its primal state.
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Similar to your prevention reasoning, for harvesting natural resources. An advanced alien species sends the Kaijuu to destroy local planetary inhabitants before they arrive to farm the planet's natural resources.
[Answer]
**They do it for the bonus points, of course.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cBbuc.jpg)
But seriously, what if they are simply very large bio-machines designed to collect resources of some kind (organic, genetic, mineral... whatever) and they are competing with each other?
If whatever source they came from has a competitive, entertainment based society, there may even be masses of beings gathered into massive arenas where giant holograms are reproducing the perceptions of the senses of the bio-mecha-kaiju stomping around the next dimension over.
There could be legions of fans rooting for their favorite monster and smack-talking the others, commentators excitedly covering every move by the kaiju and the prey - maybe even multiple commentators each streaming their own channel so the spectators can pick their favorite voice, popcorn and hotdogs and sugar-spiked drinks... or whatever it is they drink and eat over there. Perhaps they view humans much like we view ants, capable of great feats of engineering, but not *really* intelligent.
Besides, there has to be *some* reason why they keep attacking Tokyo. **I'll bet you there's an alien poke-stop there or something**.
[Answer]
Thinking of this as more of an invasion from another dimension, this could be a
## prelude to an invasion
This Kaijuu attacking a city could be an initial attack on humans to test specific weakness in our defenses before the actual invasion by a hostile alien race.
I can think of three situations of how they would achieve this:
### 1. A Soldier
The Kaijuu is a soldier of the 'alien race'. He is of the same race as the alien race, and during this initial attack, he is to show no ability to reason.
### 2. A Soldier's "Dog"
The Kaijuu is of a different species to the alien race. It has less intelligence and a very different appearance to the alien race. It is used for it's voraciousness and high tolerance to weapons. And furthermore it is mentally prepared for the attack by the alien race.
### 3. A Synthetic or Bio-Mechanical Creature
The Kaijuu was created by the alien race specifically for this task. It is made to shock and overwhelm the humans on a small scale. It's appearance is designed to look like it had been living in Earth's sea. This creature gathers the information needed for the main invasion assault.
[Answer]
Godzilla is the best example imho. You could adjust the motivation to meet your scenario.
Every time an act of evil happens in our world, a pocket of negative energy travels through to our shadow world or Kaiju dimension. Eventually enough energy collects and a Kaiju is born. This energy backfires through the tunnel and the Kaiju travels back to our world. The process is extremely painful and form-changing for the infant Kaiju. As it enters our world, the very first thing it experiences is pain, darkness and loneliness. Inherently evil, immensely powerful and angry from the start. What happens next would seem natural.
This scenario takes away from Kaiju being a physical monster a bit and the logistics should be more detailed
[Answer]
# Maybe they do it for fun?
Any child with a magnifying glass and a hot summer day has had the same experience: burn the ants. It's fun. Yes, it's cruel, and yes, most adults wouldn't let themselves be seen doing something so detestable for a person well past puberty, but perhaps the Kaijuu have different reasons:
## Cultural stagnation
*Godzilla* meets *The Hunger Games*: Kaijuu compete with each other to cause the most mayhem on Earth to prove the superiority of their home districts to distract them from the insidious undercurrents of their society.
## Boys will be Boys
Kaijuu have immense power to traverse space-time and so the billions and billions of star systems are their playthings. Most adults prefer to vent their stress in abandoned systems or asteroid belts, but angsty adolescents sneak into the star systems of intelligent life and cause a wreak because they won't admit it but they want their parents to pay attention to them more, especially after their Kaijuu parents split up and brought in Kaijuu step-siblings in their second marriages.
## Gentlemanly Hunting
In, say, Middle Ages-era Europe, it was common for the nobility and their associates to spend their leisure time with their associates by hunting. It was seen as a gentleman's sport. Perhaps the Kaijuu venture forth with monocles the size of the Hubble Space Telescope.
[Answer]
### Global Warming!
Or some other natural/man-made change in the creature's natural environment affects the creatures primary food source.
This may force the creature to leave it's natural environment to seek a more abundant source of nutrition.
A human gathering(i.e. a city) could be discovered through eating fisherman, and following the trail intently or not, to the dock of a city. Hungry and malnourished, the creature is confused and looking for sustenance. *(Cue the blonde woman looking up and screaming)*. Seeing modern technology like cars and neon lights could make him more hostile, confused and angry.
[Answer]
The scenario I like is they attack because they just like violence. Not every vile and ferocious creature has to be sugar-coated in a movie for us, so we can understand their motives and why are they doing this. Think of the situation as a desperate one, there are creatures that like rampages, killings, blood and carnage.
[Answer]
Depends on the reason these gargantua showed up in the first place, but let's say YOU just found a cool new planet to live on, with lots of good breathable air, plenty of water, vegetation, etc., which was a super handy discovery since you were previously planet-less. So you land, all excited to get your new life started, and you discover there are teensy little critters infesting the place, covering it with their weird little structures and whatnot -- well that's all fine and interesting, you'd be happy enough to live and let live. Only, unlike roaches and ants and spiders and other such teensy critters which you've found a mild irritation in the past, these seem to be intelligent and rather annoyed and terrified by your arrival, so they start trying to, you know, kill you and stuff. And it turns out, they're actually pretty dang smart and unusually effective at making things dead.
Plus, they're everywhere, so (as has been mentioned in other posts), you can't really help but keep stepping on them, which they seem to not like very much.
So yeah -- **intelligent, terrified, nuke-wielding ants with itchy trigger fingers, and you with no place else to go.**
What would *you* do?
[Answer]
Imagine the "weird" pleasure we humans (or most of us, at least) feel when we kick/step on/destroy a sandcastle, and multiply it tenfold. Maybe they have no real motives or reasons to destroy cities apart from the fact that it might be fun as hell, or at least relaxing, to them, coupled with the fact that we would be perceived by such a creature the same way we perceive ants.
Speaking of ants, another good comparison would be a very small kid who burns ants with a magnifying glass. He's not evil, he's not trying to make the anthill his new home and he's definitely not looking for food, he's just *having fun*. And if the monster is intelligent but not like a human adult (e.g. not self-conscious, or as much as a little kid can be) it could basically be the same thing.
As to why the Kaijuu decides to travel to our world, we first would have to know what their world actually is like. It may be barren and "boring" or they could even have come here by mistake or unconsciously.
In that case, attacking a city might even be a decision dictated by the "panic" caused by the fact of finding itself in an unknown world surrounded by unfamiliar things.
[Answer]
**It's beyond our understanding:**
I'd like to refer to Neil DeGrasse Tyson on this:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ro9aebFZhM>
To summarise, he states that everything we are that's different from chimpanzees can only exist in the 1% difference of our DNA from chimps. So building computers and swinging from the trees is only 1% difference. Now imagine an alien race 1% smarter than us in the same way we're smarter than chimps, or suppose they're 2% smarter. Suppose these Kaijuu are somehow related to that alien race, we'd simply lack the intelligence to fully understand why.
**The Galactic Prime Directive:**
My other suggestion, we're being prepared. Our 20years of world wars advanced our technology faster than the previous 200years. To an alien race war would seem like a good motivator to hurry us along. Now all the world is working together to fight a common enemy. Perhaps we have some friends out there preparing humanity for the rigours of a galactic community by putting us through the galactic prime directive.
*"Only races strong enough to survive and overcome the Kaijuu are strong enough to join the Galactic Council".*
Kaaiju in this context may simply mean test. We're a war like species, so our test is war...
[Answer]
**Maybe the Kaijuu is really just an enormous garden hoe?**
In that case, we'd be like ants, and buildings would just be seen as weeds.
[Answer]
There's a word zoologists use, territoriality. It's a hell of a word when it's applied to something like a hippo, that will chase you down and stamp you to death for the crime of existing near it.
I imagine it would be a hell of a word when applied to a kaiju, which will roast your city for the temerity of being a few miles from its nest.
[Answer]
I'm actually working on a Pacific-Rim-inspired story dealing with these questions. Here are the answers I give in the story.
**ANSWER 1: WE AREN'T ALONE ON THIS PLANET ANYMORE**
The kaiju in my story are refugees from a dimension where the barrier between living organisms and non-living machines is practically nonexistent. Thing is, their dimension is dying, and for reasons currently unknown to science, portals have opened between their own dimension and earth.
Naturally, seeking greener pastures, the kaiju migrate to earth, where there's plenty of food and the planet isn't dying. Unfortunately, these gigantic creatures are now sniffing around urban areas, chowing down on crops and livestock, and causing no end of trouble for us humans. And we don't have a means to deal with them.
In essence, they aren't actively malevolent, but we must now share our planet with them, and all sorts of problems are going to ensue as a result of that.
**ANSWER 2: THEY'RE BEING WEAPONISED**
If that doesn't work for you, then what happens when someone finds a way to control or direct the kaiju? It's highly probable they're going to weaponize it. After all, kaiju in military service are astronomically powerful assets, as it takes a metric \*\*\*\*ton of ordinance to take down just one of them.
"Hey, that's a nice population center you got there. It would be a real shame if a kaiju went in and wrecked it. Of course, I can prevent that... if you immediately step down from your position and make me dictator of your country. And if you don't, well... I can't exactly guarantee the safety of anyone there."
]
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[Question]
[
Set in the medieval period, adventurers like to frequent the guild hall to check out the bounty lists, which are updated on a daily basis. Many of the requests on the list requires adventurers to pit against dangerous towering monsters or venture into unfamiliar places where one misstep could spell certain death.
Fortunately adventurers could take a break in between the hunt or retire from the quest using a cheap portal scroll and teleport back to the guild hall. Each portal scroll is cheap and is activated by tearing the scroll apart which *immediately* transports the user to a destinated location, usually the nearest guild hall. To prevent one from accidentally triggering the effect the scroll is rolled and tied up with a ribbon.
However statistics have shown that only a tiny fraction of the adventurers have used the portal scroll to escape from their impending demise. Why do many adventurers did not reach for the portal scroll when their life is in danger?
[Answer]
**The Spell Takes a Few Minutes to Work**
After you rip up the scroll the spell immediately starts working. But teleportation spells are very complicated and the magic takes a few minutes to memorise where all the molecules in your body are located relative to each other. You must stay absolutely still for a few minutes while this happens, and only then are instantly transported.
So you can use a scroll in the evening to return to the guildhall but not to save yourself from a falling boulder.
**Bonus Points:** If you stay inside the radius but make a sudden movement during the priming phase, you might have part of your body not *scanned* or the same part scanned twice. Best case you reappear with an extra arm where no arm should be. Worst case you reappear without a head.
The worst case is someone else jumps inside the radius during the scanning phase, the spell tries to teleport one person, and you get reconstituted inside each other. The guildhall keeps two unfortunate such individuals preserved in its museum as a cautionary tale to any new adventurers who would abuse the power of the teleportation scroll. The families receive a yearly stipend in return for this.
[Answer]
**Gauntlets, security, accessibility and coordination. Plus falls and loot.**
Assumptions: A teleport scroll will only take a single adventurer and the items that adventurer is wearing / carrying. If this assumption is incorrect then there are lots of potential problems (how much of the ground they are standing on is teleported with them?) and a very simple solution to why teleporting is a bad idea (the hostile touching the adventurer will teleport with them and continue killing the adventurer post-teleport).
**Gauntlets** - Hands are vulnerable. When facing an enemy, an adventurer's hands will typically be the closest part of the adventurer's body to an enemy. If an adventurer's hand is damaged then their ability to fight, treat their wounds and conduct a myriad of other tasks are seriously impeded. Therefore, melee fighters will wear protective gloves or gauntlets to prevent themselves being disabled. Archers using traditional war bows need a protective glove on the bow hand to prevent damage from the fletching of the arrows being shot and a half-glove at least to protect the fingers of the drawing hand from the bowstring. Even spellcasters, assuming that there are such, will find themselves needing gloves in a number of environments and adverse weather.
Even light, modern gloves designed for flying and running reduce the wearer's dexterity for tasks such as tying and untying knots and bows, removing items from pouches etc. Heavy gloves and gauntlets make such tasks almost impossible.
The question states that:
>
> To prevent one from accidentally triggering the effect the scroll is rolled and tied up with a ribbon.
>
>
>
How long does it take to undo the ribbon and tear a scroll? I ran a few tests using sheets of A4 paper, rolled up, tied with a ribbon and placed in an unfastened breast pocket of my jacket:
* 5 seconds when using both hands with no gloves under no pressure. The paper did not tear remotely cleanly in half - scrolls need to be perforated if a clean tear is required.
* 8 seconds when using both hands with snow gloves under no pressure.
* 17 seconds when using off-hand with snow glove and my teeth while wrestling with an energetic adolescent 25 kg German Shepherd X with the primary hand.
* 11 seconds when using off-hand with snow glove and my teeth while (badly) practicing parries with an ornamental short sword in the primary hand.
One interesting observation was that my form while parrying in the last test was even worse than normal due to splitting my attention between sword work and trying to unwrap and tear a scroll. Against an opponent who is so superior that I would need to teleport to safety, I would not survive the 11 seconds it took to access and tear the scroll.
Note also that I did not even attempt to simulate a two-handed weapon, dual wielding or weapon-and-shield fighting - one hand must be free to access and unwrap the scroll, which means that a two-handed weapon cannot be employed effectively while unwrapping a scroll or an off-hand weapon or shield must be dropped and presumably abandoned (see "Loot" below).
**Security and accessibility** - In the above tests, the "scroll" was not secure. An enemy could pick such an obvious pocket easily, it would not be a feasible place to have a pocket in most types of armour and any flame, slashing or piercing attacks would destroy or at least damage the scroll before it could be used. In order for the scroll to survive to be used it would need to be in a more secure pocket or pouch, which would mean that instead of 10+ seconds to trigger the scroll it would take much longer. 10 seconds is a long time in close combat when things are already going sufficiently wrong that it's bug-out time, longer will make it that much worse.
**Coordination** - solo adventurers are not particularly plausible as a sustainable operating model. Adventuring teams are needed in order to allow for role specialisation, all-around observation and any teamwork tactics (eg distractions, flanking). When an encounter has gone so badly wrong that the team needs to teleport out, how well will this be communicated in the fog and din of battle? Will all team members realise that it's "scroll time" if they cannot hear the order to teleport? As soon as some team members teleport out, the adventurer/s remaining will face the full brunt of the hostile encounter.
**Falls** - Adventurers may fall to their deaths. Things may fall on adventurers to cause their deaths. Assuming that a *really* alert adventurer who is either falling or has something falling on them can access and tear their scroll in 5 seconds (with no "decision" time required) then 125 metres is the magic distance. If they fall less than 125 metres or if something is falling on them from a height of less than 125 metres then there is no time to use a scroll. 125 metres is really high - 99.99% of drops of or onto adventurers will be much less than this but still easily fatal.
**Loot** - Adventurers live and die for loot. They prefer not to die, which means that if they are entering battle while carrying heavy loot then they will put it down rather than try to fight with it on. (Armour is bad enough, but at least it is distributed over the body. A backpack with more than a few kilos in it will unbalance an adventurer, slow them down and restrict their movement - for example, it is simply not possible to fire a rifle or a crossbow from the prone position with a large backpack on.) However, this may lead to a possibly fatal hesitation when a battle is going badly - should they fight on and possibly die or teleport out and lose everything that they are not carrying? Note that this includes not only their backpacks but any weapons/shields of their own that they need to drop in order to have at least one free hand to access and use their scroll.
**Summary:** The time and splitting of attention to use a scroll may make fighting on or attempting a conventional withdrawal a more survivable option in many circumstances. When an adventurer falls or has things dropped on them they will not have time to use a scroll. Finally, adventurers may be reluctant to abandon team mates and/or valuables.
[Answer]
My first thought would be the length of the ritual, but this doesn't seem a factor.
The next would be if you were forced to return within a certain time, meaning your life would be in just as much peril as before. But since you state they can abandon a quest like this, this doesn't seem an option either.
One option could be that you would need to do it from a safe place, as **whatever is threatening you, could follow you through the portal**. The portal could stay open for anything like 30 seconds afterwards to permanently until it is used again. The authorities may have made it illegal to let anything in after you, because they got fed up with adventurers letting in dangerous monsters in the middle of their city, leaving them to clean up your mess. Same with dropping huge boulders in the middle of the hall, or random arrows or projectiles coming flying out a portal.
[Answer]
**It doesn't work everywhere**
You need to be in a clearing, or at an intersection of ley lines for it to work. It's easy to reach a suitable spot if you're freely walking around, but if you're being chased by a monster or trapped down a well, you often don't have the time or ability to reach a teleportable spot.
[Answer]
**You show up naked.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hDQbG.jpg)
[source](https://musingsofamiddleagedgeek.blog/2018/09/12/requiem-for-a-nightmare-james-camerons-the-terminator-1984/)
The spell takes you, and only you. None of your loot, or supplies, or weapons. Also only live cells; your hair and fingernails stay behind too. If you have time to cache your stuff that is fine but that also means you might have time to figure out some way to escape with your stuff, and hair.
These adventurers are pretty resourceful and will often figure it out. They are even more confident than resourceful, and they always think they will be able to figure it out.
[Answer]
While Teleportation spell scrolls are cheap, there is a maximum ammount of teleports that can happen simultanously within the Manasphere of a planet. To cope with that limitation, spell scrolls come with a *delay* spell that keeps the actual teleportation magic from trying to overload the Manasphere by transmitting the spell into the Grand Magic Spire's spell capacitor with a given priority written into the delay spell. The actual teleportation spells are then executed by the Grand Magic Spire after the rules of priority and then FIFO (First In First Out). Priorities are pretty much like one could expect from [Radio priorities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_precedence).
* Commercially availeable spells come only with a ROUTINE priority, resulting in waiting times for the actual teleportation is delayed by about 30 minutes in low busy times and on very heavy traffic times upwards 3 hours, or even 'tomorrow'!
* PRIORITY spells are only availeable for Law enforcement, Heads of State and military, need some sort of valid ID to be used and, result usually in waiting times between 10 and 30 minutes, on heavy traffic days at worst 3 hours.
* IMMEDIATE spells are for Medical only and are commercially unavaileable - and might contain some sort of limitation that prevents such - possibly need to be activated with a valid First Responder Badge. While they strive to manage to get a teleport as fast as possible by queing them above all Priority spells, the sheer ammount of Immediate teleport requests means that even a medical evac spell takes up to 10 minutes to get through, with an average of about 5 mintues.
* It's rumored that there is a FLASH priority been coded into the delay spell, but so far it has never been used - even the messangers that delivered the capitulations at the end of the last war only went Immediate.
[Answer]
## Because they are not used
Simple as that.
@Daron answer is great, but even if the spell takes one second, it doesn't mean everyone would use it.
The problem isn't that one can't buy them, but that one usually that one can't use them.
If I get shot by an arrow in the head, I would die no matter if I had a portal scroll or not. I just didn't have time to react. And even If I had, I would simply raise my shield, and continue the adventure
If I try to unlock a chest that turn out to be a trap and explodes me, I would die no matter if I had a portal scroll or not. I just didn't anticipate it. If I would, I would just avoid the trap and continue the adventure.
If I fight a duel with the black knight, and he cut me in pieces, I would die no matter if I had a portal scroll or not. I just wasn't good enough. If I was, I would kill him and continue the adventure.
[Answer]
Games are your easiest reference here.
If you *can* teleport during battle, players will cheese the system.
See teleportation in Diablo II for an example where hackers rigged it so if their HP dropped below a certain threshold, the bot would auto-teleport them back to town.
In purely combat games like MOBAs, teleporting is prohibitive because it **gives away your position (or at least draws attention)** and **takes a long time to cast**. There's a huge risk associated with it, as you cannot move or defend during this time and if you try to do so, you have to start again afterwards.
(Given your constraint of immediate teleportation, this doesn't seem applicable).
In typical RPG type games, you **can't teleport within Dungeons**--places where some sort of counter magic seals your teleportation. Dungeons can have places that aren't sealed though, allowing for checkpoints or places where you can return from.
**Other games won't allow you to teleport while in combat or enemies are close by**. You can make up any reason for this--enemies have evil auras that block the teleportation, or maybe they can cast counter magic that could send you into a volcano.
Lastly, **execution could be an issue**. If you have to carefully rip along a certain line or risk accidentally teleporting 100m away from where you thought you'd be, you won't really be able to do it in combat. This idea could set you up for some scenes with rushed teleportation landing people in trees, etc.
---
Other tropes I vaguely remember:
* Baddies can also go through
* Can only teleport at certain times of day
* Teleporting consumes scrolls, but you still need to be close to some sort of waypoint stone
[Answer]
# Shame
While the guild supports the safety of their members, and prefers them to get back safely even if unsuccessful, its membership is comprised of adventurers.
These people easily kill a dragon before breakfast on their bad days[dubious] [reference needed] or so they claim. As such, getting out of a dangerous situation using a portal scroll is frowned upon. Using one would be the coward's choice. The guild members will (literally) risk their lives over using a scroll, and so far they managed quite well (i.e. survived) so they constantly overestimate their chance of getting out in one piece.
If they valued things differently, probably they would not take part in those adventures, instead joining for example to the cooper's guild.
[Answer]
**Running from a train right in front of it**
You know in some comics where a character would be running away from a train, and you would shout, "Just run left or right, not straight you idiot!"?
Since I've experienced a similar effect I can safely say the reason for that is if you do not spend 100% of your speed and energy on staying your course, any slight deviation in your trajectory would have you run over.
The distance you lose between you and the threat by going diagonally spells certain doom.
What does this have to do with your scenario?
If you are being attacked, would you rather;
* grab at a scroll, or
* attempt to block, parry or dodge the immediate threat?
Even if YOU say "but the scroll is sure escape!", *what does your instincts say in that moment?*
Secondly, if you are being overpowered it will often be swift enough that you simply do not have time to survive it, in that you realize it too late. You have already been slain, impaled by the trap or actively being hindered from escaping by the imposing threat, usually by unrelenting attacks.
The few cowards who have survived using this method was simply walking into danger knowingly, scroll in a dual white-knuckle grip while inching forward, ready to rip at any sign of danger, movement or noise. Great strategy for scouting ahead I'd say, less of an option for "in the heat of battle" escape.
Leaving your party behind like this is of course a sure fire way of never getting in a adventuring party ever again, unless you are a really good liar. But suspicion would set in soon enough regardless I'd wager.
As a final note I want to mention that I would expect regular "fully beaten, half dead" adventurers to show up at the guild hall. If not, it's possibly **due to all that blood, sweat and urine** sogging up the parchment.
Alternative reasons could be **focus**, as for the spell to complete successfully, (even though the somatic component is mundane) it requires the caster to be fully focused on the spell. For instance they would need to visualize the guild hall clearly. Rather difficult when a dozen skeletons are gnawing at your soft and tenders.
[Answer]
You can afford to pull out a scroll if you're in a game and know you can take 3 more turns before your HP is depleted. In real life, so much as reaching for your pouch in a melee battle will get you decapitated. Try to run away? That'll be a sword in the back.
You could still teleport back if you win a fight but have been wounded, but this is not a very common scenario because getting wounded usually means getting killed seconds later.
Traps are usually deadly as well, and any enemies who capture the hero will make sure to remove the scroll from their possession first (and perhaps hand it over to chieftain Orglukk the undefeated half-ogre half-minotaur, who may want to go get his golden totem back; after a few such incidents, the guild no longer gives scrolls to its junior members).
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The scroll not only has a fixed destination, but also a fixed departure point. So the adventurers will still need to get to the departure point. The adventurers will probably take several scrolls with them to have several possible departure points, but having too many scrolls becomes clumsy and will become too costly. So in a way it will become a bit like public transport, where you have several nearby bus stops, but you still have to walk to one of these. On the way to the bus stop still a lot can happen.
[Answer]
Side effects.
How fast you tear the scroll matters, as the faster you tear the scroll, the faster the ritual happens and the faster you get out of there. However, the faster the ritual happens, the higher the chance something goes wrong, such as teleporting without your blood, or upon arrival you don't have your left arm
Depending on any magical effects or artifacts nearby, those can interfere with the scroll, and you may not teleport to the guild, but instead into a dangerous location.
Yet more effects could be the infliction of physical or physic damage. The magic has to get it's power from somewhere, and the farther you are, the more it costs. A weak hero might succumb to the drain of the scroll and die.
.
Use any or all of these suggestions.
[Answer]
The other answers are all good. In addition, maybe pride, maybe the adventurers are unlearned peasants in search of glory that don't understand the power of the scroll, maybe they put it in their back pocket and can't reach it in full armor, or maybe they just got killed too fast and had no time to grab their scroll.
[Answer]
**Area of Effect**
A variant on Plutian's idea.
The spell teleports the user to the intended location... along with every other person, aboveground object, or stray spell within a couple of yards. So an incoming axe or fireball just gets brought along, with its momentum conserved, and strikes you just as it would if you hadn't moved. More worryingly, an enemy you're fighting at close range will come along for the ride, meaning you haven't improved your situation at all. Most adventurers have wised up to this and favor evading or blocking attacks instead.
The best time to use this spell is if you're in danger from *afar*, and everyone knows adventurers do their best work up close and personal.
[Answer]
Because they do not close immediatly after you- and what hunts you may come to the village. Leading to dug out spike holes beneath the portal scroll porch. And crossbows. And heroes hating villagers. Thus its longterm unhealthy to use them in peril.
[Answer]
**It's kinda hard to tear.**
Don't think of parchment or paper, which rips easily.
No, scrolls are made of a special material that has magical properties. Writing on this film is nearly impossible with non-magical quills. Likewise, ripping it isn't the easiest task in the world. Have you ever tried to tear plastic? Some are almost impossible, you have to work at it with your hands and that takes time and concentration that you don't have running from a minotaur.
The act of tearing the scroll, due to its material, is not an easy task in and of itself.
[Answer]
**Anything easy for you to use is easy for an attacker to abuse.**
We'll imagine that it is instant to tear a scroll and teleport away. I mean truly instant, like you think about grabbing the scroll and teleporting and it's as good as done.
Since it basically costs you nothing, anytime you stub a toe, you just pull the plug and disappear in a puff of figurative smoke. That means your enemies can never kill you, and you think it's so smart of a loophole.
At first your enemies are a bit annoyed, but they figure if you can disappear at will, so can they. And now every time they come close to dying, they just teleport away from danger. And if you manage to make your way to the big boss, they'll teleport away too, with their precious loot and McGuffins.
What this accomplishes is remove the need to fight. You just have to walk up to the bad guy's fortress, knock on the door, ask politely if they want to surrender and go home if they say no because any confrontation will end up in somebody teleporting away and nobody gains anything.
Even if your enemies are magically challenged and only the good guys can procure scrolls, you have a problem. But remember, the easier it is for you to use, the easier it is for an attacker to abuse. So their standard strategy now isn't to fight you off and kill, it's to activate the emergency teleport and watch you go away.
In conclusion, you really want your teleportation magic to be mildly inconvenient and unusable in battle.
[Answer]
**Bravado.**
Those who use scrolls to flee danger live with a terrible stigma amongst adventuring circles, and the social pressure does its trick for other would-be cowards.
[Answer]
# YOLO
You only live once. You've fought many battles before and are still alive, so you are now over-confidant about your chances of survival. You simply don't expect to die, so there is no reason to escape a fight. And you wouldn't know at what point in a fight is the best time to escape.
[Answer]
# Unreliable scrolls
Scribing magic scrolls is really hard to get right, and sometimes the scroll is bad : maybe you appear in the guild hall, but get teleported back where you were 10 seconds later, maybe you're at both places at the same time for a couple minutes, or maybe the spell just fails. This means teleportation scrolls aren't guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free cards and should be used in safe contexts, because you might need to go through 3-4 ones before you're sure to be fully teleported.
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## It takes two hands to tear up a piece of paper
So you must drop your prized weapon. Teleports are cheap; **good weapons not so much**.
Or you pause to sheath your weapon, but that is very dangerous.
## It takes the monster with you
To be more specific, it brings along anyone who is touching you. So monsters have learned that when you stop fighting to tear up a piece of paper, to body-check you. Now the monster arrives at the guild hall, achieving total surprise, and tears up the place. That'll get you kicked out of the guild!
[Answer]
## Poor Planning Prevents Preservative 'Porting
Most adventurers keep their Portal Scroll somewhere safe, so that they can use it to get back home when the quest is complete, or they run out of supplies. Unfortunately, "buried in the bottom of your knapsack" isn't exactly *fast* to access.
Some adventurers experimented with "quickdraw" scrolls - fixed at one end, with a ribbon attached at the other, you just had to pull the "rip-cord" to teleport back to safety. These, however, proved too easy to catch on bushes or door-handles, and were given up as a bad idea.
Beyond that, however... Adventurers practice blocks, attacks, and dodges every day. Those things are ingrained, and almost automatic. On the other hand, what pansy would practice **using a portal scroll**? So, in the heat of the moment, either the option escapes their minds entirely, or they fumble with trying to untie the safety ribbon.
[Answer]
**It is not a portal spell**
The spell deconstructs you, your stuff, and all your belongings and recreates it perfectly at the destination. However, your soul is not a physical thing, or something that can be measured, so it is not transported. So the first time you use the scroll, you die, and you are replaced by a copy of yourself with all your memories. So, the only adventurers who would use that are:
1. People who are providing for their family and know they might die.
2. People who do not care about their souls and just want money, not realizing they don't get to enjoy it.
3. People who believe in a cause greater than themselves, and are willing to die for.
The reason they are so cheap and common is because the teleportation magic is easy, and nobody wants it. It is also a bad weapon, because you have to activate it, and the copy of the person will immediately comeback and try to kill the person who de-souled them.
So not many people use the portal item.
[Answer]
**There is a cost attached to teleportation**
This cost could either be of physical or mental nature.
Version 1:
Using the teleportation scroll takes a hit on your life force. So if you are using it while not well rested, it could kill you. That means that by the time you found out, that you would lose a battle, it is too late to use it. Better spend your energy on the tiny fraction of a chance to survive some other way.
Version 2:
The teleportation scroll transports your body without a problem, but the mind is not transferred that easily. So if you tear the scroll up, while not being fully focussed on the teleportation process, your mind or a part of your mind could get left behind. This means you cannot use it in a fight where you constantly have to watch your enemy. You would also not be able to escape a death trap like a falling boulder, as the shock of surprise would fully occupy your mind.
If the teleportation did not succeed, you would arrive in a catatonic state, where you have lost your memories, sanity, were kissed by a dementor, or something else. In any case you would not be the person you once were. The local tavern could reserve a dark corner for the unlucky adventurers, where their presence would warn other travelers about the peril of teleportation scrolls, and after some time the hapless remainders are driven out and left to die.
]
|
[Question]
[
One rule: it cannot be caused by aliens or AI invading the planet. But it is okay if an alien race causes the destruction in any other way.
It's an Earth-like planet. I need the effects of the destructive event to be continuous there-after, i.e massive storms and natural disasters for years to come that threaten the small population that survived in bunkers.
I want the majority surface to get wrecked. I need all things that are required to rebuild a civilization to survive, i.e, an atmosphere, because I need characters to come up from the bunker and be able to live. I don't want them to be comfortable. Their lives are to be miserable. The planet should look like a hell-scape afterwards and they should desire finding a new home.
Hope you don't consider this a duplicate question because I feel my question is more nuanced than any others on this site.
Edit #1
This human race is quite advanced. They'd have technology to redirect asteroids, comets, etc. Unless an alien race were to guide some into the planet. The event also needs to be fast acting. So global warming is out of the question
[Answer]
First, welcome to Worldbuilding, halp!
Let me preface this by saying that [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/137808/14698) @rek gives about volcanism is a good start, and it was my first thought, as well. But in considering the additional details you've given, you may want to go another route (that is, depending on how realistic you want to be). I'll expand on some of the finer points below.
Now, do you want the surface of your planet to get really hot, or really cold?
## Cold
If you would prefer the surface environment of your planet to end up being quite cold, then (paradoxically) a good place to start is with increased volcanic activity. As mentioned by @rek, a volcanic event on par with the [Siberian Traps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps) would indeed be catastrophic. However, the focus then becomes: How fast do you want your extinction-level event to occur, versus how long before people can safely live on the surface?
If you want your people to see this catastrophe coming far in advance, giving them plenty of time to build bunkers and prepare, then one way to do this would be to start with a series of small eruptions (or a couple of large ones) that in turn give volcanologists indications that such activity is poised to increase in severity and frequency. Respiratory issues will occur in places, but by-and-large, they won't be a major problem by themselves in the short term.
Alternatively, if you want volcanic activity severe enough to cause a massive, unexpected extinction-level event quickly, then (without protective gear), the surface of your planet will be uninhabitable for a very, very long time. The [P-T extinction event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event) took *millions of years* to unfold. In order for your wasteland conditions to appear in short order, you would need something much more severe. For starters, there will be a *lot* of fire. Molten rock and burning ash will rain down over your planet like fireballs and flaming confetti. All the resulting ash and CO2 would certainly cause the atmosphere to become too toxic for oxygen-breathing lifeforms, nor would you be able to reliably grow anything using traditional methods due to the reduced levels of sunlight.
**Gradual volcanic event:**
Even [some of the largest eruptions in history](https://ge-c-nuclearwinter.weebly.com/volcanic-winter.html), while disruptive, didn't result in any significant long-term repercussions by themselves. The ash these eruptions threw into the atmosphere caused global cooling of a few degrees; winters were rougher for a couple of years, with record snowfalls and strong blizzards occurring. Naturally, a string of such eruptions in close succession would increase these effects.
So, if a) your eruptions are relatively steady and strong, and b) there aren't many of them in total and/or spread out over too long a time (say, a few months or less), then once the volcanic activity stops, the planet will return to normal over several years, or perhaps decades (again, depending on the exact details regarding the climate and topology of your planet). However, if your increased volcanic activity goes on for too long (say, months to years), you could plunge your world into an ice age. Once ice sheet growth and ocean temperature decreases become significant enough, then even without a single eruption, it'll be a cloud-covered, snow-smothered wasteland for centuries to millennia, at best.
**Sudden catastrophic event:**
If instead you want a single, massive incident of volcanic activity to wreak havoc on your world with repercussions felt for an extended period of time, then the ash itself becomes a more immediate concern. This would be the route to take if, say, you didn't want the inhabitants of your planet to see the event coming, or you want them to have the bare minimum amount of time to prepare. Portions of the surface near the eruption zone will be in flames from burning debris, and large portions of the human the population (if not all of it) will find difficulty breathing. If you also want marine life to die off, then there will need to be enough CO2 in the atmosphere to choke off nearly everything living on land (humans would find the atmosphere toxic in this case, as well). Then, cue the blizzards.
## Hot
A severe increase in solar activity could compromise or overwhelm your planet's magnetosphere. The increased ultraviolet exposure would turn your world into a desert. People would be able to walk around on the surface and breathe just fine without assistance, but they'd want to stay out of direct sunlight as much as possible. In any case, the increased exposure to UV and cosmic radiation will undoubtedly result in a spike in cancer incidence.
Increased solar activity can occur naturally. It's up to you whether your scientists get any advanced warning or not; stars can be fickle. The upsides to this scenario are a) you have more leeway in how much time people have to prepare, b) people can come up to the surface whenever they want, but they will still rely on their tech below ground to survive.
[Answer]
/Their lives are to be miserable./
I know a recipe for miserable.
**Flies everywhere.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oAWT8.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fly>
The flies are a genetic modification attempt gone wrong. They are everywhere and they attack anything that moves, biting and chewing and drinking. They cause blindness and carry other diseases as well. Attempts to control them with pesticides wound up wiping out other aspects of the ecosystem - agriculture crashed and with it, civilization. The bunker was not necessary for the flies, but it was for the fall of civilization and the chaos that followed. The genetic germ weaponry used in some of these wars wound up getting picked up by the flies as well, and now those diseases are also transmitted.
The flies did fine with all that. They are still out there. It is their world now. The humans know they are out there, because somehow now and then one gets into the bunker.
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# Gray Goo
Nanobots that can break down anything and use the raw materials to make copies of themselves go out of control. They literally devour the surface of the Earth.
Things get back to normal when for some reason the bots decide to stop replicating and decay naturally.
Source: <https://xkcd.com/865/>
[Answer]
A significant increase in global volcanism would satisfy your requirements:
1. The devastation would be widespread, varied, and continuous. Think of something on par with the formation of the [Siberian Traps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps#Impact_on_prehistoric_life). Such eruptions can last millennia.
2. The resulting [volcanic winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Potential_climatic_precedents) would wreak havoc on the biosphere and agriculture, necessitating greenhouses and artificial light, but the atmosphere would still be breathable over much of the planet within the expected lifetime of a human civilization. Weather nearest the eruption site(s) would be turbulant year-round, and if the eruption is near an ocean the interruption to currents would have chaotic butterfly effects around the globe.
3. The cause could be entirely natural, from an abnormally large [mantle plume](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_plume), for example, or alien-induced (perhaps a microsingularity or other weaponized hypothetical physics).
[Answer]
# Nearby Supernova.
[Dr. Mark Reid](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993hep.ph....3206E), a senior astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics stated:
>
> … were a supernova to go off within about 30 light-years of us, that
> would lead to major effects on the Earth, possibly mass extinctions.
> X-rays and more energetic gamma-rays from the supernova could destroy
> the ozone layer that protects us from solar ultraviolet rays. It also
> could ionize nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, leading to the
> formation of large amounts of smog-like nitrous oxide in the
> atmosphere.
>
>
>
Pretty unpleasant, no laughing matter - killing off huge swaths of animal and plant life some would recover in time but not without huge changes, the [nitrous oxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide#Atmospheric_occurrence) would cause serious warming:
>
> On a per-molecule basis, considered over a 100-year-period, nitrous
> oxide has 298 times the atmospheric heat-trapping ability of carbon
> dioxide (CO 2)
>
>
>
A hot Earth then, but what about the oceans:
>
> ....phytoplankton and reef communities would be particularly
> affected. Such an event would severely deplete the base of the ocean
> food chain.
>
>
>
It's clear that if you take away the base of a food chain then the whole thing falls flat.
Sure, deep ocean life feeding on bacteria at oceanic vents might be ok, but everything else would radically shift.
Given time, technology and resources to shift everything back and make new plantings and reseed the oceans with life - it could be done, but it would be harsh.
[Answer]
Gamma Ray Burst. It would have pretty much all the same effects as the supernova in Fay Sugger's answer, except it affects a narrow beam. Nobody really knows how narrow the beam is, but I don't know of any reason why it couldn't be small enough to only hit the Earth.
Fun fact, this may have already happened on Earth once. Gamma Ray Burst is a popular explanation for the [Ordovician-Silurian Extinction Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician%E2%80%93Silurian_extinction_events).
[Answer]
A chemical treatment for a global problem gone awry.
Imagine the planet was headed for a man-made disaster - pollution, starvation, disease, etc., and the proposed solution by one of the superpower governments was a chemical release of an antidote high in the air.
There was a second warring nation who wanted to be seen as the savior of the planet. They created a different chemical treatment, but had a similar plan to release theirs into the sky.
The rest of the world was opposed to any global releases of any kind of chemicals, but had no solutions of their own.
Because the governments were at war, cooperation with the enemy was treasonous. Neither side discovered until it was too late that their differing plans and chemistries were incompatible, and when combined produced destructively acidic solutions that eventually broke down into flammable gasses. Acidic fog followed by firestorms swept across all the habitable regions of the planet.
The acid in the air penetrated everywhere, corroding virtually every bit of iron and steel and structurally ruining most buildings, bridges, vehicles, and infrastructure, which then collapsed in the fires. Smoke clouds blotted out the sun, ushering in an ice age in all but a narrow band around the equator. The ash cover killed most remaining plant life. The seas are covered with algae, and few fish species survived. Molds and fungus cover most things. For some reason, some lichens adapted and are one of the few things that still grow.
The clouds have cleared and the atmospheric acid is mostly gone now, so the air is breathable. Fresh water stores can be replenished from rains, but groundwater is not potable. Some lichens and algaes turn out to be edible, but most are toxic. Machinery and vehicles were destroyed by corrosion. Animal life on the surface has been reduced to insects - no vertebrates survived.
Sound hellacious enough for you?
[Answer]
**Get rid of the moon**.
---
EDIT: As @PeterA.Schneider points out in the comments, this very much looks like the novel [SevenEves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves) by Neal Stephenson. Never heard of it, but it looks like an interesting read if you're interested in my idea.
---
Or have some aliens get rid of it. Perhaps they needed the materials present in it, and deemed its removal "compliant" with their code of conduct, which mainly dictates they can not directly cause the loss of other species' life.
>
> -*What about indirect loss of life* - asked the captain.
>
>
> -*Nothing on the books, ma'am*- replied her lieutenant.
>
>
>
Yes, shady individuals.
More on topic, the moon, or rather its more or less sudden disappearance, could have devastating results on our planet, as devastating as your feel comfortable handwaving them.
# The moon gives our planet axial stability
The moon is what scientist believe made our Earth have a tilted spin (whith respects to our translational plane around the sun). They also strongly believe that it is what is **keeping that tilt**. If it were to disappear, that tilt could become much more erratic and cause much more sudden weather changes, and stronger ones.
Just imagine we go from 23º to, say, 50º, in the span of a couple centuries. The planet's cold and hot areas would change dramatically, and seasonally, which would make winds a nightmare.
# The moon is (almost) the only thing that keeps our tides going
And along with their almost complete stop, ~~ocean currents would greatly diminish~~ *(EDIT) tidal currents would greatly diminish, which is one of the primary factors in nutrient distribution for the ocean's ecosystem*. They wouldn't stop, but it would be significant enough to cause **massive loss of life in the oceans**. This would be pretty much immediate, and would cause severe damage to the economy, particularly in already empoverished places, which would cause major political and economical unrest around the globe.
# Increased volcano activity
Maybe not that much. Maybe a lot. Maybe just the oposite, less volcano activity. This last one is my favorite, because it would mean that presure would be building up under the Earth's crust. The thing with the moon is that it doesn't *just* move water, it also moves our tectonic plates. No movement (or far less) would make them stop releasing the presure they build up, eventually resulting in one *biiiiig* BOOM (exaggerated for dramatic purposes).
# Heavy moonrock shower
This one depends on the need of the alien race. Maybe they don't need the entire Moon, just about 50% of it. The other 50% is left there as a cloud of rocks, dust and other debree. It would rain down as a fire shower for centuries, potentially making the surface of the planet too risky to live on - hence the bunkers. This and evrything else I already mentioned.
# It would affect everyone's psyche
Last but not least, there would be major unrest due to the uncertainty that watching your moon disappear would create, and the sense of defenselessness against a much more advanced bully race that just takes what they need and leave you to die. Morale would be just on the floors, and I would assume many people would start acting very irrationally, to the point that governments wouldn't be able to control populations any more, plunging the entire Earth into an environment more tipical of a few thousand years ago.
## Final thoughts
Basically, it would trully be hell, and I don't expect much to survive. Though I think there's a good chance that humanity lives through it, and the Earth would eventually find a new balance. But I would assume it would take thousands of years.
Unless another, now benevolent alien race takes pitty on the Earth and puts a new Moon there. Or the same race judges those shady individuals and condemns them to restore it. Or not, and make everyone suffer. Up to you :)
[Answer]
# They *thought* they had the technology to deflect an asteroid.
The impactor looked large and menacing, two or three orders of magnitude more than the Chicxulub impactor. This gave one little advantage - it was seen far enough out that they had the time to do something.
Small asteroids and comets they could deflect using [Yarkowski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarkovsky_effect)-Sekanina effect masers mounted on the Moon.
Largish asteroids, even rotating ones, would be electrically coupled to a solar sail or fusion-torch probe.
This one, they needed something more, and they needed it *fast*. So they supplied it with self-deploying [Orion engines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)). The plan was to use a string of nuclear bunker-busters to drill a crater in the asteroid. Then, at every rotation, one large fusion device would be detonated at the bottom of the hole, vaporizing the surface and ejecting the resulting ionized gases at enormous speed and accelerating it towards Earth. After several dozens explosions, the speed gain would have ensured that the asteroid would cross Earth orbit several days before the Earth, and be safely slingshotted away.
The third fusion explosion, unfortunately, fractured the asteroid completely and the tephra destroyed the launching probe. The asteroid became a cloud of several thousand smallish impactors, lazily bumping into each other, fracturing into smaller objects, surrounded by a cloud of dust and gases that efficiently deflected both visible light lasers and microwave masers.
There was no time for a second expedition to be arranged, and the bombs already in flight could not be repurposed and detonated inside the cloud to ensure a wider dispersal.
As a result, four months later the cloud hit Earth. A large part bounced on the atmosphere, most of it aerobraking and entering unstable orbits that would collapse in months, or years. The rest began raining on the surface, more than half impacting the oceans - and often causing disastrous tsunamis - and the rest on the ground.
Humanity space-sight was instantly blinded by the resulting [Kessler cascade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome), so there could be no forewarning of incoming meteor strikes, most between 5 and 7 on the [Torino scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale). By the time the cloud of shrapnel had reached Earth, it was calculated to be composed of at least 1,000,000 rocks ranging from the size of a pebble to that of a large hill; more than a quarter of those would be [Tunguska](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event)-sized or larger.
Massive ocean level increase, firestorms and a nuclear winter were the results; after the first years, even the oxygen content of the atmosphere decreased to an uncomfortable 15%, while carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulfurs reached an unsurvivable 2%, requiring filter masks, oxygen extractors and air regeneration systems.
[Answer]
# Nukes.
That is actually the plot of every Fallout game ever.
Russia and the US ha e enough nuclear bombs to strike the surfave of the whole world. For the classical atom bomb, with a ground-level burst, the area of impact will be dangwrously radioactive for one to five years. Some time later there will still be radiation, but won't be as dangerous.
If every city and town in the world is nuked, only people in bunkers would survive. They would come out to see nature having taken a major impact too, as the oceans and rivers will have taken a lot of radiation as well. Every ecossystem would be impacted, even if indirectly. The world will never be the same.
[Answer]
Here’s a solution attainable with minimal effort.
Just let your population continue normal behavior until global warming takes off significantly. then the change in weather patterns should increase both the number AND intensity of **tropical storms** until you reach a point of permanent “bad weather”.
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In a future world with advanced technologies, the government of a desert kingdom is experimenting with new climate technologies in the hope of terraforming the desert into arable lands.
Experimenting in these new technologies leads to catastrophic effects, pushing the global climate into a new state of much higher energy resulting in decades of destructive weather events. All efforts to adjust to the new norm prove unsatisfactory and after the global death toll reaches breaking-point, all those who survive retreat to their "bunkers" awaiting better days.
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### Coronal Mass Ejection
I hope this isn't too technical, but a coronal mass ejection is when the sun spits sun stuff at the earth. They can be bad. One, the Carrington Event, happened in 1859 and took down parts of the first telegraph network--starting fires and shocking operators.
Robert Schoch theorizes that a big ejection event was responsible for ushering in the end of the last ice age. Schoch is a bit of a fringe scientist, but his ideas are fascinating. [This page](https://www.robertschoch.com/plasma_iceage.html) of his, describes how (he believes) a plasma ejection from the sun destroyed the advanced civilizations operating during the time of the last ice age. From that page:
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> Plasma hitting the surface of Earth could heat and fuse rock, incinerate flammable materials, melt ice caps, vaporize shallow bodies of water creating an extended deluge of rain, and send the climate into a warming spell. The release of pressure that follows the melting of thousands-of-meters-thick ice sheets can induce earthquakes and even cause hot rock under pressure to melt and erupt to the surface as volcanoes. The world was in chaos, and this is the event recorded by petroglyphs and the rongorongo texts.
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**They *thought* they had the technology to deal with any impactor** version 2.
They could deal with anything in their own star system. They couldn't deal with the intergalactic rogue moonlet coming at 1000 km/sec. The good news: It didn't hit them. The bad news: It hit their moon **hard** and retrograde.
The orbital space is full of debris from that event, still being nudged around by what's left of the moon that is now in an eccentric orbit that raises some very nasty tides at periapsis, coupled with the very frequent pieces of debris that come down.
Their defense system was very good, before it's ordinance was expended they were able to smash the bits that would have been cataclysmic if they came down but they didn't have enough to deal with it all.
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I would have the aliens release some kind of advanced explosives from a cloaked or otherwise hidden ship or ships, but they are not aimed at major cities or military outpost. Instead they are aimed at supervolcanos. Specifically Yellowstone in North America, Taupo in New Zealand, Tobo in Indonesia, Santorini in the Mediterranean, and the Pacana Caldera in Chile. The explosives should be detonated about 1/2 of a mile above the surface causing a shock wave that could in theory collapse the crust above the magma chambers causing almost immediate eruptions. It would need to be detonated in the air to ensure maximum downward pressure as a detonation at the surface would have a relatively small area of downward pressure.
The Pacana Caldera in Chile has not erupted in about 4 million years so you could have that one fail and thus giving your people a chance to figure out exactly what happened.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano> for the names and location of the volcano and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event> for information on airburst explosions.
Note, the Tunguska object exploded somewhere between 3 and 6 miles in the air so the damage is more spread out and less violent in scope than what a similar event happening only 1/2 a mile in the air would be.
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# Shutdown of thermohaline circulation
Thermohaline circulation is the mechanism which moves ocean waters around the world. It takes warm waters to high latitudes and is what keeps the UK and France from freezing over.
It is also affected by global warming.
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> [A shutdown or slowdown of the thermohaline circulation is an effect of global warming on a major ocean circulation.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation)
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The north would be cold for a few decades. When the oceans become stagnant, every ecossystem in the world will collapse. After the tundras and rainforests are all dead, the amount of methane in the atmosphere will increase ever faster and the climate on Earth will be venusian for millenia, maybe millions of years. You may adjust for lesser, less dramatic effects than this though.
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I would think that a civilization capable of redirecting asteroids could manage normal volcanic activity. You could have a close approach with a rogue plant passing through the solar system. Something as large as a planet could disrupt the orbit of your fictional world. It could also collide with a gas giant. Something as kinetic as that kind of impact could catalyze a thermonuclear reaction turning the gas giant into a second star that could burn indefinitely. Your world would experience rapid climate change and biosphere degradation forcing the people into subterranean bunkers, while still allowing them to travel with specialized equipment.
You could modulate the intensity and duration of the disaster by how large and close the gas giant was.
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Let’s say there’s a Human Space Navy, called the Terran Defense Force. They’re currently in a war with their interstellar neighbors. They’ve reached one of their enemies colonies at the very outskirts of known space. My question is, given all their weapons, what would be a logical reason for them not to use orbital bombardment, but instead send ground forces?
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Imagine you want to seize a mine. It’s a good mine. Lots of equipment, easily accessible tunnels, resources untainted by pollutants.
Would you do this by bombing the hell out of it with nuclear weapons? No. That would destroy equipment, collapse tunnels, and irradiate everything in the nearby area. You’d send in troops.
If there are any resources to be claimed on the colony (IE you want the territory, not just the utter genocide of your enemies) then indiscriminately bombing things will only make life harder for you in the long run. Instead of taking over an industrialised world (potentially with a viable workforce if you’re not too totalitarian) you’d be taking over a ruined hellscape that you’d have to then build back up.
If your aim is total genocide (you monster) then the other answers have you covered.
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The *Gliese 667 convention on inter-stellar warfare of 2283* (Earth reckoning) has explicitly banned orbital bombardment and flare-inducing as war crimes and against good galactic order. Other space-capable civilizations will take note of their use, and condemn them at the United Space Civilisations in Upsilon Andromedae.
Ok, on Earth, certain acts, such as carpet-bombing civilian areas of cities are explicitly banned by the [Fourth Geneva Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention), and most countries try to abide by this. There may well be a galactic version of the Geneva Conventions.
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**Because the technological balance has swung from offence to defence**
In general, there has always been a competition between offence and defence, for most of history it's been fairly strongly in favour of defence, a crossbow bolt is stopped by a shield, a sword-blow is deflected by plate-armour or even leather plate, a stab can be stopped by chainmail.
Today, a bullet is effective at normal ranges against almost every personal armour ever created. The balance has swung strongly in favour of offensive technology.
An RPG will defeat most passive defences, a tank-round will hurl straight through almost anything.. but that's changing, active defences can swat aside RPGs or detonate them early. Tank armour gets better every year.
In the future though, the advent of active forcefield defences has taken this to its logical conclusion. With enough power and heat-dissipation, any attack can be resisted.
A defensive emplacement on the surface of a planet has access to petawatts of power and the heat-dissipation of entire oceans. No orbital bombardment can mean a thing against a well established planetary forcefield. No ship can sustain the firepower required to overwhelm it.
There is a weakness though. the shield cannot cover the whole planet, only a region.
Regardless, pounding the shield down is not a viable tactic, an army must instead be landed outside the range of the bubble and wage a conventional ground war to win the planet.
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For the same reason we don't today: they don't want to cause a humanitarian crisis.
Orbital bombardment will have a measure of inaccuracy and overkill. Even with precision weapons, are you *really* sure you can tell the difference between a hospital and a defense building? Are you *really* sure your intelligence is correct?
Why wouldn't they want to cause a humanitarian crisis?
They're The Good Guys and don't want to harm civilians nor their infrastructure.
Or they're pragmatists and know collateral damage will leave them with an angry, hungry populace they must now support and more willing to take up arms against them.
Or they want to avoid escalating the war, knowing the enemy is capable of doing the same.
Or they are held to treaties banning the use of orbital weapons and do not want to be denounced by other signatories.
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Orbital bombardment with KE weapons is over-hyped in many SF settings. Causing a rock or a metal rod to impact with the force of a nuclear weapon requires *lots* of delta-V.
Orbital bombardment with nukes requires, well, lots of nukes. Nuclear weapons are *not* efficient at attacking dispersed enemies. Assume that the planet is habitable, and that the settlement patterns are small homesteads.
It is cheaper to land an infantry squad which travels from one farm to the next than to expend one nuke per farm.
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There's lots of reasons, all surrounding a single theme: you dont want to destroy everything.
You might want to convince the colonists to become your citizens eventually. Having more taxpayers and a larger workforce is always nice.
Murdering everyone in a solar system brings baggage. Your own population might not like it, the people pulling the triggers might not like it. What is even worse is that now your enemy isnt going to hold back either and annihilate entire planetary populations as well. Preferably the one that contains the ruling body, including you.
Resources are nice, and nothing contains as many refined and ready resources as the buildings and equipment themselves. Destroying it is a waste.
The planet is so nice this time of year. Using kinetic impactors on a large scale makes it rather hard to inhabit afterwards. Maybe invade instead?
Or how about one that I've never seen anyone use: invading solar systems isnt as easy as "warp in and nuke it". It requires you to get the materials in, but you can only carry so much so you need to manufacture a lot of the equipment in the solar system you are trying to take over. Your opponents are going to dig in and make it a type of trench warfare. Every time you use an orbital bombardment they just hide in deep bunkers, then dig themselves out and assault your landingcraft as you try to gain control. Why waste the time, the resources and the planets environment with OS's if you'll end up in ground battles anyway? Better use it to build up your forces and have only a light bombardment to get the space for building staging area's on the planet.
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Realistic orbital mechanics put severe restrictions on orbital bombardment. Depending on the technology level of your setting, unless your troop transport vessels and space dreadnought have cloaking devices, energy shields or weapons with infinite ammo like very poweful lasers, they probably want to spend the least amount of time in orbit around the planet they attack.
1 Orbits are *predictable*
Just like it is possible to know exactly when the ISS will pass above a given point on Earth, your enemy on the ground knows exactly were your vessels will be at any point in time.
Your vessels can bomb only points of the surface their orbits take them over, with very little deviation. Sure, with enough orbital inclination and the rotation of the planet, you will end up covering most of the ground, but you lack initiative.
As soon as you cut FTL and enter normal space, they can compute your trajectory and start speculating about your target, evacuate or shield up, or mass their anti-orbital countermeasures on your path.
Orbital plane change is a very costly maneuver, realistic space ships with reaction drives can't perform it as much as necessary to catch the enemy by surprise.
2 There is *no stealth* in space
There is no realistic way to hide something in space. Your orbital ships will at least emit an infra red signature easily detectable against the cold background of empty space. Detection can be done by cheap, passive sensors the enemy will probably have hidden scattered all around the planet. You will have a very hard time detecting those and making your enemy blind.
If your ships fire their engine to modify their orbits, especially if they are big and require powerful engines, you can bet the enemy will detect it and keep track of your position more easily than you can change it.
The enemy on the other hand, can burry his installations on the surface and hide from you. Which leads to my third point.
3 Space ships in orbit are (counter intuitively) *sitting ducks*
The enemy is hidden and shielded. They know where you are and where you will be. In fact, you are in serious danger that they bombard you. They might have to climb the gravity well, but they have many advantages over you.
* they are hidden, you are visible.
* they are shielded, but your ships can never offer the protection that a few meters of solid rock can offer.
* they have nigh infinite resources and stuff to throw at you, when you have only the ammo you brought with you from home. Even your defensive anti missile counter measures will run out faster than their orbital railguns.
In fact, in a somewhat realistic setting there can be no way to invade a planet from space unless you have a significant technology advantage, utter and complete surprise or sabotage missions like informatics warfare already crippled their reaction, if possible all 3 at the same time. Even the landing pods for your troops are sitting ducks for the *several minutes* that atmospheric entry will last. Expect 90% loss even before reaching ground.
TL;DR: use spies and hackers before you risk any ship in their solar system.
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You can bomb as much as you want, but if you want to conquer a place, you need your troops to set foot on that place.
This has been a constant in all wars: bombing just prepares the ground for the invading forces, if the ground needs to be prepared.
If there are no surface structures to be destroyed, bombing is even more useless.
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Just as your ship’s precision missiles and bombardments are very accurate, planetary defenses — rail guns rounds and interceptor missiles — are more accurate, faster, and cheaper.
The only other weapons available to your space side forces are KE attacks using asteroids too large for the planetary defenses to destroy or Assault Troops (Mobile Infantry).
One asteroid would obliterate the habitable surface for thousands of years, at least.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Qgcn.jpg)
This makes boots on the ground — Mobile Infantry — the most effective means to prosecute the war because they can hit planet side outside the range of defenses protecting cities, military bases, and manufacturing enclaves from bombardment, and then advance on the ground to their objective to destroy or capture them.
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David Webers Honorverse uses the Eridani Edict for this purpose:
Mankind warring factions once bombed Epsilon Eridani into oblivion, with billions of casualties. Afterwards, all Major factions agreed to NOT do that again and the sole superpower of that time decided to back that treaty up. If you violate the Eridani Edict your faction will get destroyed, your leadership shot. It's a hell of an incentive to not do that.
The flip side is that if you conquer the orbitals, a Planet should surrender to your faction and give up active resistance. Therefore most army action are more like anti insurgency operations.
If your setting does not have such a superpower available your factions could still agree to not bombard each other. Since bombarding a Planet is relativly easy, it is something like MAD: If you bombard my colonies, my fleet will destroy your worlds too. This only works if both sides value life in some form. If your opponent things you are disgusting space vermin, this is not viable.
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Besides the reasons everyone already provided, because of cost.
In ideal scenarios, the energy cost to send a piece of whatever from orbit to land is the same cost to send it from land to orbit. If an atmosphere is involved, then the cost of landing is much reduced due to aerobraking, but it gets harder to aim due to winds.
Also remember Newton's third. Firing an orbital weapon will change your orbit. That means whomever is firing is breaking formation really fast relative to those who are not firing, or firing at different targets.
Don't trust me just because I am saying it. Open up Kerbal Space Program and do some orbital bombardments yourself (make some rockets wich can break up into smaller rockets, then burn retrograde from low Kerbin orbit). Try to aim for the space center or some other feature, see how well it goes.
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Orbital KE bombardment costs more than it's worth. Asteroid bombardment is easier than you think to defend against.
Rods from God - dropping tungsten telephone poles from orbit - is actually a dud. The planet's gravity does not help you. It takes more energy to move them into a low enough orbit that they start falling than they deliver to the target. The explosion is pathetic compared to a nuke, one ton of tungsten delivers KE equivalent to ~11 tons of TNT. The only reason to consider this is speed: from launch to delivery is only a few minutes, it was meant for a Cold War scenario where you want to blow up the Kremlin faster than the enemy can get a missile from Russia to Washington.
Nukes work better than inert rods, but the enemy can just as easily nuke you, and you don't have a bunker to hide in, so the defenders have the advantage there.
Asteroid bombardment means you have to lower the solar orbit of an asteroid until it intersects with the orbit of the target planet. You want a pretty big asteroid, or it will burn up in the air without killing anybody and nobody will be impressed. In 2013 a 13,000 ton asteroid hit the atmosphere over a Russian city and didn't kill anybody. So you start with an extremely heavy asteroid (the dinosaur-killer was ~ a million tons!), and you have to move it, which could take you years if your engines aren't superweapons already.
During that time the enemy will notice, and turn their entire planetary economic output towards nuking your little engine off the side of that big asteroid before you can get the asteroid's perihelion low enough for it to hit the planet.
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## Because you don't want to get mass-drivered *yourself*
The French used to have a red flag they would hoist in battle. It meant "we will take no prisoners today". It was meant to strike fear in the enemy, particularly the nobles, who were generally captured, held courteously and traded back. However it also meant that if the French attack was repulsed, the enemy would slaughter any Frenchman captured. "No prisoners" **swings both ways**.
So. Every spacefaring species has lots of history with war before space travel. They certainly develop nuclear weapons *on their way to* interstellar travel, and have been forced to navigate that balance of terror. So even if they have never formally developed Geneva Conventions, they certainly understand chivalry, taboos and "what we do, gets done to us".
You are in a neighborhood where interstellar foes *don't* habitually mass-driver each others' cities. You know that because wars get talked about. It isn't a written rule, but nobody does it.
You can do it anytime. Anyone can. But you know... *the day you do it, the enemy will feel license to do it to you*.
But not just this enemy this war. You are sticking up a billboard at the edge of your space that invites *any future combatant* to do it to you. "Please, come mass-driver us, *we think that's A-OK in warfare*.”
The problem with this is, ***it is irrevocable***. Unlike the French where they can decide on a battle-by-battle basis whether to hoist the red flag, your choice will be treated by others as a long-term choice. It would take your diplomats *decades* to walk it back and convince the other powers of your renewed commitment to chivalry. The victim party would have to accept your apology, reparations and other concessions. They would have to see a fundamental change in the government, e.g. A flip from dictatorship to democracy.
Given the staggering cost of that, you will keep your field commanders on a tight leash regarding such tactics.
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**Friendlies or neutrals at the enemy colony:**
Maybe the terrans aren’t at war with all their neighbors, and some of those neutrals or friendlies are at the colony.
Maybe the friendly or neutral neighbors would get angry if you killed all their traders, diplomats, observers, tourists, scientists, hostages etc currently at the enemy colony.
Or maybe they have taken human hostages.
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**They don't have bombs.**
Or lasers, or particle beams, or photon torpedos. The space ships of the Terran Navy are troop ships because that is the tech Terra has in the year 2022. And is lucky to have that: they are powered by FTL drives salvaged from captured / wrecked enemy spacecraft and welded onto whatever Terra had left that they could seal against space. The initial assault by the enemy was devastating and the consequent destruction prevented development of new tech. Maybe the humans could push a nuclear warhead or two out of their flying shipping containers, but after the first one went off the response would clear the Terrans from orbit.
The hope of the humans is to show up unexpectedly, get to the surface as fast as possible, get out of their "ships", and show them how humans make war in person.
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Here are a few:
* **Treaty.** Even if we haven't been on friendly terms, we may not have always been at war, so there may be agreements in place.
* **We don't want to open that door.** They haven't started throwing rocks at us yet, we don't want to give them reason to.
* **Bigger, badder interstellar neighbor.** There may be a bigger, badder power in the local neighborhood who doesn't care what we do to each other, as long as we don't cross a certain line, and this crosses it.
* **There are some lines you just don't cross.** Earth is a coalition of governments, and there's just not the political will in place to do this. Besides, this would be a war crime **by our own laws.**
* **Rigid rules of warfare.** It's relatively easy to bomb a world back to the stone-age. In fact, once that particular Pandora's box is open, it wouldn't be long until all the desirable worlds in a particular neighborhood were rendered unusable. The difficulty lies not in defeating an enemy, but in bending him to your will or in having usable real estate, once you're done. I suspect use of nukes on planetary targets would face a similar moratorium.
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What if it's just pointless.
If your enemy can prepare to defend against bombardment then they can potentially defend against it very well. If they've been at war for a while then they'll have an idea of your tactics, strengths and weaknesses.
As an example, the Battle of the Somme started with a 7-day artillery bombardment against the German trenches. 1.5 million shells actually achieved very little - the barbed wire wasn't cut, the German artillery largely survived and they used the wrong type of shell to get through the concrete in the trench bunkers.
Or it could go another way. What if the enemy lives wholly underground? Massive cities powered by highly efficient geothermal energy. Of course, over the centuries they've had to go deeper and deeper into the crust to both expand and extract more energy and most of their cities are now around a mile or two deep. In that case, the most sensible option is to find the entrances and go in with troops.
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Because colonists are expensive and you'd rather not kill them.
Consider the cost of finding willing colonists, getting them into orbit, then FTL to a new place, then dropping them and getting them set up. These people are difficult to replace and you don't want to be responsible for the bill when it comes due.
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They do, but it's not enough.
With all the potential targets on the surface, it is very expensive to bring along enough mass to hit them all, plus enough propellant to accelerate them to impact velocity.
Instead, it makes sense to land perfectly reusable troops, which can potentially handle so many targets for the same mass+propellant. And they can adapt to changing requirements.
Besides, they would be needed anyway even if more bombardment was plausible. No operation is complete without boots on the ground.
The navy does provide limited surgical strike support for the marine force, eliminating a few critical targets that would otherwise become a tough obstacle for the ground forces.
Launching such a strike isn't a simple affair though. There is a limited time window when the navy is in the right vector to launch projectiles at a specific target. Unless the target is a static installation, it could easily avoid the kill zone on the slightest suspicion that a strike was coming. Even a static target can brace for impact and mitigate most of the damage.
The best tactic is to have a very mobile and stealthy scout force approach the unsuspecting target right before the launch window, mark a few critical targets for the navy, and do most of the work after the strike eliminates those but before reinforcements arrive.
Also, don't forget that any orbital maneuver that would align vectors for a strike is a dead giveaway to what your intentions are. It gives the enemy time to prepare, and exposes your strategy. Layers upon layers of ruses and deceptions is the only way to put your navy in a firing position at a still-unsuspecting target. This takes time, and is expensive in terms of delta-v spent on fake maneuvers.
Naturally such tactics are reserved for what command believes to be decisive blows. Regular operations are handled by the resources of the ground force.
On top of that, the navy has a number of better missions for its kinetic kill weapons: Space superiority, strategic orbital asset elimination, launch denial, interdiction. They would be much more helpful handling things that would be very hard (if not impossible) to reach from the ground.
So, unfortunately, Operation Mjölnir is a no-go.
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[Some of this overlaps a bit with what “Grand Phason” has written. I wrote the following before reading that, so I am just going to post it as it is (with this apology).]
For the TDF to not do orbital bombardment, they must be either • unable or • unwilling to do it.
I take it from the question that • they are immediately able to (i.e. they have O.B. weapons), and that • their purpose is simply to destroy the aliens.
Thus, we need either • a non-immediate reason why they are not able to, or • a reason why they are unwilling to.
Of course, whatever the reason is, it can not count against sending in ground forces.
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Not Willing To — my favourite
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• I like the idea that there is some information that they need, that is on the planet. Any vital or very useful or important information would do. Perhaps it looks from orbit as though the aliens may be the long-lost Second Colonisation Wave (somewhat evolved, of course)… or have such as slaves… or might know something about them. Perhaps there is a (plausible) claim that the aliens have kidnapped a loved and important Terran personality, or a religious figure. Perhaps there is a spy with vital information (stored in some physical object), who failed to escape as planned. Perhaps there is some vital military technology, or there is some hope of discovering a piece of medical technology that is useful for some reason. Perhaps there is a discovery (or suggestion) that there is some information about the aliens, that would be important to the war effort (if correct), that requires going down there. Perhaps the aliens are in intensive communication with some unknown party, using an ansible — that is, they can tell this from orbit, but can not tell where (nor what) the other party is from orbit. Perhaps there is a discovered possibility that there is another planet of the aliens somewhere else, and they want to (try to) find out if that is true, and if so where it is. Perhaps there is something that the aliens have been doing, or might be able to do, or said, that they want to know more about.
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Not Able To
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• It is a water (or viscous goop) planet, and the TDF“s O.B. weaponry is unsuitable, because the aliens hide under-water.
• One possibility here is that they initially believe that they can, but find out that they can not. [I do not think I have any good ideas here; maybe someone else can help?] • Maybe the atmosphere is thick, and is corrosive to orbital weapons in some fatal way. • Maybe they are using nuclear weapons but the aliens have some sort of technology that causes them to detonate too early or not at all (or any parallel technological superiority in the arms race)… or they have some amazing and exotic military technology, and it just happens to not work in this alien environment (because of ionisation or no metal core or no atmosphere or no oxygen or who-knows-what)… or maybe it [the nuclear part, or some imaginary/future technology] does not work and they just have no idea why.
• They want to do *both* an orbital assault and then a ground assault… but it turns out that this does not work — perhaps because the aliens inform them that they [the aliens] have planted canisters of gas that is poisonous to human beings… such that blowing stuff up would have the result that their ground troops would die if and when they send them down. (Either they commence the O.B. to check or they are able to see for themselves… or they are not sure but can not take the risk.) Possibly some sort of biological agent would also work here. On second thoughts… if they can do this, then presumably they would release said agent regardless. To make this work, there would have to be some significant cost in releasing this agent, for the aliens, such that they only do this if forced to — perhaps it is also somewhat destructive for them [which they would not tell the Terrans (but maybe the Terrans already know)], or it is incredibly expensive… or perhaps it is just that it only lasts for a little while. [This needs some polishing.]
• Possibly the humans are simply not *certain* that this is *the* alien planet — it might be a decoy, or there might be another one — and they have enough O.B.s for only one full-scale planetary destruction — not to mention the element of surprise, or fighting on two fronts or what-have-you. (Perhaps their instruments tell them that there is — meaning that there might (or might not) be — a sizeable population in the next star system.)
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Other
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• The enemy has some sort of technology that means that they can not see what to bombard, or what the results of bombarding are (along the lines of a hologram, or some sort of jamming, or an engineered atmospheric layer). They can bombard all they want, but they have no idea what the effect is. For the OP’s purposes, this would require that they do a bit of O.B. and then give up.
• It turns out that there is a saboteur on board (or back at base)… and all the nuclear safety codes have been changed, or the uranium is depleted, or the AI that is the sole authority to launch an orbital bombardment has developed a conscience… or all the O.B.s are in one ship and there is a terrible virus on board that ship… or there was an accident that released gallium [(?) - the corrosive stuff] into the tungsten rod storage area… or the targeting computer clock is wrong, and it insists on launching the O.B.s towards where the planet was 49 minutes ago… or the advanced AI in the nukes has developed a conscience, or… .
• It might suit the OP’s story for the TDF to do the whole invasion and then find out that there is no one there. Perhaps they just fled, or perhaps they are all in a massive attack fleet on the way to Earth.
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[Question]
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I should say: this is for a video game, not a short story or novel. Calibrate accordingly. ;)
Imagine that we solved the rocket equation with some kind of impossibly energy-dense fuel. Interplanetary space travel now happens more like something on the scale of cross-country trucking in some very distant, fictional American past. One of these truckers is flying solo on an unremarkable route that normally takes three months (one-way), and then for video-game-combat reasons they turn off their ship's reactor and play dead for *11 days* in a desperate game of stealth Chicken.
Their attacker gives up after an incredibly-patient nine days. Our hero waits two more days just to be sure, and then decides it's safe to light up and move on. But there is not enough juice left in the batteries to restart the reactor! That's it: certain death. They are marooned, and it's only a matter of time. (My kingdom for a solar panel!)
What will kill our unlucky Flash Van Winkle?
I'm going to take some causes-of-death off the table, some for video-game handwavium reasons, and others because I'm looking for failure scenarios I don't know about.
* they won't run out of edible food or potable water (*this* time)
* the ship won't break down
* nothing will randomly collide with it
Also, some precautions have been taken against obvious causes of death:
* there are space heaters with their own batteries, charged to 100% right before hibernation; neither the heaters nor their batteries are magically efficient, but they may be closer to optimal than we have today
* there are plants all over the ship; these ships are designed to maximize plantable surface area, and the plants are varieties cultivated for use as last-ditch life-support; think "best-case" but not magic
* if the atmosphere would give out before the temperature, assume those systems share batteries such that both systems last as long as whichever would last the longest on its own
Finally, there is no rescue for this pilot. I want to know about the bad ends. So:
* they can't generate or scavenge enough energy to restart the reactor
* they don't have any solar panels
* nobody will come looking for them
* nobody will stumble across them in time to save them
* the radio can't be used to call for help
So, what will cause the death our unlucky Rip Van Winkle (and how long until it happens)?
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P.S.: I'm asking so that I can tell the player what killed them if they wind up in this situation, *not* so that I can flesh out the details of some magical way to avoid that death.
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### A Million Ways To Die in the *West* Black
Let's face it, there are way too many ways this can end. I mean, yeah, it all *starts* with stupid, but the endings themselves are just too varied to cover in any detail. (And yes, shutting down your drive without a guarantee that you can start it back up again is a stupid, convoluted way to commit suicide.)
Humans die for a few tens of thousands of reasons, but the following broad categories seem to be fairly likely in this case:
* Asphyxiation - not enough O2 or too much of other things.
* Nutrition - from running out of food to specific deficiency.
* Trauma
* Suicide
Yeah, those are pretty broad and immediate. Let's step back to earlier causes that can lead to one or more of the above.
### Power
Either you're running on stored power (batteries, capacitors, flywheels, whatever) or you have a way to generate power from some long-term source. If it's stored power then you probably don't have much time. Same with limited generated power. Long-term generation from things like RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) last for a long time, but they don't tend to produce a particularly high output - great for powering pacemakers, not so good for spaceships.
You need power to produce the lights that keep your air plants alive and producing oxygen for you to breathe. You need it to run the fans that move air around the spaces on the ship to stop toxic buildup of CO2 and so on. You need it for heat or cooling, depending on the thermal balance in the area of space you're traversing. And there are probably a ton of other things sucking up your power - better to disconnect everything that isn't on the critical list.
When the power finally dries up though? The air stops moving and CO2 builds up in concentrated pockets wherever you are. Stop moving for 10 minutes or so and you'll use up all of the oxygen in your local space and end up sitting in a growing concentration of CO2. If you're lucky you'll pass out from lack of oxygen before the fire in your lungs gets too unbearable.
Asphyxiation is, I'm told, a particularly dreadful way to go.
### Food
Unless you're hauling a cargo of food and dietary supplements, odds are that you're only carrying a couple of months worth of food in the galley. Mostly the extra food is for the sake of variety and emergencies, but eventually you're going to run out. You can ration it, reduce your energy expenditure to extend it somewhat, but at some point you're going to open your last freeze-dried ration pack.
What then? You can eat some of your air plants - spinach is apparently quite good at producing oxygen - but it's far from a completely balanced nutritional intake. And each plant you eat is a little less oxygen generation until it grows back. You can live indefinitely on the right blend of vegetables, but do you really have enough room in your truck to grow a nutrionally complete crop? I very highly doubt it. For one thing the amount of plant growth you can support is limited by your personal CO2 output.
At some point you're going to start developing problems due to a lack of some critical vitamin or mineral in your diet. If you're lucky it'll be vitamin C and your teeth will fall out. If you're not and you run short on niacin (vitamin B3) due to a lack of peanuts or grains in your meagre crops then you can look forward to some quite nasty symptoms before the dementia makes you incapable of looking after yourself. At least you won't be around to experience most of it I guess.
And don't forget that you need plenty of power for those plants to grow. They need light to photosynthesize and heating or cooling to maintain an optimal temperature range.
### Heat
Depending on where you are and how your hull is insulated against the external environment, you're either going to be losing heat or gaining it. You want to be losing heat because there are a few ways to easily generate it. Too much heat buildup on the other hand is a major problem because there aren't too many simple ways to get rid of it. You can shuffle it around a bit, but in the end you'll run out of thermal capacity and start to boil. Or bake.
Too cold isn't an issue so long as you have a good long-term energy supply. Running heating elements on batteries is a very short-term solution, and you need that power to keep your life support systems pushing oxygen around the ship. It's enough that you have to keep the air (and food) plants at a consistent temperature, wasting power on heating the ship as well isn't going to prolong your life much.
Assuming that you have a good supply of canned O2 and scrubbers, you might be able to survive for a while after the power goes off. If you extend it long enough you get to sit in the frozen ship while the heat is leeched from your body, dropping your core temperature closer and closer to the hypothermia zone. Circulation cuts off to your extremities and unimportant things like fingers and toes die and start to rot. Gangrene takes a while to set in, by which point your body is already in a near hibernation state. Your brain shuts down and never starts up again. Eventually everything stops and, as the temperature drops further, the water in your cells turns to ice, expands and tears your cells into pieces. Even if they find your corpsicle in a few thousand years, you're never coming back from that.
In the other direction your body heats up and you sweat out every ounce of moisture you can spare. Dehydration starts to break down your ability to process information, and eventually the various processes in your body that rely on all that extra water hanging around stop working. Organs shut down and so on. A little after you die the proteins in your body are denatured by the heat and you cook all the way through.
Either option sounds fairly excruciating to me. I'm going to go ahead and guess about a 13 on the standard 1-10 scale of nastiness.
### System Failures
Ooh, there are just so many of these it's hard to know where to start. You're driving a glorified truck after all, you're almost certainly not carrying the sort of spare parts needed to fix everything that can go wrong. You have backup systems for most of the really important stuff, maybe even double or triple redundancy for the critical bits, but 90% of the time when something breaks you can't do a damned thing about it. And if what breaks is something critical to life support, temperature regulation or power distribution then... yeah, it's not going to be fun.
This is also where your main options for physical trauma come in. Attempting to disassemble things, diagnose them and make whatever repairs you're able to while in transit is a potentially dangerous task. You just have to slip up once in the right way to lose a limb or end up trapped in a piece of equipment. Heck, just failing to secure a heavy chunk of tech and having it drift into you at an inopportune moment might be sufficient.
Or perhaps you screw something up and let the air out. We've all seen Total Recall, right? You know, the one with Arnie? He survived the low pressure on Mars for long enough to truly, deeply regret being exposed to it before he was saved by Deus Ex Machina. I'm afraid you're not going to be so lucky if you pierce the wrong seal.
---
And that's by no means an exhaustive treatment. I never touched on disease, for one thing. Or poison. Or... and so on.
Ultimately, whatever the case, it's probably going to be nasty. You're going to have to figure out how far your character will take it before they take a walk out an airlock or stick a needle of poison in their veins. It's probably the better option once you've confirmed there's no way out.
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Those emergency rations and plants growing everywhere were designed to buy a few months. As the rations decline and some types of the on board plants die off, dietary imbalances will occur. Scurvy is unpleasant, but there are other things that will kill you faster. To borrow from a very old school video game, the last thing the player will see is a green sign that says:
**You have died of dysentery.**
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## They try to Macgyver their way out, but it's not enough
This plucky protag of yours isn't gonna take dying in space lying down. If the life support batteries are fully charged why not try jump-starting the reactor batteries with them? This can fail in all kinds of ways. Life support is down which could expedite what would have been a slower death. They could also mess up the wiring and blow up the ship. There are many more ways this line of action can fail and you could choose whichever method makes the most thematic sense either for your character or your story.
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# Poverty
The trucker is on a three month flight. The last two years have taught us that humans are just fine (though whiny) in isolation. Radio communications are very effective in space, given that nothing blocks them, and the first thing the trucker would have done upon spotting pirates is call for help. Because the [coast guard](https://safetyandsecuritynet.org/piracy-passage-precautions-central-america/) manual says so.
The trucker drifts for a few months, but is off course, however, the coast guard of the destination is:
1. Aware of the fact a ship destined for their port has gone dark after calling for help
2. Are surely keeping tabs on large fast moving objects within their airspace
In addition to that last point, trade routes would likely be monitored for large objects by radar and passive observation methods. A ship would never go long without being detected, even while going dark, because these systems would be designed to advise traffic of [space trash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris).
The trucker is rescued by the coast guard, is chided for not [cooperating with the pirates](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/bank-robbery) and issued a fine for putting others' lives at risk by operating their vehicle in the dark.
The trucker, being a minimum wage employee of a small company, has to sell their rig in order to pay the fine and becomes stranded on a distant world with no home or job.
They die of dysentery huddled up in a cardboard box under a bridge.
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### Either suicide, or suffocation in the dark
You mention using plants as a last-ditch life support system - but photosynthesis isn't free. A plant is just another form of life support system that requires energy (in the form of light) to turn carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. It probably isn't even the most efficient method of converting CO2 to O2.
You said they won't run out of food. Evidently, this is because they have enough food to last until the batteries expire. And sooner or later, they will. Unless they are near a sun, they will need to burn energy to keep the plants or artificial oxygen systems working.
Cold probably isn't going to be an issue, at least for a while. Contrary to what many believe, keeping spaceships warm isn't hard, because space is pretty much the best insulator there is. Keeping them *cool* is the hard part, since all systems generate waste heat as long as they are running. Even a tiny space heater will be more than enough to keep him warm, especially if he sticks to one room.
The space trucker could prolong survival for a while by routing energy to the places that need it the most. The lights will be the first to go, and the life support will likely be the last. So unless he decides to kill himself in some other way (shutting down the carbon monoxide scrubbers would probably be the optimal method), he will ultimately suffocate in the dark.
(Note: if the ship IS reasonably close to a star - even a little bit inside Earth's orbit - a big part of the life support systems will be dedicated to keeping the inside of the ship cool. In this case, once the systems fail, your trucker will probably be baked to death very quickly.)
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Ummm, **old age?**
After a long life of solitary confinement, singing the same songs umpteen million times, watching the same videos over and over, slowly going mad, delirium sets in. The 'hero' slowly gives up caring for personal needs, gets progressively weaker through neglect, falls asleep and never wakes up, mostly because the mind and soul have given up.
It would be a very bleak lifestyle, something that no human could survive mentally intact and NOT want to end it with death.
**Addendum**
As for the power source that could maintain emergency survival capacity, I would suggest a human-powered generator, much like a stationary bicycle. It could provide day-to-day power and recharge batteries, but certainly it would not provide enough power to restart a reactor core. I mean, what else is there to do but pedal for 12 to 16 hours every day? With high efficiency superconductors and super-magnets, it could easily be speculated that there would be enough power for survival, especially if nutrition came from vats instead of growing plants. Think mushrooms. Wait - a diet of only mushrooms is a **really good reason** to 'pack it in'. That would be a fate worse than death, methinks.
But then again, it IS a 'truck'. Just think - a lifetime supply of pre-packaged never-go-stale Twinkies.
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# Heat.
The only way to be truly stealthy in space is to avoid emitting heat. Everything you do generates waste heat (thanks, Newton), possibly with some technical exceptions around heaters. Space vehicles need to work to shed their waste heat (eg., the [ISS's External Active Thermal Control System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System), making up the wavy white panels that a lot of people think are solar panels).
If the ship can go into "stealth mode" without magic technology, it's able to somehow prevent itself from radiating that waste heat out into the rest of the universe. That heat has to go somewhere.
The ship might have the ability to concentrate excess heat into eject-able containers (hopefully ejecting away from the pirates' thermal cameras), but that's a limited resource. It might just have a large thermal mass, but that's still a limited resource.
While in stealth mode, it's getting warmer and warmer in the ship. In low-power mode, it takes a couple of weeks to reach the point of no return, heat-wise: even if the active cooling systems are activated, they can't handle the built-up heat already in the ship. Depending on how mean you want to be, that could mean that the trucker is roasted, they could die of dehydration when the ship's water recyclers/stock can't keep up with the trucker's increased needs, or some component in the ship could fail to heat stress causing the ship to explode and giving the poor trucker a quick death.
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# Stone Cold Psychology
They are already living in the far future. They have a sixth sense impression that GOD has it in for them, and nothing they do can possibly prevent death. Should they wait around for days, months, years, trapped in a tin can with nothing to do, nothing that can matter, waiting for a random and painful death? Or should they knock themselves out and freeze to cryogenic temperatures, in the hope that *one day* it will finally be possible to reassemble shattered cells, tissues, and organs into the semblance of a live human being again, and *one day* they may be found once the lonely trade route has turned into a paved and settled highway between the stars?
They may think about it a *while*. But this only can end one way.
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Note that such a response generally should not be categorized as a *suicide*. I'm reminded of misguided news reports after 9/11/1 that described the act of jumping from the buildings that way, even though the alternative was certain immolation. The day before, clearly, it would have been suicide, but *that* day, it was a brave decision by those seeking the last best chance at life. Even the reporters believed a yarn about someone falling to the ground unharmed, and they weren't standing in a fire.
The philosophy on board this ship would be more complex than that, because the crew would need to decide against what might be a good chance of living a fairly long but entirely pointless life, followed by an unplanned death with very little chance of a medical resurrection. A closer comparison might be made to an enlisting soldier, whose actions might be viewed as heroism or suicide depending on the loyalties of the observer. Given a plan to turn the ship into a stable tomb, the feelings of those who think they can leave behind a Great Novel before going gentle into the night might be in hard conflict with those who feel cut off from whatever gives them purpose, whether it be family or research publications. Quite a philosophical journey might be written for that single-set stage.
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My first thought is that if they don't freeze then the waste gases that plants *don't* take up are going to be the first thing that might kill them. The slow build up of, in no particular order, carbon monoxide, nitrogenous, and sulfurous oxides would be the killer. I wouldn't expect them get the chance to die a lingering death though, if they have enough heating to not freeze to death then they won't have effective stealth, the raider is going to spot their hull at over 200K above ambient and come after them.
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While stealthing only needed machinery was active - all others off - this included the Slurp-O-Tron, small robots cleaning dust and condensation puddles away.
To lengthen available survivability time the sole surviver does not activate them again.
Dripping condensate kills him: he slips in a puddle and breaks his neck.
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**Maybe they don't need to die this time.**
I am sure they die in many ways in this game. But for this scenario, maybe they don't need to. They persist in the ship. They endure. They are rescued 8 years later by an alien merchant, or space pirate, or an asteroid cult, or a charitable FLANG HOUND (mix it up for each instance). They swear never to go to space again and they spend the rest of their days working on a tunicate ranch in Bali. Their days turn out to be many. Life is good!
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## The Hero uses the remaining battery to broadcast their last words
If the hero knows they'll die alone where no one will find them they'll probably want to find some form of solace and wouldn't mind giving up the last few days or weeks of their life to do so. Perhaps the radio isn't powerful enough as is to send a message in deep space, but the hero could boost the signal with more power... at the expense of life support. The hero's final message could be a great story telling device. It could be a warning, a will, a one liner, a meta joke of some kind whatever best suits the tone of your game and character.
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## They don't actually die
If the settings medical technology is advanced enough, they might try to jury rigg a cryogenics unit. Given that they are adrift in space without a radio signal, they are probably lost for centuries. If the medical technology for cryogenics exists, this is the reasonable thing to do. If it doesn't... well you got centuries of medical advancement on your side. You don't actually got forever, as after about 2000 years the radioactive decay of your own bodies potassium will have damaged you to the point where you would die instantly.
So, speak a prayer to the maschine-god, step into the freezer and wake up in the future. (Or don't, the beauty of the arrangement is that failure has no concrete consequences.)
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## Weight Loss (sort of)
A spaceship with a sublight (slower than the speed of light) engine is going to travel by accelerating for the first half of the journey, and then decelerating during the second half. As such the ship isn't going to bother creating its own gravity (if such a thing is even possible) - the acceleration will function as gravity for it.
This means that when the engines are of, there's no gravity. Now, the ship will be designed to handle zero gravity for short periods of time (a couple of weeks at least). But long term zero-g is surprisingly bad for the human body, and a ship designed primarily for use in gravity will have some functions that weren't properly designed for extended zero-g either. Either the sewage will get blocked up, or the air won't filter properly, or a joint normally held in place by friction will float into an unexpected position, and eventually something critical will break.
Or maybe the traveler tries to spin the ship for gravity, and something breaks under the stress of trying to do a maneuver it was absolutely not designed for.
If you're talking about interplanetary travel, constant 1g acceleration will get you anywhere you want much faster than you want for your plot to work ([three weeks gets you to the Kuiper Belt](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/5016)) so presumably your ships are using less than 1g acceleration. Still, the difference between low gravity and microgravity is enough to cause problems.
If you're talking about interstellar travel then you need much higher g forces, so we'll assume they invented an inertial dampener or something.
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# No one will ever know
They might as well have disappeared into the vastness of space. Space is a desert of haystacks, so once a needle is lost it'll likely never be found.
All you have to do is tell the player they're trapped on a ship that is adrift and they simply vanish, never to be seen or heard from again. Their ship is entered into the registry of missing ships. But the derelict is never found. Eventually they are declared dead and the ESS *Yourname Heer* becomes a somewhat famous ghost ship.
Sure, *something* eventually kills them. It always does, in the end. But you've set this up so in-universe no one will ever know, so lean into the mystery.
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## Create a list of ways the player spends their life
If you hand-wave food and water, and you're willing to hand-wave medical things and heat/power, the player will survive for several decades, then die and leave something behind that probably no-one will recover. Say what they do in that time. Maybe they write a great Martian novel, or several synthesiser songs that would have made the Top 40 if they ever got played. Maybe they become a world-champion level Solitaire player. Maybe they practice meditation, until the years fly by like seconds. Maybe they pump iron until they break an arm and lose it all. Maybe they build a telescope using ice and patience, and watch the stars. Maybe they go mad and start carving faces into the ship bulkheads and equipment.
By making a random list, but one that the player can be reasonably confident they've seen all the options for, you can add some kick to the "lost in space" screen, so the player never quite knows what's going to happen when they die in space. This will make the player feel an anticipated loss harder than a normal death.
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In a mind burp, I have forgotten about the thermal radiation in space, so I had to take down my previous answer.
But the issue of thermodynamics still stands. So, the issue is this - he will die, when his life-support system runs out of energy.
You specify that he can't use the batteries of the life support system to restart the engine, so they should be quite small. And it doesn't matter, whether the life support is organic, like plants, or a machine of any sort, it still would need an energy input to run (grow lamps and irrigation, in case of plants, for example).
So, however effective his life support system is, it wasn't expected to work without engine input for long either. If you do not want food or water to run out first, then the oxygen processor or thermal regulation fail.
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As systems shut down, slowly, one after another, our hero uses what energy he has left to drift towards an empty but Earth-class planet.
The ship gets grabbed by gravity. He has the choice: burn up and die quickly, or try for a bumpy landing. He survives the landing, mortally injured, and crawls out of the wreckage with his plants to kick-start evolution with his last gasp...
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We all love laser guns (which are usually plasma weaponry) but why guns? It's not like we need the long barrel for making it more accurate or the stock to control recoil. So why guns and why not something else?
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# User Expectation and Skeumorphic Design
The floppy disk üíæ is used (less so than five years ago, but used) as a save icon, even though outside of old industrial machines and nuclear missile silos, no one uses floppy disks. Your phone makes a shutter sound when you take a picture, despite not having a shutter. Electric cars are designed to look like gasoline vehicles in many ways that are utterly unnecessary, because it‚Äôs what people *expect*, and when something looks the way people expect, it makes them happy and comfortable and more likely to award your Laser Gun Company with the government contract for one million Pew Pew Guns. So your industrial designers make it look like a nice old fashioned projectile-throwing rifle, even if it doesn‚Äôt strictly need to.
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It's an interesting question because our current laser guns look more like giant flat panels that fire invisible beams of heat at airplanes and torpedoes.
But those are aimed by computers. People need to use sights to aim. A longer barrel gives a more accurate sight and better control of the gun. It also allows the weapon to function like a bat in close fighting and could hold other attachments like grenade launchers or backup conventional rifles for when laser just won't work (like the Chinese mirror armor they developed in response to USA laser weapons).
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Take a look at the wikipedia article on [lasers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser).
>
> A laser consists of a gain medium, a mechanism to energize it, and something to provide optical feedback.[8] The gain medium is a material with properties that allow it to amplify light by way of stimulated emission. Light of a specific wavelength that passes through the gain medium is amplified (increases in power).
>
>
>
The accompanying diagram shows that the gain medium is a long tube. The longer the gain medium is, the more the laser is amplified.
Furthermore, one can have a laser version of [choke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choke_(firearms)) (change the spread of the beam) by having a series of adjustable lenses, and a long barrel facilitates that.
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Cooling system
Longer, mean more cooling, mean more heat can be dissipated, mean more powerful laser / you can use it for a longer period of time
That might be unrealistic but in a sci-fi world, why not (imagine a new metal/cooling technology to miniaturize everything)
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To aim a weapon accurately, a long barrel is helpful. You also want to have some heft to dampen jitter (Photographers know that a light camera is harder to hold steady).
As well, you need some place to put all of the tech, even if you don't need a long lasing cavity you'll find some use for the volume. A short but thick device would be much less practical, for aiming as well as for carrying.
Of course the validity of all of these reasons depends entirely on the author's whim in a scifi setting. You coud have a short, giro stabilized hand gun with computer assisted aiming and nano components if you so please, but who wants to ruin a good trope?
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Some considerations from Atomic Rockets (They have a gorgeous article about side-arms on hard Sci-Fi):
A portable laser weapon can't realisticly exist, since we have a major problem on [portability of batteries](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php#id--Lasers--Power_Supply) and to save energy they would need focusing lens what can drive their form to be like a old [Super 8 camoder](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php#id--Lasers--Laser_Muzzle) due lens size.
Aiming can be done by a [periscope](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php#id--Lasers--Targeting), as in Star Trek, as energy weapons don't have trajectory deformations, like projectiles, reducing the need for a barrel.
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I guess it is just for readers/viewers to be able to recognize in a fraction of a second that the character is holding a weapon that can hit at a distance.
To justify this would be so that military personnel doesn't need to adapt to a new way of fighting and can be even more efficient than before without the required formation time.
Then you still need batteries, plasma ammunition, electronics to handle the energy release, attachments and so on that make is as big as a classic gun.
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Your "long barrel" comment implies a rifle configuration as opposed to a pistol configuration.
For a given level of technology a rifle has more space for "stuff" than a pistol.
## What sort of stuff?
* Power/energy: it can fire more times before it runs out of juice. It can also pack a greater punch for armour piercing.
* Targeting: The rifle form factor allows invisible light sensors to read the eyes of the shooter and automatically place the laser on target. It also allows dynamic aiming adjustment to keep the shot on target long enough to be effective. I always thought Predator shoulder mounts have no way of targeting unless linked to a visor.
* Crowd suppression: either multi-shot (machine gun-like but each shot targeted) or wide beam (close up shotgun-like scattershot).
* Robust/Hardened design: smaller form factors are more prone to failure of delicate parts. A laser that can't shoot is just a stick.
* Heuristics/Learning curve. It's pretty obvious which end to point towards enemy and a trigger to activate. If it looked like a Dyson Airblade (or a makeup mirror, or a bow & arrow) it's not so obvious.
## Alternate form factors
I believe we are in the last generation of personal war-fighting. Drones and automatons are the future.
So an adventuring rascal of the future is more likely to have a weapon drone in close proximity or close response time.
* Yondu Udonta in Guardians of the Galaxy has his Yaka Arrow.
* Han Solo should have wasted Greedo (first!) with a small remote sitting on the booth. Of course that would change the cowboy elements of the space opera.
Close protection drones would probably be big enough to shield behind while they lay fire upon aggressors. So I'm guessing the size of a riot shield.
If personal anti-gravity doesn't exist in your world then the drone has wheels and/or legs.
Another approach: the Close Protection Drone is actually made up of nano-robots hiding as clothing and cover exposed body parts quickly. Return fire is handled by specialised nano-bots that are part of the outfit and therefore have no specific form. Laser fire shoots out of the body.
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1. The laser source is a long tube. The beam bounces back and forth in it and is amplified by the excited medium inside. The thinner and longer the tube is, the better collimated the beam is. That means it does not spread as much and therefore remains effective at longer distance.
2. The long barrel also makes aiming more accurate.
3. The stock is not needed to absorb recoil, but the additional fixed point it provides improves how steady you can hold it to get good aim.
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A real futuristic personal laser weapon would probably sit on someones shoulder and the aim point would track whatever the user was looking at. It would not look like a gun at all.
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It's not clear what your question is when asking about an imaginary weapon that does not yet exist, so any answer would depend on which particular weapon you're referring to.
But not all laser type weapons are shaped like a gun, some are shaped more like a TV remote control than a gun. (more photos [here](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/25318/19183) )
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qksva.jpg)
Though even the federation uses a [more traditional long barreled rifle-like shape](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Type_3_phaser?file=Phaser_rifle.jpg) for larger guns, and since it's made up technology there can be lots of reasons including cooling, a longer laser/phaser chamber for more power, etc
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In addition to the excellent reason given by Daniel B, there are other considerations with the look, expectations and usability issues. Guns, like knifes or spears, have two ends, a good one and a bad one. If your laser gun looks like the Star Trek TNG class 1 phaser:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0VZbX.jpg)
then you not only risk holding it the wrong way (darn it, which way to enemy?), but also it isn't clear to enemies what you are holding. What's that, a garage opener? A medical scanner?
For a gun, as famously pointed out by Douglas Adams, it is important to make sure that you *know* when you are at the wrong end of it. With a traditional gun design, there is no doubt. Bullets come out... here.
Makes me think of a fun detail I saw in "Edge of Tomorrow". A thing that looked like what I believe is called a "claymore" mine with "This side to enemy" written on one of its otherwise identically looking sides. I don't know whether these have that text written on them in reality, but I wouldn't be surprised! The design sucks ass.
Now that we come to design, why does a pistol look like a pistol, and why do little boys who play cowboy point out their index finger? Well, guess why. Because that's exactly what the design of a pistol imitates, and it is exactly what we are innately able to do without training. You can just point your finger at something, and your finger will point to it 99% good. There's no doubt about what pointing the barrel towards something in the same manner will do either.
There would be much "better" designs for pistols that transmit recoil more favorably. But they *don't* let you point your imaginary index finger intuitively.
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[Question]
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I recently watched *The Purge 2*, which inspired me to write this question. If every year, on a non holiday (e.g. not Christmas), the government made any crime excluding assaulting government officials and using explosives legal from 7 pm to 7 am, what would the effects on US economy leading up to, including, and directly after this period of time be?
I imagine people would be frantic to get to their homes and help their families (unless their goal was to kill them) and weapons purchases would rise before the purge.
Edit:
Law enforcement are not available and hospitals are closed for the duration of the event, however, military are activated to protect government officials and clean up the following morning. I should also probably say that important structures to out national infrastructure are protected by military. So no hitting a nuclear reactor or blowing up a sky scraper.
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**The economic effect would be enormous**. Movies like the Purge focus on physical crime like murder, larceny, robbery, rape, etc. Arson is a bit different though since people with agendas against specific businesses could destroy millions or tens of millions of dollars in assets and inventory in a single night.
With the exception of arson, blue-collar crimes in and of themselves don't have a huge effect on the economy when compared to white-collar crime like embezzlement, insider trading, bond fraud, insurance fraud, or fraud in general.
Oligarchs could just not pay their employees during the Purge period and save millions or tens of millions of dollars in wages. Likewise, employees could loot their places of work then sell the goods on the black market.
Even if business weren't looted or destroyed, the costs of increased security would weight heavily on business, affecting their profitability for that quarter.
Having a Purge period would definitely instigate significant instability in the economy.
Take this scenario:
>
> A disgruntled high-frequency trading developer decides that he isn't getting paid enough for the 80-hour workweeks that management has been pushing on him recently. So, he installs a small, innocuous-looking trigger set to sell all his company's stock and bond assets then transfer the funds to a multitude of off-shore accounts that will make tracing incredibly difficult. Better still, transfer some of the funds to his boss' off-shore accounts to implicate them too. While this developer can't be prosecuted for his crime, the damage he inflicted on his company and all his company's customers is enormous.
>
>
>
**By the Tenth Purge Day**
After ten years of the Purge, individuals, groups, and companies have adapted to 12 hours of mayhem. Security best practices for financial information and transactions have been implemented. Banks put all transfers on hold till the morning (as much as law permits). NYSE and Nasdaq suspend all off-hours trading.
The security industry has seen a huge boom over the last ten years and charges exorbitant rates for their services on Purge night (in much the same way that pyrotechnics companies can charge large amounts for their services on the 4th of July).
Known violent psychopaths, serial rapists, and other violent criminals are put into protective custody for the duration of the Purge. This way, the criminals can't perform more crimes and the families/friends of their previous victims can't take revenge.
The general consensus is that the Purge is a bad idea. The costs and damage involved don't justify the 12 hours of freedom that a few psychopaths and criminals enjoy.
**Psychology**
The vast majority of people have intact senses of empathy. Even if it were legal for them to murder someone else, they wouldn't because of the empathy they feel for them.
**For Poor People, Every Day is Purge Day**
In the poorest of places, where the police don't ever go, there isn't any distinction between Purge days and non-Purge days. Criminals may act with impunity and there isn't much anyone can do about it.
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Do you think everyone just has some deep-down rage that they would love to vent once a year by going on a murderous rampage? I imagine one in a thousand people would take the opportunity to go around killing people. I think that all the rational people, including law enforcement would be happy to man the streets voluntarily to protect against these people. I think it would just be like martial law for one night. Even if it wasn't the government or the military manning the streets, companies would just employ security firms to do it so as to protect their businesses. There would probably be an increase in murders but they would be targetted. Also, considering everyone would be paranoid that night they would probably lock themselves away somewhere safe from their psychopathic spouses and greedy grandchildren. Again, private security firms would outweigh those kind of threats.
**The Real Threat**
If literally every crime was unpunishable I think you would see a lot of cyber attacks that had been in waiting. A lot of scams and financial crime happening. Are all laws that apply to banks ignored? Without any restrictions, markets would probably collapse as all the big businesses try to break deals and screw each other over. There would be huge assaults on human rights as all sorts of illegal agreements would be made during the purge.
For these reasons I see the purge as pointless, illogical and never likely to happen.
P.s. check out the [latest episode of Rick and Morty](http://www.adultswim.com/videos/rick-and-morty/look-whos-purging-now-pt-1/) that came out yesterday, it's coincidently about the purge and is very entertaining.
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**Very significant, but not in the way you're thinking.**
The Purge would rapidly turn into the "Not really a purge." People who are anti-anarchy would band together into self-enforcing communities. Just because the government isn't enforcing laws doesn't mean that you can't do it yourself during that period.
Anarchists trying to take advantage of the Purge would be in a minority, and as a much higher risk population would die out quickly. There might be an elite criminal core that survives multiple Purges, but random criminals just going around trying to loot and shoot? Likely dead in 2-3 at most.
An entire industry would grow up around the Purge, but it would be around the protection aspect. You'd see corporations that offered "safe" towns and enforcement, as well as self-policing militia types (think credit unions, but with guns and explosives). Even if you don't live in a safe town, you'd probably pay each year to go hide in corporately protected bunkers for those 12 hours, along with your valuables.
Regular corporations would shell up and hide. They'd also hire (or support and train directly) groups of mercenaries to attack other corporations during the Purge period. This would have a relatively minor impact on businesses with defendable assets, but something like Starbucks might be in trouble because they have too many locations and it's too easy to take out their assets. You'd also see a lot of corporate espionage. Extremely important assets would be outsourced and stored out of country - I imagine Canada and Mexico would see a huge boon from the Purge.
You'd see a "Purge Insurance" business grow up. The rates would be obnoxiously high, but as long as they lasted through multiple Purges and paid out on time, they'd start getting business and could practically print money.
The government will not be significantly impacted since they have the military to defend their important stuff and people. There's no way an assassin is going to get the president or supreme court justices, for example.
Negative economic impacts will be minimal. No one is going to be actively doing business or working on Purge day. There won't be trading going on, or hours for employees to be paid. Companies that attempted to not pay people would rapidly find their turnover increasing. Employees that stole would get blacklisted.
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You have to consider the reasons that people don't commit crimes.
For example, people (on the whole) don't shoplift because if they get caught they'll be arrested. That's all very well, but would they be *more* likely to shoplift if the consequences of getting caught was that the store's security guard would take you out back and batter you with a pipe? So would there be a rash of shoplifting, if the stores remained open but well-staffed? Quite possibly not.
On the other hand, the police (on the whole) don't conduct illegal searches because the case will be thrown out and they might be disciplined. If they had 12 hours with no law then you can bet they'd want to spend the time busting down the doors of drug dealers and mob lawyers, taking everything they can get their hands on that could possibly be evidence, questioning the bad guys and their immediate family members rather more aggressively than is usually allowed, perhaps destroying exculpatory evidence in existing cases. Some lawyers might betray certain clients, where their professional responsibilities to them have been onerous (but then, if the law doesn't apply does that necessarily mean you won't later be disciplined by a quasi-authority like a bar association?). Perhaps bailiffs would be collecting debts in ways the law wouldn't permit (although that's a tricky one: if you're going to do that why not forget about debt collection and just take stuff?). Landlords would evict undesirable tenants by force, that kind of thing. The press would break every court injunction and (assuming civil as well as criminal law is suspended) take libel risks they normally can't. Chemical plants would dump a year's worth of toxic waste in the river, assuming they can store that much. Want to pay someone a bribe? Do it tonight. The people most likely to be out smashing windows are glaziers.
In some cases your condition is ambiguous. If I fire someone on this night because of their membership of a protected class, then the following morning are they actually fired, or can they still bring action against me on the basis that their being fired is a *continuing act* and not a single action restricted to the 12-hour period? Similarly, can I just declare this night that a contract I've signed is no longer valid and be done with it, or will it be right back in force the next morning? The economic consequences of it being in general legally impossible to commit yourself to a contract that lasts beyond the next special night would be really profound (no long-term loans, for a start), far more than those of a few murders and broken windows, but I'm not sure whether you expect that to be the case.
Can my bank just keep all my money by zeroing my account that night? If so then the economic consequence is that banks are no longer considered safe places to keep money: the resulting cash/barter economy will last all year round since you can't in practice take all your money out the day before and put it back the day after. Or does the bank have a contract with me that will be enforced any other time of year to ensure they can't do that regardless of what silly games they play with numbers in their computer on the night itself? The nature of the suspension of normal law matters.
Murder is a crime that, for those few who want to commit it, the law is a major restraint. It's easy to kill someone and difficult to get away with it, so if you don't *have* to get away with it then those with murderous grudges will like their chances far more on this day than any other. For example you might see a lot of people who have been acquitted of crimes or charges dropped in the past year, targeted by their victims (or, even if they genuinely were innocent, by vigilantes). On the other hand, the kind of person who might shoot up a school (a) isn't that fussed about being arrested and (b) will do it when the school is open, not at night, so won't be affected.
You also have a social signal that "the rules" aren't in force, which sometimes happens in the real world when the police lose control of a situation. As such, rioting, looting and general destruction might increase. But in a "normal" riot, those who wish to defend their property still feel restrained by the law even when the rioters don't. In this situation, you might not just smash the window of a McDonald's restaurant to stick one in the eye of global capitalism (or whatever reason) if you know there's a guy in the restaurant who's been hired to shoot you if you do.
Personally I'm not sure much would happen outside of certain socially-agreed "hotspots" where trouble would concentrate. After all, if someone wanted to throw a brick through my window tonight and run away, then there's very little chance they'd be caught. So why would they be any more likely to do it on the special day? The people who want a rumble would all congregate in the town centre, or in a park somewhere. My windows would be pretty safe.
As such, I don't think the economic consequences would be catastrophic, except from organisations capable of committing truly massive crimes (like the toxic waste I mentioned above). Note also that even if there's no legal repercussions, there would be social ones, and so many people would still feel constrained by an *approximation* of the law. The news the next day would be all-over pictures of people up to no good: if they smash up a shop they'll be barred from shops in retaliation, maybe fired from their jobs, and since the matter isn't sub judice there's nothing to restrain the press from reporting their names. So you might even find that the streets are almost empty that night, and that simply being out marks you as a horrible person to be shunned. There's no better time to murder your spouse, so people who don't trust those they live with are going to have a nervous time of it, but that's not an *economic* consequence.
Final thought: I would *really*, *really* not want to be on the roads anyway. Someone who wouldn't even dream of punching you in the face would run a red light through a pedestrian crossing given half a chance.
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The US of A would *turn from a country of immigrants to a country of emigrants*. An exodus of gigantic proportions would ensue, basically bringing economy to a halt.
If Joe Average citizens need to fear that anything can happen to them, they will move to a place with **sane** laws. Hello Canada :-)
People fled countries in masses for much less. Think of the brain drain from the former German Democratic Republic to then West Germany. It hit their economy so hard, they came up with an insane wall to keep their population from draining. Consider that GDR law was much less life threatening than the *Purge* and you have your answer derived from a historic event that actually happened!
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Do you think the relatives of people murdered during the purge would be satisfied that it was legal? Do you think vigilante revenge for purge activities would be confined to the next purge? I don't think so.
The purge also destroys conventional politics. Suddenly every pressure group could become a terrorist group. You might be able to protect government officials, but what about other controversial public figures? Activists and union leaders? Opposition politicians?
The US already has a problem with mass shootings, and you're proposing to legalize them? Admittedly everyone will be hunkered down rather than concentrated in public places, apart from the groups of neighbourhood defence organisations manning the improvised barricades at the entrances to suburbs.
Let's not forget the race relations. You've re-legalized lynching. This will spark a set of riots comparable to the LA riots and the Ferguson riots and the Birmingham riots, in many major cities. People who feel threatened will start shooting at the rioters. The rioters will start shooting back, or at least burning down any building from which they suspect gunfire. You've also legalised the burning of churches, mosques, synagogues, etc.; a good way to start a civil war.
At the end of the purge, you're proposing to send in the army to restore civil order. Do you think you can successfully restore order without any more deaths? Or indeed at all?
Industrial crime will also give you lingering problems. Suddenly there's no need to dispose of toxic waste properly, just wait until purge day and dump it in the river. You'll also see armed hostile takeovers: it's legal to storm the opposing company HQ and force them to sign their property over at gunpoint.
Every purge day would be another spin at Russian Roulette of maybe turning the country into Syria.
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I suspect that only one thing will happen. Government will be changed before the first purge.
In our world we get riot at the moment when government will issue such a law. No reasonable man will support such government.
If we really want to discuss such law, we need to first describe the world in which such a situation is even possible. Clearly such a world will differ from our in its economics, politics, etc.
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Most crime happens for the purpose of enrichment. Acquiring wealth by illegal means. The most wealth is accumulated by businesses, so they would be the most popular targets of crime.
Things like shoplifting, theft, armed robbery, fraud, embezzlement. Now imagine yourself as a business owner or executive director of a bank. You'd be very motivated to do two things:
1. not have any physical assets in the country during this day
2. not have any agreements which could be broken on that day
The financial implications of both are quite large: moving all assets out of the country would take literally the whole year to prepare (if not more), cost half as much as building your business from ground up, and having to make contracts for 364 days every year would cost a fortune in administrative expenses.
Of course, you can just protect your assets at all cost, with lethal force. That would require one-day contract with a militarized organization. This sort of organization would be more likely serving the highest bidders, which is prohibitive for small business.
So… In this scenario, small business would not have much chance to survive.
And banks, banks would not want to have vaults, ATMs, data, or other caches anywhere on your soil. Means lack of access to safe financial procedures.
So in all likelihood, there would be mass evacuation of any personnel who have access to sensitive information (don't want them kidnapped and interrogated), rapid decline in small business, large increase in prices of goods, increase in private armies for hire.
Rape is a popular thing as well, so expect increase in abortions, single mothers, suicides and orphanage children.
All this looks like very fertile soil for extreme income stratification. Such situations would normally lead to political instability and a coup d'état.
Besides that, there would be drastic increase in injury and death at workplace, political/racist/chauvinist/etc. layoffs. And don't forget things like that Ford Pinto exploding car thing, corporate negligence would be on the rise, with companies releasing dangerous products (and not necessarily on purpose) to cut costs. Although the products might be sold any day of the year, they would be approved for production and distribution during that day, without the need to go through all the regulations and massive paperwork.
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The damage done during the previous Purge would not be completely cleaned up by the time it rolled around again.
Damage to buildings and other infrastructure will likely require extensive repairs and possibly demolition.
The largest economic effect would be the boost in tourism dollars to any other country on the planet and everyone able to do so would be out of the country on that night.
There would also be well armed, highly trained, private security groups who would contract for protection over that night. Just because it would be legal for them to kill their employer would not offset the (lack of) future employment that betrayal would cost.
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One of the earliest problems would actually happen *before* the purge started: the complete collapse of the U.S. (and probably the world as a result of globalization) economy. No one would want to have their wealth invested *during* the purge, so there would likely (almost certainly) be a mad rush of people selling all of their securities and withdrawing everything they had held in a bank account (unless the bank were **extremely** well defended.) The above actions would lead to a complete collapse of the securities markets and of the banking system. Most of these effects would start almost immediately after the announcement was made that the purge would happen (and maybe before for anyone with inside information.)
Long story short, this would be the financial equivalent of a nuclear holocaust, long before the purge itself actually happened.
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One big problem: It would be legal for the bank to steal my money, right? So any bank could transfer all the deposits on the day into their own accounts... Since they can do that, I would get all my money out before the day. As would everybody else. Which could then cause a bank run of unprecedented magnitude.
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Very simply sales of guns and ammunition would go through the roof throughout the year in preparation. That would be the economical impact.
Living in a small village, I'd assume that there would be a very well organized shooting training throughout the year, two hours before the "event" warning signs would be erected on both ends of the village, and for twelve hours anyone trying to enter the village would be shot on sight.
Should any villager have the clever idea to commit a crime against another resident, they'd die 364 days later.
On the other hand, I'd say that any member of a government allowing such a thing to happen would have lost the right to live. After the first few die, the rest would follow quickly.
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I'm the president of Mega-Investment Mutual Funds (MIMF). We hold 10% of the nation's retirement funds.
Oddly enough all of the assets under our investment control were used to buy stock in the new company formed by myself and the other officers of MIMF. Unfortunately the company paid out large bonuses to its management team and then went bankrupt. (things like this [do happen](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-federal-bailout-that-saved-mitt-romney-20120829) in real life) Was it illegal for us to use those assets like that? Not during "amnesty". We're very, very rich now. Those people who didn't have the sense to close their retirement accounts with us before "amnesty" are upset, but I now have more assets than most nations. So I don't really have to worry about them. I live somewhere else now, and I've got the equivalent of a national military just to protect me.
Next year, everyone will be sure to take out all of their money from all banks and investment firms to prevent this from happening again. So the markets will crash every year right before the amnesty. And of course since everyone knows that shares will become worthless once a year, no one will invest in companies for periods longer than that. The entire economy turns to cash for a day. The financial system we have would need to be completely restructured. The concept of owning shares in a company is gone now, since those shares will be lost in the next amnesty. It's all bonds now that pay out the day before "amnesty".
Also - during "amnesty" the small-time thieves will be pretty busy since they know that everyone has to have all their assets in cash/gold/physical objects for the day.
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If not **ALL** crime was legalized but only **SOME** crime was legalized during the period then major economic disasters could be avoided.
Considering that the movie which inspired the discussion was mostly about violent crime and blue collar crime the laws cold be written to legalize or depenalize blue collar crime but not white collar crime during the period in question.
What would be the purpose of such a law? Whatever silly reasons were given in the movie, of course, and other reasons which we might think off.
For example, it might be an experiment. Such a law might be enacted to test how much law enforcement was needed to prevent crime. It would indicate how many people obey the law because they believe in it and how many obey the law because they fear the penalties for breaking it.
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in the short term, there would be very little impact. in the long term, people would realize they are safer under private protection during purge hours, than simply walking down the street the rest of the year. this realization would lead to an increase in year-round private security and a decrease in government support. eventually this would obviate the need for the government, and therefore eliminate taxation. without the tremendous burden of taxes, everyone would be roughly twice as wealthy and the economy would grow at roughly twice its current rate.
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## There's no such thing as a one-day purge
The movies are silly and avoid basic deduction, but think about it. If your neighbor had a right to kill you on January 1, he and 20 other guys from his gang are going to be lounging around on your lawn drinking beer and shooting knickknacks they looted out of your apartment with big guns in August. *"It's OK with you we hang out here, right? We'd love to be friends with you on New Year!"*
I mean basically, it is a classic gang-infested neighborhood, only instead of rare random deaths you have a particular day when it's going to happen. Day in and day out, the gangs will be in absolute control ... and when they fight their wars, they will not be playing around.
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I think many people would initially misunderstand the consequences and do a lot of crazy stuff, true. Like many of the answers attest.
A rational person would eventually understand that there is a day after the purge. Even if rule of law and legal consequences are suspended, other consequences are not.
Lets lake white colar crime like embezzlement. Sure you could do this, but you would lose your clients. Unless your in a position to get enough money, and keep said money over next purges your shafted. You would get fired and have a hard time getting new clients.
The rich on the other hand would have a good time as they could organize all of their shady business to coincide with the purge. All tax evasion to happen on this day for example. Dump your trash etc.
In the long run this would be just a normal day where people would get some extra protection around. Sure some more crimes, and certainly deaths.
But the economic impact of rich people being able to maneuver around restrictions would be enormous loss to the government.
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Long story short, my world is set on a habitable moon of a gas giant, and as a result has some very intense tides (about 5x those of Earth, averaging a few dozen foot difference between high and low tide.) As a result, coastal areas tend to flood quite easily a few times a day, and it would be a lot more work to set up a coastal city/harbor than in our world. I was wondering how you all would go about setting up docks or a harbor in a world like this?
I think there'd probably be a few ways to go about it, from putting the city itself on an elevated area and having docks in a lower section, to maybe putting the main body of the city further inland and just setting the docks where high tide would meet them? One of my main worries is that if you put the docks in a place where high tide comes right up to them, during low tide they would be essentially unusable. But obviously, if you put the docks any lower than that, they'd flood at high tide—making that not an option. Am I correct to assume that it's impossible to have docks that work 100% of the time? It seems like ships are just going to be stuck in the harbor during low tide (since low tide is presumably low enough that the water is too shallow for big ships to sail.)
Any ideas on solutions, workarounds, etc. to any of these issues?
[Answer]
**LOCKS**
The answer is one that is used extensively today in canals and rivers: Locks.
Locks are basically double water-tight gates. If you want to go from high water to low, you sail in, the gates are closed behind you, and water is led or pumped out until it is level with the lower water within/outside the harbor. Vice versa for going from low water to high.
This works best if the harbor is situated at the end of a river or large stream. That way, you can maintain the water level in the harbor at high tide levels and use the locks to lower ships going out and raise ships going in.
A lock is used in [Chicago Harbor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Harbor_Lock) (see picture below) and can accomodate up to 100 vessels at once, handling water level differences up to 1½ m. Increasing this difference is simply a matter of engineering.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wnmlU.jpg)
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Some years ago I went to Scarborough (Yorkshire) and visited the local harbor during low tide: all the ships were sitting on wet sand, as shown in the [painting](https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/19883/lot/413/) below (for some reason I can only find stock photos)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dF7qx.jpg)
If you are able to predict the tides, it's something you can live with.
If instead you want to ensure water access at every time, you can resort to using floating piers, which can follow the level of the water, like you can see in harbors in Zeeland, for example.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O6MjE.jpg)
As long as they have their end in the water, they work. They are also widely used in rivers, which change their level quite a lot during the year.
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Just take a look how communities with much higher than average tides handle the issue IRL.
e.g. these boats are in the Bay of Fundy, which due to quirks of geography has the worlds highest tides at up to 53ft:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eMiJ3.jpg)
As you can see, people just accept that their boats will be grounded for a significant chunk of time.
Large ships can be flat bottomed and designed to handle being beached without stress.
Also, river ports that can handle ocean traffic, e.g. Portland Oregon, that are far enough inland not to be affected by the tides much will have a much greater importance in this world.
Ships will be smaller for a given tech level, due to the constraints of either being flat-bottomed or riverine.
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Given the extreme tide experienced globally, smaller boats as we know them would likely fall out of favor, and the daily driver would be overtaken by amphibious vehicles, which can negate the need for traditional docks entirely.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/n2lHh.jpg)
Several answers here include floating docks, which I think will just have to be the reality of larger cargo and cruise vessels, where they're always anchored fairly far off land during high tide, and accessed via smaller boats. This isn't uncommon now, but the distances will be more extreme in your setting.
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I work with some ports that have high tidal ranges, it's a big issue, but it's a problem for which many solutions have been developed.
If the vessels are small, they can simply rest on the seabed when the tide goes out. If the vessels are large then you can schedule the ship movements so they won't ground. If the port would completely dry out during low tide you may need to dredge an area in which water will remain when the tide goes out - keep in mind that water won't flow out of a pool when the tide goes out! A tidal barrier can also be built to trap the water in the harbor like a giant lock.
You're right in thinking it's impossible to have docks that work 100% of the time, but I think you are missing that is true for most big ports on Earth too as there can be a 400,000 ton difference in weight between a ship that is ballast, and a ship that is laden. So if a ship is importing to your harbor it could come in on the high tide, offload its cargo, and leave later on a low tide. This is not unusual at all.
One factor that I think you are neglecting is that having such a big tidal range means water is going to be moving fast. That's a significant problem because ship engines can only exert a limited amount of force. It may be extremely difficult or impossible for you to bring a ship into your port during the ebb or have a ship depart during a flood.
You could also build your port on a river or lake connected to the sea, which does not drain when the tide goes out.
## Port evolution
So, you have a port with a 25m tidal range that is drying out your port entirely. If you don't have much money, the first step is just to use small boats - they are quick to load/unload so they can arrive and leave quickly, they can sit on the seabed if need be.
**Transshipment**
If you need to move more tonnage then you might opt to use transshipment - your little boats don't sail all the way to the destination, instead a larger boat waits in deeper water as the boats ferry goods between the port and the boat.
**Stronger ships or locks**
If that is still unsatisfactory, you are going to have to either develop large vessels which can survive sitting on the seabed during low tide, or create a lock which will hold water in your harbor while the vessel can be loaded/unloaded.
**Dredging**
If you absolutely need to be able to move more tonnage, then you have the currently most effective and most expensive option: dredging. Dig a big hole at your harbor so that even at low tide ships can maneuver. Now dig a big trench from your harbor out to the ocean. Both of these need to be deep enough that they always contain enough water. Once you have finished this project ships can sail in and out at any time of day and your import/export ability is maximized. However, that's assuming your ships can actually sail against the tide. In all likelihood the speed of the water is going to be too fast to sail against, so you will still be tidally limited.
**Deepwater ports and berths**
There's actually some other options that can help your ships deal with tides. The first is building a deep water port. Go out far enough from the high tide line that there is always adequate water, and build your port there. Build a bridge or causeway to connect your deep water port to the city. A cheaper option is to build single berths rather than a whole port. There are a lot of options here; build a jetty with a normal berth at the end, drive some piles and have the ship moore against them, add some heavy anchors with lines connected to buoys on the surface that the ship can connect to. To load the ship either use transshipment as above, or construct conveyer belts or pipelines out to the berths.
[Answer]
**Pseudo-drydock**
The low tech solution is to have [drydock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_dock)-like supports at every pier. Sail the ship into the drydock at high tide and, as the water recedes during low tide, the ship is cradled by the supports instead of the water and harbor operations can continue unhindered. The disadvantage is that ships can only arrive or depart at high tide.
[Answer]
### Boat lifts
Your harbor could use boat lifts, such as the [Peterborough Lift Lock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_Lift_Lock) or the [Falkirk Wheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel). Your harbour would be at the top of the lift, and a channel to the ocean would be at the bottom. Most likely you would have to block off the harbor itself with a dam & spillway system to maintain a constant depth in the basin there.
You can see these lifts in operation (time-lapsed) in the following videos:
* [Peterborough Lift Lock](https://youtu.be/XyRFmzmp_gQ?t=171)
* [Falkirk Wheel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucg1O-5jsnM)
Most likely a vertical lift system would be more practical if the lower level varies with time (as it would in your situation.) But a wheel lift is pretty damn nifty and might be allowable under the Rule of Cool.
[Answer]
## Build two docks
It's simple. People could talk about the "low-tide docks" and the "high-tide docks". If your story involves violence and whatnot, you could even have this world-building detail, or even plot detail, of crooks tying people to the low-tide docks and waiting for the tide to drown them (or for them to give in and give them the info, for example). It'd be reminiscent of tying someone to train tracks.
[Answer]
As an extension to Klaus's answer about using Locks, I think it's worth pointing out what would make a tide "intense" beyond just extreme gravity - the clarification of which should open up significantly more options.
A tide generally refers to the local change in water level caused by gravity exerted by nearby planetary objects. On Earth, this would be the Moon. The scale of the tide is controlled by two factors: the force of gravity these planetary objects apply, *and* the amount of water available to move around. In the case of a planet whose surface is primarily water (such as Earth, where the connected oceans account for around 70% of the planet's surface area), this amount of water is staggering.
However, even lakes, ponds, rivers, and any smaller body of water technically experiences a tide. The difference is that these bodies have such a comparably smaller amount of water that the scale of their tide is correspondingly less. As a few examples::
* [The tidal range of the Great Lakes is around 5 centimeters - small enough to be functionally called "non-tidal"](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gltides.html) The Great Lakes have a [combined volume of around 22,500 cubic kilometers](https://www.epa.gov/greatlakes/physical-features-great-lakes).
* [The tidal range of Long Island, New York has a range of nearly 9 feet](https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stationhome.html?id=8468799). Being adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean, its tides have access to the entire oceanic body of water, [which is around 1.3 *billion* cubic kilometers](https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo1_ocean_volumes.html), however the actual tidal range can vary all along the East Coast.
* The Mediterranean Sea - which is connected to the Atlantic Ocean via a comparatively narrow inlet - [only experiences tides in the centimeter range as well](http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/37-our-solar-system/the-moon/the-moon-and-the-earth/33-does-the-mediterranean-sea-have-tides-intermediate). From the same source as the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea has a [volume of around 4.4 million cubic kilometers.](https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo1_ocean_volumes.html)
So while Locks are a good answer to this question, so too are any sufficiently isolated or flow-restricted bodies of water such that it is not easily influenced by oceanic tides. As a result, your concerns about tidal levels only need apply to harbors or docks directly on the coastline of the major oceans, and not as much to inland lakes or seas.
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Build your cities near [amphidromic points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphidromic_point) where the tide is naturally low because the oscillations interfere.
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> At the amphidromic points of the dominant tidal constituent, there is
> almost no vertical movement from tidal action.
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[Question]
[
I am looking for **possible ways in which a vampire could obtain blood to feed in an modern urban fantasy setting *explicitly without* harming humans or other sapient beings.** Parameters for this question are as follows:
* **"Harming" as defined here includes voluntary victims.** No vampire wannabes who want to be bitten, a lover letting them drink their blood, etc.
* **The setting is essentially the present day. Stereotypical masquerade rules apply.** Society at large is unaware of the vampires and while the government does know it doesn't give them blood wellfare, small numbers of individuals are allowed to know at a personal level (e.g., humans who know vampires personally). Vampires live alone or in small groups.
* **The vampires aren't fantastically wealthy.** They are more or less average people, so they can't just throw money at the problem until it goes away and bribe anyone who looks at them funny.
* **The vampires in question are utterly biological.** No walking corpses, no supernatural “life force” they consume to explain why they are drinking blood, no immortality (their lifespans are the same as humans), no "mind whammy to forget feeding", no nothing. Basically just a humanoid species that drinks blood. Anything that goes for a real vampire bat goes here. Mentally they are basically human and try to pass as such, hence them looking for options for blood that do not involve harming others.
* **How much blood is needed each night is not that much of an issue.** I realize that blood is probably the least nutritious substance in the human body by weight (being 80-90% water), and that it is probably not possible to feed a warm-blooded human-sized organism with a large, nutrient-hungry brain on blood alone, [given that vampire bats barely manage to avoid starving to death most nights](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574350/). **I am more looking for possible avenues that vampires could get blood rather than whether or not a particular source is efficient or the viability of a stereotypical urban fantasy masquerade**. However, I realize by this definition they could feed on lab mice and that would satisfy the criteria. If metabolic parameters are absolutely necessary, let's go with...low enough that they can exist but high enough that they can't just feed once a year like a python and the whole thing is a non-issue.
* **There are no limits to where the blood can come from.** Animal blood, human blood, blood from still-living organisms, stored blood. Anything that can be used to feed a real blood-drinking animal (vampire bat, biting insect, lamprey) is acceptable. The only caveat is that it can’t be taken from live human donors. So no “draining the innocent in their sleep” or “only drinking the blood of criminals”, and so forth.
* **Crime is to be generally avoided if possible.** The vampires are trying to fit in to society, murder is out, something like "rob a bank and use the money to buy blood" is out, but discreet stuff like drinking someone else's livestock as long as you don't get caught is okay. They basically just want quiet lives and would prefer to do things legally if at all possible.
Although preserved blood in blood bags fits the parameters, I think swiping blood bags from a hospital might be right out. Mostly because getting access to said blood bags in the first place isn't likely to be easy and hospitals tend to notice these kinds of things if they are done often enough. Additionally, doing so greatly increases the risk of getting a bloodborne pathogen. Plus I hear there are lots of preservatives in it to keep red blood cells from dying.
One option I have often heard suggested in these stories is eating extremely rare steaks and other meats. However, it turns out most of the “blood” in rare meat is myoglobin, and that the blood is drained from the animal at the slaughterhouse before it is butchered and sold. The myoglobin is in the meat cells so it can’t easily be gotten rid of. Would myoglobin be digestible to a blood-drinking organism like a vampire bat?
Another option I have heard of is that milk is produced from the body’s blood. *However*, I have also read a lot that says that it isn’t, and at best you can say it’s only metaphorically true because it’s made from the same nutrients that the bloodstream carries to all parts of the body. But by that logic all the flesh and secretions in the body have to be considered “blood”. You can have blood in milk, but it usually means the animal is sick or hurt.
The best options I can think of are:
1. Preying on wildlife like deer or raccoons
2. Doing what real vampire bats do and sneak into livestock farms in the night to lap up blood from cuts on their ankles. Zoos are another option, but those animals are supervised for unusual wounds pretty closely by the keepers.
3. Blood from slaughterhouses, though I don't know how easy it actually is to get blood from them despite the prevalence of vampires getting blood from slaughterhouses in fiction
4. [Internet](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/19/18231673/young-blood-fda-warning-aging-plasma)? Dark web?
However I am not sure how well these work.
[Answer]
Since you say it doesn't have to be human blood, they would just straight up buy frozen animal blood by the bucket at supermarkets like nobodies business. No need for any fancy subterfuge or specialized trickery of any sorts, it's a perfectly ordinary, boring grocery.
Might be a cultural thing, but here in Norway blood is trivially available. I'd imagine it wouldn't be unfeasible to find this in most places. Blood here is used to make traditional recipes like blood sausage or blood pancakes for example. It's incredibly nutritious after all, even for us mundane non-vampires.
Attached example shows a 0.5L bucket of it, costs about five bucks or so at a local store here. Not exactly cheap as far as ingredients goes I suppose, but far from being out of range for any normal income individual.
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> However, it turns out most of the “blood” in rare meat is myoglobin, and that the blood is drained from the animal at the slaughterhouse before it is butchered and sold.
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> Blood from slaughterhouses, though I don't know how easy it actually is to get blood from them despite the prevalence of vampires getting blood from slaughterhouses in fiction
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are not at odds. In fact, the solution. Let's examine:
1. Slaughterhouses will deal with a lot of blood.
2. Vampires want blood.
Conclusion you assumed - vampires would have to somehow have dealings with a slaughterhouse to procure blood *and* avoid suspicion afterwards. This seems...complicated to pull off for a variety of reasons. How about the much simpler:
# Vampire operated slaughterhouses
They work as normal but just get the blood. And can re-sell it to other members of the vampire community. The vampires operating the slaughterhouse and others dealing with them can easily pretend it's [a religious prohibition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_dietary_laws#Blood). Doesn't need to be exactly Muslim, they can use other religious or just claim they are a separate sect.
* Vampires avoid scrutiny from *real* religions, if the processes don't seem *quite* the same as normal.
* They avoid suspicion from normal workers: if you have a policy that all blood needs to be collected and deposited somewhere safely, that seems strange. If you say that, say, a religious leader has to perform a rite to "cleanse" it before disposing the blood, then they won't really bat an eye. It sounds slightly odd but no more than just halal food, really. The blood can then be moved and used as needed.
* Vampire clients avoid suspicion, either. They go in for a "special steak" and get a complimentary container of blood in a brown paper bag. Or special house sauce. There would need to be some screening process for vampire clients - if they can be recognised (via some means), then it will be easier. If not, they just need to set up some codewords to establish legitimacy.
* The people working the counter need to be "in the know" for this to work but it's not hard. Either have a vampire selling, or a trusted normal person. Nobody should even be suspicious that only *some* people get to handle the sales. Oh, geez, only people *management seems to trust a lot* are given *the responsible task to handle money and clients*? Who would have guessed. Additional cover can still be provided with the religion, as well. Just say the teller is "ordained" (or equivalent) to exchange the cleansed meat for money. Again, not even that strange in the grand scheme of things.
There you go - you have your false religion, and a false front for conducting business that all sounds quite believable. And it's only some parts of the business that need be falsified - they can still just meat as normal. The business can even start up easily by offering better prices for animals. This ensures local farmers will tend to sell to the vampiric slaughterhouse, thus the vampires should never run out of stock.
Addendum: I mentioned hiding behind religious practices quite heavily. This *might* be dropped. The primary purpose is
* to give the people operating the slaughterhouse plausible way to ask their (likely non-vampiric and non-aware of vampires) workers to deposit the blood somewhere.
* there is also the matter of sanitation requirements - if a health inspector comes in and asks "why aren't you disposing of the blood according to regulation 47-15-A?" then the slaughterhouse can claim they *do* but their religion requires them to consecrate the blood. Still a plausible way to avoid government oversight catching wind of something.
I'm just wary of rising undue suspicions.
A secondary reason is to just give the vampires another excuse to hide some of their peculiarities (if any). "Sorry, I don't drink...beverages. I'm fasting" or something similar. This isn't a big thing, as there are plenty of non-religious excuses one can use, if needed, but it's just a side-benefit.
[Answer]
**Dog hoarder.**
**[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sD8Fy.jpg)**
<https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/97-dogs-rescued-hoarding-south-fulton-now-many-ready-adoption/>
Dog hoarding happens. And a dog hoard (horde?) would be a fine place for a vampire to get blood. Dogs are pretty tolerant. If a dog learns that a cuddly feeding episode correlates with some tiredness afterwards but a lot of hamburger that she does not have to share with the horde, dogs will be cool with giving blood. If you have 97 dogs each one comes up for rotation infrequently.
Acknowledged: small dogs might have to team up.
[Answer]
### Blood banks...
...also kosher meats, and other sources of meat preparation.
In a society where vampires are trying to be normal peoples with different diets, and integrating into society, blood banks may open a restaurant side business. Rare and delicious blood types might be worth a premium price, Ebay and Amazon would start a blood section, and other social adjustments would occur. Not to mention the criminal underground.
Kosher meats are specifically prepared by draining the blood, however since the religion also prohibits the drinking or eating of blood, I'm not sure how they would feel about sharing.
Other places of meat preparation would probably be willing to accommodate, if they made enough profit on it.
[Answer]
First, why can't it be blood donated by live humans? The American Red Cross and various affiliate donor organizations bank thousands of gallons of the stuff every day. The willing donor doesn't have to know their recipient is a vampire. Most modern-day vampire stories involve the use of medicinal blood as a food source that doesn't involve human injury.
If animal blood works, slaughterhouses would *love* to sell drained blood from slaughtered cattle. Some of it is used to make niche foods, like blood sausage and blood puddings, but the vast majority is handled as "inedible" and ends up sold to rendering plants for basically nothing. In fact in many cases the rendering plants charge for pickup of their own source material, and then sell the results back to those same farmers as animal feed, food-safe machinery lubricants and other products; there aren't many businesses on this planet that earn money coming and going like this, and almost all of them have had Mike Rowe invited in for a look.
If some foodservice company goes to Cargill or National Beef and offers to buy clean, food-grade, whole beef blood from their slaughterhouses at \$5 a gallon, ostensibly for some niche delicacy in mainland Asian cuisine (but in reality they turn around and sell it to vampires for \$5 a pint), you bet your bottom dollar those slaughterhouses would agree to just about any precaution required in collecting it from the animals as it drained from the stunned cow or pig (e.g. cleaning/sanitizing the neck before draining the animal, collecting the blood in food-safe sanitary tanks, segregating by compatible blood antigens if not per animal).
A single beef steer averages about 10 gallons of blood, so we're talking about an extra $50 each, and the companies I mentioned process tens of thousands of animals every single day. 20,000 animals (conservative for many of the larger slaughterhouses) times \$50 additional revenue for each animal's blood carefully harvested represents a million dollars *a day* in additional revenue. You could hire an entire department of people at that slaughterhouse, maybe 100 steady paychecks, for 4-6 months' worth of this revenue, and take the other half straight to the bank. I know of no successful company that would turn their nose up at these kinds of returns on what's currently a waste byproduct.
[Answer]
Vampire society should develop multiple sources of blood, to help reduce suspicion and eliminate single points of failure:
* If it needs to be raw whole blood:
+ A few people working in blood banks who discreetly expropriate [expiring blood](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96237648) about to be discarded and donations flagged "do not use" by people who know they aren't safe donors but are socially pressured to donate(\*) at, say, a workplace blood drive.
+ A few farmers who bleed live cattle (adapting [traditional Maasai practices](https://thomsonsafaris.com/blog/traditional-maasai-diet-blood-milk/) for modern equipment)
+ A few sausage-makers who buy blood from slaughterhouses, along with all the other parts they use, and divert part of the blood to feeding vampires.
+ A few slaughterhouse operators who save some of the blood for their community instead of selling it to sausage makers, fertilizer companies, pet food makers, etc.
+ Some move to Finland and simply buy cartons of frozen pig or cow blood [at the grocery store](http://www.dlc.fi/~marian1/gourmet/7_20.htm). (You'd probably need a vampire working as a food wholesaler to keep this discreet at scale.)
+ Buy organic blood from that [small organic slaughterhouse](https://modernfarmer.com/2014/12/blood-whats/) that isn't big enough for the dog food companies to work with.
* If it's just that important nutrients can only come from blood:
+ Buy "meat glue" made from blood ([$100/kg on Amazon as I write this](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B003EX46XC))
+ Buy dry blood meal sold as fertilizer
+ Buy blood pudding, blood sausage, etc.
Lots of sources of blood. Lots of ways to be discreet and fly under the radar. How do you know there aren't already vampires among us?
(\*) I haven't donated blood in years because I fainted the last time I did, but the checklist I filled out had a box for "do not use my blood". I suspected at the time that it was primarily for closeted gay men.
[Answer]
Overall, there are a handful of ways for a vampire being to acquire their blood source, likely all previously stated by others. In general, they amount to:
* Directly from a human (Explicitly Forbidden by Question)
* Indirectly from a human, such as a blood bank
* Directly from another animal (Not expressly forbidden, questions of sapience arise)
* As a byproduct of something, such as an abattoir or butcher
* Through Science!
### Other Issues
As the question mentions the traditional Urban Fantasy MasqueradeTM, there are three critical questions as to how best to do this:
1. How connected are those in the know?
2. Do they have any of the standard vampire weaknesses?
3. How fresh does the blood have to be?
The first point is actually more critical since logistics come into play at this point. A small cluster of a dozen or so will have different needs and abilities than a country-wide network of several thousands in a variety of positions. While the question does mention that they tend to live alone or in small groups, it is about how connected to each other those small groups are and as such how well they can pool their resources.
Second, they will have to work around their racial weaknesses. If they can't be in the sun, then obviously they are going to work nights or from home, which may make certain methods easier or harder as the case may be. The questions mentions that they are all biological, but are there things that they have to watch out for?
### Farmer/Breder
Assuming that other animals can survive periodic blood donations the same way that we can, then by farming some manner of livestock a vampire can feed on the live animals while they are taking care of them. If there are horses on the farm , then they too can be tapped as well. The trick is to not tap any single animal too often.
As a single family operation, the vampire will have a supply of blood so long as there is enough animals to rotate through for donations. A larger corporate farm might even be able to support a small group of vampires. Depending on how stealthy the feeding vampire is, then you can do an effective feeding while the livestock sleeps for the night and nobody would have to be bothered by it. This creates a self-sufficient food source that you can breed to keep the lineage going.
The main drawback here is that if you have a sunlight allergy, then some farm work will be difficult to do at night. This is what hired farmhands are for. That or humans in the know about your true nature so that nobody will bat an eye as to why the boss only comes out at night to do work.
An animal breeder, such as one for dogs or cats, would function in a similar way. Just different rules and regulations to consider. Also the sustainability numbers will be different.
### Abattoir Owner / Butcher
This has been mentioned enough that I will not elaborate much on this.
What I will note is that considering that this is a world where vampires are a thing, it will be more likely that blood will be sold and not discarded or given away. The slaughterhouse might not know that they are selling it to a vampire, but they know that the blood is in demand and they can get a decent price for it compared to our regular world. This is a logical consequence of worldbuilding in this case.
Given the larger volume of blood collected here, this is a good initial point for a blood logistics system. If it can be preserved and bottled for individual use, then the blood can be distributed to more people. There may be regulations involved in shipping it though. Perhaps a small-scale packaging operation alongside the meat processing areas?
As part of a logistical solution, they could get their livestock from the vampire farmer, and help each other out that way too should they be in contact with each other
### Professional Embalmer
While this one is perhaps banned by the question, if the freshness of the blood is less of an issue, then a vampire embalmer could drain a deceased's blood by consuming it in the process of embalming the deceased's body. If the blood was to be drained anyways, then it might as well be put to use. How they do it will vary according to their morals and qualms about this.
Technically, it is not harming a human as they are already dead. In addition, so long as the next of kin consents to the embalming procedure, then the vampire is following the wishes and desires of the people in charge of the body. So long as they resist the temptation to blood drain the people that deny embalming, they are good.
Side note: This might be the last request of a person that knows a vampire well -- to bequeath them their blood. The propriety of such a bequeathal is another matter outside this question. Your worldbuilding may vary.
This will probably really only works for a single vampire unless they run a wildly successful funeral home or otherwise have enough work in order to keep multiple beings fed in this manner.
### Blood Supplements
If science can determine what in the blood that a vampire needs to survive, then it is plausible that it can be created synthetically. Once that happens, then blood needs could be reduced to a pill or meal supplement drink, or some other kind of medicinal treatment.
As the original question eliminates the need for an abstract "life force" for them to feed upon, that would indicate that their need for blood is based off of some chemical that is in blood. If that chemical can be found, then it can (hopefully) be synthesized.
[Answer]
## Help people with haemochromatosis
People with haemochromatosis, or "the Celtic Curse" absorb too much iron in from their diet. The effects can be controlled with regular blood donation. Since it's not a blood disease, the blood is considered safe for donation.
Without treatment, people with haemochromatosis can suffer from chronic fatigue, muscle aches, arthritis, fertility problems, and cancer. Regular donation is part of the treatment.
It might be a casual thing, or your vampires could set up a specialist clinic. The incidence is about 1 in every 200 people of Northern European descent. In a large town (say 100,000) with a lot of German (or Dutch or Irish) immigration background (say, 30% of the population), you could very reasonably expect around 150 of these "superdonors". Scale the town up if you need more. :)
<https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-09/haemochromatosis-provides-a-positive-spin-off-for-blood-banks/10594100>
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Why not work for a diagnostic lab? One where blood and blood products are tested. When they are discarded from healthy test subjects, the vampire feeds on those.
Should be a massive amount of blood available.
[Answer]
## Operate a vertically integrated testing lab.
These are the places, every town has one, where you go to get routine lab testing done. You go in, they call your number, they sit you down, draw a couple of vials, they make you watch them stick barcode stickers with your name, and they send you on your way. The next few days the results show up at the hospital.
What's actually happening is several times a day, a runner gathers up vials from 3-4 locations to a central location where they're run through the testing machines.
A lot of the space in the vials is spare blood for if a test is botched. **So you collect a little more still**. That other lab uses 10ml vials, you use 15ml.
"Vertically integrated" means the same company does both the collecting and the testing, and handles the blood all the way from collection to ... disposal.
In fact, a company called Theranos entered that testing space, and made quite the splash.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0UfT5.png)
*Theranos's embattled CEO.*
The company was since exposed as fraudulent, and shut down. Certain reasons for the shutdown were given to the public.
[Answer]
I have found the following idea in one volume of [Dylan Dog](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Dog_(character)):
The vampire works in a hospital, during night shift (to avoid exposure to sunlight) and uses transfusion blood bags to get an ethical lunch without harming humans.
He behaves like an eccentric lonely man, so that nobody questions his preference for night shifts.
[Answer]
1. Operate a fake mobile blood donation van. Kind of illegal I'd assume, and certainly a lot of work even if licensed. Significant startup costs.
2. Assuming blood sausages aren't sufficient 'bloody', then just buy the blood from bloodbuy.com instead.
3. Don't bother hoarding dogs. Plenty of 'normal' people are farmers with a few cows (sheep, goats, whatever). Sure, it does require a few acres and a few cows, but I can't think of a more quiet and unassuming life where no-one would think twice about your lifestyle or what you do for food.
[Answer]
Perhaps they have figured out how to make [artificial blood](https://www.phlbi.org/divisions/blood-disorders/artificial-blood/). Maybe it's not good enough to be used as a blood substitute in humans, but still safe and effective to drink.
[Answer]
If the blood doesn't have to be particularly fresh, you could try raiding [**body farms**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_farm). These are research facilities where donated corpses are left outside, exposed to the elements, so that forensics researchers can study the effects of decay on human (and sometimes other animal) remains. Unlike, say, a morgue at a hospital, it should be considerably easier to sneak into these locations late at night (which if you're a vampire is pretty much a given anyhow, unless you're going with *Twilight*-style vampires or some other day-walker route).
It's not glamorous, since the bodies are likely to have been sitting around for a while, and possibly have been picked at by other scavengers, but it's still a pretty easy source for blood that doesn't involve killing anyone, as the victims are already dead. The only thing to worry about is making sure you move around to different locations, or else the researchers might start to notice their subjects' blood loss to be proceeding more rapidly than expected.
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They would probably be drawn towards professions that encounter death regularly: hunting, veterinary practice, farming, the meat industry, certain kinds of medical care and of course, war. All of these sectors could provide opportunites to sneak some blood while nobody is looking.
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[Question]
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In my world, I planned for humanity’s soldiers and civilians to use conventional, chemical-propelled firearms. There are changes of course *(ETC ignition became common, more lightweight materials, telescoped ammo, and high-tech sights)* but other than that, they still rely on the same old principle of “propellant lit, bullet go forward”.
Here’s the thing: since humans use more traditional weaponry, I wanted my aliens to use more ‘alien’ weaponry. Exotic stuff such as lasers, plasma, proton beams, so on. But here’s the thing: each species would logically want to use the most efficient weapon.
I wanted to have it so that the human weapons were almost as effective as the alien ones, while costing less energy. But that brings up the question of why the aliens would be using the energy weapons in the first place.
Is there a way I could create an in-universe reason for the aliens to use energy weapons (ie they have specific advantages over firearms while not being completely superior)?
[Answer]
## Divergent Resources = Divergent Technology
We humans evolved on a planet where celulose evolved millions of years before the enzymes required to digest them came into being. For this reason, or other various factors, we have TONS of fossil fuels which might be exceptionally rare on other worlds. We also have a lot of the elements you would get from, sources like exploding white dwarves and supernova, but an alien world that formed in the wake of an exploding neutron star or low mass star might have a lot more of certain elements that are pretty rare on Earth like xenon, tungsten, lithium, and gold to work with which would make high energy electrical components much more accessible.
Basically, when Humans entered our industrial revolution, we switched from a cottage industry reliant on wood and charcoal to one based on petro-chemicals which incidentally made our crappy musket type weaponry cheap and easy to develop into the assault weapons, missiles, and long range cannons we have today.
Most alien worlds however may not have had a Carboniferous Age; so, when they entered their industrial revolution, there was no coal or petroleum to work with. Basically, a lack of fossil fuels meant that their scientists would have very few petrochemicals to experiment with like humans did. So, where we went for things like internal combustion engines, and coke stack smelted steel, they went instead for things like solar powered electric engines, and electrolysis smelted aluminum.
Because of this disparity of resources, you don't just get different costs, but you also get a disparity in how much effort has gone into studying these resources for practical applications. So while human history is full of petrochemists and a relative handful of electrical scientists, your alien history would have a lot of electrical scientists, and very few petrochemists.
So, when the aliens see a human assault rifle, they don't see a primitive back-water weapon, but rather a highly advanced piece of technology made out of exotic materials. On this level, their perception of a gun is exactly the same as our perception of a laser. These weapons are comparable because both races have invested the same amount of time and effort over hundreds of years to get really good at making weapons this way or that, and once you find something that works well, it's hard to introduce a more experimental alternative that costs more and lacks the maturity to be as good. So, both races continue to make THEIR weapons, even as space travel makes both sets of resources more attainable.
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Matthew's answer also brought up one of my favorite sci-fi quotes ever, but missed one of the most significant details of this quote that makes it so good:
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> "The Asgard would never invent a weapon that propels small weights of **iron and carbon** alloys by igniting a powder of **potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur**."
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> ~ Thor (Stargate SG-1)
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Not only did the Asgard not think to make kinetic weapons, but they showed a sheer lack of understanding in regards to ballistic technology by thinking we would use steel bullets. They also seem to have missed the fact that we stopped making weapons grade gunpowder from potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur over 150 years ago. In this quote, it seems that the Asgard tried to assume they knew how to make a human gun based on what they knew about our technology in general and maybe some historical records, but if they tried to make a gun that worked in this way, it would be an utter piece of garbage... and that is assuming they could get all the other stuff right like riffling, gas repeaters, percussion caps, etc.
Likewise, if your aliens think as the Asgard do, then if they try to make their own knock off versions of ballistic weapons, they will remain sub-par compared to their human counterparts barring a lengthy period of R&D.
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**Both kinds of weapon are dangerous for the soldiers of the other side**
Bullet based weapons have a strong recoil\*. Humans have a skeleton and a structure that allows to withstand the recoil without damage.
If the aliens are a kind of octopus or mollusk, they would find it difficult to shot a rifle without being injured by the recoil (and developing a recoil-less technology would seem to them a waste of time and resources).
At the same time, plasma weapons use a technology that is inherently unreliable: there is a small chance that the weapon explodes, killing the soldier. Aliens have a hive mentality, so the small chance to die killed by own weapon is an acceptable risk, while humans would never bear it
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"The Asgard would never invent a weapon that propels small weights of iron and carbon alloys by igniting a powder of potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur."
A long time ago, your aliens perfected kinetic defense to the point that "traditional firearms" were all but useless. Generations passed, and the aliens, who haven't used such weapons in a very long time, [stopped defending against them](https://hell.pl//szymon/Baen/The%20Baltic%20War/The%20Trouble%20With%20Aliens/1416520775___6.htm) and forgot about them. Everyone uses and defends against energy weapons. Meanwhile, those plucky humans came along and... their kinetic weapons are quite effective.
This is a [standard](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeWillUseLasersInTheFuture) [trope](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RockBeatsLaser) in science fiction.
Okay, so that covers why the humans don't just get their sorry backsides handed to them. Why, then, do the aliens use energy weapons? Well... <https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/59995/> has quite a few suggestions, though the above also gives another; because at one point, kinetic weapons became useless. Since energy weapons still work, why change what isn't broken? (But also, all the other reasons in other answers here and in the question earlier in this paragraph.)
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Since some comments are complaining that the aliens will just start defending against kinetic weapons again, let me explain in more detail why they might not.
* First off, note again the suggestion that *they forgot how*. It's been a long time since they had any *need* to do so, and the technology that gave them near-perfect defense may be lost.
* Even if they didn't forget, if they don't just *conveniently* have the defense systems lying around in their forward depots, it's going to take time to get them distributed to the front line. That assumes that they have them mothballed *somewhere*. More likely it will take them years, even *decades* just to spin up the necessary manufacturing capability again.
* Alternatively, defensive systems usually come with drawbacks; mass and/or energy penalties, if nothing else. Maybe they have to choose between a defensive systems that makes them invincible against puny humans, but leaves them completely vulnerable to some other opponent or potential opponent, versus having good protection against energy weapons and so-so protection against kinetic weapons. (Maybe the reason they stopped using kinetic defenses in the first place is because their system likes to blow up if you merely wave an energy weapon in its general direction.)
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**Supply chains**
Humans have been using projectiles weapons and have manufacturing processes for them. We dabbled in portable energy weapons but never could perfect them enough to overcome their drawbacks, so it was more practical to continue using what we knew.
The Aliens must have figured out some exotic energy source that is stable enough to power Portable Directed Energy Weapons (and not explode like a super-grenade).
Humans can't recreate their tech yet, or don't have the unobtainium required. Maybe the Alien weapons have fail-safes so they DO detonate when they fall into the enemy's hands.
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**Efficiency in different ways**
Now lots of people will probably give answers that firing plasma and other energy weapons aren't effective or incredibly difficult to implement. For your story I'll assume they do work.
Efficiency can be thought of in many different ways. Making of the ammunition, shipping and effectiveness against different targets.
Imagine both sides have the technology for energy and conventional weapons, which are equally effective. They will use what they have infrastructure for. If you already have large amounts of factories and knowledge in your armies on how to use them, you would not go for the other weapons suddenly.
But building it can have their own problems. Possibly the resources to build conventional weapons is much more prevalent for humans, while the resources to make abundant batteries or other energy holding/discharging resources are easy to come by.
In relation to that they might focus on less weapons and military, but with higher effectiveness. That means higher resource cost and time investment for effective troops. Humans might just build a ton of weapons. Much like Germany vs Russia in WWII. Russia had much less modern and effective tanks than the Germans. They did have good front armour at an oblique angle and ok guns on their tanks so they could damage the German tanks. They had parts found in tractors and the like, making them easy to repair and build in their massive factories. And they fielded so insanely many tanks that the German tanks were simply overwhelmed. This made them exceedingly effective for multiple engagements, while individually they are very much lacking.
There might also be a certain doctrine against a certain enemy. We can see in the HALO series that humans have conventional weapons, while aliens have energy weapons. This is correct for them, as humans only had unshielded humans to fight against. The bullets are great at penetrating flesh, but not shields and does little against electronics. The aliens however often have shields on their individuals and vehicles. Energy weapons are great to take out shields and electronics, while being slower to damage flesh. They still have some aliens that don't use shields and you see they often have some flesh penetrating weapons added. They didn't know each other before, so the effectiveness of their weapons is based on what they encountered. Themselves.
Even if conventional weapons would be less effective you might continue to use them. Difference in tactics can determine a great deal. See the Vietnam war. High tech and overwhelming forces lost to an enemy who knew the land and had older weaponry, with a few exceptions like the AK47, which was everywhere at the end of the war. Even if they could've used modern tanks and artillery, it might've lost them the war. Their strength was invisibility, guerrilla tactics and psychological warfare.
Your human tactics might be with conventional weapons also because of tactical reasons. Maybe the loud noises, flashes and explosions more than make up for the lack of effectiveness. Humans are trained to be used to it, while the possibly more effective, more quiet and less flashy energy wielding aliens might go straight to panic when a pistol goes off.
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Simple solution: the exotic weapons aren't any more effective than the projectile weapons overall, when you take into account things like logistics, durability, field operations, and weapon characteristics. There's a rock/paper/scissors relationship, and as a result there's no real benefit to either side switching to what the other side uses when their own logistics and training is set up for their own weapons.
Hypothetical example: say one side uses portable energy weapons, powered by a non-removable battery pack and firing an energy blast with similar characteristics to a laser in terms of speed and particle mass vs humans with combat rifles. Because of the technobabble technology used, field-replaceable battery packs aren't optional.
In damage, not much difference. Getting hit by the energy blast and hit by the bullet will both ruin your day. In terms of penetration, a wash as well. They both have similar characteristics, so you're not blasting a hole through a half-meter of concrete to get the enemy on the other side.
Advantages the energy weapon has over the rifle: the battery last a hell of a lot longer than the number of magazines the soldier can carry on them, so for a given mass, the alien will be able to shoot a lot more. Also, because it shoots some kind of energy, it isn't going to be effected by bullet drop, time to impact, wind, or many other environmental considerations. Essentially, if you can see it, you can hit it.
Advantages the rifle has: it doesn't have to be recharged. As some point the alien weapon has to be connected to an power source, and power sources make targets. A pile of magazines or cases of bullets are inert and thus can be stockpiled and not attract any attention, and in combat can be brought forward to the soldier on the front line so they don't have to move to continue fighting. The alien has to be pulled back for the weapon to be recharged, or else a new weapon brought up to him. This makes logistics more complicated because you need a greater number of weapons per soldier, or tie them down to some kind of infrastructure. And it might be able to have a faster rate of fire because the energy weapon has to cool down between shots or the heat builds up too rapidly, preventing it from doing something like firing the equivalent of full-auto, meaning that while a combat rifle can fire single precision shots and can also lay down heavy suppressive fire, the alien weapon cannot.
So you've got a situation where each weapon system has advantages in specific situations, but overall the whole things balances out so there's really no net benefit to switching over to use the same weapons the other side does.
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## Ethics
The aliens have their own notions of *ethics*, which regrettably do not exclude killing humans, but *do* exclude risking the lives of one another. They cannot countenance firing a bullet and leaving it to make its own way in the world. They need beam-based weapons that lock onto a target with particles travelling nearly at the speed of light, and continually verify they are damaging only that target. The technology uses a lot of power, but it is still cheaper than trying to deal with the bad press that follows a friendly fire incident.
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The simplest answer may be available energy density.
Humans have been using chemical energy storage for a very long time now. From the first piece of firewood to the latest chemical explosives, we've been gradually increasing the energy density of our fuels and propellants. More recently we've been trying to find other ways of generating and storing energy that are not reliant on nasty chemicals, but our best solutions to storing energy are still chemical. Electric cars store energy in batteries as chemical energy, because it's by far the best option we have available to us at the moment. Even then it's far more effective - if more polluting - to run a car directly on chemical reactions than to use batteries to drive electric motors.
The same is true for weapons. Yes, we can theoretically create a capacitor-powered man-portable coilgun (or railgun), but the energy demands are so high and the storage density of capacitors so low that a power pack capable of a single shot would outweigh the rest of the weapon... and probably the person wielding it. Meanwhile a 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge carries a chemical charge of about 3.5 grams, capable of sending a 10 gram round down-range at about 850 m/s, purely by hitting a primer cap with a tiny metal hammer.
The aliens on the other hand have long out-grown the need to store their energy in crude chemical propellants. They have direct energy storage capable of much higher energy densities than we poor humans can even comprehend, allowing them to store a few mega-joules worth of energy in a device about the size of a standard 30-round M4 magazine. Or perhaps they have discovered (or created) a material that can be readily converted to pure energy, or a way to tap into zero-point energy, or a clean and efficient method for creating and storing antimatter that can then be used to produce energy through annihilation with normal matter. Whatever the actual method, the aliens have a way to carry around power for their weapons that has an energy density on par with - or better than - the best chemical propellants known to man.
Not only that but they have perfected the necessary superconductors and insulators to allow them to use that energy efficiently. All of this is based on technologies that the humans don't have access to, and materials that humans don't even know exists.
In order to switch to energy weapons, humans would need to learn a lot of material technologies that are old hat to the aliens. Power generation, transport and storage would all need to be greatly improved. Then we'd need a way to actually use that power in big bursts without melting the equipment or letting any of it go where it isn't wanted: superconductors and (near-)perfect insulators.
In the meantime, we still have all those factories churning out the weapons and ammo we already know how to use. We have a lot of slightly crazy people figuring out new and interesting ways of constructing bullets to screw with the aliens too. Alien force fields messing with your day? Turns out when you hit them with buckshot the sheer number of tiny bits of metal makes the shield controller circuits freak out and they have to reboot, giving you a quarter of a second to hit the armor underneath. Oh, the armor is too strong for buckshot to penetrate? Not to worry, we put a depleted uranium penetrator in back of that buckshot with a handy proximity fuse to make sure you get the perfect 1:2 shot every time, or your money back. And if you buy now we'll throw in a camo tarp guaranteed to fool alien sensors with every case, free of charge. How many can I sign you up for sir or madam?
Uhhh... sorry, my inner sales-bot got out for a moment there.
In the end we'll stick with guns and bullets until we find something better, we run out of people who can make and use them, or until we find a target that they just can't affect. If your aliens have overpowered defences that can shrug off the best bullets we can make... then we might as well just throw a big party to welcome our new Alien Overlords.
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## Vulnerability
Aliens are a way more prone to get damage from energy weapons, so in the moment they discovered first energy weapons (say electro-shock - stun baton - taser) they had "ultimate weapon" in hands and then they invested to make it better on one side, make shields against it on other side and soon they come to all the lasers, phasers, aliensers with long range attacks and also to energy shields to protect agains ranged attacks, maybe with basic latex armor under to prevent contact energy weapons.
With so powerfull weapons at hands, knifes, swords etc. was just primitive technology, mainly dead weight if you can imagine, what could do batery driven taser of the same weight.
Now aliens are nearly immune agains simple energy weapons, as their shields are able to synchronise really fast, so the arm race is about variable frequencies, polarised lights and more complicated ways to overcome those shields. This leads to all those strange emitors, subemitors, concenrating rings and energy modificators on their weapons.
Humans are prone to energy weapons too, but not nearly as much as aliens are. So AAA batery powered taser is not deadly threat, but just childern toy. Knive on the other hand ... and gun and canon ... and big steel shield as counterpart (well it could be melt by energy weapons, regardless frequency hoping, just by pure energy - but it still takes a lot of energy to melt a civilian car)
And while aliens are little more resistent to simple knifes (as their bodies have totally different construction and multiple organs), swords are problem, as well as chainsaws. Long burst from assault rifle is totally deadly and lead ignore all energy shields and latex.
And mass production of rifles and swords is a way easier, then massproduction of super pasers with frequency hopping and polarisation effects and stroboscopic.
So it is on you, how to balance this two approaches, hight tech low-but-sofisticated energy and brute force hard alloys - maybe we are totally superior (after rediscovering flags instead of walkie-talkies), and they have to build all the industry to get bullet lead from escavated prehistoric inefficient accumulators and steel, which have use just similar to our use of silver for jewelry ...
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## You don't bring a lead-slinger on a spaceship.
The aliens arrived in spaceships, so they wouldn't have brought conventional projectile weapons with them on the journey. A stray bullet could puncture the hull and depressurize the ship, killing everyone. They'd have energy weapons that can easily do lethal damage to organic matter without posing a risk to the ship. You might also have an enriched oxygen environment on the ship, and using a firearm might actually result in a *fire*, one of the worst things possible in space.
Even if you don't plan to get into a firefight onboard your ships, there's always the risk of a poorly-maintained firearm going off unexpectedly from heat or jostling - too much of a risk to even store those on a spaceship, let alone allow everyone on board to be armed with them.
Now maybe they have firearms similar to ours on their home world, and of course nothing stops them from acquiring and using Earth-made guns once they get here, though if they're the type of aliens that *look* alien enough that they can't easily blend into human society, it's possible they'll have a harder time getting Earth weapons, or maybe their hands or whatever appendages they possess just aren't compatible with Earth guns for whatever reason (fat fingers? tentacles? lack of opposable thumbs?), so they'll just stick with what they brought with them.
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**Alien weapons are extensions of alien bodies.**
The energy weapons can be powered by the aliens themselves, and are similar in many respects to the inborn biological weaponry of the aliens. These weapons make sense to the aliens because they are really augmentations of the aliens themselves. The aliens do not need to carry ammo or batteries to use them. For the aliens, attacking with their energy weapons feels as natural as hitting something with a stick is to a human.
For an alien there might actually be more to using an energy weapon than just zapping something. Their electromagnetic senses extend through the output of the weapon. A hit on a target (or near a target) also provides information to the alien about the target or energized region. Aliens also use their "weapons" as sensors.
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**Reliability vs Repairability, and/or Tactical Differences**
Plasma weapons/proton beams/lasers are hugely reliable compared to human "slug throwers". The mechanisms are solid-state, and the only moving part is the trigger and the latch that keeps the fuel cell/magazine in place. No bolt, no residue, no problem. It works underwater, on land, in space, you name it. But that doesn't mean the things are indestructible, just that they're low-maintenance compared to a human gun. The downside is, when they DO develop a fault (because that much power/plasma/whatever will eventually wear out the components) it's DEAD. Throw it away, get a new gun.
Meanwhile the human rifle isn't quite so rugged. You have to clean it fairly regularly, it can fire underwater/covered in mud but is more prone to jamming in those conditions and so on. The upside is, you can FIX IT. Soldier can disassemble it and clean the insides, and because there's no electronics at all it's less susceptible to certain types of extreme environment problems. And if a piece wears out you can replace that single part rather than the entire weapon, which has strategic implications. (Humans can fix 300 rifles with 100 spare rifles, but aliens would need 300 spares, for an oversimplified "strategic implication.")
Or it could be a matter of ammunition. Perhaps a laser/plasma weapon can store fewer lethal shots in the same amount of mass. A 1kg pile of human ammo is 400 rounds, whereas it's only 100 shots of laser/plasma weaponry because batteries/plasma containment tubes are heavy. But the aliens are bigger/stronger and CAN carry 400 rounds of plasma ammo but the smaller humans (who also think 400 rounds is what an infantryman should carry) stick to lighter-ammo slug thorwers. After all, the killing power is *almost* the same, and it's better to have a weapon you need to clean occasionally than one you run out of ammo for!
Or maybe there could also be Tactical reasons behind a choice of weapons, and the aliens are happy to carry fewer rounds that pack more punch. As it stands, "Suppressing fire" is hugely important in warfare, and has been since forever. Humans *duck* and that means even if you don't hit one the simple act of shooting helps. Military tactics have evolved from that and most shots are sent "in the direction of" the enemy, rather than "aimed at" an enemy. That's why the M16 has a 200 rounds a minute max rate of fire and is only accurate to about 350 yards. But it wasn't always like that. WWI American doctrine believed americans were better shooters than their enemies, and therefor the US made infantry that could shoot 1000 yards accurately and were told only to fire when they saw a target. There was actually PUSHBACK against a semi-auto rifle because it would encourage soldiers not to aim. Turns out none of that was true, so they started making faster-shooting but less accurate weapons. But maybe it IS true of your aliens, so the slower-to-fire laser or plasma weapons pay off for them, where they wouldn't for human infantry. Your aliens can take those 60 aimed shots and make as many kills as a more jittery human soldier with 400 rounds.
I should point out these ideas aren't mutually exclusive. Once a war gets going with whatever weapons they have it's also HARD to change over mid-war. Doubly so if the weapons are so different in design and manufacture and supply. So if any of the above is true in human v human or alien v alien fights, once they meet each other they'll keep using what they've got because the inertia of tradition/logistics may very well outweigh the benefits of a changeover. Like the Japanese with their terrible bolt-design of their WWI infantry rifle. They knew it was bad but had no time to change it. Or the US Army in the American Civil War, whou COULD have been equipped with breech-loaders in 1862/3, but didn't have the logistics or political will to make it happen.
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**COST.**
Simple. Cost. It still costs too much to create and mass produce weapons with exotic power sources and discharges. Maybe humans have a few, like cannons mounted on space ships, but for the most part its just too darned expensive.
Not to mention the fact that they still haven't cracked how to do it on such a small scale for guns and rifles. Maybe they'll get to it one day, but as of right now, too expensive and too much trouble.
Also, bullets still work just fine. They still do the trick. A *single* bullet may not break through an alien's force field, but *several* bullets break the force field down enough that finally a bullet gets through and bingo "that's a kill!" Fortunately, "them bullets is easy to mass produce, so we's gots lots of 'em!"
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**Equipped for Different Operating Environments**
Energy weapons will perform more poorly in many environments than projectile weapons, and vice versa. Atmospheres, especially thick and humid ones, will interfere with beam propagation much more than they will affect a bullet's trajectory. Smoke, fog, heavy snow, or high humidity may significantly reduce a laser's effective range and firepower.
In space, beam weapons do not have these problems, and they have other advantages such as a lack of recoil that must otherwise be compensated for. Meanwhile, projectile weapons require ships to carry the extra weight of ammunition, and extra weight is expensive. Projectiles also have disadvantages after the battle is over: lots of spent projectiles in orbit leads to collision hazards for years, if not centuries.
Thus, aliens who come from lower gravity worlds with lower density atmospheres or worlds with more predictable and less extreme weather might see much fewer drawbacks with energy weapons than humans, living on earth, did. If they do more space travel than humans, or have been at it longer, they may have adapted to energy weapons because of their particular advantages in that environment. Humans, meanwhile, have learned different lessons in weapon's development.
Thus, each race has built it's military and logistical chain to support the weapons it favors, and this is not something easily changed in the course of a war. The logistical situation may be such that, even if a beam weapon or a projectile weapon is more suitable for a particular environment, the advantage may not be great enough to warrant the supply disruption, or stockpiles may simply be unavailable.
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## The alien energy weapons require Helium, and we're all out of Helium.
With current usage we're likely to run out of helium in 25-30 years. Aliens will of course have their own sources. It's not far fetched at all that the energy weapons require helium in their manufacture, or even usage. Humanity could have access to the tech, and even have a few energy weapons, but while Helium is possible to artificially manufacture it's extremely expensive to do so. And it's needed in medical devices, as well as chip manufacturing and more. Diverting the small created supply to military use would be unlikely to happen just because the supply would be mostly insufficient compared to the need and further already needed elsewhere.
This would result in the military having maybe a few (especially vehicle mounted) energy weapons, but mostly relying on traditional arms.
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You can't make the weapons incomparable or you defeat the purpose. Someone suggested the aliens have defeated bullet-technology. Well then humans would be non-competitive.
Shields protect against high energy weapons, so a kinetic weapon has an advantage there, the mass is much higher than the energy involved. If anything the shield just turns the mass into a molten mass like sabot round.
Aliens still use shields even though tactically they shouldn't.
As for beam-weapons versus kinetic weapons.
Humans don't have a lot of defense against the beam weapons so aliens have no reason to adopt them and already have the beam weapons-industry built so aren't going to retool everything to switch to kinetics.
Humans have the kinetics and against shielded opponents are not a disadvantage so the incentive to develop beam-weapons is much less.
Alien strategies and tactics developed millenia over vast deep space conflicts with little logistical capacity. The colonial wars in far flung worlds require minimal industrial effort or minimal supply lines so beam-weapons are favored.
Humans are on defense so they have access to all the resources and control the access, so they can mine the kinetic materials required.
Other things I saw as answers are also not really that good (not to poo-poo anyone).
Ammo vs. recharging? There's no difference. You can only carry so much ammo. It is MORE LIKELY that an alien can fire many more shots than a human can simply because power density is much greater than mass density.
Microwave power-beaming could remotely recharge your beam weapons in the field.
Tactically, humans could be forced to take out the "microwave battery tank" before really engaging an alien infantry force...so that their ammo can at least be limited.
A beam weapon would have a much higher rate of fire. Suppressive fire would be much more practical than a machine gun.
Machine guns are designed to pepper an area, a beam weapon can be designed to do the same only it'd do it more precisely with a computer generated algorithm that would ensure the most volume of area at a precise distance is filled by a pattern of beams flooding the area per second.
Ultimately, the only advantage a kinetic weapon has is it "does the job".
Because beam weapons take so much more to integrate, use, and maintain (such as the microwave battery tanks to recharge), a soldier might capture beam weapons but only be able to use them a limited time.
Developing beam weapon technology can be a priority of humans but its not useful now.
Keith Morrison mentions tanks, he's wrong about tanks.
German tanks were inferior to both Shermans and T-34s, the only thing that was good on them was the gun and ironically the German 88 flak gun out performed every German tank because it was also a superior gun.
German tanks were hand-built and hype. The hand-built custom build caused the tanks to be unserviceable. Their heavy armor meant they had a longer lifespan but that just meant they broke down in the field.
Russians knew their tanks wouldn't last more than 19 hours in combat so they didn't bother to build transmissions that would last longer than a minimum time, something like 20+ hours. So it's a misnomer that Russian tanks weren't well built. They had no reason to build certain parts better when battle attrition would make them explode.
Germans had great engineering, but their tanks died like all the rest.
Tigers never fought shermans on the western front, Fury is a myth.
Shermans were excellent tanks, well built, well machined, standardized parts so they could be repaired in field, and their armor was sufficient. The idea they were "death traps" has more to do with ALL tanks were death traps.
The attrition rates between Shermans and all German panzers was about 1:1 ratio.
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Well for one thing even by today's standards modern weapons are primitive, consider the case of fingerprinting and serial numbers. This would also assume that some body would have to keep track of gun registries, I would imagine it would be easier to mass produce energy weapons because their less bulky. Easier to conceal thus require no traditional ammunition, you would also have the advantage of quicker response time. They might even be safer to store and handle if Star Trek has taught us anything. On a starship I would imagine a loaded gun to be both a fire hazard and a danger to crews living in space, imagine a bullet ricocheting off the bulkhead and causing a puncture in the hull. You would then have an even larger crisis, you would need to deal with heat and oxygen deprivation. Not to mention the spontaneous loss of atmosphere, thereby killing every living thing aboard the ship or space station.
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I'm just adding a consideration to add to the existing answes.
Any sci-fi premise where the main combattants are sentients rather than computers and drones is already not based on potential future reality, so for starters if you say that t0he weapons are equal they simply are. Its no bigger leap than having evolved sentients fight each other with almost WW2 style weapons and combat.
That said, your aliens and humans have simply had a divergent weapons research with a similar eventual outcome. For example:
Lasers are nice because of their high muzzle velocity. They are held back by atmospheric disturbances and possibly tailor-made smoke grenades and the like, so for longer ranges plasma bolts were created. Plasma might not cut through an opponent but their effects can still go through armor, leaving charred craters rather than long cuts.
Humans in the meantime spend more time developing their bullets. Gyrojet bullets (rocket-propelled bullets) are now cheap and reliable, reducing recoil and allowing for high velocities (again, the gyrojets have been further developed than the low-velocity low reliability that current gyrojets represent). You could add layered mechanisms to fire the bullet, for example initially the bullet is fired by a normal charge before the gyrojet takes over or launched using railgun technology. The bullets could also be miniaturized bombs, such as mini shaped charges or using highly corrosive sub-coatings to cut through armor more easily.
The ability to cut through some armor or deal damage changes based on what weapon is used, but on average the weapons have similar utility in a fight. So both aliens and humans are content with the weapons they have and see no reason to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of getting their technology and industry on the level of their opponent just to field similar weapons.
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This sounds like variation on "why bring a knife to a gun fight", to which possible answers include:
1. reusability and lack of re-supply issues;
2. surprise factor during combat;
3. the sheer joy of watching from up close as your enemy realizes (a) *oww that hurts* and (b) *oh no, I'm dying*.
(Ok, there's not much difference between a crossbow, a gun and a blaster on point 3.)
Firearms are a lot more practical when you have a planetary industry dedicated to producing standardized projectiles.
Otherwise if you have to use what you can collect as you go along: rocks are plentiful, knives and arrows are easy to extract from previous victims, and sunlight (or fusion power) is readily available even in space, and the equipment you need to carry along is a lot smaller than an ordinance factory.
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Logically, since Earth-like weapons are effective against your aliens, then those aliens *would* research how to develop those weapons *if* they ever had to fight each other. And logically, aliens *would* research how to defend against Earth-like weapons *if* those weapons were (or had the potential to be) used against them. In both offense and defense, they would have a strong motivation to do such research - it would be a matter of life and death.
It's not plausible that a life-or-death motivation would have been ignored for your aliens' entire history, so we must presume that developing such weapons and armour has *not* been a matter of life or death for your aliens, at least until they started fighting humans (and now there's not enough time to start a research program from scratch, though they might be able to come up with some primitive defenses against bullets partway into your story).
We can conclude that:
1. Your aliens are peaceful at least amongst themselves, they do not fight each other so they have not had to develop Earth-like weapons for their own use. Their military exists only for fighting other alien species and defending themselves from external threats, and their enemies (until now) haven't been sufficiently vulnerable to Earth-like weapons for those to be worth developing and deploying.
2. Your aliens simply haven't been up against Earth-like weapons before. Your aliens' prior enemies *aren't* vulnerable to Earth-like weapons so those enemies haven't developed those weapons for intraspecies war (and hence didn't have those weapons readily available for interspecies war); and your aliens' prior enemies haven't figured out that your aliens *are* vulnerable to those weapons because, not being vulnerable themselves, they didn't think to try. It would help if your aliens haven't had much reason to do interspecies war before, so their prior enemies didn't need to research much about their vulnerabilities.
Alternatively we could conclude that your aliens *did* try to develop Earth-like weapons for fighting amongst themselves but weren't able to; that strains plausibility, since it's not *that* hard to fling something heavy or fast at something you don't like, but it's not logically ruled out.
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**Differences in tactical doctrine**
There are a number of reasons why different armies would prioritize different aspects of weapons. Here are some examples:
* Weight. One form of ammo is heavier: bullets or batteries. How many shots can one soldier carry? Is one species stronger than the other? How long will a soldier on each side have to lug it around?
* Longevity. One army may run more long term field missions than the other. Which ammo can be more easily supplied to soldiers in the field? Which kind of weapon is more durable when you wade through a river with it? Can it be repaired easily? An army that uses guerilla tactics will be more concerned with this.
* Stealth. If one side is more prone to ambush tactics they may favour the quieter weapon.
* Cost. Which is better: A thousand super high-end weapons or ten thousand basic but effective ones? Every army strikes a balance based on the resources and materials available to them.
* Supply lines. Weapon 1 is the absolute best but can only be sourced from one place in your territory. Weapon 2 can be sourced from 10 places. If the source of weapon 1 is captured, your whole army must resupply and retrain with a new type of weapon in the middle of a war. The smart leader will choose weapon 2, to avoid this risk. Each side controls different resources that force them to choose different weapons.
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## The aliens did not invent their weapons, they stole/copied them.
You may be interested in the **man kzin wars** by Larry Niven. the Kzin did not invent their technology, they stole it from a species that tried to enslave them and found Kzin survived a lot better in their own environment than they did. Thus the Kzin have advanced technology but not all the precursor technologies that lead up to them. they can make gravity ships and lasers but don't know how to make missiles and effective slug throwers because the aliens the overthrew did not use them, and the Kzin are not big on research for just knowledges sake. The kzin did not even know reaction drives were a thing until they met humans.
Alternatively in the **Uplift** series by David Brin aliens inherited advanced technology from the species that uplifted them, and almost all species are uplifted from caveman technology. Very few species evolve and develop tech naturally. So most aliens lack low and middle technologies. they have spacecraft but not airplanes. plasma rifles but not shotguns. because most technology has been passed down by uplift, tech that is too primitive never gets passed on even if it is useful.
TVtropes has a whole page of similar examples.
<https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AliensNeverInventedTheWheel>
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Form. The aliens are quadrupeds. Their exotic guns require a barrel length that's impractical for a human soldier to use, while they can carry it beside their body and aim with a periscope, rather than aiming directly along the barrel as a human would.
While such a weapon could be vehicle mounted by humans the combat normally doesn't involve them because they're too much of a target. A practical version for infantry combat would be a crew-served weapon and that's not worthwhile. Two humans with rifles are better than two humans with one exotic gun, but one alien with an exotic gun is better than one alien with a rifle. Thus neither side adapts the technology of the other.
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The aliens have simply no idea how human weaponry works.
Oh, believe me, the aliens WANT to use the humans' weapons. They just have no idea how to make them. They've tried reverse-engineering them, they have strange components made of even stranger materials. They've tried stealing the weapons, they don't have the proper knowledge/body structure to use them. It's a simple answer, but an effective one.
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An ammo round is very self contained. A gun is very simple.
Downsides:
* It takes time to traverse the distance between, so is less useful in long distance combat. Compare to a laser which is line of sight for miles. (Although one intense enough to do damage gets fuzzed out by air and dust.
* It has recoil. Using a rifle in zero G will be challenging.
Upsides:
* Chemical energy, at present, is our most economical dense way to store energy.
* Very long term energy storage is possible, meaning that you don't have to have energy generators on the front line.
* Training is quick. A few thousand rounds separates a novice from an effective soldier.
* Guns are not delicate (most of them). Present laser tech to deliver a combat rifle's rate of energy will NOT fit in a backpack.
* guns lend themselves to guerilla actions, becuase of their independence of supply of constant energy. Aliens may be hesitant to mess with a people who are trained in the Swiss tradition of 2 years service then keep your rifle at home. Add to that keeping them with 2000 rounds of ammo, and you have a potent trap.
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A combat rifle right now weighs about 6-8 pounds. Modern materials could cut this in half, but a good chuck of that weight is the breach block and barrel. The requirements to make this out of much lighter material are daunting, but plausible using a combination of graphite, ceramics.
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It could be that the precursors to gunpowder were not found on your aliens planet. So they only found it on other planets but by then they had already developed other tech so didn't see the point.
If your aliens don't like especially loud noises then they may shy away from gunpowder.
Finally it's just really cheep for us to produce guns and ammo as compared to the power packs that the aliens use.
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Various mythological creatures have this strange thing where wearing clothing inside out can ward them off, allow them to be outwitted, or be outright defeated? Why could this be a weakness for any magical creature?
Answers should be world-based, not what the creature "would" do. (Humans wouldn’t like clothing inside out because of social standards, or anxieties brought on by OCD, or desire for perfection. However how would this affect a creature that isn’t human or doesn’t have the same cultural build up? Please do not include something alluding to these as a potential answer.)
Here's a link for a quick example I found. I presume it alludes to the clothes being worn with the tag or collar on the wrong side: the [Äbädä](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%84b%C3%A4d%C3%A4) and the [Spriggan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spriggan)
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# Totally different perceptual system.
Mythical creatures clearly don't prey on humans because they *have to*; they do so because they *can*. They have not evolved with human beings, they often come from a completely different set of dimensions.
While humans are fond of saying, "The cowl does not make the monk", thus proving they can distinguish where the man (monk) ends and the dress (cowl) begins, demons don't think in the same way - they don't even *perceive* in the same way.
To begin approaching this mindset you might think of an algorithm to model the human from their dress: you start from the "outside" (definition based on physical properties and similar to that of a locally differentiable manifold) and you proceed along the local normals until some specific property indicates a discontinuity. Now, the compact space lying along those normals is the human being.
This is how we might program a robotic surgeon or robo-policeman - that has no "perception" in the human sense - or something like that to "perceive" a human body. And that's very much like how demons "work".
Reversing one's dress completely changes its topology; to a demon, according to the algorithm above, the "wearer" *within* the dress is now *the whole universe*, and it is definitely *not* a human being. For all intents and purposes, the human has just disappeared. This kind of "disappearance" is common in the higher dimensions of demon-space, and is often used to attack. So, instinctively, the demon shies away, since to its eyes the situation has abruptly taken many of the characteristics of a demon trap.
As to how a demon's senses might be so thoroughly fooled this way, this is a characteristic they share with humans. Humans do not "see" what is in front of them, but synthesize a lot of semi-independent cues to infer shape, distance and motion. Not only several drugs can interfere with that process, but even *seeing specific things* can mess with the human visual perceptual system (sixty seconds of staring at [this](https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AnotherGrayAmericanbulldog-size_restricted.gif) will give you, for the few seconds it takes the brain VPS to reset, what an alcohol addiction gives permanently - the illusion of something crawling under the skin of your hands or behind the wallpaper). The reverse is also true, which explains why "circles" can, in the appropriate circumstances, keep demons out, or demon-inspired dwellings have angles that are "subtly wrong", like an Ames room.
(This is the reason why some demonic rites mandate that the participants be naked. It allows demons a more "natural" - to them - management of their sensory space. Makes them comfortable, you might say).
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People are warned against animals that behave oddly, and for good reason. Such animals are often sick with possible infectious diseases.
Humans who do odd things, such as wear their clothes inside out, or even stop in the middle of the woods and turn all their clothes inside out, are very likely mentally disturbed, which can throw plans out of order and even be dangerous to eat.
There's also the chance that the human is a mythological creature that hasn't mastered the art of appearing human, which is even more dangerous.
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**It is not the reversal of the dress that scares the monsters away, it's the exposition of the dress label!**
The dress label has a lot of [strange symbols](https://www.pinterest.it/pin/75716837468788644/).
Reversing the dress, the monster now sees that you have this strange leaflet, with what at its eyes seems to be an array of arcane and mystical runes.
Obviously monsters are not very smart, but they are wise enough to avoid fighting what they think could be a dangerous wizard.
Maybe that leaflet could be a seal that banishes them into a dimension of eternal pain... or an enchantment that will transform them in frogs... Better to flee away and look for an easier meal.
Maybe some slightly smarter monsters will start to wonder how it could be possible that there are so many powerful wizards around... But he will answer himself that evidently they have already eaten in the past all of the easy humans and now only mages are left, which is a kind of survivor bias!
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Its just like eating a fruit with a bruise on it.
Some just don't like it. There's nothing wrong with it. They just have that subconscious opinion of that because if bruised long enough it could become infected and taste bad and could be harmful. But with a just lightly bruised fruit it doesn't affect it for us.
The same thing could sort of apply. They're just so used to people wearing clothes normally that it just weirds them out when they're inside out.
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**Aura**. The clothing usually has some organic components, which tend to retain some image of a broader whole as per the (mythological!) [Kirlian leaf phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirlian_photography). So to the creature, a piece of clothing tends to have a visible aura of prior wearer(s) emanating out of it, in the rough shape of the wearer.
When the clothing is turned out, there is the wearer still in the middle with an aura, and the clothing with an aura like a person inside out extending in many directions around it. The result is that the person has a much larger aura -- and the obvious interpretation is that he is really some other sort of mythological creature *pretending* to be a person, which only fellow mythological creatures or the very psychically sensitive can hope to avoid by pulling back in time.
The shoes help to complete the ensemble because, due to the nature of their role and the physical force they endure, they create a good impression of the aura of the legs all the way up, which now bends slightly *outwards*. The larger legs greatly enhance the sense that the larger aura is supported and put together in a believable way.
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# Body Odour
Mythical creatures are known from records of past centuries, when people took showers on one specific day in odd years and washed their clothes on even ones. You do the math. If you were a creature from a culture with at least weekly baths you would be stunned too.
Also just imagine nowadays if you had to fight someone in the olympics for Judo and your oponent shows up with their sweaty knickers over their pants. If the referee doesn't disqualify them on the spot I would resign before the match.
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Mythical creatures are often not exactly the smartest one on the playground.
You might have seen those videos where the dog owner sends the dog away, hides under a blanket and the dog is puzzled upon returning and not finding them there. Something similar is happening here: the monster is used to see humans in a certain way. Any oddity in their appearance confuses them, be it switched shoes, inside out clothes and so on.
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# Very Bad Things
A long, long time ago, in a dimension far away, the long running series of wars between the Sorcerers of Earth and the Monsters of Otherplace was finally brought to an end by the great Piece Treaty. The Sorcerers agreed to return to Earth and take their accursed 'time' with them, and in return the Monsters swore to never attack or interfere with the Sorcerers, **Ever Again**™.
Of course the Monsters were not willing to extend that protection to all Humans (and the Sorcerers were annoyed enough with their fellows to not press the issue), so a means was devised that a Monster could visually identify a Sorcerer. Maybe it was the wearing of underpants outside of trousers. Maybe it was always dressing in pajamas and a robe and carrying a bath towel. Maybe it was putting a sprig of celery in their lapel. To be honest, the Monsters don't remember anymore, and if the Sorcerers do, they seem disinclined to issue a reminder. As a result, the Monster carefully avoid any Human who dresses too abnormally.
Because, you see, the Treaty was not simply words scribed on parchment by old men and women. No, it was a legally and magically binding contract. Any Monster who attacks or even just bothers a properly identified Sorcerer will immediately have **Very Bad Things**™ happen to them. Again, the Monsters don't remember what exactly the Very Bad Things are, but no-one subjected to them has survived to give an account. Most Monsters just assume it means disintegration of the body and dissolution of the soul, and leave it at that.
And besides the Very Bad Things, the leaders of both sides are alerted to the breach. The occasional accident or argument is acceptable, or at least explainable. But a large number of attacks would be known and could restart the war.
So yes, if you see a Human wearing their shirt inside-out or a necklace of beer corks, better to just give them a wide berth.
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**They think it is our skin**
Imagine meeting a creature that rips its skin off bit by bit and then puts it back on again with weird pocket-like organs hanging on the outside. That would put anyone off.
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Try reversing it. Clothing inside out isn't their weakness it's a way there are identified. they don't have clothing And don't know how to put on correctly. So while they are able to become indistinguishable from humans physically they don't have the Knowledge to do something even as simple as put on clothing correctly so can be easily identified and dealt with.
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The monster spots human targets by looking for things that wear clothes (that's why it doesn't attack animals). If you turn your clothes inside-out, the clothes are now effectively being worn by everything in the world *except* you, so the monster can no longer see you.
You could also just take your clothes off, but in cold weather or in the company of others, for example, it is not convenient to walk around naked.
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In my very Earth-like world, the ruling entity possesses a seal of authority.
It is essential that the validity of any seal is proven to be authentic, which had historically been achieved by having very intricate seals which would be too expensive to forge.
However, times have changed and with precision measuring and milling cheaply available, no mere seal is safe. Otherwise society is early Victorian.
Tradition is a very important part of the culture, and it would be loath to have to replace the seal with any other method of guaranteeing authenticity.
**How can one modify the seal to guarantee authenticity, when any physical shape can be easily copied?**
When referring to 'seal' I mean both the negative (for example a signet ring) and/or the positive (the wax seal).
Any part of the process and government policies may be adjusted to solve this problem.
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Not sure why you'd want to do that in the same room, but a low barrier with glass or a wire mesh should keep the seals away from the forge.
(See reference picture ↓)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bIzEH.jpg)
...wait, all the other answers interpreted this differently.
...
Alright, fine.
How about two or more negative seals (...the non-animal kind) that superimpose to create the positive seal? That way rotation matters, and maybe even detailed steps like how long to wait between the two(+) applications, and a positive can't easily be used to create the negatives.
(Of course you'd need to somehow ensure that the seal can't be made by a custom single negative somehow...)
Let's do the proper thing and attribute the picture, even though it wasn't entirely fitting.
It's from [here](https://www.la-gruyere.ch/en/P20011/forge-of-charmey) and [here](https://www.sevendays.nl/nieuws/hoe-vang-je-een-wilde-zeehond-op).
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## Make the seal a signature
Specifically, a *cryptographic* signature.
The mathematics of an asymmetric cipher like RSA would be accessible to the Victorians, although they might not fully understand *what* they were doing (or understand why it is secure) they could probably work through the arithmetic by hand. This is also the era of Charles Babbage and mechanical computing.
Your 'seal' is actually the output device of an Analytical Engine-esque machine which calculates the digital signature of some input, like the date and title of the document being stamped, using a private key that is hidden in the configuration of the machine. The seal design might look something like a QR code: the machine clanks away and outputs by raising or lowering type blocks that cause the seal to imprint, or not, a particular bit in the code. To seal a document, you load it into the machine, input the title, and the machine stamps a seal which contains both the title and the signature.
The imprint of the seal is therefore different for every document signed, and in a way that ensures that imprints are verifiable (as coming from a source that knows the private key) and non-transferrable (an imprint sealing the 1850 Treaty of Outer Flooble cannot be copied to seal the 1865 Order Granting Me Unrivalled Wealth). The signatures can be verified by hand (or on another machine) without needing to take the document back to its source or compare it to any other imprints.
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*Actual seals are so widely used exactly because it is close to impossible to fake them completely.* Of course you can fake almost any seal to, say, pass a police check on the road. But experts would distinguish most fakes with ease.
The reason is that any seal has it's own "fingerprint": scratches, wear, small features and even ink distribution (due to different smoothness of material ink has different layer thickness - like frost patterns on a window). Same thing as with bullets and rifles. There are technologies *now* that can forge the exact copy. But since they include, say material degradation with electron beam , they are very expensive and require a lot of material and human resources (and its hard to keep it secret) and does not guarantee a success.
In old times they used to make seals as complex as they could (as now is done for banknotes). Say in old China, they even invented a special zig-zag writing for seals (all straight lines were replaced with highly detailed patterns). And that worked fine for them.
So your question is both true and false:
* it's true, because most "seal readers" do not perform any complex analyses (in most cases it is just a glance). And thus the answer is - you can't protect seal from rough, but still good enough for casuals copying. And thus people are using "multifactor authorization", like seal on special paper, special form (with tens of other banknote-like ways of protection), verified by personal signature.
* it's false, because it is practically impossible to forge *exact copy* of a physical body. Even in such a precision production as gun barrels difference is still enough to identify one single barrel among millions of them. It means that seals are already "protected" enough for experts to reliably identify fakes.
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**Secretly radioactive**
Secretly add to the wax a slightly radioactive substance that emits radiation at a very precise wavelength. Seal-testing equipment openly scans for imprecisions in details, but also secretly scans for this wavelength. The wax is produced every year, and the half-life of the radioactive substance means that there is also a precise amount of radiation depending on the time of year.
The signet ring(s) also contains a small amount of this substance, which is replaced every year.
Even if someone discovered that the seals and rings emit this radiation, they might not realize the time-dependency of the amount of radiation.
A good candidate for the radioactive substance is [Iron-55](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron-55), which has a half-life of 2.737 years. It decays into stable manganese by emitting X-rays with a power of (mostly) 5.9 keV. Iron-55 is most effectively produced by irradiation of iron with neutrons. Forgers examining old seals may discover traces of manganese and mistakenly add this to the wax.
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TL;DR: use cryptography, and moveable elements in your seal. The seal is basically there to be pretty; the actual authentication will be done via clever mathematics.
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Lets get down to the basics here.
What is the purpose of a seal, or signature, or official ID badge or anything similar? It is intended to enable someone who is familiar with what the article *should* look like to tell whether they are being shown something that *is* the real thing. This is one half of [message authentication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_authentication).
Any change to the seal that can only be verified by the office of the holder of the seal basically renders the seal *useless*. If everyone who sees a copy of the seal then immediately has to telegraph the office of the holder of the seal to verify it, why not just skip the whole seal malarkey in the first place and just use some other mechanism of authentication.
Obviously, not *everyone* needs to be able to verify a seal... Joe Schmoe, having his door kicked down by the police is not going to be in a position to telegraph the chief of police to see if this is a legitimate operation, nor is he going to have the time or ability to check the police badges to see if they are forged. Furthermore, not everyone *can* verify a seal... secret military orders might need to be carried out without the luxury of verifying their validity with high command.
What I suggest, then, is something a little like a [Message Authentication Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_authentication_code). These can be computed using something a little like the predecessors of the [Enigma device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine), called [rotor machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_machine), and seals that have elements that can be advanced or retracted according to some mechanical settings.
Firstly, the authenticator needs to construct a [checksum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum) of the message. Take your rotor machine, bash in the first letter of each line of the message. Each time you press a key, the rotors turn. When you've finished bashing it in, there is a mechanical readout... maybe 12 little flags, which can be on or off, and correspond to 12 little elements around the edge of the seal. When the seal is created, you adjust the mechanical elements appropriately. When you verify the message, you check that the output of the rotor machine matches the checksum.
By way of a bonus, not only can you not trivially forge a seal for a new document, but you also cannot modify an existing document or steal its seal because the checksums will not match.
Obviously, the rotor machine can be stolen, but now in order to create a forgery you must have three things:
1. A high quality copy of the positive seal.
2. Knowlegde of the checksum algorithm.
3. A rotor machine, suitably configured.
Your average forger is going to have to work a *lot* harder.
Depending on your mathematical or engineering knowhow, you might even be able to create something more complex... a mechanical calculator capable of implementing the [RSA cryptosystem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)). Things like the [Curta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta) device postdate the Victoria era, but Babbage's difference engine would probably have been up to the job. Now, large keysizes are needed nowadays because of the existence of fast computers that could brute force smaller keys, but much more modest size keys would be suitable for your needs.
As above, you create a checksum of the message, and use a mechanical device to generate the pattern used by the seal. This time though, it doesn't matter if the verification devices are stolen... they can only be used to *verify* a seal, not to *create* it!
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## Supplement the seal with secondary authentication
How do you tell if a Banksy painting is authentic? You might check for a signature, sure, but fakes can copy the signature too - so you check Banksy's website, where genuine paintings are pictured.
And of course, even if you could fake Donald Trump's signature perfectly, you couldn't just start mailing executive orders and agreeing to trade deals - there are extra levels of validation, one would hope!
Maybe you want to apply the seal to secret documents, without posting the whole document online? In that case make your sealing wax produce a random pattern, the way glitter nail polish produces a pattern that's nigh-impossible to reproduce. Then you can post pictures of the seal without showing the rest of the document.
## Random, nigh-uncopyable seal features
Perhaps every seal is carved from wood of the Macguffin tree, with a distinctive grain, coarse enough that it always transfers when stamping, but fine enough you can't duplicate it by taking a silicone cast. Seal validation is done extremely carefully, checking this grain is just right.
## Per-recipient seals
Inspired by [Wikipedia's description of "ginkō-in"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)#Japanese_usage) you could have different seals for different applications. You've got a seal you use for bank documents? Only you and your bank (and maybe people who handle your cheques) know what it looks like.
## Just accept mediocre security
Plenty of real-world procedures involving signatures just tolerate fraud - almost everything in our world that relies on signatures, for example. Easy to just print [an authentic-looking signature](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_signatures_of_politicians_from_the_United_States) straight onto a document or cheque - and everyone knows cashiers are sloppy about validating credit card receipt signatures. So long as fraud is low enough everyone can afford insurance (or self-insurance) that's good enough. And if you're a celebrity, a billionaire or a world leader, maybe people know to carry out secondary checks, like your bank manager knowing you personally.
Likewise, plenty of [people in East Asia use seals right now](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)) - and while they're not 100% secure, they're good enough for most purposes.
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You did not specify the level of technology involved, however with cheap precision milling and measuring available I assume a reasonably advanced technology level.
Whatever physical method is used to secure the seal it would be possible for someone to forge it with sufficient time, money and especially access to inside information. However it could be made extremely difficult for the forgers.
The first step is to ensure that the secret of the seal is kept absolutely secret the knowledge being held by just 2 or 3 of the most highly trusted officials. Nobody else should know how it works. Infact different aspects of the secret could be held by different officials to make it even more secure each one thinking they had the sole secret, but with only the person doing the sealing knowing the full truth and being able to cross check fully.
There are then numerous options for imbedding additional security into the seal any of which might be used:
A code could be used where by the position of the seal, its orientation or the colour of the wax used could be changed slightly according to the date of the document or the number of words or letters contained on the document or some combination of these in an elaborate manner if required.
Chemical or physical changes could be used. The wax seal might be impregnated with harmless chemicals that glowed under UV or other frequencies of light or reacted with other chemicals so that the seal could be easily tested for the presence of one or more harmless chemicals in the seal.
Radioactivity could be used with very low levels of radiation. Perhaps the wax for the official seals have a radiation level 3x that of the background radiation from the local area and half that of the granite blocks that rulers castle is built from.
A wide variety of Microscopic particles of different shapes and sizes could be added to the wax or even the ring or stamp in such a way that examination of the seal under a microscope would reveal their presence.
The above methods and many other similar devices could be used in isolation or together and could even be varied over time.
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# Price War
Since the *information content* of the seal can apparently be copied with ease (cryptography notwithstanding), then you are stuck with relying on the *physical content* to provide authentication. While using exotic materials is one solution, the better one, IMO is just to use very expensive materials that are too difficult for any but the wealthiest nobles to acquire.
This is similar to the idea of using gold leaf, except that gold is too "common" to create the necessary rarity. Anything with a rare, controllable source would work. Refined aluminum might be one possibility. A custom perfume might be another (especially if commoners have mostly all smelled the "royal scent" at some point, and could thus serve as reasonable judges of a seal), but it would need to have a rare but distinctive ingredient to discourage forgery (like saffron, imported at great cost from the Far East).
# Glass
Milling works fine on wood and metal, but not so great on brittle materials like glass, which is why glass is blown, rather than milled. The trick is not to create something trivial, like a stained glass pattern that can be easily copied. Instead, you want to create something distinctive and unique, that only one or two glassblowers in the whole kingdom can produce. Consider a 3-dimensional knot of sorts fashioned from glass of varying colors. Having a micrometer and a CNC machine handy will do you no good in reproducing such a piece. Bonus points if the blowers use refraction to cause their "glass seals" to produce a distinctive, uniquely colored, optical pattern when held up to the light at a proper angle.
Obviously, this would cause each seal to effectively become a royally expensive piece of artwork, but that is sort of the point with a royal seal, is it not? Also, being 3D, it wouldn't work very well to just stamp it onto a letter. Rather, each seal would be housed in a protective box that is associated with the "sealed item". And clearly, the royal house would demand each seal back after use, to prevent hoodlums from absconding with them.
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### Chemical compounds in the wax/ink
There are many materials we have that when lit up by a certain wavelength, emit another. We use a lot of these for lasers, and some of them are synthetic or have certain mixtures of gas.
However, it can also be biological. [Bioluminescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence) is.. actually quite rare, but animals like fireflies mastered it ages ago. Some of these work on the animals' own biology, but some of them can be stimulated externally. So your country would harvest a certain protein that does this from a top-secret animal, mix it into the ink or wax. Then you can watch it light up when illuminated strongly enough, or by burning a certain metal that gives just the right wavelength of light when burned (or magnesium if you just want a lot of light...).
The major problem with this is that the protein will be hell to harvest, and after use it'll break down over time.
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**SHORT ANSWER**
Forging government documents and seals was a problem throughout history, but probably not a big problem that required advanced technology to defeat.
**LONG ANSWER**
Four parts explaining why forging of seals was not as big a problem as the OP seems to think, and thus why highly technical methods to prevent such forging have not been necessary.
**PART ONE**
Here is some information about the use of government seals.
seals of many different types with the names of their owners and/or images of various types have been used since ancient times.
In medieval Europe the standard type of sealing material became wax. The matrix would be used to impress the seal pattern in wax. The usual shape for seals became circular, with the name and titles of the owner being written in a circle around the edge of the seal.
With the development of heraldry in the 12th century in western Europe it became common to depict the coat of arms on the seal. Sometimes the owner would be shown in armor riding a horse with the coat of arms on his shield, and/or surcoat, and/or horse trappings, and/or banner. Sometimes a monarch ruler would be shown seated
on a throne with crown and robes and with a shield with the coat of arms floating in space beside the throne. Sometimes the coat of arms or the full achievement of arms would fill the circular area in the center of the seal.
In Britain, the most important documents are sealed with the great seal of the realm.
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> Edward VIII, who abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson only a few months after succeeding to the throne, never selected a design for his own seal and continued to use that of his predecessor, George V. The longer-lived British monarchs have had several Great Seals during their reigns. Only one matrix of the Great Seal exists at a time, and since the wax used for the Great Seal has a high melting point, the silver plates that cast the seal eventually wear out. Queen Victoria had to select four different Great Seal designs during the sixty-three years of her reign.[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malet_coup_of_1812)
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> The Great Seal is attached to the official documents of state that require the authorisation of the monarch to implement the advice of the Government.
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> Under today's usage of the Great Seal, seals of dark green wax are affixed to letters patent elevating individuals to the peerage, blue seals authorise actions relating to the Royal family, and scarlet seals appoint bishops and implement various other affairs of state. In some cases the seal is replaced by a wafer version, a smaller representation of the obverse of the Great Seal embossed on coloured paper attached to the document being sealed. This simpler version is used for royal proclamations, letters-patent granting the royal assent, writs of summons to Parliament and for licences for the election of bishops and commissions of the peace. It formerly constituted treason to forge the Great Seal.
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> The Great Seal of the Realm is in the custody of and administered by the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. This office has been held jointly with that of Lord Chancellor since 1761. The current Lord Chancellor is Robert Buckland. The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 reiterates that the Lord Chancellor continues to be the custodian of the Great Seal.[7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acta_Diurna)
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> The Clerk of the Crown in Chancery, who is also Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, heads Her Majesty's Crown Office, and is responsible for the affixing of the Great Seal. He is assisted by the Deputy Clerk of the Crown. Day-to-day custody is entrusted to the Clerk of the Chamber, and subordinate staff include a Sealer, and two Scribes to Her Majesty's Crown Office.
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> Section 2 of the Great Seal Act 1884 governs the use of the Great Seal of the Realm:
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> 2 - (1) A warrant under Her Majesty’s Royal Sign Manual, countersigned by the Lord Chancellor, or by one of Her Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State, or by the Lord High Treasurer, or two of the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury, shall be a necessary and sufficient authority for passing any instrument under the Great Seal of the United Kingdom, according to the tenor of such warrant; Provided that any instrument which may now be passed under the Great Seal by the fiat or under the authority or directions of the Lord Chancellor or otherwise without passing through any other office may continue to be passed as heretofore.
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> 2. The Lord Chancellor may from time to time make, and when made revoke and vary, regulations respecting the passing of instruments under the Great Seal of the United Kingdom, and respecting the warrants for that purpose, and the preparation of such instruments and warrants, and every such warrant shall be prepared by the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery.
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> (3) No person shall make or prepare any warrant for passing any instrument under the Great Seal of the United Kingdom, or procure any instrument to be passed under that Seal otherwise than in manner provided by this Act or the Crown Office Act 1877; and any person who acts in contravention of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great\_Seal\_of\_the\_Realm[2]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_of_the_Realm%5B2%5D)
The British monarchy also has a lesser seal:
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> Privy Seal of England
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> The Privy Seal of England can be traced back to the reign of King John. It has been suggested that it was originally the seal that accompanied the person of the Sovereign, while the Great Seal was required to remain in the Chancery. Eventually it became a requirement that almost no non-judicial document could pass under the Great Seal without a warrant from the Privy Seal.[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malet_coup_of_1812) The Barons wrested control of the Privy Seal away from the King by 1312 and it was replaced by the signet as the King's personal seal. The Privy Seal became the heart of a second writing office and clearing house, with warrants being sent to the Chancery and Exchequer under orders made with the Signet.[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malet_coup_of_1812) (By 1400 the Signet was in the custody of the King's Secretary, and as such it is the precursor to the seals of office held by today's Secretaries of State.)[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_of_the_Realm)
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> The Great Seal Act 1884 effectively ended the use of the Privy Seal by providing that it was no longer necessary for any instrument to be passed under the Privy Seal.
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> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_seal>
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You will note that the use of the British royal seals became highly regulated and bureaucratic. This made it difficult for someone to make unauthorized used of the royal seals.
Unauthorized use of the actual royal seals seems to have been the main worry.
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> The last types of high treason defined by the Treason Act 1351 were the forgery of the Great Seal or Privy Seal, the counterfeiting of English (later British) money and the importing of money known to be counterfeit. These offences, however, were reduced to felonies rather than high treasons in 1861[10] and 1832 respectively.[11]
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High\_treason\_in\_the\_United\_Kingdom[3]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_treason_in_the_United_Kingdom%5B3%5D)
So medieval and later governments did consider the possibility that forged government seals could be used on forged government documents and did make that a crime of treason.
**PART TWO**
Medieval forgeries.
But the most common type of forgeries in the middle ages were for the purpose of fraud instead of treason.
As I remember, monasteries usually accumulated various plots of lands (and other rights) which they bought, inherited in people's wills, or were given. And sometimes a monastery might own or claim to own a plot of land (or other right) without having any sort of paperwork to prove it. So monks familiar with the genuine deeds and other papers kept by the monastery might forge fake deeds, wills, and charters granting or confirming the possession of various lands and other rights, including forging the seals attached to those documents.
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> Diplomatics (in American English, and in most anglophone countries), or diplomatic (in British English),[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine)[5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilegium_Maius) is a scholarly discipline centred on the critical analysis of documents: especially, historical documents. It focuses on the conventions, protocols and formulae that have been used by document creators, and uses these to increase understanding of the processes of document creation, of information transmission, and of the relationships between the facts which the documents purport to record and reality.
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> The discipline originally evolved as a tool for studying and determining the authenticity of the official charters and diplomas issued by royal and papal chanceries. It was subsequently appreciated that many of the same underlying principles could be applied to other types of official document and legal instrument, to non-official documents such as private letters, and, most recently, to the metadata of electronic records.
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatics[6]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatics%5B6%5D)
And from my limited knowledge of medieval forgeries I think that most medieval persons wouldn't worry too much about the possibility that somebody would forge a document and their seal decades or centuries after their own death. Most medieval persons wouldn't worry too much about forgeries committed after their own lifetimes that would never affect themselves or their close relatives.
What most medieval persons worried about was someone forging documents in their name during their own lifetimes. Which was apparently rarer than forging documents from long dead people.
The two most famous medieval forgeries are The Donation of Constantine and the *Privalegium Maius* of Austria.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation\_of\_Constantine[4]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine%5B4%5D)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilegium\_Maius[5]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilegium_Maius%5B5%5D)
And in those cases the persons whose documents and possibly seals were forged had been dead for several centuries. Though if they cared about what was good for the Roman Empire they would not have been pleased to learn about those future forged documents.
**PART THREE**
Forging documents of contemporary persons as part of a coup attempt:
What is more relevant to your question is the use of forged documents with contemporary dates, allegedly issued by real contemporary persons, in various plots. For example, forged documents were used the unsuccessful Malet Coup of 1812 against Napoleon, and those documents might have been sealed with fake seals.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malet\_coup\_of\_1812[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malet_coup_of_1812%5B1%5D)
Isaac Doukas Komenos (c.1155-1196/97) Arrrive di Cyprus with falsifed imperial letters naming him the new governor in 1185. He soon made himself the absolute ruler of Cyprus and had himself crowned emperor.
**PART FOUR**
Publication of government actions.
By the 19th century and the Victorian era (1837-1901) literacy was very widespread and there were many newspapers in circulation. And 19th century governments usually published important government decisions and actions in newspapers and other sources.
There were official notices of government actions and other events as early as, for example, the Roman Empire, in the *Acta Diurna* or "Daily Acts" posted in the Roman Forum, allegedly begun by Julius Caesar in 59 BC.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acta\_Diurna[7]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acta_Diurna%5B7%5D)
So if someone forged a document saying the emperor abdicated in favor of Senator No Account and forged the imperial seal on it, and Senator No Account showed the document to an official who hadn't already heard that the abdication had been published in the *Acta Diurna*, the official would be likely to be suspicious of the document no matter how well forged.
In Britain, government actions are publicized in the *London Gazette* since 1666.
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> The London Gazette is published each weekday, except for bank holidays. Notices for the following, among others, are published:
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> Granting of royal assent to bills of the Parliament of the United Kingdom or of the Scottish Parliament
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> The issuance of writs of election when a vacancy occurs in the House of Commons
> Appointments to certain public offices
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> Commissions in the Armed Forces and subsequent promotion of officers
> Corporate and personal insolvency
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> Granting of awards of honours and military medals
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> Changes of names or of coats of arms
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> Royal Proclamations and other Declarations
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And most European culture governments in the 19th century would have used similar methods to publicize their actions.
I think that such methods of publicizing government actions strongly limited what someone could get away with by forging a government seal in a 19th century culture.
So from my knowledge of history it seems that forging of documents and attached seals was sometimes a problem but not very often, and it was much more common to forge the seals and documents of long dead rulers than to forge those of contemporary rulers, so people didn't worry about it as much as the original question supposes.
[Answer]
Keep a copy of the stamped document for comparison.
This is the concept of a receipt, and even some old time carbon copy notebooks had 2 carbon pages where both parties could have a receipt regardless of who receives the official documentation.
You can add to that a OTP (One Time Passcode) such that each time the seal is used a number is associated with that use, and never used again. This will also aid in finding the copy later.
[Answer]
This answer is in part a frame challenge, and in part an answer to a situation where my frame challenge is not applicable.
With the rise of printed and mass-distributed journals (and rapid, reliable transport such as steam ships) such as daily newspapers, advertising royal decrees would serve to act as a cross-check against production of a fraudulent document. If a person produced a sealed decree that appeared genuine, the person examining it could check the various archives of journals recording the issue of royal decrees to verify that *this* decree was in fact journalled, and the wording of the decree if it was in fact made on the date the document says. Hence the historical reduction in severity of the act of forging a royal seal being reduced from high treason to the lesser change of fraud - the *entire document* is independently verifiable.
Now, in certain situations - such as where the extent of the realm is such that rapid transport of data does *not* exist - forged documents *and their accompanying verification journals* could be presented. In such a situation, another means of verification would be invaluable.
To this end, may I present permanently [thermochromic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermochromism) inks. The wax used in the production of official documents would, for example, start out being pale green. When the wax is melted, the permanently thermochromic substances in it would begin to change colour, one from white to red, and the other from green to white. When placed officially, the process would include stirring the molten wax and comparing its colour to the official royal purple colour, and when the colour was right, pouring, stamping and cooling it, fixing its colour. It goes without saying that the thermochromic substances would be a royal secret, and/or very difficult to produce.
If a very recent official document is presented at the fringes of the Empire with its associated attestation journals, it can be verified that the seal is genuine by taking a shaving of the characteristic purple with streaks of red, white and green royal seal, and heating it, and seeing if it changes from largely pale purple with streaks of red, white and green to all pale red or red with white. If it doesn't change, non-thermochromic pigments were used, and the document is verifiably a forgery. If it does change, all is well.
Additionally, since the substances involved are permanently thermochromic, merely obtaining wax from the edges of existing seals will not help a forger - the act of melting the surreptitiously obtained wax will change it from the characteristic purple to something rather redder than is acceptable. Obtaining the right wax would involve either knowing how and being able to produce the necessary thermochromic compounds, or stealing a sample from the heavily guarded stores of official wax, neither of which would be easy for a would-be forger to achieve.
However, since every vessel departing from the centre of the Empire could be expected to be carrying a number of journals for distribution to remote official outposts, and outposts are likely to receive a number of different journals on different vessels that will all agree, the verification process for a recent official document is likely to be longer, and if the content of the document necessitates haste such that follow-up journals cannot be awaited, the procedure should be such that documents of such urgent importance should be accompanied by two official persons known to the verifying authorities at the outpost at which the document might be expected to be presented.
If those persons were also to be subverted, the system has far greater problems than mere forgery.
[Answer]
For centuries (*at least* since [Ben Franklin designed early bank notes](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/arts/design/how-franklin-thwarted-counterfeiters-.html)), the first defense against any sort of counterfeiting has been to introduce a level of complexity that is difficult to duplicate.
When the concern is mechanical duplication, the original needs to be something that a machine can't readily make: smooth, flowing strokes are outside the usual mien of mechanical measurement and machine cutting. High resolution hatching (like the shading on American currency) or other microscale features can defeat photographic attempts, if they can be made finer than the combined resolution of lens and recording medium.
Likely the hardest to counterfeit while still within Victorian technology, however, would be a seal with the above features, plus a variable magnetic field across its surface, and wax with fine particles of iron oxide or similar magnetic compound -- particles which would, as the melted wax solidifies under the (relatively) cold seal, preserve the magnetic pattern of the original seal. A ["reader" glass](https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=light-viewer) containing a [thin layer of viscous liquid holding similar magnetic particles](https://www.teachersource.com/product/653/) could then be easily used to verify the seal on a document without need to have access to the original for this step. The magnetic pattern should be finely detailed as well, ideally complex, and of course unique.
[Answer]
The cryptographic solution is indeed powerful, but it's a bit complicated. There's a much easier and cheaper method for validating authenticity.
Think about what a seal is supposed to do. It imprints a reproducible, verifiable, and uncopyable pattern onto the document. You can do the same thing with a simple fingerprint. The recipient would simply need to have a known-valid fingerprint sample to compare it against, and a magnifying glass for checking fine details. A fingerprint is ink on the page, so it can't be transferred to another document. Place the fingerprint across the seal and any tampering will be evident. There's no practical way to open and re-seal the document while keeping all of those tiny details aligned.
[Answer]
You can't eliminate forgery completely. However, in addition to some other answers,
you can add a significant barrier by
## Using seals on watermarked paper.
After all, it is what *we* do with banknotes.
Watermarking is an *expensive* and delicate process in your world. Similarly to ours, watermarking equipment and *quality* watermarks are near impossible to come by in ordinary life, require several kinds of specialized knowledge, and most skilled artisans who create intricate, recognizable and precise patterns for the [cylinder mould](http://banknoteinfo.net/security-features/watermark/). There is a single printing company which is entrusted with producing watermarked paper for all the needs of the royalty and nobility -- the Mint.
Forged papers can only attempt crude, blotchy watermarked paper, which will never pass even cursory examination. The seal adds additional security -- two-factor authentication in fact -- and lets keep up the tradition of seals.
Contrary to some of the other answers, watermarks are easy to check and even a small amount of training can teach people how to evaluate both the quality and the content of the watermark.
It would be easier to steal a proper seal and a sheet of proper watermarked paper rather than attempt to forge **both** the seal and the paper.
[Answer]
# Coloured glass beads in the seal...
...is the key to a One Time Pad
I will make the following assumptions...
* Empress Alice wishes to send a message to her trusted envoy Baron Bob.
* Alice and Bob will meet some time before the message is sent
* Alice wishes the messages to remain secret until accessed by Bob
* Bob wishes to authenticate that Alice sent it
* Bob wishes to ensure the message has not been tampered with
* Bob's loyalty is absolute, he will not attempt to falsely represent Alice, not betray or reveal secrets
Then it is simple...
## Bob has a [One Time Pad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad) code book
A One Time Pad cipher is pretty much unbreakable in the Victorian era. All Alice needs to do is to tell Bob which page in the code book to use for a particular message.
So, the seal includes 3-6 coloured glass beads (or jewels if you want to get really fancy). These colours represent *digits*: black is 0, clear is 1, blue is 2... and so on, until you have sufficient number of potential digits.
Reading the stones in the seal, Bob uses the number that the digits forms to pick the correct code from his book of One Time Pads.
Once Bob has the correct page, he can decode the enciphered message.
## Strengths
* It ensures secrecy (no-one can read the message without the pad)
* It ensures authenticity (only messages sent by Alice will turn out legible)
* It ensures a tamper proof seal (only messages sent by Alice will turn out legible)
## Weaknesses
* It demands distribution of the one-time-pads
* It demands that Bob keeps the pad safe
* It demands that Bob is trusted, when he wants to carry out the orders of the message
[Answer]
**Cover the seal in gold leaf and have the amount of wax and gold precisely weighed.**
The gold leaf already makes the process more expensive, whereas knowing the density of the entire seal (it would have to be on a ribbon to prevent damaging the document) allows it be easily tested.
However, if the standard amount of gold and wax are leaked, the proportions will have to change.
[Answer]
**Holographic stickers**
Holograms are widely used today to prevent counterfeiting currency. They are difficult to reproduce. Every owner of a seal would ask a specialised manufacturer to prepare a certain number to holographic stickers and every time a seal is used a sticker is added before the wax solidifies.
BTW the stickers are fragile, once embedded in the wax they cannot be removed without breaking.
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[Question]
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Humans meet some distant alien species. They are mutual first contacts. After learning the languages of each other, they begin to share scientific and engineering knowledge with one another, but here's the problem: given our separate lines of evolution and scientific development, we have different systems of units, computer architectures, character encodings, names for the same mathematical concepts, mathematical notation (including default numeric base), etc...
We have to standardize or coordinate- and this question will begin with units of measure. We can certainly use unit conversions, but this becomes a complicated matter when working on e.g. spacecraft, as past human experience has shown that [bad things happen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter) when engineers are using two different units of measure for different components.
The problem here is there are a lot of units and neither species can really strongarm their way into making the other conform to their units (assume both have a well-defined and self-consistent system like SI, so neither is objectively superior). They have to come to a compromise somehow.
**How do two independent interstellar species come to agree on a system of units?**
[Answer]
In all likelihood, there is no forcing one society to adopt the other's system, instead, people would likely adopt a local market approach to measurements. Let's say you are on Earth building spaceship parts that will be used to make ships on Farawaynos, you manufacture to the other society's system of measurements. If they want to sell parts to Earth, they need to manufacture to the metric system of measurements. This is basically the same way that we do things now with the Metric and Imperial systems.
The only way you will probably see a standardisation is if one society is much more influential than the other. If Humans have 20 billion people across 5 planets and the Farawayans have 20 trillion people across thousands of planets, the humans would likely be strong-armed into accepting that the alien societies unit of measurement is more reasonable for standardisation. Or, if one society conquered the other, you'd likely see the loser's system be replaced.
Another option would be for the societies to agree on a new "interstellar" standard that is different than both nation's customary systems. If we use a base-10 metric derived from our own planetary motions and properties of water, and they use a base-6 metric derived from their planetary motions and properties of methane, we might agree that both systems have their flaws and adopt a new base-16 standard derived from the properties of our galaxy's central black hole and hydrogen. Chances are, both societies would be slow to adopt this as THE standard, but if all interplanetary trade becomes based on this, eventually, societies would shift to accept it as the more useful metric.
[Answer]
**Humans have already solved this problem.**
There are many useful universal numbers that can be used. mostly atomic phenomenon such as the mass of X atoms of a particular isotope or natural atomic oscillation. You may want to checkout the current definitions of all [SI units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Base_units). which are defined in such as way as to make them universal. That is they are based on universal constants like the transition states of cesium atoms.
Second: The duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.
Meter: The distance travelled by light in vacuum in
1/299792458 second.
Kilogram: The kilogram is defined by setting the Planck constant h exactly to 6.62607015√ó1034 J‚ãÖs (J = kg‚ãÖm2‚ãÖs2), given the definitions of the metre and the second.
Mole:The amount of substance of exactly 6.02214076√ó1023 elementary entities.
Kelvin: fixed numerical value of the Boltzmann constant k to 1.380649√ó1023 J/K, (J = kg‚ãÖm2/s2), given the definition of the kilogram, the metre and the second.
Ampere:The flow of 1/1.602176634√ó1019
times the elementary charge e per second.
Candela: The luminous intensity, in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 5.4√ó1014 hertz and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian.
The individual numbers can be derived by any civilization you can communicate with. **They will not have the same units but as long as you can communicate with them they can match the units using the universal constants used to define them and use them as common unit of measure.** Alternatively the two species (them and us) can come up with a mutual set of units defined in similar ways, an interstellar system of units.
[Answer]
**This isn't as hard as it might seem**
It would be harder to work out the semiotics than the conversion and/or adoption. After that it's just software. Why?
Because a substantial amount of science involves *relationships.* For example, the value of ùúã is unitless (3.14159...) That relationship would be the same no matter what mathematical base was used, or what standard of length, or even what the alien's definition of base units like meters or "seconds" (base unit of time) are.
Consequently, once you've figured out how to represent ùúã in both languages (and every other unitless relationship number, like the proton-to-electron mass ratio or the Planck constant, ([see more](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionless_physical_constant))), everything else is basically algebra.1
As for whose version of the math/semiotics wins out, that has more to do with who's the bigger gorilla. If we have an empire of ten worlds and they have an empire of 100, the odds are very good that their systems will win out. In other words, we may use our systems internally, but anything that touches both species will also have their system.
Like o.m. said, it's like the U.S. being metric. We hate it, but every can of soda has both ounces and liters printed on the can. Eventually a generation will be born who wonders what an ounce is.... *But not today.* üòÜ
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1 *Or calculus. It's either going to be high-school trivial or PhD hard ... but it'll still just be an issue of software.*
[Answer]
**Why do they need to standardize?**
Humans haven't managed to do it amongst themselves. All they need is a conversion process like we already do for imperial to metric.
[Answer]
* The way the [US is really metric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act). There are the scientific (and legal) units and then there are customary units which are defined in terms of the scientific units.
* The common scientific units are based on [powers of two](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_two) and [naturally-occuring constants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Optical_lattice_clock).
Currently, a second is 9 192 631 770 times a certain transition of a caesium 133 atom. One could make the time unit $2^{32}$ transitions of this or another atom.
[Answer]
They would not "standardize" on a single set of units. Changing the tooling, measurement instruments, slang, intuition, and jargon of two advanced inter-stellar civilizations won't happen.
Instead, like the use of Metric components in Imperial countries, both would exist in parallel. Depending on the market dynamics, they may revolve around conversions of bulk materials (like shipments of grain and ore), or specific items may be made to the other's standards for export or replacement parts (like am M3x1.5-13 machine screw).
Among the few individuals on both sides who directly interact with the others, there will emerge an agreement to use common units. This will probably be determined by which side has more desire for interaction with the other and may not be driven by civilization size or level of economic activity. The emergent solution is unlikely to be the same among every group of mixing individuals.
It will be chaotic and opportunistic, and it will mostly work.
Or, the "civilizations" will struggle for dominance and either ignore each other or go to war.
[Answer]
They might simply choose to use [Planck units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units), which are all ratios of various physical constants of nature (like the speed of light and planck's constant), which implies that if you express these constants of physics in terms of these units, they all have a numerical value of 1--for example, in these units the speed of light is 1 (planck length)/(planck time), and Planck's constant is 1 (planck mass)\*(planck length^2)/(planck time).
The disadvantage of these units is that ordinary human-scale phenomena will have huge values, for example 10^35 planck lengths is about 1.6 meters and 10^44 planck times is about 5.4 seconds, but you could just invent special names for large multiples, for example 1 YGlengths could be defined as 10^33 plank lengths (where Y and G stand for [yotta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta-) and [giga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga-)) which would be about 1.6 centimeters, and 1 YZtimes (where Y and Z stand for yotta and [zetta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zetta-)) could be defined as 10^45 planck times or about 54 seconds.
edit: Apparently Planck units are not the only possible system of units defined in terms of physical constants though, see various others on wikipedia's [natural units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units) page.
[Answer]
Basically, the bigger economy will win. (Usually. Exceptions apply.)
First, you get commercial exchange between the two markets, simply because that ramps up faster than any technological cooperation.
Now you don't have any strong-arming; it's just that the larger economy is usually not too interested in dealing with the specifics of the smaller economy, so the smaller economy will be faster to adopt standards and regulations.
When the high end of the power structure finally manage to start technological cooperation, the markets have already agreed. Without any strong-arming involved, actually - though strong-arming can speed up the process.
Obviously, there are exceptions.
An alien race may not have an economy like we know it, though that would be a pretty different story than "let's build a spaceship together".
Or the aliens may not have standardized something that the humans did, but now that they see the benefits, they want a standard as well - that's the situation where the flow of regulations is independent of market size, or military/political power (heck, the military people usually prefer standards simply because things get much cheaper for them).
One side may intentionally make life difficult for the other. E.g. when technology levels are to wildly different that the advanced side does not want to share anything at all. Sure we can do cooperation, but the warp drive will be sealed off, and we intentionally use our own, incompatible measurement systems (and standards! never forget the destructive power of incompatible standards!) so that your attempts as reverse engineering will be that much harder... er I meant to say, you are not yet mature enough to wield the power of Warp Flight.
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This would actually happen before the language barrier is broken. Math is a universal language and regardless of bases, any creature that has developed language and mathmatical skill to be considered intelligent will also be able to recognize certain mathmatical constants. For example, First Contact is likely not to be an exchange of words, but numbers. One of the first messages used by SETI was a series of pulses that cycled over the first 20\* prime numbers. This is because the prime numbers are a mathmatical constant. No matter what you call your number 7, it's a prime number... even if it's 10 because you use a base 6 counting system, it is still the 4th Prime Number in the cycle (2, 3, 5, 7...) and is still the number that is one greater than 6 and one less than 8. Similarly, Binary, which is a base 2 counting system, is still going to find it's value for the base 10 7 (0000 0111) and it is still greater than 6 (0000 0110) and less than 8 (0000 1000).
The other reason this was used is because the order does not naturally occur in any phenomena. An intelligent being would be able to pick up the signal as something more important that wasn't just randomly made, but intelligently constructed and transmitted. It's random enough that if you weren't looking at it it would disappear, but patterned enough that if you understood math, you would get it right away.
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They keep their units. Just like the meter is based on the circumference of the earth they have a similar unit of measure based on their planet. So you use meters on earth and zeters (or whatever alien measurement) on their planet.
If you need to use units for interstellar travel or collaborative projects between the species you use fundamental constants like planck length, the only true units.
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Its important to note that there is a human standard called the Gauge Block. This would be the basis of any communication of industrial measurements to said aliens if we wished them to produce goods to our specifications. Conversely it would be appropriate to assume that the aliens, being space faring, would have a similar system of their own. There it becomes the mere question of which system are you using, and then you can tool to that system.
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> Gauge blocks are the main means of length standardization used by industry.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block>
This is how humans can specify a certain length in one country and assume those in another will produce it exactly to specification. Both sides would own a gauge block, or a gauge.
The blocks are so flat, and precise that putting two of them together makes them almost inseparable by pulling, and must be slide apart.
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> An important feature of gauge blocks is that they can be joined
> together with very little dimensional uncertainty. The blocks are
> joined by a sliding process called wringing, which causes their
> ultra-flat surfaces to cling together.
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The easiest way to do so is to standardize on universe-invariant measurements - for example, mass is standardized on the mass of the proton, length is standardized on the wavelength of the radiation emitted by a particular electron transition in an atomic orbital (or perhaps on Planck Length), and time is standardized on light travelling in vacuum across the length standard (or perhaps Planck Time), electrical charge is standardized on the charge of the proton/electron. Everything else can be derived from those measurements.
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**It has occurred to me** that were to get substantial evidence we lived in a infinitely large and old multiverse, the effects on religions would be massive.
**A incredibly** large number of religions are based on the idea of a deity or deities creating everything that exists. However while our universe would still be finite the newly discovered multiverse never even had a beginning in this scenario.
**The evidence** for the newly discovered multiverse is substantial, denying it would be like denying relativity. We can directly observe other universes with new technology, though we can't see anything above the atomic level, however this is still sufficient to figure out how their physical laws differ. Scientists haven't found any universes that are hypothesized to be very similar to to our own, but they can prove that while choosing which new universes to look at is random, the multiverse is infinite and had no beginning as thus universes just like our own are almost certainly infinite in number.
**Should in real-life** we discover evidence that suggests a infinite multiverse it is unlikely the evidence will be *quite* this damning. This scenario is designed to make it clear, that in this scenario the people who deny the evidence for this multiverse are like solipsists in that they would have to deny the ability to trust their senses and thus other equivalent claims like the fact objects fall.
**What would be the effect of this evidence?:** Both initially in the first few months when the evidence wasn't undeniable, and after a year or more once the evidence can't be plausibly refuted. I would like answers both for what it would mean to religious individuals, and how religious organizations would react as time progressed, the long term effects on religion will be highly speculative, so I encourage most of the detail to be on the effects in the first few decades.
**The technology itself** is irrelevant and is assumed to be of very little actual use. This question is primarily concerned with the reactions religions might have to evidence that undermines one of their most vital tenets, though certain religions wouldn't be affected very much, because existence being eternal and infinite wouldn't run counter to them necessarily. I also don't see a lot of religions liking the idea of redefining their god to be finite and for admitting humans are infinitely insignificant cosmically.
**I don't exactly** see this as being a death-blow to religion, with it only affecting some religions and potentially drawing people to other religions both old, and to some of the religious sects that would be produced by this.
And of course one only need look at the number of creationists to see how well religion can deny that which is utterly undeniable, the fact evidence in this situation is even more damning than that for evolution, likely won't make a whole lot of difference to some religious groups.
Edit: The fact the multiverse is infinite and eternal wasn't postulated, it was confirmed by direct observations, I'm not sure what those observations would have to be but that is irrelevant, what's important is that you couldn't just look at the evidence another way, to deny it being eternal and infinite means rejecting the evidence altogether.
Edit 2: Well I understand that some people have problems with whether observations that could prove the assumptions in the question may be impossible. But even if they are impossible, in the scenario they just turn out to be how the universe is even if it doesn't necessarily make sense.
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I don't think just discovering that we're part of a multiverse will make much of difference to religion. You would have to discover a lot of details about the multiverse to answer questions better than religions currently do. I think there's still plenty of room for Gods even if a multiverse exists. For example, who created the multiverse? Maybe God could live outside of our universe in the multiverse?
Bear in mind religions don't just answer questions about how we were created, but also about how we should live our lives. Many people are drawn to religion because it gives them rules and order, knowing that there's a multiverse does not do this!
If you look at history you will notice that religion adapts it's philosophy according to the times. I think there will be plenty of wiggle room for religious people to keep justifying their believes if we discover there is multiverse.
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Absolutely nothing would change. Many Christians still believe the earth is 6,000 years old, evolution doesn't happen, and we're not warming the earth. You're somehow imagining more convincing proof for the multiverse theory than for the fact the earth is older than the Mesopotamian civilization?
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What constitutes creation is a big deal here. "God created the Heavens and the Earth" - Creation means organization. Yes many believe that he created everything out of nothing, but unless the multiverse (and especially our dimension part of it) existed forever *in it's current form* there still leaves room for a creator.
In fact, come to think of it, I don't think that a *proven* infinite timeline would be a detriment to the creation story at all. God is commonly believed to be completely outside time, without beginning or end, who else could create something infinite?
The whole idea of multiverses and infinite time and dimension are perfectly suited to religion, with God as a being transcending those dimensions, with invisible spiritual planes (heaven, hell, purgatory what have you). Concepts like this will only encourage religion.
The people who will lose there faith over this lose it only because they change the way they view the world, shifting to cold hard science over religious experiences. It is the same for any other scientific discovery/theory, evolution, the big bang, etc. It's not that those things are at all incompatible with religion, it's because by shifting to scientific based answers they are changing their value system.
The whole idea of physics ever disproving religion in the minds of the religious is ridiculous. The farther to the right a science is in XKCDs field purity comic, the less likely it is to convince someone there is no God. This is coming from someone very religious, and I can tell you that the stuff on the left bothers me sometimes, while the stuff on the right is perfectly in line with my religious views.
<https://xkcd.com/435/>
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I think that very little would actually change for religion. Consider the current battle over Evolution. The Priesthood of Science, the vocal teachers of science as a source of truth, already proclaim "Evolution is true." They have nowhere more emphatic to go, so if one was to prove an infinite multiverse, they could be no louder. They would simply proclaim "The Multiverse is true."
Accordingly, religion would be expected to change no more than it has had to to deal with evolution. Very few can read the scientific papers that would discern the difference between today's epistemological statement, "the evolution model fits the observed data better than other theories," and a very ontological, "the multiverse **is** infinite." Accordingly, few would treat the situation differently. **Everyone would go on living their lives, just as they always have, with the same arguments - only the names have changed.**
Oh, except for [Philosophy StackExchange](http://philosophy.stackexchange.com). They'd flip out over there! Questions would spill in from all over the world asking Philsophy SE to use the new ontologically proven multiverse to prove that their religion was right all along!
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For some religions, this would actually be a boost for their belief system. Hindus who believe in an eternal cycle of creation and rebirth would have proof that their religion was based on a real and verifiable fact, for example.
The existence of a multiverse could also be made to fit into the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), as mentioned by wedstrom and Bug J., for example.
And there are lots of people who believe or deny things even in the face of contrary evidence (9/11 "truthers", Hollow Earth. the "Face on Mars", young Earth creationism/evolution (depending on what side of the fence you are on), the Apollo Moon landing etc.), so the existence of a Multiverse will simply not register on their belief system(s).
Finally, I think you are seeing science and religion as a zero sum "either/or" proposition. Consider that most of the giants who developed science during the Age of Enlightenment were in fact deeply religious men, and that science is a system to understand the "how" of things while religion is a system to understand the "why". There is no reason that the two cannot be complimentary for most people.
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I'm not sure of the etiquette for suggesting that part of your scenario might well be impossible, so I'll put it at the end of my answer, but I think there is good reason to believe that no multiverse could possibly be eternal in the past.
That said, I think many religions would be perfectly fine with the discovery either that the universe is eternal in the past, or that the universe is part of a past-eternal multiverse. Many individual people may change their religious beliefs, but the religions themselves will likely still stand. They will either not particularly care whether the universe was created, or they might hold that the universe was created despite being eternal.
# Not really caring
As I mentioned in [my answer to a question about religion in a world with backwards time travel](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17955/is-religion-possible-in-a-society-where-backwards-time-travel-exists/17976#17976), many religions *do not* rely on claims about specific events in the past, including the origin of the universe. These religions either don't make the claims at all (non-dogmatic "philosophy of life" religions), or they modify the claims to fit the current view of the facts (while medieval Catholics may have considered the Big Bang a weird theory, it's now officially sanctioned by the church as the method by which God created the universe).
Many holy writings originating from the Ancient Near East can easily be interpreted as describing a past-eternal universe. Creation myths [often describe a habitable world being formed from chaotic (but already present) material](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth); many people consider the Genesis story to be of this form. If the universe were proven to be past-eternal, many believers will have to change how they interpret their scriptures, but the scriptures won't have been proven wrong.
# God created a past-eternal universe
The [Omphalos Hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis) states that perhaps God created the universe recently, but with the appearance of billions of years of age. Using something like an extreme version of this hypothesis, one could maybe say that at some time in the past the universe was created with the *appearance* of past eternality.
In fact, someone who believes in a god who is "outside of" time, and also holds a [B-Theory of time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-theory_of_time) (that is, this person considers the flow of time to be an "illusion", and past, present, and future are all equally real), could reasonably believe that the god created the entire space/time manifold that we call the [uni|multi]verse, "all at once" in a sense. There are, of course, quite reasonable philosophical objections to this viewpoint, but as there are many B-theorists in the world, and many believers in a transcendent god, many people probably already hold this view. Many believers in transcendent gods would likely just add B-Theory of time to their belief collection if the [uni|multi]verse were proven eternal.
### Nitpick: Possibility of an eternal universe
I don't think it's entirely apparent that a eternal-in-time universe is even logically possible. This sort of comes down to the problem of ["Actual infinity"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actual_infinity), the philosophical disagreement over whether an infinity can truly exist. While this problem classically applied primarily to questions like "Do the natural numbers exist?", it has also been applied to the age of the universe.
I can not imagine what sort of physical evidence could be reasonably expected to resolve this issue (to demonstrate that not only *can* an actual infinity exist, but that one *does*). Many philosophers (especially philosophers who hold religious views) will see the statement "The multiverse has an infinite past" as belonging in the same category as "my nephew is a married bachelor". Physical evidence (particularly *theories* based on physical evidence) cannot demonstrate the truth of a statement that is logically impossible.
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Id say it does not counter for example the essence of Christian faith at all. There are plenty of stories that there are both different levels of Heaven and "Hell".
Id say the discovery of a finite or infinite multiverse would rather give me more faith in God. And the son. :-)
Jesus said: "My kingdom is not of this world",
(but of another 'verse right ? )
And "I go away to prepare place for thee".
"I have other flocks that are not of this fold".
Mod me down if you like, but I cant say anything but a multiverse makes the stories of an existing Heaven more credible..
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Since there are degrees of infinity, I would imagine some theologian would postulate there is a being of an even greater magnitude of infinity than the multiverse. Some would even claim it is necessary as how could you have an infinite multiverse if someone more infinite didn't make it, after all many people already believe that the universe requires a creator but don't seem very concerned about why the creator doesn't also appear to need a creator.
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I once wrote a story in which the deleterious effect of a proven multiverse on religion was mentioned in passing - but the problem didn't relate to the multiverse being infinite in age or size (as others have already said, that is easily assimilated), but on the realisations that
* a multiverse makes moral decision pointless. Whatever good act you struggle to do, some other "you" does the opposite. In fact infinite versions of "you" do all possible variations of good and evil.
* looking specifically at religion, in a multiverse that contains infinite versions of historical religious figures such as Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha, their acts and teachings vary infinitely, including taking directions that real-world Christians, Muslims and Buddhists would consider evil.
Something like this is described in Larry Niven's memorable short story "All the Myriad Ways". In that story Niven suggests that the effect would be widespread depression and suicides, along with more crimes committed for kicks as people feeling a random sadistic impulse say to themselves "Versions of me *will* do it whatever 'I' do. So why not *this* version of me?"
It should not be forgotten that the effect of a proven multiverse "on religion" will not stop there. In turn the changes in religious belief will bounce back to affect multiverse-aware society. It might be possible\* for religions to push back against widespread despair (and perceptions of their own irrelevance) by concentrating on teachings of personal morality and salvation after death for THIS version of "you". Even in our world, religions and religious people are generally much more practically interested in questions of day-to-day good and evil human behaviour than in their beliefs about creation.
\*Well, *ex hypothesi* it would be not just possible but inevitable, as would all other possibilities.
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Any idea that fundamentally changes religion is generally rejected by religion and religious leaders based off the fact that these individuals generally value Ethos (Authority of the Source of information) over Logos (the actual rationale behind the argument being made). The value of their religious texts outweighs science until the belief is widely popular, and undeniable.
For example, it was thought that the revelation of the sun as the center of the solar system (instead of the earth) would cause dramatic fallout for religious groups, and while there was backlash, it did not make any drastic difference to established religious groups.
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I think that Buddhists already believe something like this is the case, so they especially would be unaffected.
As for the other religions, i don't think they would be affected too much either. Any evidence can be ignored if it doesn't fit one's beliefs. Young earth creationists are a great example of this. If their theories were true, we wouldn't be able to see any celestial objects that are more than 6000 light years away. But as you can see, for people with strong beliefs the evidence doesn't matter.
Other than simply ignoring the evidence, religious people could claim that God is infinite and that this does not clash with their beliefs. And as always when new scientific evidence arises, they would retroactively find biblical passages that agree with it through some kind of a metaphor.
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"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." –Alan Watts[1]
Buddhism uses a similar image to describe the interconnectedness of all phenomena. It is called Indra's Net. When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net>
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Religion would both adapt, as others have pointed out, and also it would collapse completely, depending on which part of the mulitverse you are in.
I would ask this in comments but I mostly lurk and haven't answered any questions on Worldbuilding SE yet. Could you refine the question as there literally infinite valid answers?
Also 'because multiverse' would replace 'because magic' on many internet forums (in most universes).
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I agree that an infinitely old and large universe would have a devastating effect on religion.
For example, the strongly held belief of 'Cause and Effect' would be nullified - after all, a universe that was never created could never have a cause!
As such believers of scientism would have to reconcile their beliefs to scientific fact. Maybe they should convert to a religion that professes an infinitely old, wise and large deity?
Or not.
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Regarding to all the comments you gave so far and given the restrictions mentioned in your OP the answer is pretty simple and it looks you have chosen that already for you and just want to be confirmed.
The fact that you say something is observable and therefor given is ok.
So in which way it happens is irrelevant, I aggree to that. But one strong point given by zfrisch on an answer is:
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> The problem is that, even if we were able to manage to prove that we were in a multiverse, most people wouldn't be smart enough to understand how that would imply their religion is incorrect. When part of your religious rhetoric is to believe without proof or logic(faith), you can't really do a whole lot to sway those people with science.
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Where you counter ~Thats why this proof is puplicated in a way so everyone gets it~ (stated in my own words)
So this is the final knock out!
given it is observable that it is infinite and all religions rely on some one that had to be first, so there cant be anything infinite excepting him self. AND given that this fact is presented in a way that everyone udnerstands in what way that affects his religion. so everyone understands why it is prooved that his religion can't be true.
given this limitations. (what simply are the limitations you give in collection of OP and different comments)
Then religion is simply dead. In the moment everyone knows that religion is wrong and everyone knows that everyone else knows aswell. Then religion is simply dead and there is nothing else you will get as answer for it.
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I just thought, taking as an example Catholicism, it has evolved its doctrines through time (encyclicals, ecumenical councils), though never incorporating new concepts brought about by science. Actually, Christianism (under which Catholicism is) has fragmented so much it would be mind boggling just to think of how it got fragmented that way, of course influenced by pockets of societies (borne by culture) in which it is thriving. Generations of people come and go, some things forgotten, some held on to, some replaced by something else. I myself am in a society I can describe as living in a duality - people recognize science and understand and believe (shucks, that word in itself is a can of worms in this context but it seems to be the best way to describe it) in it, yet deeply religious, never feeling conflicts in how they perceive life. Whether that duality is just for show or not, it just is there.
I do believe though humans will further evolve in intellect and emotion some time, forgetting the concept that we presently call "religion"
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With many religions it would help! Aren't heaven and hell held to be in sort of parallel universes? (e.g. you can't dig to hell, or fly a rocket to heaven)
The religious people would simply say, "Yes I know, we've been telling you that for years!"
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I don't see most Religions changing at all through such a discovery, even if they openly accept everything about it.
The main point is that the interpretation of the most gods allmightiness would be easily shifted from creating everything in our universe to creating the multiverse and everything in it.
The missing "startpoint" of the multiverse is no problem, too, as this could easily shifted to be misinterpreted by humans as no start point in time but a start point in exiastance or such, and thus jump away every time science would prove it wrong.
So in short those religions who don't want to change would not change.
On the other hand many soiritual oriented people would probably (and correctly given the nature of an infinite multiverse) believe to find a physical version of their god's reals as one of the many universes. The aboriginis dreamworld, christians paradise or norse valhalla come to mind.
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Just because the uni/multiverse would not have a *temporal* beginning doesn't mean it wouldn't have a beginning of some sort. The world can still *proceed from* something other/greater than it even if this is not evident within the space/time manifold we experience.
A lot of individuals either lose their faith or resort to denial in the face of scientific revelation of course. But really it seems to me that when a scientific discovery "disproves" or makes "less room for" God, it only really damages worldviews that fail to consider how complete the transcendence of God is.
It seems to me that the responsible thing for a religious group to do is develop a robust theology that goes beyond whatever minimums for transcendence are put in place by modern science, and properly asserts an all-powerful, completely *other* god. My (limited) understanding is that a rich tradituion of robust theology has existed for many centuries within at least the Christian church and presumably with other religions as well (although fundamentalists may choose to ignore it).
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Well, an easy cop-out would be to note that our time is not god's time, and therefore what is an infinite time for us may well be a finite time for god. Thus god can have created the universe at what *to us* is an infinite time ago.
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The necessary course of action depends solely on **how accessible** are the other universes. **How universes behave should also be considered.**
### Inaccessible Alternate Universes
If you know something is most probably true somewhere else, but have no way of knowing, then you have nothing to worry about how true that something is, not even where that something is. You simply have to stop caring, because you can't do anything. Really, you can't affect them and they can't affect you. Let each other be for each other's sake. If you can't make peace with that, declare war on the compartmentalized multiverse find out how to have access.
### Accessible Alternate Universes
This is the problem. There are other universes, and there are a lot of ways we can affect them. Just remember they can affect us too. The ultimate problem here is defining the rules of the multiverse, so that we'll know if we can (and then how to) circumvent them.
## Some Types of Access (and possible courses of action based on each)
**1. Unlimited Parallel Universes: Our universe exists *alongside countless* others**
This means that the cosmos is truly infinite. We can be anything, anyone, anywhere, rules does not really exist. Order comes after chaos. God is also Satan, somehow. Do whatever you like, or not. Your choice. Anarchy reigns.
**2. Limited Parallel Universes: Our universe exists *alongside countable* others**
The cosmos is not infinite, but there are a lot more within it. This means rules between universes can be set to the bare minimum of not destroying each other. Universes are like people. Treat each other with respect and caution, should you choose to access another and still desire to safely return to your own.
**3. Possible Universes: Our universe exists *with* others**
The multiverse obeys probability and statistics, and some universes receive the anthropic bias of being the best among the rest, wherein the worst ones are eliminated by the best or some shit. Religion now, is to become the best universe, whatever that means.
**4. Altered Universes: Other universes are *not really* universes**
The laws of physics in other universes are not the same as with ours. We are not allowed to exist there as we exist here. We can go there, but we need interuniversal law translation devices. Religion now, is to create the best such device, and conquer all the others.
*Note that all some of these types might actually be just one, or that the ones listed here are just what I can extemporaneously design.*
## Summary
Like all memetic structures, religion is alive. Depending on how one universe can affect another and how the meta-universe can affect all universes, religion shall adapt and evolve accordingly for it to survive.
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It's an extremely common trope in Role Playing Games (RPG's) for wandering monsters to carry lootable currency (gold, moolah, dinero, big ones, cash, large, green, etc.).
Now, it makes sense that *non-human* intelligent creatures such as orcs, trolls, elves, dwarves, gnomes, fey, Crab People, Rigellians, or small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri could find it helpful and useful to possess small amounts of human currency to use in their encounters with humans, so it makes sense for such creatures to drop that currency upon being defeated. These creatures generally are intelligent enough to understand what economies are and how to participate in one. What doesn't make sense, though, is why *wild* creatures also carry cash.
Why would *wild* creatures in a fantasy role playing universe, such as bears, bats, tigers, sharks, or flatworms, regularly carry currency to the extent that adventurers would see them as a reliable source of dough? Reasons could relate to an in-universe fantasy or science fiction conceit, but should make sense within that context rather than be little more than "that's just how it is". Creatures that are intelligent enough to participate in an economy, such as orcs or trolls, don't count since a reason already exists for them to hoard an adventurer's favored currency. The question is why creatures such as bears that *are not* sophisticated enough to participate in an economy nonetheless regularly carry currency from that economy.
This question occurred to me when I was playing a role-playing video game and realized that I was gathering cash by literally killing *bugs and rodents* and then resetting them by leaving the screen so I could kill and loot them all over again, and that half of the games I had played similarly provided a steady income stream for killing bugs and rodents. None of these games provided any *in-universe* reason for these creatures carrying money.
To be clear, I am asking for *in-universe* reasons for wild creatures carrying money. Out-of-universe, most games that follow this trope do it in order to allow the player an easy but tedious way to make enough money to buy the items they need to achieve the next game checkpoint (e.g. I can't afford the 100 Spacebucks price to buy the hyperspace regulator I need to warp to Regulus, but I know that about one third of mice in the sewers of Spaceport Alpha drop 1-2 Spacebucks each. I'm going rodent hunting!).
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You kill the creature, you sell its fur/hide/meat/whatever and that turns into money.
Thanks to the real time service of RPGazon, you don't need to reach the closest village to monetize the bounty, it's immediately monetized and cashed into your wallet.
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Shiny! Give me the shiny! Real-world crow behavior of collecting shiny things simply because they are shiny is simply incredibly prevalent in RPG monster behavior.
The real question is why there is enough cash laying around in caves and forests for monsters to perform the initial collection. I doubt it's because they've managed to kill enough adventurers and collect it off their corpses, it has to be something environmental that produces specie in already-struck coin form.
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## Your animals are not preys, they're predators and they need lures!
The player is almost always a legend, so killing monster is an easy task for them. After all, when you're the hero of the old tales carrying the XP-Scalibur sword, nothing should frighten you. But what about the others, the common adventurer? **For most people -and especially rookies-, even one single giant rat is big trouble**. This is the reason villagers ask for specialist guilds to help, and the reason why the animals want money : it's the perfect bait.
**Indeed, they learned one way or another that money attracts all sorts of tasty adventurers**. Perhaps they think it's the gold smell, perhaps they saw another animal use it as bait, in any case it's very effective to attract greedy adventurers and hunt them. And they make a very nutritive food, although a bit iron crispy at times.
**But why don't they pick up the armor or sword that often instead? What sets money apart from other pieces of valuable equipment? It's simple, you can easily scale the bait to the prey you're chasing.** You can pick the amount you need, and you don't need to estimate the price of the item either, just have to check the size and color of the heap. You're a bear? Take enough to fill your paw in order to attract the mid-level adventurers. You're a dragon? Fill in a cave with some normal hunting before, then just let the crowds of snacks in your new dining room. In the end, why should you seek your meal when you can just let it come to you?
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**Reverse the Causality**
It's not that wild creatures drop money, it's that people use money from what wild creatures drop. Now, obviously, this doesn't work so well for a currency which is explicitly gold coins, but most JRPGs use some fictional stand in i.e. gald, gol, gil, etc. which doesn't necessarily mean gold.
Think of it like this - monster killing is usually a necessary job in fantasy worlds given that villagers can easily be killed by the evil ratmen or what have you, so adventuring needs to be a profession. Now, instead of a bounty system or anything of that nature, the currency was shifted to be a little more direct - the animal corpses *themselves* are the currency. This was shortened, and now just an animal token (i.e. bone fragment or some unique and easily preserved body part) are used as currency. This is especially easy as many fantasy creatures have fantastical design elements, i.e. scales, which lend themselves toward money.
Now, an generatable money supply is usually a problem from an economic standpoint, but this is a commodity currency, not a fiat one. The money, given that its monster parts, can also be used physically - making weapons, for instance, so you don't have runaway inflation problems.
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# Stomachs.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TCrQy.jpg)
These are vicious animals, preying on the population. There is no shortage of giant rats and cockroaches that are willing to swallow something shiny and just a little larger than what they can conveniently pass on while consuming that indentured servant who disappeared on his way to town to buy a love potion. This means that poor and determined adventurers, desperately willing to do a *Jaws* style autopsy on every critter they kill, inevitably find some coins and other valuables here and there. Of course, some things do pass out, but the adventurers probably are checking the nearby poo piles while you're busy looking at the glowing +2 on the screen.
Yes, I would have given L. Dutch's answer if he hadn't beaten me to it, and said they carry wallets full of bear gall bladders and shark fins, but in a classically gold-rich gaming environment there ought to be enough literal coins around to sustain this.
(Photo: [Radiopedia](https://radiopaedia.org/cases/ingested-coin-1))
[Answer]
**Because a wish made it so:**
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Long time ago, the very old, but once worldly famous thief Gold Dinero Smith, was in the middle of his morning stroll around the city while watching the children of the shadows, the wannabe thiefs of tomorrow, perform their daily practices and activities around the populace.
Some kids were caught, others took a beating and some were starved or stabbed corpses laying in the gutter waiting to be removed. Sorrow filled the old thief´s heart as he saw for the thousandth time that nothing ever changes for those who took the path of shadows, willingly or not.
It was foolish and certainly to many a waste of a perfect opportunity, but to Gold Dinero it was simply a wish for change. He grasped the stone set in the necklace around his neck, a gift gained when he stole a goddess's favor.
The old thief felt clumsy little hands relieving him of his many coin bags that he usually carried for that very reason. Taking a seat on an empty crate that complained louder than his joints he inhaled for the last time and saw a world where every act of sucessful thievery however small would be justly rewarded.
[Answer]
## Money is magic and visa versa
Why don’t magicians just summon money or gold coins? Because the magic needed to make the coins is the same cost as the magic, that is also why your magicians need gold, the magic in the money is consumed and the money disintegrates once the casting is done. When creatures die their bodies materialize an amount of money equal to their latent in expended magic. That magic is greater in more powerful things, and smaller in weaker things.
[Answer]
## Fundamental cash particles accumulate in the food chain
You're stopping too early. Look at the bugs, with their single coin, the tiny gnats with their centimes, and the microbes, with their millionths and billionths of a penny.
You see, the out of universe reason for the in game universe is to generate cash. That ethos so pervades the in game universe that every animate creature has just a little cash.
In the same way that every microbe exerts gravity in our world, they have a small amount of cash in theirs. When the small enough, the fundamental particles that constitute this cash reside in an uncollapsed quantum state; the cash fields sum additively inside a larger creature's microbiome and collapse when observed by a player. After this, the coins/GP/gil are normal macro scale objects and subject to normal money conventions.
Now, you may be wondering about conservation of cash. There is plenty of cash to go around for a long time, especially because sometimes cash is transformed into potions by Conservation Officers, otherwise known as shopkeepers. When drunk, the observed coins return to being unobserved, uncollapsed cash. All the same, in the long term, an imbalance called Charge builds up.
This is safely dissipated during player-unobserved episodes of in game economies revolving around NFTs, or collatoralised sub prime mortgages, or tulips, which result in mass death of the characters involved and the safe dissipation of the cashons back into the fabric of the in game universe.
The greedier the developer, the stronger the propensity for cash to spontaneously aggregate; hence loot boxes.
[Answer]
I don't know why the critters in your game or stories wander around carrying gold, but Robert Heinlein provided a possible explanation in [*Glory Road*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Road).
One of the obstacles that Star, Oscar, and Rufo have to overcome is the "Horned Ghosts." These are essentially non-intelligent minotaur type (and sized) creatures. Horned ghosts have a gizzard (like chickens and other birds) to help digest their food. Like the birds, they have to fill this gizzard with small stones as grit to grind the food. Unlike birds, horned ghosts use only gold in their gizzards. Old adult horned ghosts may have as much as 20 to 30 pounds of gold in their gizzards.
Maybe the critters in the games you've played and the stories you've read don't really carry cash around with them. Rather, they have some valuable material in their substance (gold, pelts, mother of pearl, etc.) and the games just convert the value straight to cash to simplify things.
Say, like a beaver. Beaver pelts were used as trade goods in the early days of Canada and the USA. You are out there in the forest and trap beaver which you can then take to a trading post to exchange the pelts for money or materials (food, weapons, etc.)
Your games just elide that step of going to the trading post and award you the cash value of the critters straight away to simplify the game play.
[Answer]
The creature has no use for money. The poor schmuck it ate earlier, whose remain you found in its stomach while harvesting it for materials, definitely did have a use for money. Stomach acids aren't strong enough to digest metal coins or the linen/cotten that makes up paper money.
[Answer]
## The clay used to shape life had some gold dust in it and thus...
When god or the gods shaped clay to create all life, the dust particles in the clay were forever linked to the breath of life and now EVERY creature CRAVES gold as it extends their life span and energy.
Either by wearing gold ornaments or consuming them, the touch of gold makes you live longer and also make you stronger and more powerfull.
Stronger animals will devour the smaller ones for the gold boost they will accquire and this also makes possible for stronger, larger enemies that when slayed will give a more substantious reward.
[Answer]
>
> Why would wild creatures in a fantasy role playing universe, such as bears, bats, tigers, sharks, or flatworms, regularly carry currency to the extent that adventurers would see them as a reliable source of dough?
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The short answer is that this is just how the System works.
Let me explain. (In story form, because... well, I'm bored, that's why.)
Magic in the most raw, unstructured form is highly chaotic and has a tendency to destroy things. Imagine a universe like our own where the laws of physics are the only thing that keeps everything running smoothly. Something happens to introduce magic into the world and things start breaking down. Unless something is done to curb the effects of magic the world, and everything on it, are doomed. For example if the contamination extends as far as our sun then it only takes a minor disruption to cause a catastrophic event - a coronal mass ejection would be sufficient, but all it takes is a very small change in the strong nuclear force to make our sun either collapse or explode... or both.
Fortunately a group of scientists discover ways to manipulate magic and do useful things with it. Eventually they figure out a way to create a magic framework that takes raw magic and channels it in various ways. They can't just make it disappear, it can't be stored (because eventually boom, that's why), it has to be actively expended. They work on the problem for a few years and come up with the System: a magical framework that converts raw magic and channels that power into safe and occasionally useful outlets.
Over time (for reasons that only a few of the major gods currently are aware of) the amount of raw magic contaminating the planet increases. The System has had to grow to handle larger amounts of power and provide more outlets for that power. The engineers who created the System added all sorts of extras to the system, but when they found a way to connect the System to everyone they figured out fairly quickly that this would be a good long-term solution. They tinkered a bit and came up with some additions to the System that let everyone use some of the excess power to improve their lives. They added mechanics for all sorts of things to encourage people to burn the processed Mana more effectively: skills, spells, abilities and even Divinity. Anything that would (relatively) safely consume the power before it could cause problems.
Of course the engineers, being human, became the first gods of the setting. What's the point of creating a cosmic power machine if you're not going to get to use it, am I right? A few of them kept working on the System, but the rest mostly got drunk on the power and just started playing.
Each time the power levels reach a certain threshold the current group of System Lords tinkers some more and adds more things to either directly use the power or encourage the morals to use more of it. Monster spawns were an early favorite, especially since the monsters had useful parts that could be harvested and use for alchemy and crafting.
Dungeons were another innovation that lead to a major leap in power utilization. Originally a safety feature to create mana orbs in areas of dangerously high mana concentration, it was eventually determined that these orbs were themselves quite dangerous if not drained and would continue to absorb mana until they exploded. The Dungeon subsystem was added to encapsulate these cores and drain their power by creating subspaces populated with created monsters, and valueable items to lure people to the Dungeon. If a Dungeon isn't cleared often enough the core becomes dangerously overloaded until it has to dump power by creating and releasing large quantities of monsters - a bad thing for anyone living nearby.
Seeing how Dungeons worked so well, the System Lords decided to extend some aspects of it to the rest of the world. Specifically, loot drops. Hunting creatures for their meat, hides and other body parts is all well and good, but when you can get actual money and items right off the corpse? Almost overnight loot drops became the most successful addition to the System in terms of motivation. Adventurer's guilds, previously only found near Dungeons, sprang up all over the place. Hordes of adventurers sallied forth in search of the most awesome loot... ok, mostly for drinking money and enough cash to upgrade their gear.
And that's how it is that you can collect money from creatures that have no rational need for it. That lizard you just killed has probably never seen a gold piece in its' life, and the only time it has ever seen a magical weapon is while Harold over there was hitting it with one. That doesn't stop us from picking up a few gold pieces and a crappy magic dagger from it.
Just remember to thank the Gods and the System for their bounty. Maybe they'll appreciate it enough to rig some results in your favor in future. Can't hurt, eh?
[Answer]
**Waste**
Those coins weren't made by humans. Turns out your creatures create disk shaped lumps of metal as a waste by-product. Turns out creatures in fantasy worlds really like eating rocks (to help aid their digestion). From that they process out some of the minerals for their own usage and the rest gets compressed into a disk before being excreted. The process of passing though the animals body polishes it to make it shiny and leaves behind a gold stain. So what you scavenge is in fact the waste that has not yet left the animals body. This also explains why there are random piles of coins scattered around the world.
[Answer]
**Golden Kidney Stones are a Waste Product**
There's actually a fair amount of gold in various chemical forms on this world, for geological reasons. As gold is inert, animals need to clean it from their bodies. They *could* have evolved to excrete it the normal way. But a quirk of evolution and chemistry means that most animals on this world instead form stones of gold, similar to pearls or kidney stones, or [this bacterium](https://www.newsweek.com/gold-bacteria-heavy-metal-toxic-798615) (C. metallidurans). These golden stones accumulate in the kidney of the animal over the animal's lifetime. They hardly ever grow large enough to threaten the animal's health over the course of its life, so there is no evolutionary pressure to do it a different way. The golden stones can be extracted when the animal dies.
[Answer]
## Because the gods want people to kill monsters.
The gods are trying to make it easier for people to hunt dangerous creatures, for some reason they can't just kill or weaken the creatures (perhaps a deal with evil gods that keeps the evil gods from just killing heroes) but they can make sure people that do hunt them can make a good living. This is why a cow or deer does not drop money but a fire bear or zombie or other "monsters" do, or whatever the gods consider "monsters". The gods have made it so the death of a monster creates/summons spendable money. A divine bounty if you will.
this has two big benefits
1. even selfish or downright evil people still have an decent incentive to kill off monsters.
2. hunting monsters makes for a good living ensuring the people that can do it have a strong incentive to do it. Heroes do not need to be independently wealthy to spend their time fighting monsters, fighting minster will pay for itself.
[Answer]
A wizard did it.
A long time ago, a powerful dracolich decided to use necromancy to feed his greed. He began a ritual which would curse every living being on the plane, so that when they die, their life essence is used to teleport someone's valuables to the dracolich's hoard. Usually gold, but sometimes magic items, trinkets, and all manner of things. Soon enough, he would collect everything that is of value in the world! Mwa ha ha ha!
Enter a group of plucky adventurers who caught wind of the plot and resolved to stop it. They worked long and hard levelling up and collecting McGuffins - it was a lot harder back in their days, adventuring didn't just pay for itself like it does for all you whippersnappers nowadays! But in the end, after an epic battle, they defeated the dracolich. It turns out he made his phylactery the focus of the teleport spell, which broke the ritual... Almost. With the phylactery destroyed, the "teleporting to the hoard" part stopped working, but the life essence was still being captured. The spell just started dumping the items at the spot where the being was killed. This they discovered rather dramatically when they killed the dracolich. You see, one of the party members happened to be wearing, this whole time, without telling anyone, a powerful and valuable magic item that, ahem, *changed their appearance* somewhat... But that is another story, for another time.
In any case, the adventurers were declared heroes and there was much rejoicing. Although the ritual wasn't fully dispelled, it was all put to a vote and most folks felt it's better left as is to help offset growing wealth disparity in recent times. A few wealthy people grumbled about disparate impact but the rejoicing was just too strong. The heroes themselves were also happy with this, since frankly they had to defeat this dracolich quite a few times now (being that he's been a recurring boss who reanimates) and had grown tired of it, not to mention quite financially strained with all the potions and supplies and what not. It was agreed that in lieu of payment, they would simply wander around and dispose of roving nasties as a sort of DIY retirement fund.
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> As you contemplate this silly little child's tale (as well as your almost empty mug of ale), you suddenly hear a conniving voice in the shadows nearby. "Psst! You looking for a job? I have a *very* wealthy patron who needs some... creative problem solving services, shall we say? Experience with magic artifacts and breaking spells not required, but highly recommended. Now listen, my patron is losing *a lot* of money on this as we speak, so if you can solve his problem, there might be a very generous reward - what do you say?
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You can add a few twists to this, of course. Maybe the goddess of adventure is materializing the loot, to keep people interested in adventuring as the world becomes more civilized and enlightened. Or maybe there's a magical plague that captures loot in pocket dimensions, sustained by the life force of a being, which then become embedded on their body like cockleburs. Or maybe the pocket dimensions are temporary portals to the Elemental Plane of Loot? Or perhaps there is a secret cabal of invisible mad pixies running around, casting spells of Create Loot, setting them to trigger on death. You get the idea.
[Answer]
# You are the exterminator
You exterminate "bugs and rodents" for a living. The more dangerous these pests are the higher the reward. Their sheer mass and quick reproduction has made the villagers' life hell on earth so they're willing to shell out quite some money to get rid of them, rewarding you for every dead bug or rodent.
Since you live in a time before the invention of pesticides you'll have to make do with swords, clubs and the like. It comes in handy that these critters are pretty large. As you get rid of them your reputation rises and the villagers of every new village you arrive at readily await the famed adventurer to fight their pests.
[Answer]
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> It's an extremely common trope in Role Playing Games (RPG's)
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### No it isn't!
In roleplaying games, if you kill a creature then you get the creature's carcass. You may then be able to sell the creature's carcass to get money, or use it to craft objects which you can sell for money. But an unintelligent creature will not itself drop money, unless there's a *very* good reason for it. (For example, raiding a jackdaw's nest for the small shiny objects they've pilfered.)
It's a common trope in hack'n'slash video games though, which are not role playing games. In a video game, the purpose is to sustain a flowing gameplay, and interrupting this to have you go back and sell stuff may be considered to spoil this flow. Other video games may have a score system too, in which case "gold" is simply a scoring system from kills.
So you need to rethink your categorisations. If your game makes so little attempt to model reality that it has bugs dropping gold pieces, then by definition it cannot be a roleplaying game. It can be a fun hack'n'slash adventure, sure, but it lacks the contact with reality which would make it a roleplaying game. By the same token, a game like [1942](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942_(video_game)) would not be called a flight simulator just because you happen to be moving a sprite that's a plane.
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[Question]
[
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> Carbon monoxide (CO) is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless flammable
> gas that is slightly less dense than air.
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So begins Wikipedia's article on [carbon monoxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide) (CO). To the best of my internet researching ability, animals cannot 'smell' or otherwise detect CO.
How could a creature, like one that exists on Earth, "smell" carbon monoxide?
The creature must be in all other ways like an animal that exists on Earth (mammal, insect, etc). It must be terrestrial (i.e. I don't care about smelling in water, if that is even possible), and it must be able to detect carbon monoxide at concentrations lower than the [toxic limit for humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning#Signs_and_symptoms) (which is around 35 ppm).
[Answer]
You just need to have the appropriate chemireceptor which is triggered by CO molecules.
Sensitivity is less of an issue: our nose can detect certain molecules at very low concentrations, like H2S, the molecule responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, which can be smelled at 0,0047 ppm.
Since [CO reacts better with hemoglobin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning#Hemoglobin) than oxygen and CO2, a suitable receptor can be based on a modified version of hemoglobin, with the reaction triggering the nervous pulse to the brain.
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> The affinity between hemoglobin and carbon monoxide is approximately 230 times stronger than the affinity between hemoglobin and oxygen so hemoglobin binds to carbon monoxide in preference to oxygen
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Once the brain has its impulse, it will smell the gas.
[Answer]
Are you open to symbiosis? There are microorganisms that actively metabolise Carbon Monoxide. A creature that harbours colonies of such bacteria may not be able to directly smell atmospheric Carbon Monoxide but they could get feedback on it's local concentration based on the activity level of those colonies. This would be by way of sensing metabolic byproducts from those bacteria.
[Answer]
They can just smell it like anything else.
"Odorless" just means "human noses didn't happen to evolve the ability to smell this particular chemical."
If humans or other animals evolved in an environment where being about to smell carbon monoxide was beneficial, they'd just be able to smell it.
People are talking about particular mechanisms, which is fine and all, but I suspect you don't care about the exact biochemical pathway activated when you smell, say, a cheeseburger.
[Answer]
It's not the same as "smelling" it, and as far as I can find, there are no studies testing this ability, but there are countless stories about cats (and [sometimes dogs](https://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2008/02/06/Saved-by-the-dog-family-is-recovering-from-carbon-monoxide-poisoning/stories/200802060302)) who saved their human families (and dogs) from carbon monoxide poisoning.
In these cases, the CO levels were high enough to cause severe symptoms in humans, but they were asleep and didn't notice. [The cat noticed and woke at least one person up.](https://wreg.com/2017/03/15/cat-saves-family-from-carbon-monoxide-poisoning/)
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> ...The time around 1 a.m. when everyone was sound asleep.
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> “All of the sudden Gracie, I heard she was pounding, knocking,
> knocking, knocking at the door,” Shanahan said. “And so I got out of
> bed and to stop her from pounding at the door, and I looked to my left
> and Annette was there in the chair.”
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> “I was hanging onto the arm of the chair, and I thought I was dying,”
> his wife Annette said.
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> “And she called 911, and all she could say was ‘can’t breath.'”
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> When firefighters arrived, they discovered lethal levels of carbon
> monoxide in the home. It was caused by a malfunction in the hot water
> heater.
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> Annette and Kevin were taken to the hospital, where they spent the
> night.
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> Had it not been for Gracie — well, they’d rather not think about that.
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[There are many more stories.](https://user.xmission.com/~emailbox/carbon_monoxide.htm) In several the family has a working CO alarm, which sounds after the cat has already woken them.
We humans can detect CO quite well. But we've been conditioned by a couple centuries of living indoors with combustion to ignore mild symptoms. Even [manufacturers don't make detectors for low-level exposures](https://www.kidde.com/home-safety/en/us/support/help-center/browse-articles/articles/what_are_the_carbon_monoxide_levels_that_will_sound_the_alarm_.aspx) that may not be immediately life-threatening, but [certainly do affect your health](http://mcsrr.org/resources/articles/P11.html).
Most studies are about acute exposures to high levels of CO, at least 30-50 ppm over a few hours (and all the charts about "safe" exposure levels say "for healthy adults"). But [health effects can occur with chronic exposure to low levels](https://oem.bmj.com/content/59/10/708), like 10 ppm, especially in children and people with pre-existing health conditions.
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> Evidence that exposure to low concentrations of carbon monoxide can
> affect a number of organ systems is accumulating. It is, perhaps,
> easiest to explain effects on the heart in subjects with incipient
> myocardial ischaemia. Less easy to explain are effects on the central
> nervous system; that these effects may not be accurately predicted on
> the grounds of blood COHb concentration does, however, seem
> increasingly clear. Whether long term exposure to low concentrations
> of carbon monoxide can produce long lasting effects on the brain does
> not yet seem to be settled. If such effects do occur, the impact on
> public health may be large: many homes are heated with gas appliances
> and a significant number by solid fuel; failures are inevitable and
> known to be common, and thus a significant number of people must be
> being exposed to levels of carbon monoxide in excess of those found in
> ambient air. Even if only a modest proportion of those exposed
> sustained effects, the impact on public health may be significant.
> These findings may have implications for the setting of occupational
> exposure limits. The Health and Safety Executive recommend a limit of
> 30 ppm, which can cause COHb levels to rise above 2.5% in less than
> one hour. However, it should be noted that the evidence for low level
> effects of carbon monoxide does not arise from occupational exposure
> studies. The patterns of exposure of people exposed in their homes may
> be quite different from those exposed occupationally.
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We humans may not recognize CO as such, but we do usually know something is wrong with our bodies. Most people ignore that or get belittled by doctors when they try to get help. Or they might get a diagnosis that doesn't acknowledge the source, or even attempt to test for it. If tested, it's dismissed as an issue, because the prevailing wisdom is that CO below 30-50 ppm isn't dangerous (in some cases, the thresholds are even higher).
Animals can also be trained not to "bother" humans with complaints. But generally they know something is wrong and don't care what humans think about it. Many will go to great lengths to alert their humans as well.
In your creature design, take animals that have intelligence levels similar to cats and dogs and add in something specific that CO can do. If it's a world with lots of CO around in pockets, this could be something an animal evolved to detect easily.
For example, have the lack of blood flow CO causes that turns gums red also produce heat. Uncomfortable levels of heat or a burning sensation. It doesn't matter what, as long as it's exclusive to CO exposure. This can be inside the mouth and nose. Or it could be on the paw pads or anus or someplace that other animals can see the change to bright red (make sure their eyes can detect that color change). The animals might also be able to touch noses to noses (or butts) and feel the heat.
These are all signs to raise the alarm, scruff the children, and get the hell out.
[Answer]
Have a look at the Wikipedia page on CO detectors: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_detector>
Especially the sections about Biomimetic and Electrochemical sensors could be used here. Biomimetic sensors try to emulate hemoglobin which darkens in the presence of CO. To emulate that process they use Cyclodextrines which can totally be produced biologically.
The Electrochemical sensors work like a fuel cell that digests CO to produce minimal amounts of electricity. I don't see why a very simple version of that couldn't be grown in an animal.
The question is what kind of circumstances would be necessary for an animal to evolve something like that? Usually, CO is not an issue when you are outside of buildings or caves, both of which are places that wild animals don't live in.
[Answer]
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> To the best of my internet researching ability, animals cannot 'smell' or otherwise detect CO.
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They can't detect it? But they can! CO is even used as a neuromodulator and gasotransmitter.
**Soluble guanylyl cyclase (sGC)** is able to detect both nitric oxide and carbon monoxide, and that is an enzyme we all have. Although CO is a polar molecule and thus not effectively detected with membrane-bound receptors, an intracellular receptor could be made to work. It turns out that sGC is able to fully discriminate between NO and CO, so it would be an ideal chemoreceptor to "smell" carbon monoxide.
Guanylyl cyclase is one of the candidates for CO and NO's surprising behavior as a neuromodulator. While sGC is more sensitive to NO, it has mechanisms to detect which one it is bound to. Because sGC is a signalling molecule, it can communicate the fact that it has bound to CO to the rest of the cell, leading to a neuronal response. In an olfactory neuron, it could be used to selectively detect CO.
See also [NO and CO differentially activate soluble guanylyl cyclase via a heme pivot-bend mechanism](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1783457/).
[Answer]
* From Wikipedia, *s.v.* [Sentinel species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_species):
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> *The idea of placing a canary or other warm blooded animal in a mine to detect carbon monoxide was first proposed by [John Scott Haldane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scott_Haldane), in 1913 or later. Well into the 20th century, coal miners brought canaries into coal mines as an early-warning signal for toxic gases, primarily carbon monoxide. The birds, being more sensitive, would become sick before the miners, who would then have a chance to escape or put on protective respirators.*
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> *Canaries were iconically used in coal mines to detect the presence of carbon monoxide. The bird's rapid breathing rate, small size, and high metabolism, compared to the miners, led birds in dangerous mines to succumb before the miners, thereby giving them time to take action."* ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sentinel_species&oldid=894428518#Historical_examples))
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* From the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM):
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> *Small animals like canaries proved useful for detecting poisonous gases because of their rapid breathing rate and high metabolism, making them more sensitive to the effects of poisonous gas. When exposed to low levels of CO, a canary has difficulty breathing and becomes quite visibly agitated and unsteady. Miners knew there was poisonous gas around when the bird began to sway on its perch or collapse.*
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> *Regular miners rarely brought canaries with them into the mines on their shifts. The birds were, instead, primarily used by rescue crews following explosions resulting from regular detonations during mining, sparks from mining equipment, or the open flames of the miners’ carbide lamps. Combustion in the mines produced CO, which could kill miners through asphyxiation.*
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> *Canaries were brought underground in cages about the size of a lunchbox, made out of a durable, transparent material known as Perspex. The handles doubled as a small oxygen canister, and if a canary collapsed from exposure to CO, the miner could cover the ventilation holes and open the oxygen canister to revive the bird. It was not in anyone’s interest to let the birds die, and miners were known to grow fond of them and treat them like pets, whistling to them as they worked. Some even carried extra oxygen bottles with them especially for the canaries just in case they needed a refill.* (Correy Baldwin, "[Who brought the canary into the coal mine?](http://magazine.cim.org/en/mining-lore/who-brought-the-canary-into-the-coal-mine-en/)", in [*CIM Magazine*](http://magazine.cim.org/en/), November 01, 2014)
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[Answer]
**The creature cannot smell carbon monoxide directly, but is extremely sensitive to the other gasses that usually accompany it.**
This is, after all how we humans generally manage to avoid breathing too much CO most of the time. We can't smell CO directly, but we tend to avoid breathing anything that has a lot of the bad-smelling combustion products that are normally emitted along with the CO. Automobile exhaust fumes (for example) are deadly because of the CO, but they also smell pretty bad because of all the other combustion products in there. If you are standing in a garage that has a dangerous concentration of exhaust fumes, you will probably notice the smell and get out of there quickly.
However, some sources of CO produce much less odor than others, so there will be some cases where human noses are not good enough to notice the smell in time. In a situation where CO poisoning is a major risk, it would make perfect sense to train some animal to detect the subtle scent that accompanies dangerous levels of CO. Some animals, like dogs, pigs, and rats, have a vastly better sense of smell than us, and could be trained to recognize the danger signs long before humans could.
[Answer]
Mosquitos can detect carbon dioxide from a distance, and follow the "scent". Shouldn't be that much different for an animal and carbon monoxide.
In the real world, the main difference is that carbon dioxide occurs naturally, while carbon monoxide pretty much doesn't, so animals haven't evolved the ability to detect it. (Also, carbon dioxide sinks while carbon monoxide rises, so that would make it less likely for a ground-based or near-the-ground animal to detect carbon monoxide in general.)
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[Question]
[
I **need** technology patent terms to last centuries, thousands of years even (not necessarily millions though). Obviously I don't need the Patent Laws to change overnight. The Laws can take its time to update.
**What reasonable (at least to us in the present day) justifications could be given to change patent terms lasting from ~20 years to such incredibly long periods of time.**
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> The exclusive right granted to a patentee in most countries is the right to prevent others, or at least to try to prevent others, from commercially making, using, selling, importing, or distributing a patented invention without permission - Wikipedia
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I've been thinking along the lines of far-future advanced tech. People (and hence their families), corporations, even governments will want to keep 'control' of such devices to keep the excessive royalties flowing to certain individuals or groups. Supposedly people may possibly live longer; will they not want access to their royalties longer?
Would sufficiently advanced tech for space exploration/planet colonisation/increasing longevity etc be enough of a justification to change the Patent Laws? I'm thinking of Tech that once, discovered and developed into a working technology wouldn't have too many further developments, obviously they will get tweaks and updates, but the core technology is still the same. Something along the lines of the 'wheel'...FTL/wormhole travel/antigravity/inertial dampeners/anti-aging tech etc etc.
Obviously if there are Patent Laws, this is not an Utopian Future. War is bound to break out and governments, or whatever stands in their place, can change, dramatically. I think, trying to make a new claim for a Patent held under a previous Regime might make for some interesting story-telling. So I'm not too focussed on how to transition regime shifts at the moment. Just focused on how the Patent Terms would have been extended in the first place.
While this is far-future scenario, and therefore all opinion-based, can answers please be focused on **believable** shifts in law-making, taking into account how humans act around large amounts of money. As many of our worlds are based many centuries into the current future, I believe the question is on-topic about WorldBuilding...or at least LawBuilding.
note: I do not know a lot about Patent Law, so if I've missed something that already exists, please let me know!
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Time will do it.
There is continuous pressure from long lived corporations to extend the length of patents. The more power corporations have in your universe, the longer patents will end up.
There is a reason why the length of patents were set as they are. The patent is designed to give the inventor/designer a short term monopoly so they can recoup the costs of R&D and make a profit. Then the new technology is suppose to go into the public domain so new entrants can price compete and get the product out to more people. The end of the patent is also there to allow the innovation to spread and inspire new ideas.
So, if corporations are strong enough, they will push longer patents in order to give themselves longer monopoly periods.
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Lobbying, plain and simple.
Copyright used to be much shorter than it is today. Every time the first Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to fall out of copyright, legislators influenced by Disney change the law to make copyright last longer.
Another corporation could do the same for patents. There's nothing way-out-there about it, again, it's happening before our eyes with copyright.
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Space travel was slow, expensive, and unfair.
Earth invents a lot of stuff that would be really useful in other places. before FTL with one thing and another by time the products are adapted from the Earth version and shipped the decades patents where well on their way to expiring, so local copy-cats at the far end did better than the importers. And if you are going out of the solar system the patents where lapsed before anything gets there. The solution proposed by Earth based governments was to extend patents at least long enough to get the farthest colonies.
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If the human race survives I expect it will eventually happen. Look at growth curves. There are two basic possibilities for the shape of a growth curve: A stretched S (pull the SW corner W, the NE corner E enough that the curve always goes at least somewhat forward) or something like an inverted U. The latter is catastrophe so I will disregard it and look only at the S.
Specifically, I am looking at the growth of technology. The length of a patent should be related to the slope of the curve. When we were in the flat part at the start of the S this didn't happen because we didn't have patents in the first place.
We are now on the part of the S where it's heading up--until the curve starts to inflect we have no way of knowing where we are on it. There isn't an infinite amount of **practical** knowledge to learn (I won't say there isn't an infinite amount of knowledge. Some theories of cosmology have universes which are infinite or have an infinite number of universes. In either case a planet listing is obviously infinite.) Eventually that curve will inflect and bend back down.
Picture the very top of that curve as we close in on knowing everything. Improvements will become harder and harder to find and return a smaller and smaller benefit. Patent durations should increase to compensate.
Unfortunately, I rather expect this answer won't work very well for your world.
You might be able to have a society in which corporate power has grown unchecked resulting in increasing patent durations without economic justification. Progress all but grinds to a halt in such a society, if there is any possibility of an outside group it's going to fall behind and end up dominated/destroyed. (Look at China to see what I mean. They turned inward and froze innovation to keep it from upsetting the social order--and found themselves behind the 8-ball when the British showed up.)
Edit: For the commenter who doesn't understand the S-curve I am describing:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ClTcZ.png)
Of course this is from the realm of biology which is where such curves normally occur. Just think of "carrying capacity" as "all knowledge".
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There's a very reasonable reason:
## To give the inventor *time* to recoup his investment.
That is the entire point of patents and IP law, after all. It's not literally recoup; it only provides the *chance* to recoup. The chance must be high enough to motivate the inventor, investors etc. to sink the up-front to take the chance.
So, if you have an exceptionally long patent, you may have an invention which, *by nature*, has an exceptionally long recoup time. Perhaps
* sales are few and far between...
* the up-front is *staggering* (think Moonshot)...
* delayed development costs continue to accrue (think Manhattan Project\*\*)
* customers are profoundly affected by time (e.g. the invention is relevant to interstellar travel with decades in cryo-sleep)
* some grave injustice was done during the invention (e.g. damage the DNA of thousands of test subjects, cursing their progeny) and the patent royalties go to needed and ongoing reparations.
This reason must be obvious enough for government to want to grant it.
We know the investment isn't money; because money isn't that patient. The resource is likely something else: massive societal commitment (Logopolis), a social debt, state/planetary security, something a mortal will want his great-great-grandchildren to have.
\*\* don't forget the *still-ongoing* cost of nuclear waste cleanup at Hanford, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos etc. [Hanford alone](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hanford-nuclear-cleanup-problems/) is going on four *times* the original Manhattan Project cost. *Yes, inflation-adjusted.* An expense that will seemingly never end. If Manhattan Project patents were monetizable, you bet they should be extended indefinitely, to pay for the cleanup.
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In the future Patent and Copyright laws merged, and became "Life of inventor plus 80 years". Several decades later Ron Swanson (no relation) discovered that a specific blend of herbs and spices applied to smoked bacon caused near immortality. In fact the only thing that broke this benefit was accidental ingestion of lettuce.
Unfortunately (for some) this meant that a large number of patent holders started living on the new diet, and the phrase "with immortality comes great profits" entered common use. Companies started complaining that individuals were managing to keep their new patents, while the patents they spent so much money developing were running out after a "mere" 80 years.
Lobbying happened to try to change the laws, but unfortunately money talks. And, well, there were more trillionaire individuals than companies. Time moved on, and not much changed. Individuals got richer, and pig farmers made profits often compared to the legendary "mineral water providers" of the early twentieth century...
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Ever heard that an idea was "ahead of its time?"
That's what Patent Durations are set up to measure, the time between the discovery of an idea and when it ought to become public knowledge. Patent law is not set up as a mechanism for companies to engineer convenient monopolies (although we know this happens a lot). Your patent **is** designed to guarantee two things:
1. You get a period of monopoly so that you can recoup the expense incurred developing your idea.
2. Once the patent period is up, your idea is guaranteed to become public domain.
(We agree not to rip off your idea now if you agree to give it to us for free later)
It's the second point that seems most pertinent today. Without patent law, it would be very bad business to share technology. The onus would be on the developer of a new technology to make it cryptic and complicated and hard to reverse-engineer. If it were a chemical formula, the onus would be to never disclose the process that produced it. We see this in the recipes for many popular foods and beverages (i.e. Coca Cola) whose formulas aren't covered by patent law. The monopoly guarantee of a patent is an incentive for companies to provide comprehensive design details sufficient to re-create the product to the public.
So what will happen to patent duration in the future? Obviously money follows the corporate lobby which wants longer and stronger intellectual property protections (People who've already got a good business model want to keep it). At the same time, the incremental value and scope of each technological change makes the useful duration of a patent much shorter. Technology is changing fast and if there is some technical barrier in a company's way, they are more likely to work their way around it with a different/new idea (which is getting pretty cheap) than to buy the license for another companies patent. So you say that's bad, don't let them duplicate work, now you are extending patent coverage beyond the original work of the patent. But there is a long vetting process in place to guarantee you can only patent something you fully developed. Patent law is designed to be good for consumers, and consumers should be active custodians of this law. Longer duration and broader protection will slow down the economy which isn't necessarily good.
Ideally patent duration should track with the incremental value and cost of making patentable advances. This trend is downward, not up.
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There's a simple enough reason for patent terms to be extended in at least some fields, although I'm pretty sure it's not going to work with your scenario and the scope might not cover all patents in the general case; longer lifespans.
Copyrights on creative works, for instance, are to my understanding granted for the length of the author's life plus however many years on top of that (to allow the author's children/other family to exploit the benefits for a time). If people are, due to your advanced technology, living for several centuries, then those copyrights would naturally extend as well.
This wouldn't require any extensive changes, even, or any great suspension of disbelief: authors can claim with perfect logic that they should keep copyrights to their own works as long as they are alive to keep writing about those works. Note: with longer lifespans may come a clause to require them to create works set in any given creative world they made at least once every X years, or lose sole rights on grounds of disuse or some similar excuse (which is itself a potential starting point for a plot).
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I can think of two reasons, bullet pointed here:
* **Cryogenics/Uploading consciousness**
Perhaps only for select individuals who are deemed worthy or extended royalties
* **Generational Corporation Slavery**
Families become tied to mega-corporations whereby they recieve no pay but tithes for patents their ancestors created. Notionally this is for individuals, but the corporation also takes home a large chunk of it.
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Security reasons.
The point of a patent is that you publish your invention. In exchange, you get patent protection. In exchange for giving you patent protection, the State (or the People) have persuaded you to publish your invention ... which benefits everyone when the patent term expires.
If patents didn't exist then inventors wouldn't publish their inventions ... instead they'd keep their inventions as Trade Secrets.
There's a disadvantage to Trade Secrets, e.g. they cannot be audited for security. For example if no-one knows what's in a medicine, or how an encryption algorithm works, or what material is bridge is made of, then people are less safe. Ditto if the inventor dies without having published it.
So a reason for extending the term of the patent laws would be if they were not sufficiently sweet for inventors, i.e. if inventors preferred to keep their inventions secret than to publish/patent them.
For example the patent terms might be extended to favour inventors, if there were some world-changing invention[s] (e.g. a seemingly-magic battery, a cure for cancer, an anti-gravity drive for spaceship), which the inventor[s] kept as a trade secret and refused to patent.
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The only thing that makes sense if patents are super generic.
Invent a gun(from bullets to lasers), and now every size shape technique and etc is covered.
Invent a computer chip, and every chip is covered. From 1000nm to <1nm.
Invent a toothbrush, every variations is covered.
Then profits from said inventions would drive corporations want to protect the free money as much as possible. However, each patent would be so generic that there would 1000's if not 10,000 of thousands fewer patents.
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In the distant future, the strongest corporations have banded together into quasi-government cartels.
Corporations within each cartel share new inventions and discoveries amongst their own cartel in exchange for a period of exclusive use that the other corporations in the cartel will help enforce with their highly armed security forces.
This period of guaranteed exclusive use is a difference-maker when corporations are deciding where their allegiance will lie.
The official government would rather these inventions be shared with the entire public and discourage this vigilante enforcement. The government has been forced to keep up with the ever expanding period of exclusive use that these cartels have been offering and enforcing.
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I don't know if this is helpful, but there would be consequences to extending patents to last even hundreds of years. Primarily the potential wealth generated by the innovation would be massively reduced, (I can produce quite a long argument for this). So if this happened regularly then the world would be much poorer - which is why governments restrict the length of patents. There are however alternatives to protecting an invention by patents:
1. Create a black box that no one can see inside (already done in
some book, but I can't remember the name)
2. Establish solid commercial barriers to entry, such as the cost to
develop this "thing" is so high (and the selling price so low) that
it would take tens (or hundreds) of years to recover the
investment.(Alternatively market dominance can provide protection -
Google are I am sure happy to have both commercial and cost barriers
to entry.)
3. Government sanctioned licence to produce, potentially for armaments
or "critical infrastructure" - but usually ends badly.
Hope this is not too negative.
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I don't think it makes much sense to make significant extensions of the patent period.
The patent is more or less a social contract: in exchange for disclosure of trade secrets, the government will enforce prohibition of anyone else using your idea. The value to the government (actually to society) is that not only can everyone make, sell, or use and benefit from it *after* the exclusion period, but the state of the art can immediately be improved by improving on the idea (or just using it in a different context).
Investing in innovation is expensive, so if there weren't much profit to be squeezed out of an idea (possibly due to the enormous burden red-tape imposes), then it would make sense that if government/society wanted to encourage investment in them, one way to do it would be to lengthen the period. That means the more competitive a market is, or the more expensive the R&D investment, the longer the period (or protected profits) must be to justify the expense.
Obviously simple corruption can also result in the same outcome (longer period). But, consider an alternative: a restructuring of the law of patents and copyrights which makes most (or all) patents not based on physical things, but on the idea behind them (the intellectual property). If we make the protected "thing" the idea rather than the mechanism (or code), then copyright law might apply. And if you know anything of copyright law, the period they grant is ridiculous...try going into the business of singing the Happy Birthday song for hire and see how long it takes you to get sued. (Created 1893, U.S. copyright expires 2030, EU copyright expired 2017).
So, if you must get all patentable things protected, I think making the idea copyrightable is the way to go and perhaps gradually morphing all "things" into the novel ideas behind them...after all, at some point in the future the number of novel "things" (that is all simple components) will become exhausted - they'll all have been made (long before all of their uses have been explored).
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There are currently two competing ideas on the **primary** purpose of patents:
1. to encourage the publication of inventions
2. to encourage investment
The first idea is that patents are a 'necessary evil' to encourage publication. Patents are limited in term to minimise the evil. The term of the patent should be only just enough to get inventors publishing rather than keeping their inventions secret.
The second idea is that patents are wonderful, providing certainty for businesses thus increasing the investment and trade in technology. From this point of view limits in the term of patents are a historical quirk and a nuisance and should be extended (eventually indefinitely).
All that needs to happens for patent term limits to be increased to hundreds of years (or eliminated all together), is for the second idea to prevail. There is currently a gentle but persistent push from business world for the second idea. If governments lose sight of the original purpose of patents (the first idea), then it is inevitable that the second idea will prevail.
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If you want a rational economic reason then consider the point of a patent, which is that people will be more inventive and innovative if they can profit by being so. Allowing people exclusive rights over an invention allows them to profit by it after accounting for the expense of creating the invention.
Now consider the point of a patent expiring, which is that owning a patent gives you a monopoly on a technology or process. Monopolies are bad for consumers, so we should break the monopoly given by the patent ... **ONCE** you've enjoyed a reasonable period in which to profit from it.
So, if you want a reason for centuries long patents, you must be able to reasonably assert that it takes centuries to profit from an invention. One possibility is that the only inventions "left to invent" require enormous upfront effort and cost that can only be recovered over centuries of being the exclusive provider.
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I think this can happen quite neatly by time and law eventually blurring the lines between patents and other methods of preventing corporate espionage - namely, [trade secrets](https://www.thebalance.com/trade-secret-law-2164628).
As far as I understand it, trade secrets have a much longer lifespan - historically, they profited families for generations - but they also have two pretty strict limitations. For one, the processes have to be *kept secret*, and "[insufficient effort](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/trade_secret)" to protect a secret actually legalized its theft, and for another, there could (of course) be neither oversight nor regulation of trade-secret processes or productions.
Patents were supposed to be a compromise that got these processes into the public view (both for further innovation and for safety regulation) in exchange for limited protection and enforcement of the patent-holder's monopoly.
So, it makes sense there might be a government crackdown on trade secrets at some point in the future - especially if there were safety concerns - to the point where even trade secrets were required to be noted somewhere for regulation. And to induce cooperation instead of frantic evasion, the monopolies of registered trade secrets were offered legal enforcement - but because this was dealing with processes that the holders had *already* decided the patent time-limited protection tradeoff wasn't worth, it needed to have extra inducements. Namely, longer time spans, covering the generations a trade secret would have profited (rallying cry of "for the children" and emphasis on supporting one's family for those generations), and basically ending up valuing the ability to oversee and regulate safety concerns of trade secrets instead of encouraging innovation by making the processes open to the public after a more limited amount of time.
And from there, it was only a matter of time before the two processes intermingled, with patents simply acquiring the *possibility* of longer extensions - perhaps depending on value or perceived value of the invention, how innovative it is, the status or political power of the holder, the amount of time or effort that had been previously invested to let it be held a trade secret, or other considerations.
I would expect, in this system, patents that might be quite variable in length, either short or quite long depending on perceived value and the ability of its creator to negotiate. Some major leaps of innovative technology might have centuries of protection because the inability to regulate it was quite dangerous and its inventors bargained hard, some modifications and improvements might have rather short patents because it wasn't urgent enough to be worth offering more time in patent for.
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One could also do much as some of the setting development for the Traveller role-playing game did, and change the nature of patents - instead of being an exclusive right to manufacture/use a particular technology, it simply becomes a right to receive fees when it is manufasctured/used - but you don't have a choice as to whether John Doe is allowed to do so or not, as long as he pays the fees. Furthermore, if my invention is based on yours, a portion of *my* revenue stream from *my* invention goes to you for the use of *your* technology. Thus, useful inventions are available to society quickly, but you get a revenue stream effectively forever.
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## Crescian Society
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In the Crescian society, on alternate Earth, the nobles take to settling disputes with mutual assassination.
The unspoken rule is that assassinations must be carried out directly by the nobles themselves. Should a noble be ‘caught’ in the assassination process, they will be executed, upping the stakes of the game. The preferred way to carry out this sport are indirect ways like poisoning, while direct bloodshed is frowned upon.
Due to how the Crescians have been poisoning and assassinating one another for centuries, they have developed an advanced understanding of chemistry and the biology of the human body. As such, not only has the field of poisoning advanced greatly, the law and crime investigations in the world are also quite developed. All existing Noble families train the Nobles in the skills of assassination, and take personal pride in conducting assassinations that the law cannot resolve.
Crescians Nobles are, by nature, very devious, but are very prideful and conscious of their honor, and their status as Nobles. Because of this, most Nobles adhere to the unspoken rule of personally carrying out assassinations, because if an agent is tasked with the assassination and is traced back to the Noble, the Noble and his family would be branded as cowards and suffer humiliation and a drop in status worse than death. Their entire family would also risk losing their Noble status.
## Romance and the Rite
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A problem for this society is a general lack of mutual trust, as they're so used to mutual poisoning and assassinations. This lack of trust influences how nobles romantically court each other, as a lapse in judgement can lead to a painful death.
To solve this conundrum, the Crescians have created 'The Rite of Winter', which is a solemn ritual with implications in either spirituality, and/or in law, to be carried out whenever a couple decides to mutually start the courtship.
The Rite is to be carried out/renewed every period of time, and is effective for the next period, until either the time is up or the marriage, 'The Rite of Summer', is conducted.
My question is, what format should the Rite of Winter have, so that by completing it, the couple can have some sense of security and trust for the period of their courtship?
The more unlikely it is for the couple to betray one another, the better the answer.
Also, it is important if the Rite can allow the couple to develop trust in one another, and/or explore their compatibility.
---
Note that we use Artistic License: Poisons, hand-waved by how the Crescians have been poisoning each other for centuries.
Tidbit: the reason for the name, Rite of Winter, is due to how the couple starts the relationship cold, and needs to warm up the relationship until it is warm/hot, leading to the Rite of Summer. The Rite of Fall can be seen as the divorce, and the Rite of Spring, is the name of the renewal ceremony for the Rite of Winter, with each renewal being the Rite of Spring.
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**Renewed poisoning**
Or another way of saying Mutually Assured Destruction. What the ritual does is both members of the couple personally poison a bottle of wine at the start of the ritual with a secret poison on their choosing. At the ritual, each partner drinks the other's poisoned wine. Unfortunately, there's no poison that is really long-term enough for a courtship process, so a different method is used - renewed poisoning.
At the start of each day, or perhaps at each agreed date if you can find a poison slow enough, the couple exchanges wines again. This time, the glass contains two things - an antidote for the first poison, and a new second poison. Thus, the process can be continued ad infinitum, and should either member break it off without agreement, it would lead to the death of both involved. In other words, any betrayal guarantees the traitor's death. And, on the day of the wedding, it's just the antidotes. (Presumably.) This seems a rather elegant and thematic solution, and as a bonus, it would heavily incentivize both parties to stay loyal to their partner.
Divorce in this stage would be a messy affair, but that's typically the case with these kinds of high-stakes marriages anyways, and someone dropping dead of poison after a divorce squarely puts the blame on the ex-fiance.
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Personally I see this as the wrong way around.
Courtship isn't about trust. It's about proving yourself. Personally both sides should be trying to quietly kill the other because if the other isn't skilled enough to avoid assassination attempts, they aren't worthy to marry. What kind of parent would they be if they missed a simple poison in their wine?
Think [Mr and Mrs Smith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._%26_Mrs._Smith_(2005_film))
The trust part comes in when they are married. The rule is both partners get buried together. Death do us part doesn't apply. If one dies and the partner flees, it brings great dishonor on the family and the family is tasked with hunting them down and burying them.
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One conventional approach would be to exchange hostages. If a member of family A and a member of family B wish to be married, a *different* member of family A goes to live with family B for the length of the engagement, and vice versa. If the couple makes it to the wedding night without poisoning or stabbing each other, the hostages go home and nothing more is said of the arrangement. On the other hand, if one of the betrothed kills the other, their family member could be imprisoned or killed, depending on the circumstances.
During the engagement, the hostages are treated as part of the host family - boarded in a manner fitting their station, educated (young hostages were most common, since they wouldn't have any other responsibilities that might interfere), given social, political, and even military opportunities. For a member of a small, weak, relatively poor family, this could be a real bargain except for the whole maybe dying thing.
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## Clockwork Heart Contraptions
Your society reminds me a lot of Geidi Prime from the Dune franchise. I am reminded of the "Heart plugs" in David Lynch's version of Dune that were installed to ensure loyalty from subordinates in Geidi Prime.
At the beginning of the rite, the parties exchange a contraption, made from a family-employed locksmith, that is surgically added to the heart. If after a year has expired and the device is not deactivated using the right key, it plunges a blade into the victim's heart, killing them instantly. It's dark and morbid, but for a society so focussed around death, it's fitting.
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It's going to have to be a sort of marriage-light. The courtship and time of betrothal has always been a sort of practice for the actual marriage. So lets split up by whether or not spouses would kill each other:
### Spouses are NOT to kill each other.
Spouses should also be charged with protecting each other from poison. Having your potential be poisoned would be as bad as letting your spouse get poisoned. Depending on the exact functionality of honor, this would also mean that any prospective couple would announce their courtship. A potential for side-stories opens up, because jealous romantic rivals could consider this the moment to start killing off the competition.
Another way of enforcement could be that every noble makes his own, personal poison, the results of which are both a non-traceable way of bragging (I did it, and nobody can prove it!), and they'd have their own antidote. Part of the Rite of Winter would be exchanging doses of the antidote. This requires a high honor percentage, as otherwise they'd ask the poison of a sibling.
Side benefit of personalized poisons would be that if you can make it's effects spectacular, it'd give you even more prestige. Of course, this requires the authorities to also play the game, and not use the poisons in their murder investigations, or for them to be virtually untraceable.
Please note that this poison/antidote idea benefits from quite a bit of [Artistic License: Biology.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArtisticLicenseBiology) While it might sound sort of realistic, it really isn't.
### Spouses are to kill each other.
Then perhaps so should people courting.
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### Secure two-way wine exchange.
The answer by @[Halfthawed](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/64961/halfthawed) is elegant but fails because there's **no trust** that the antidote will be present in the next wine bottle.
We can model the wine exchange as a two-way secure exchange of data. For that, we need a trusted and verified protocol that will guarantee that the antidote is present in the next bottle of wine.
Therefore, we will base this answer on the following assumptions:
1. The world has a infinite variety of poisons that a) have antidotes and b) are harmless until X amount of time passes.
2. The antidotes can be crafted from several basic, known materials, and other known exotic materials, but the combinations are infinite. It takes, in average, way more than X amount of time to figure out the antidote.
3. Once the specific material for a poison is known, the antidote can be made with haste.
4. Most basic, known materials are incompatible. So a poison made with Purple Verbenna can be tested for Purple Verbenna.
5. A person afflicted by a particular poison can detect without fail and absolute accuracy other doses of the same poison.
6. A poison that reacts with a sample of its anditode creates a visible, known effect. The sample is large enough to test but small enough to not cure the victim.
7. Poison samples can be kept for a long period of time. These can be marked and later consumed without losing their potency.
Therefore, the spouses drink their wine, as per @Halfthawed's answer, but they only drink half the bottle and keep the other half safe. On the next exchange, they take the previous bottle, a sample of the next bottle, and do three checks.
1. Before exchanging, they disclose the ingredient of their poison to each other, and they test that the information is true.
2. They test that their "previous bottle" is indeed the poison they are currently inflicted with.
3. They test that the sample they have is the antidote for the previous poison.
After both tests pass, they exchange the "next bottle" and drink.
This answer was modeled on key exchange protocols.
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### Nothing More
Also known as **Blood is thicker than Water**.
Noble marriages in the past were not too dissimilar, if you think about it. Sure, our nobles didn't use poison as a sport, but there was quite a bit of backstabbing regardless. The key point was *appearance of reliability*: your reputation as a noble, and the standing of your house, is intrinsically tied to your ability at protecting -- and thus being supported by -- the other members of your house, aka your family, as it is taken as measure of how well you can support your *allies*. There is no benefit in allying yourself with a house who cannot even protect its own interests.
Entering an official courtship, through the *Rite of Winter*, means that the potential partner is now an honorary member of your house -- and vice versa. If your partner dies, whatever the reason, it tarnishes *your* reputation, as well as being taken as a sign of *weakness*:
* You are less likely to find another willing partner; especially if the murder was never elucidated. The other nobles are not fool, after all.
* Your house, especially if this happens regularly, is much less likely to find willing partners for its members. For the same reason.
* In the end, this means that your house may become more and more isolated, and when allies are in short supply, the end draws near.
And once the *Rite of Summer* is concluded, both and your partner are officially members of *both* houses -- though your children will only belong to one. Thus the same rules apply, and the death of your partner is a sign of *weakness* on your part, and thus your houses.
The only difference between the *Rite of Winter* and the *Rite of Summer* is that you can end the engagement at any time -- though it may lead to some animosity from the other house -- while marriage is until death.
This is it. *Nothing else* is really necessary. This is not even a matter of honor; just applied critical thinking from *others*.
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Marriage is not about love, but about alliance.
**If you kill your spouse, you break the alliance** and your family is in for a harsh, personal vendetta, instead of the generic, endemic low level permanent war of assassins.
Of course, other will try to imply you, in case your spouse die an untimely death. But that's just part of the general politic game. Everyone count with that. A properly devastated spouse that works in the interest of the departed's family and with the them to find the culprit might overcome the problem. Even if the one found guilty is ultimately a scapegoat.
So :
- Spouses have an interest in each other well being (through family
interest)
- Some might try to involve a spouse to get at the family behind. Or even kill a child to attack it's spouse family
- Some will find loophole with the system, but it imply trusting the deceased's family.
It gives a lot of opportunity for political play both ways, but also some strong incentive not to kill your spouse.
*The Rite of Winter* would be contract signature with disclosure of both spouses modus operandi in closed letters. (To allow identification if one of them was to die)
*The Rite of Spring* is mostly a private affair for couples and a few select "friends and family". Same as for the Rite of Summer, breaking the truce this day means bad (ugly) luck to come.
*The Rite of Summer* is the marriage itself. It is usually a day of truce for everyone invited. Breaking this rule means that your next wedding ceremony might be bloodier than expected.
*The Rite of Fall* is the divorce. Often, it ends with a dual suicide, to prevent consequences for both family, as leaves fall from the trees.
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[Question]
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I have a city in my world, about with about the land area of Singapore and about 1/6 of its population. In my story, my government needs to passively encourage its population to not go to school. *By passively, I mean by attending any educational facility, you have to pay an entrance fee, taxes, and a fine. This monetary amount is equivalent to about 2000 USD per student per year of education.* In all, a 12 year education would cost about 30000, 24000 from fees, and $6000 for supplies.Because the government has imposed such a fine, much of the population receives only homeschooling or informal education from their parents. As such, many parents employ the following plan: One of the parents or an older sibling goes to school to receive an education, then comes back home and educates the rest of the family.
**For what reasons would a government fine the educated?**
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## Country leaders want to have ultimate power
What is easier to control? Educated group of people, or uneducated crowd which can be bribed by "bread and games"?
I know it is long term plan, but uneducated people tend to be easy to manipulate. Easy to entertain, easy to control.
Make state jobs required low to none education. Supplement paid education with free, state controled "education programme" in TV which will be basically brainwashing the masses to believe the government is second best thing after sliced bread.
In 50 years, you have everyone supporting your government
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**The leaders of the country want to promote certain family or religious values.**
In this scenario, the decision-makers in government believe that large-scale education (schools) is counter-productive, and education should be happening in the home or in informal, local co-ops (where like-minded parents with similar-age kids cooperate to share the educational duties and benefits). Why would they believe that? A few possible reasons (choose all that apply):
* Out-sourcing the education of your children is Just Wrong; education is a core parental function.
* It's not a good use of resources to build, staff, and maintain schools; we need that money for something else. So at the very least, if you insist on sending your kids out to school, we're going to charge you enough to pay for those costs and then some.
* Education isn't a "sit in a classroom for 8 hours a day" thing but should be wholly integrated into household life.
* Individual or small-group tutoring provides superior education and the government actually *values* education.
People today use private schools or home-school even though free public schools are available. To find further motivation for your government, look to the reasons those families choose and adapt them.
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### They want to keep education valuable by keeping it expensive
Here's a crazy idea: We know that people with money are better off than people without money. Therefore, let's give a million dollars to everyone, and end the woes of poverty overnight! Anyone with even the most basic understanding of economics can take a single look at that and say "that's crazy, because inflation". Money is used as a proxy for labor and necessary resources, and putting more money into the system doesn't actually create more labor and necessary resources, so something has to give and it ends up devaluing the money.
What does this have to do with the question? Well, here's another crazy idea: We know that people with education get better-paying jobs than people without education. Therefore, let's give a degree to everyone, and end the woes of poverty overnight in 4-6 years! With the context above, it should be immediately obvious why this will not work. Education doesn't get you a good job; it simply helps you distinguish yourself from less-educated applicants. It can be thought of as somewhat similar to money in this sense, and putting more degrees into the system doesn't create more good jobs; it just devalues the degrees. (See: US education policy over the last few decades, leading to some places where they literally require a Master's degree to be a pizza delivery guy, because that's how high you have to set the filter.) Which means you end up with a bunch of people trying to pay off a Master's degree worth of student loans on pizza delivery guy wages! (See: current US student debt crisis.)
A government that's aware of the problems of inflation uses monetary policy to try to keep inflation down. A government that's aware of the problems of *eduflation* (yes, it's a real word, and it's a shame more people don't know about it) would use a restrictive educational policy to try to keep eduflation down.
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The government may want to discourage education for ideological or economic reasons. Ideologically speaking we've seen fairly nasty regimes go after education before, from Khmer Rouge's genocidal far-left anti-western philosophy, to Boko Haram's religious totalitarianism. In the former case they believed that formal education helped only to create inequality and was a deliberate ploy by their bourgeoisies enemies, and as such murdered anyone who was educated, urbanite, or even had glasses (because that apparently means they were definitely literate). Khmer Rouge's end game was to have a society where everyone was equal because everyone was a subsistence farmer. Similarly Boko Haram, which means western education is forbidden, believe that education which is not exclusively Islamic is used to discredit and attack Islam (they honestly believe that rain does not result from precipitation and water cycles but only and absolutely by the will of god). You may have a less extreme version of something like this at play.
Economically speaking the government may be trying to follow a "race to the bottom"; in which they have a pretty extreme view of the free market, in which the people's living standards have to drop (the masses of course, not the elite who order this\*) in order for wages to be competitive, and also will reduce the cost of public services which further means the state can lower taxation and in theory attract more investment (lower corporate and/or income tax plus lower wages for workers). In practice as mentioned prior that's simply bad economics, but like any belief system, capitalism has its extremists and fundamentalists.
You can also look to the early history of public education at the turn of the industrial revolution. Britain for instance formalised public education for children because on the one hand business interests felt that the workers needed numeracy and literacy to make use of the more advanced technology they were creating, and also because the government was enfranchising more working class voters who needed to be able to read and thus reason who they should vote for. Formal education has also been used as defensive nationalism; to promote and preserve specific languages and thus group identity. So if your society didn't need skilled workers, or didn't have voters, or didn't have a unique ethnic group (or was seeing a major decline in all three areas), people may simply not feel there is a need for public education given the cost.
* Side note: the royal families of Europe often didn't receive a formal education until recently because they were presumed to have been born with/divinely inspired with the skills needed to lead. That may be another motivation, that somehow people don't believe education works, or are against social mobility (like feudalism), or simply favour some sort of apprenticeship system instead.
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I'm new here, and I'm just gonna write this for fun.
Consider this, in the near future, where humans have advanced much in the field of computing power and data collection. Scientists can run simulations with artificial intelligence that would enable machines to be trained in undertaking tasks that are considered too complicated to do for our current computing standards.
In such a world, most jobs becomes depreciated, because machines can perform pretty much all the tasks. People can afford to live without jobs (or money), one can just go pickup their daily needs (produced by machines) such as food or any other product from some local warehouse.
It it then much better if you have a majority of less educated people.
For starters, it would be important to keep close control over the boundaries of AI development. Someone has to to make sure AI doesn't evolve in ways which would harm our existence. Those people needs to be highly educated and responsible (mostly responsible). And you just need a small number of such people (possibly monitored closely) so their actions are easily controlled.
This would be opposed to where if most people have high education, then you'd have no control over how AI might evolve. Some high school kid could be running a simulated virtual organism on his home computer, feeding it random data from the internet (or whatever more advance version we'd have in the future), without proper limitation on how it might evolve. Before long, people would be creating dangerous AI programs that would threaten our existence.
It would be better then, if say only 1% of people receive high enough education that would allow them to evolve and control the computers software. And the other 99% are only smart enough to happily play candy crush or posting selfies on facebook.
The other reason would be social unrest. When the computers take over our jobs. You'd be left with a lot of bored people. As it turns out, higher educated people are much harder to satisfy.
Ideally, people should be holidaying forever and spending more time to explore arts and music or their other none dangerous hobbies. But this only happens if they are dumb. e.g. people in the middle ages would be happy if all they did was partying and having sex forever, they'd even be happy if they worked as a blacksmith at the same place forever. But an educated person would be bored out of their mind. They'd be seeking ways for intellectual stimulation (such as the challenge of making killer robots, protesting and starting revolutions).
Lastly, why would you even need to educate people, 99% of the jobs would be taken care of, and it would be a waste of time and resources to train people when it would be better for everyone to be stupid. Sure, social values would probably degrade pretty soon, but it'd be a better alternative than total self destruction.
This might actually happen, think about it and have a nice day :).
Added thoughts:
Interesting point from @inappropriateCode with the human urge to teach and learn. One would think it'd surely be hard to enforce restrictions on education, especially in an advanced future society. But maybe this isn't as far fetched as it may seem. It might actually happen naturally to some extend.
Just to clarify, the machines in my proposed situation would be smart enough to carry out structured jobs efficiently. Say to design and 3D print cars, grow crops to the best yield. But maybe not efficient enough to run an program that trains an AI to "freely reason", in any manageable time.
The main motivation for a government who wants to dumb the population down would be to reduce the chances of someone from creating such AI programs (in which case it could force a man vs machines intellectual arms race which we'll probably lose because the human brain evolves slower).
It might take a few generations from now to reach that point. In which time people are going to get less dependent on having a job to make a living.
At some point (even now, in some countries) jobs becomes optional, and a percentage of the population would choose to not get a job or an education, as the "jobless living standards" improve, more and more people would fall into this category. And their kids would grow up in an education optional lifestyle, with no particular reason to break out of this bubble.
After some time, you'd be left with the fairly intellectually minded people, that would still choose to get an education. Now the government decides to give the dumbing process a nudge, it impose a high education fee. Remember that pretty much all the young people at this point would be born in to a job and education optional world, so unless if you're very motivated, you probably wont fight against it. Maybe most people would be redirecting their attention to some other none formal education required activity, such as arts and craft, to fulfill their intellectual needs.
We're now left with the really motivated people, who still wants to get formally educated, but even if they can pay the fees, they'd have to study really hard, with less teaching resources, and the seriously advance shit they'd have to learn. Their reward for finishing their studies would be to monitor the world and keep the machines in check (that'd pretty much be the only jobs available), while everyone else gets to party none stop or do whatever the hell they feel like.
The ones that can't afford to study but still wants to can do home learning and or form interest groups (it's their right, why not?). But if the government ban free access to teaching resources and compiling software for computing. You'd have seriously hard time trying to design code / hack into the system from scratch. Remember technology would be more advance in the future which increases the difficulty. While you're trying hack your way into AI advancement, you'd surely standout from everyone else and the government can put a stop to it before you become a problem. In that sense, there's no real need for the government to ban learning, plus you'd be fine if you don't touch AI, just learn accounting instead, that's like....fun too....
And if you've received a formal education and decides to not get a job after, you'd still have the restricted access to computing resources and you'd be watched for life probably. All manageable problems.
So there you go, that's how humanity would devolve in an advanced world, don't take it seriously..... but it might happen.....
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**They believe in a free market for education.**
Public schools in industrialized nations can easily cost the taxpayer USD 10000 per student per year. The leaders might argue that a good education is an investment in the future of the child, so the parents had better take a credit and pay at least a small part of the cost.
This is short-sighted, since better educated kids pay more taxes later in life, but with the right propaganda of "look out for yourself" and "the skilled ones will rise to the top" such a policy might be popular with the voters.
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If the educational facilities are publicly funded, it sounds like the government is just trying to recoup the cost of the education.
Good reasons keeping the price of education high:
* Prevent waste in spending by people getting an education when they don't need it. If education is "free", meaning it is paid for through everyone's taxes, some people may get an education when it doesn't make good economic sense to do so.
* Prevent waste in education efforts. In America K-12 education is free for everyone. Since no one has to pay for it, a lot of people fail to appreciate it and don't make the most of the opportunity. High schools in particular become temporary housing for difficult students rather than educational facilities.
Good reasons for encouraging informal/home schooling:
* Encourage the strength of nuclear families and local communities. Home schooling encourages people of communities to voluntarily work together for mutual benefit. In order to succeed in their efforts they need to get to know their neighbors and work with them. Public education encourages people to leave everything up to the state and lose their ability to form and maintain community organizations.
* Encourage a diversity of ideas. Formal education requires formal standards. This requires that everyone learn pretty much the same ideas. [It can even cause the creation of a learned class that actively discriminates against people with different ideas](http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/39_1_Phillips_F.pdf). Encouraging less formal education prevents this kind of echo chamber mono-culture.
So-so reasons for fining the more highly educated:
* Redistribution of resources from rich to poor. Many nations today tax the rich more than the poor. This would be similar because the educated would be expected to earn more than the uneducated.
* Encourage the educated to make the most of their education. "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs". An educated person obviously has more ability and should contribute more to society. What if someone with medical degree decided he would rather run a dairy farm? He might like farming, but sick people could die!
Bad reasons:
* Prevent the rise of a middle class by keeping everyone poor. If everyone is poor, no one has time to agitate for rights and freedoms because they're too busy trying to earn enough to survive.
* Prevent people from learning too much about ideas like individual freedoms and democracy. Keep them from learning about Milton Friedman, John Locke, George Mason, and Friedrich Hayek. People may be willing to pay high for education that has immediate economic payoffs, but they will be far less willing to pay for education that benefits the community especially when they don't know what those benefits may be before they get the education.
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Many people have put up the negative view of Education discouragement. Here is utopian- Education produces people with worse abilities than they started with- philosophers who pontificate indefinitely, artists who produce horrid artworks, engineers who produce impractical designs. The world is currently endowed with a lot of awful university trained scientists- people who spot the most flawed scientific studies, there is a lot art and soft science graduates with the most flawed thinking ever. If those people had simply started normal jobs without an university or other formal education, they could have become highly competent and that's what the government really- not useless parasites who refuse work and do bad jobs. Just make your world have the worst institutions as being held up the best ones.
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**Because other forms of education work better.**
A lot of answers seem to be slanted towards "education good, no education bad", but that may not be true, even here on earth (for some societies).
As humans we buy into the fact that we will spend the first 1/3 of our lives gaining education, the next 1/3 working and learning a little, then the last 1/3 teaching in some form.
What if we lived longer or shorter lives. Would a structured education benefit us as well? What if our government structure was different? What if our values were different?
A lot of the other answers assume that if your uneducated your stupid, and easy to manipulate and control. What if a gerontocracy was in place? Then the education of the normal citizen would not matter much.
In fact, we have this problem today with (direct) democracies. In order for a voter to make an informed decision they have to have an education in the areas that they are making decisions in. Our society is currently "specializing", and this means that an educated voter, is really only educated in one or two topics and the rest is all opinion, or at most, "That makes sense".
Lets take that "theory" to an extreme. First the country was run by some form of Democracy. As time went on, problems arose because there educated citizens were only educated in their field of expertise. It was not possible to educate a person in everything. Bad things happened because of this, so the government changed, and became a form of gerontocracy. Things were turbulent for a time, but once the turmoil was over, the people realized that this was better. Ideas were adapted slower, but that gave time for people to adjust and created a more peaceful society.
At the same time, specialization continued. Now, with the government "problem" not really requiring everyone to know everything, it became far more valuable to train people in the field they wanted. There was no need for "core skills" they don't exist any more, and society doesn't need them to keep going. Instead value was placed in a guild like system. Apprentices, Juniors, Masters, and Experts. You gained knowledge in your field as you spent time in it. Formal education is being phased out, in favor of learning what you need. Not because someone is trying to keep you stupid, but the knowledge you need as a mathematics wiz doesn't include history.
Take a look at today, and look at the negative sides of formal education. Cost is one factor, but so is the indoctrination. There is also the grand idea that one person is smarter then another, because of formal education. While education servers a need in our society right now, it's not a need that has always been there. In fact, if you ditch the "I'm better then you cause I have a degree" feeling that exists on to of education today, what it really is, is core classes that everyone "should have" like basic language, science, and math skills, and then some specialized skills. If we remove the "should have" by having a society where you don't need those basic skills, or those basic skills are acquired differently, there is almost no reason for formal education. In other words if your society focused more on "I'm happy" and then imparted specific skills via another system, then the idea of formal education is much less appealing.
In short, one could make the argument that education is a "want to have so I can be better then my fellow man". We do this today. We look at people without education and consider them "less then" (not as an individual but as a society). If instead your society learned to value contentment and didn't place a negative on their fellow man for not knowing a thing, then the need for a formal education (as you describe it) goes away. A person can be very happy, not knowing a thing. If your society helped promote this kind of happiness, then your in good shape. Formal education exists to help people "re-train" or to keep them from falling into "a groove". You can only be a farmer cause that's what your parents were. You can't be a scientist. Then you could go to formal school, learn the basics of scientists and find an apprenticeship. Of course it's more expensive now, and there is a need to keep people "doing what they have always done" or that field will suffer when it becomes un-popular (but before it's phased out).
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## The country needs its labor force to tackle a problem that (it believes) can be better solved with sheer manpower than with education and ingenuity
For example, the country could be facing hunger and require its citizens to become farmers, believing that it will increase food production.
You could look at an isolated country like North Korea as an example:
Only talented people receive high education, whereas common folk are made to become soldiers and farmers.
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# The country is in debt and/or needs money.
Perhaps said country is in a state of war with the neighboring nation and needs more money for its military expenditures. Perhaps the country needs to repay the debt that it owes the United Nations 20 years ago. There are many reasons why a government would fine the educated.
One, the educated are the rich. Not only are the rich the most likely to afford education, the educated are the most likely to become rich. This pattern continues on in an endless loop. Second, if the country is in a desperate state of poverty, pollution, disease, and starvation, the government may be trying to utilize the wealth of the upper class to help repair the country's economy and infrastructure. (Or perhaps the government is just a bunch of greedy, corrupt bastards :))
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Reminds me of an old Dutch proverb:
"You keep them poor, I'll keep them stupid, said the priest to the Baron".
Knowledge and wealth equate to power.
The powers that be (church and government) don't like competition.
So best keep them poor and uneducated so they can't challenge the powers in control.
And by making education expensive you achieve both at the same time.
The poor can't get education. And the educated ones will be poorer afterwards.
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**Scenario:**
For decades, formal education was touted as the best chance for a person to make a better life for themselves. No one is sure who started the mantra, but everyone is chanting, "Get your degree, no matter the cost"? The government got behind the schools and started handing out low interest loans to make it happen and went so far as to subsidize the interest in some cases.
The schools increased their costs and education costs tripled. The workforce abandoned skilled labor training in favor formal education. The result was catastrophic. The entire population suffered from debt overload as the jobs for the educated dried up. The skill labor population was decimated and basic carpentry and metal working skills were lost. Loan defaults were occurring faster than the planets birth rate and the government economy crumbled.
Enlightened economists and people with plain ol' common sense figured out the problem and determined to fix it, simultaneously boosting the economy. Formal education would be the least of people's financial concerns as general education took a back seat to skills education. The populace would be fined into oblivion before another college grad was produced to compete for a job at McDonalds.
Incentives and jobs were given to those who entered into cheap, skills centered training, that got them working and earning a living in months, not years.
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**A corrupt / incompetent stereotypical-third-world-style (maybe military) government/dictatorship.**
There is no political will for the government to fund free education for all as it's not part of their priorities. They keep their supporters well paid and happy so they can afford the exorbitant fees. The more common people who can't, they simply don't care about.
The government recoups the cost (or perhaps even makes a profit) from education so they don't want to spend resources and threaten this situation, and either it has never occurred to them, or they don't care, that free or cheap education for all will have long term benefits.
The economy doesn't simply collapse perhaps because the country may be rich in a natural resource (e.g. oil) that they sell to more powerful countries in exchange for political, financial and technical support. Meanwhile, the lower class learns just about enough to be able to do the menial jobs of their parents to survive, or perhaps apprenticeships are common.
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There are a lot of excellent answers here. I would like to add a political economics explanation.
In the real world, education policy is tied to the kind of government in place (what political scientists call *regime*). Different kinds of governments have different incentives for education.
Dictatorships (in this case - any government where leaders are not decided by free and fair elections) typically minimize education. There are a few ways to look at this:
1. Dictatorships only require the support of key groups (for example, a military cadre or core economic elite). They government will be pressed to provide for their education, but not the public's. They might also need to provide rudimentary technical education, but won't if they can avoid it.
2. Dictatorships don't want an educated public, because those people will demand better standards of living, more freedom, etc. The government might be more tolerant of limited technical education, but even those students will make demand better standards of living (by virtue of their better career choices).
3. Dictatorships don't want to spend money on education, because every dollar spent on the public takes away from the wealth of elites.
4. Dictatorships typically have concerns - such as suppressing the masses, fending off internal rivals, and creating symbols of legitimacy - which are more pressing than their nation's education or economy.
5. Dictatorships are seldom worried about the future. Education pays off in the long run, but not while the current dictator is still alive.
6. Elites and dictators may have never lived like the masses do (perhaps due to extreme wealth inequality, or they remain socially segregated). They may not understand the masses or their problems, or have an inkling they want (or need) to be educated.
I phrased all of these as being about "dictatorships", but you could repackage any of them to be about nearly any fictional government. For example, even a democracy might need only the support of a certain segment of the public. Only the needs of that segment need to be met, which could mean that only that segment is educated.
I will update this with journal citations this evening, to improve the answer.
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This isn't really an answer to why the government would fine people, especially such a low amount. $2k a year for schooling is not unheard of.
Why fine the people when there are easier ways to keep people from getting educated?
They could either close most or all of the schools, with long queues to get into the ones that remain
Or they could simply make the schools crappy, with underpaid unmotivated teachers, overcrowding, bad conditions, access to drugs, and tons of standardized tests that take all the fun out of learning?
It's been working for the Detroit school system for years, so I don't know why it wouldn't work for your government.
But why waste such a great opportunity?
Think about it, if you had year round schooling, 8 hours a day, you'd have the children as a captive audience longer than the parents would. It's a perfect opportunity to indoctrinate them with the values and ideas that the government wants to foster.
In fact make the schools such a great place to be that the students will resent having to go home where their parents can drone on and on about old fashioned values.
Having an ignorant population where parents get to decide what the children believe is really shortsighted for a totalitarian government.
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Ok. Heres the problem: You are trying to get the people of your city to do something strange. Dont do that. Why would you even want that?
Instead, work with your imaginary people. Start from the basics, and go with that. If they think education is cool and you dont, go with the education instead.
Dont try to think ways to do something silly. Try to think ways to do something smart.
So, why would they want people to stay uneducated? Dont know? Well, maybe they shouldnt want to keep people uneducated. Maybe they DO want it, but cant. Its not available? Its only available from abroad, and that makes it very costly.
Or maybe they want people to get educated, but all foreign educators also bring new ideas they dont want to spread. So they limit the education to only those most loyal.
If you start with hard rules, with a square hole and a round peg, and you cant make them work even with a hammer, back down a bit. Maybe it doesnt have to be just like that. Maybe you need only one or the other.
Soften the demands a bit. Maybe the leaders want people educated. Maybe they use different methods. Maybe its not the leaders, but EVERYONE who thinks education is bad, like a religious community that rejects some or all science.
Maybe education is not available, or everyone needs to work just to stay alive.
It not much more than hundred years ago, that even in the west many people thought that education makes people lazy and they cannot afford to allow children in schools, and instead they had to work the fields to grow food.
There are many options, if you can just relax your demands a little bit.
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What a coincidence. I just saw this question, while [this article](http://turkishmonitor.com/a-turkish-rector-says-better-to-keep-masses-uneducated-1646/) was open in another tab.
Titled "A Turkish rector says “better to keep masses uneducated”", it describes a Turkish university rector who claimed the uneducated people will be the backbone of Turkey’s future and has said that “educated people are more dangerous than uneducated people.”
So, no need to imagine an answer - just ask this douche (Prof. Dr. Bulent Ari, Deputy Rector of the Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University) personally.
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"Why would a government passively encourage its people to not obtain a formal education?"
The most obvious reason is that a Government plans to have the rich become an Educated Elite, 'User-Pays' so to speak. If education becomes the domain of a small privileged portion of society then that portion would be in a position of great power. "Knowledge is Power."
Edit: If schools are run down and basically became indoctrination centres, that discourages people also, so it may not be that Government is intentionally trying to dissuade people so much as the process being an end result of an attempt at mass mind control. People resist this and so are reluctant to send their children to school.
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There could have been a malicious government back in the day. The schools founded by that government are actually indoctrination centers rather than learning centers; just like in our world currently. That government itself has been overthrown, but the fake schools are still there, and most of the citizens are still brainwashed and want to send their kids there. The new, not so malicious government, can't shut those schools down for some reason so instead they try to discourage people from going there.
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I'm my sci-fi setting's history, various hominid species are in competition with each other for dominance of earth and its resources. Among these races are "Halflings" ... okay, not haflings *per se*, but rather like Homo *florensis* with an upgrade, namely human level intelligence (or H. Sapiens with an advanced case of insular dwarfism). The primary trait of these "Halflings" is a very small stature, standing but 0.9 - 1.1 meters tall. Now, this is small, *very small*, though it may give them some advantages (for example they would be but ~33% the mass of humans and thus they could have thrice the population density in the same amount of land).
There is a long and attested history of anthropologically smaller peoples being dominated by larger ones. Since they are so small, I see no reason why man i. e. homo sapiens (and in this world, his fellows) would not immediately steamroll over any population of halflings they encounter. So I have opted to include some unique biological quirks that might give them the edge over H. sapiens. At present, they have at least the following traits:
* a height of 90 ~ 110 cm (the stature [and possibly strength] of a 5 year old)
* a physical maturity age of 9 ~ 10 (though a mental maturity age in the mid teens)
* the intelligence of an average human
* (at minimum) average human lifespan
Ideally these Halfling become a problem and serious rival to humanity in the future, but I don't see a group race of homonids the size of 5 year olds standing a chance against *any* human population, much less seriously challenging them. So, sticking to that which is in the realm of evolutionary possibility (700,000 ish years of evolution).
**What biological traits could I realistically endow the Halflings with to give them *at least* a fighting change against humans?**
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## Masters of the Jungle
Your halflings are well adapted to life in the jungle. Their small frame makes it easy to maneuver through dense foliage and their low weight makes it easy to support themselves on branches. They are not as weak as a human child. In fact they are surprisingly strong for their size. Smaller creatures often have more strength than larger creatures pound for pound and these people will have evolved through millennia of lifting their body weight with their arms to get up trees.
## Hidden Treetop Villages
Due to their natural inclination for their tree based habitat they went on to primarily build in and around large trees, forming villages that aren't readily visible from ground-level. Any humans who do venture into their jungle will be hard pressed to locate their population centers and even harder pressed to actually attack them. Humans are too big and heavy to fight them in the branches and trying to light the place on fire will be difficult due to the fresh, often wet foliage. Not to mention dangerous to the humans themselves.
## Resistance to Disease and Parasites
There are a wide variety of things in jungles that can kill humans, and the vast majority of them are microbial. Halflings, however? They have an immunity to most of the jungle bacteria and know how to heal the bites of various snakes and spiders with local herbs. Humans who try to set up settlements in this jungle quickly find themselves at the mercy of the halflings' medical knowledge, and the halflings aren't sharing.
## Small Frame means Hard to Hit
Halflings don't engage humans on the ground when they fight. Instead they hide in the trees with their blowguns, bows, and throwing spears and pepper enemy armies from above. Usually in combination of complex traps or by exploiting natural sinkholes or shallow swamps to ambush them. Because the humans can't climb up the trees after them the humans are forced into a ranged engagement where the halflings have the advantage in being harder to hit. Humans also lose their advantage of heavy armor in the jungle. At least if they don't fancy getting stuck in wet mud or drowning.
## Poison Everything
The halflings have a long history of coating their arrows and darts with poison or even just feces. Even minor cuts delivered from their weapons can kill the man struck by them after weeks of vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration. Worse is that the halflings have made it a habit of sneaking into human camps at night and poisoning their drinking water or stealing their food.
## Risk vs Reward
In the end invading the jungle full force just isn't profitable. The halflings are too entrenched and too skilled at the sort of warfare the jungle encourages while humans stepping into that land may as well be entering another world. The loss of soldiers through the sheer attrition of disease and poison builds up quickly. So does the cost in horses, weapons, armor, and resources to make camp. Eventually it becomes too expensive to continuously mount expeditions of war into the jungle and humanity mostly stops save for the occasional rich explorer.
This gives time for technology to advance. If the halflings advance at a similar pace the humans may never be able to close the gap in military power that the jungle provides the halflings, allowing both to survive until whatever time period your story is set in.
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# Don't make them so weak
Make them proportionately strong, which makes them weaker overall but doesn't critically disadvantage them. They're going to have to be appropriately strong just to survive, the strength of a 5yo is not enough.
# Small size isn't such a disadvantage
They're more agile, without so much bulk to move around they can change direction much more easily. A large adult human is relatively slow to turn or reverse at high speeds. The square cube law makes them much better climbers, strength for weight they'll be able to swarm up trees and surfaces that humans would have great trouble with. Lower body mass does have some issues retaining heat, but you could give them a tolerance for a wider range of temperatures. (Also they're smaller targets.)
# Evolving with lower strength means their teamwork is necessarily better
If they've evolved on a world with creatures that are otherwise the equivalent size to ours, then to bring down large prey they're going to have to hunt with larger groups. Where humans might send out a 4 man team, the halflings will send out a team of 8 or 10 for the same task, but now the humans are outnumbered.
# In a sci-fi setting strength doesn't matter
It's now all about tools and technology. All other things are equal as physical contact isn't made. The greater agility, greater numbers and better teamwork will give them an edge in any combat situation. They'll also have a significant advantage in any defensive ship to ship or urban combat situation as their corridors, buildings and other personal spaces will be far too small for humans.
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You have the answer in the question:
**Numbers**
Just think goblins. One skilled man could easily kill one skilled goblin but what about three, what about five?
You already state that they become adults faster, just give them litters of two or three and voilà. Moreover, the number advantage will become more and more prominent the more technology advances.
* One strong man with a stick against three weak Halflings with sticks? Okay!
* One strong man with a bow against three weak Halflings with bows? Less okay...
And what about guns and tanks in the future? They can make smaller guns and vehicles, which mean more of them for the same resources.
In your world, I'd be more preoccupied about Halflings ruling every other race.
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You mentioned "sci-fi", so I'm assuming this setting of yours is either contemporary or near future.
## 1 - Faster Reproduction
The homo sapiens' gestation lasts 9 months and even so, humans can reproduce quite fast. Have your halflings reproduce faster than this, like 4 or 5 months and you will have an army that replenishes its forces much quicker than their foes.
Also worth noting that, if people are born at a higher rate, there's a higher chance that a genius (or someone remarkable, like a Tesla, Newton or Einstein) is born within that society and, thus, be the spark for a great technological advancement that will give them an edge on the dispute.
**Edit:** If you think the reduction of the gestation time is too absurd, you can achieve the same goal by saying that the gestation of multiple children is way more common in halflings than in humans. They would still have to go through the 9 month period, but every gestation would have a very high probability of yelding twins or triplets.
## 2 - Earlier Maturity Age
You stated this in the question. If you combine this with the fact that they're born faster, you have contributing members of society that will mature a few years before regular humans.
The way I see this, both these factors combine sum up to a civilization that will advance considerably faster than the homo sapiens in the long run.
## 3 - Strength in Numbers
No halfling should ever walk alone outside of their domain. Though they might be a few times more nimble than a regular human, I'm guessing that it takes one good hit from a homo sapiens to incapacitate a halfling.
Battle-wise, I believe the humans will always have the strength and reach advantage. But if you consider a 3x1 fight, the scenario is compeltely different. Fatigue builds up fast in combat. Unless the human is skilled enough to quickly incapacitate one or two of his foes, he will be in serious trouble to watch his own back against the quick little halfling going for his achiles' heels.
This can easily be achieved consdering points 1 and 2.
## 4 - Stealth
A reduced body size is a good advantage for sneaking up on enemies. Stealth operations of the halflings would be much more inconspicuous and prone to success, since they could easily hide behind boxes or under vehicles while inside the enemy base.
## 5 - A Stronger Sense of Community
Humans *could* have this as well - but we've been here for thousands of years and we're not even close to this. I think it's safe to assume that we won't have it in the near future.
Have your halflings be a kind of utopic society where everyone watches each other's back in every way possible. People have good jobs, houses and generally act as a community that strives for advancement. No need for greed or exploitation of the poor - they see every member as an equal contributing part of society, from the guy who cleans the floor to the general that commands thousands to battle.
**Edit:** Considering the edit I made to point 1, this *could* be easier to achieve (could because not all families are exactly role models). The point here is that, with more children comes the notion that they're all part of one big family (I guess).
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They are the size of a 5 year old but with the intelligence of an adult?
First - I would look at every question we have on fighting giants (cause that's what this is) and how that would work.
Second - biologically you already have one strong candidate for:
* assassin or spy
* hunter/trapper
* bard or other entertainer
+ *no voice change I presume*
+ A good way to influence people
* inventors of wondrous gadgets to confound or otherwise hurt the enemy
+ With a social, political?, drive to do so and field an equal military
+ Based on biological ability to do what the "fat-fingered" bigger races cannot1.
### Assassins and Spies
If a halfling could pose as a child (maybe even give some children a treat to gather "real" children around) and then just knife a political target and disappear back into the swarm of fleeing children as everyone panics - that's ideal assassin. In fact, simply being able to hide better (smaller more areas to hide in) or be seen as "not a threat" more easily would allow him both to be a talented assassin. As well as, allow it to be a strong candidate for a spy as it would be easier to access places most cannot and overhear conversations most would not want to be overheard.
### Hunters (and well a few other key roles)
I would think of adding one set of biological evolution to this - *heightened hearing and smell*. If halflings become excellent hunters (think of setting traps or crossbows/bowguns/slings for various small game or even larger depending on crossbow/sling type) due to these heightened senses they would be prized by kingdoms which need to fill their own warriors stomachs....and it would be a quick step from there to guerrilla tactics/warfare. Add a second fairly natural advantage - they are already smaller and so *should require less food* to keep themselves going. So just add to that with either an evolved *extremely effective digestive system* (either in the sense that they use food for energy at highly effective rates or they have resistances and strong stomach acids which allow them to digest more items as food then a human)
Traps work extremely well in environments with heavy concealment (jungles, tall grass, forests) and their size would not matter in the slightest when it came to actually setting them up. Also as a *short person* who has chased people through swamps (MP on Paris Island) *I moved faster than or as fast as my tall partners* - it was easier to get through the bramble, branches, brush, and etc.
Note, this also goes well with the assassin or even just as a tracker with the local authorities. These senses are also likely to evolve for all the same reasons they evolve in prey animals (though may need to slightly adjust look to account for) in the real world.
1*Research how children were used in industrial revolutions.*
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You are mixing time periods and evolutionary advantages with a naive interpretation of Darwin.
Your "halflings" aren't weak at all. The time when conflict was decided by body mass and strength is over. Mobility and speed is a typical advantage of smaller people (assuming we are not talking about actual dwarfism!). In a gunfight, everyone puts out the same amount of deadly force (SciFi setting, assuming that weapon size is not an issue), but being smaller means **being more difficult to hit**. Which is about the biggest advantage you can get. It also means being able to take full cover behind smaller obstacles, being able to get through smaller spaces and so on.
Honestly, with the same intelligence, I would be more afraid for normal-sized humans.
In a prolonged conflict, the ability to replenish your numbers faster (i.e. earlier maturity, meaning baby production turning into soldiers quicker) is a **massive** advantage. Almost all large-scale conflicts of the modern age have been wars of attrition. The side the lost was typically the one that stopped being able to produce new material to the frontlines - weapons, ammunition or soldiers.
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The biggest problem with spacecraft is weight. You want things to weigh less and less.
So, your halflings have a natural advantage in spaceflight. This means that, while it seems you are fighting over a single planet, the halflings are going to have an advantage in space. While hardware requirements don't change, things like life support and food and crew are all a bit less mass. Which means, ton for ton, their space stations will have more room for other things. Like weapons, if your setting so desires it.
Put a few soldiers in orbit, and they can be *anywhere* in a very short period of time. And that's ignoring any direct orbital strikes.
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**Halflings tolerate heat.**
[Environmental temperature and human growth in early life.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10887907)
>
> A link between adult human body size and environmental temperature,
> evolved through adaptation to heat stress, was first recognized a
> century ago and is now well accepted in human biology. Increasing heat
> stress favours smaller body size and an increased ratio of surface
> area to mass.
>
>
>
Mammals generate metabolic heat. If your environment is hot, you have to get rid of that heat. The larger you are, the more volume you have per surface area and the harder it is to get rid of that heat. In truly hot environments this gets to be a big problem. Humans rely a lot on sweating to dump heat. If it is 40C and 100% humidity it gets difficult for humans to stay cool.
Halfling territory is hot and wet. Their smaller size and consequent better cooling ability means they can live and thrive in these circumstances. Larger bodied individuals suffer and have to reduce heat generation and activity.
---
I thought I invented this. I did not. It turns out exactly the small body adaption or "pygmy phenotype" has been selected for many times even in existing human populations and for exactly this reason - it is advantageous in hot, wet environments. This is true for mammals of all types (many also called pygmy - pygmy goats, pygmy hippos) and it is true for humans.
[Pygmy phenotype developed many times, adaptive to rainforest](https://news.psu.edu/story/323123/2014/08/18/research/pygmy-phenotype-developed-many-times-adaptive-rainforest)
>
> Short stature may be adaptive for rainforest individuals for a variety
> of reasons, according to Perry. Small bodies require less food, which
> is adaptive for a food-limited location like the rainforest. Small
> bodies also generate less heat, which, in the heat and humidity of the
> rainforest, is adaptive...
>
>
> "What we think we see is that regions of the genome that are involved
> in the Batwa's Pygmy phenotype do not look the same in West Africa,"
> said Perry. "If the Pygmy phenotype were really old, then we would
> have expected the locations to be similar."
>
>
> The fact that they are not, suggests that both of these Pygmy
> phenotypes arose independently, separated geographically, with
> different underlying genetics, but with individuals who look similar.
>
>
>
So too your halflings. They are in essence pygmies. Their heat tolerance lends itself to a story. Suffering from heat is acute and easy to convey, and an obvious reason why large humans pushing into halfing territory might decide it is not such a good place for them to live.
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I offer you two skills which humans and to a certain degree anthropoid apes have developed and which would be reasonable for your hobbits to develop. If you put external pressure on them by other stronger and larger races closing in on them and their territories, you could argue that this speeded up their development compared to the stronger races without need for it.
**Technical prowess - craftiness**
A race with such a small amount of strength living in an earth similar to ours will find the need to craft tools much sooner than a race of stronger humans. You need little more than some strength and dexterity to create a biface, but you will need a lot of strength for throwing a spear or piercing anything with such a weapon. Inventing the bow allows a smaller creature to propel any arrow much further than a strong arm could throw a spear giving them the advantage of range before others.
Also, inventing the pulley for helping with lifting anything too heavy for them or the wheel for creating aids for transporting heavy things will become necessary much earlier in their racial history, as they have barely any chance of migrating without such aids. Being small allows you to create shafts for mining ore much more easily and you need far less strength to mine, if you a crafty enough to use the strength of dammed water to help with breaking rocks from one another.
**Taming beasts of burden or defense earlier in history**
Such a race might also find the need to tame beasts of burden which help with carrying anything to heavy for your hobbits or wolves/jackals for defense against the taller and stronger humans and other races, before anyone else comes up with the idea. Once you have riding beasts, you can outrun anyone else and flee or keep at range when you get under attack from stronger races.
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They were oppressed by humans for centuries.
There was a plague that they were resistant to, but humans were not.
During this plague, the human society keeping them down as literal slaves (or maybe just second class citizens) declined rapidly.
They used this decline to cast off the human oppressors and left to form their own insular communities that strongly distrust humans to this day.
As they have human-level intelligence, they progressed scientifically during the plague-induced dark age that the humans suffered from. Humans were left behind by virtue of societal collapse making subsistence a priority for even the brightest minds.
They're a few hundred years ahead of humans scientifically, including military doctrine and weapons sciences.
They continue to be insular from humans and jealously guard their technological might, because they fear espionage and theft of their knowledge, and they know (or at least think, depending on how irredeemable you write humans) that humans will use their own stolen technology to overpower them and enslave them again. They don't harm humans out of bigotry, or meddle in human affairs, because they're nobler and more forgiving than humans, but they still are pragmatic enough to know not to trust them with power, or the tools to obtain power.
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**Berserkers**
Size isn't everything. Killer bees are feared as are fire ants. A wolverine can bring down prey many times it's own size. If something's bite is far than it's bark, it tends to be left alone.
If the "halflings" have a fiery short temper, people would be less likely to pick a fight with them.
If you have the [berserker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker) fit hit them with a massive adrenaline kick, they can get stronger and faster plus dull the sense of pain.
Only the dumbest human would even entertain the idea of playing "toss the dwarf"....
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Kaz Smedry, From Brandon Sanderson's "Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians" series has a [list](https://coppermind.net/wiki/The_List) of reasons why short people are better than tall people. Among these are:
**15. Short people make smaller targets**
In a world where technology has advanced to primarily use ranged weapons, short people are harder to hit. Give them a boost to their natural speed and they'd also be fairly balanced in 1v1 hand to hand combat.
**63. If everyone were short, ceilings could be lower, thereby lowering building costs.**
In general, a society of smaller creatures would need fewer resources, in terms of food, buildings, et cetera. If most of the farming is done by machines now, a halfling can match the productivity of a human, while needing fewer resources to sustain themselves, meaning they have more excess resources.
**82. When short people plummet to their doom, they don't fall as far.**
While the above is not *strictly speaking* true, in a society with flying machines (or tall cliffs), it would be easier to develop glider or parachute technology designed to support a child sized person.
**257. A tall person can shield you from dragon breath.**
Entirely self explanatory.
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Maybe you should think about the Orcs in *Lord of the Rings*, *The Hobbit*, and the *Silmarillion*.
The adult orcs came in a number of different sizes, usually smaller than men, and some were small enough that a military unit of orcs mistook hobbits for fellow orcs and the overseers made the two hobbits fall in line and march instead of killing them.
And yet the dark lords Morgoth and Sauron used hordes of orcs in their armies to fight and usually overwhelm armies of men and Elves who were much bigger and stronger than the average Orc.
The Orc armies seemed to have the advantage of numbers and reproducing more rabidly. And possibly they may have had the advantage of being soldiers fighting armies of Elves and Men who were warriors instead of soldiers. Warrior forces sometimes defeat modern soldiers, but soldiers usually defeat warriors.
Note that the ancient Gaul and German warriors were bigger and stronger on the average than the Roman soldiers, but the Romans usually defeated the Gauls and the Germans.
Note that east Asian horse riding nomads were smaller on the average than, for example, Northern Europeans, yet the Mongol invaders of Europe won a number of battles and wars with superior discipline, tactics, and strategy and ruled parts of Europe for centuries.
So your hobbits can win and defeat men if your hobbits are armies of trained and disciplined soldiers led by generals who have studied tactics and strategy, fighting armies of warriors.
And you might want to see my answer here:
[What stops a race of giants from wiping out humanity?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/138263/what-stops-a-race-of-giants-from-wiping-out-humanity/138355#138355)[1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/138263/what-stops-a-race-of-giants-from-wiping-out-humanity/138355#138355)
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I would go with a combination of the Swiss, Tucker's Kobolds, Hobbiton conviviality, and (don't shoot me) World of Warcraft gnomes.
Why did it take humans millennia to figure out electricity? Religion, superstition, politics, all schemes of power... What if the halflings just weren't that into conquest and domination, and put their keen minds to science? So their tech is a bit better than the humans, not necessarily "electricity within 100 years of discovering copper", but definitely enough design generations above their neighbors.
They don't have imperialism as a value and believe in fair dealing, so they are not a territorial threat to their neighbors. Much the opposite, halflings earn a fine reputation as kind, generous, good neighbors and traders; when a halfling calls on an inn, it is considered a good portent for the innkeeper.
But they are certainly aware of imperialism, and are prepared for it. Woe be to any invader who thinks to *anschluss* any halfling lands, and march expecting to meet halfling legions spear to spear. Instead, they find themselves hopelessly mired in prepared defenses they can't even see or understand, and they are torn apart; it seems the armies are being eaten by the land itself.
When their remnants head for home, they find nobody wants to trade with them. Their neighbors do not approve of their mad, pointless assault on the halflings; it is heresy to whatever god smited their armies. The king's marriage to a neighboring kingdom's daughter is annulled. After enough pain to remind them why trade and foreign relations are good things, good relations amongst the kingdoms are restored by diplomatic efforts of - who'd imagine - the halflings.
It soon becomes a matter of near superstition: *Don't mess with the halflings*.
It helps that the halflings have an affinity for lands that are highly defensible but not particularly desirable; they favor places like Switzerland.
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Smaller size means less food required. By roughly the cube of the height ratio (i.e. half height means 1/8 food).
Throughout history, halflings lived in marginal lands: semi-deserts and tundras. Humans could survive there, but only as sparse nomadic bands: anything more would starve. But halflings can build cities, and maintain specialists. So halflings have blacksmiths in places where humans have hunters who sometimes carve bones.
As empires grow, the halflings face a new threat: more distant humans from more fertile lands. These humans can match them in numbers and technology, and while they can't live off the land, they can conquer it. But these armies are dependent on their long, vulnerable supply lines, and the halflings know the territory a lot better. So these conquests don't go well.
At some point, resources worth getting are found in the arid lands. The halflings are well-positioned to extract them, whereas the humans would need constant food caravans and still find the task very unpleasant. It's just *cheaper* to trade for the stuff than to conquer the place and extract it yourself.
By the time transport gets cheap enough to change that, guns are invented, and size is no longer an advantage.
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Their small size gives them a few big advantages.
First, hobbit-sized buildings are likely to be quite defensible against human-sized foes. In real life, a major feature of castle construction was to have two main gates, set up sequentially so you have to go through both to get in, and they are at right angle to each other. This makes it impossible to use a battering ram to get through the inner gate. Rams have to be really heavy and narrow, which makes them long. Too long to be able to take a tight turn. Well every hobbit structure has this kind of advantage. Humans simply can't get in if the doors are hobbit-sized.
Second, because hobbits are smaller, they will be able to have more dense formations on the battlefield. This is really important for pike formations; denser formations fit more pikes in the same area.
Third, they will make great heavy cavalry. Because hobbits are smaller and weigh less, any horses they ride could have more armor or could go further without tiring. You don't need to be strong to wield a lance, the horse does all the work.
Fourth, they'll be great at using chariots or war elephants. You could fit more hobbits or arrows on the same sized chariot or howdah.
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## **1. Craftsmen and Builders**
It is often a common trait in most Fantasy novels, for "halflings" to be weak and have an average intelligence however, at the same time they have the **ability to craft objects such as weapons and high quality goods at a far superior rate than any other species.** This will provide them with a sustainable economic system which allows them to dominate other species with the wealth that they are able to accumulate.
This will allow them to both manipulate other species social systems and provide for their own defense by crafting effective weaponry at the same time.
## **2. Tunnelers**
An added trait in order to ensure that the "halflings" are competitive with the dominate species, is the ability to tunnel and dig, therefore they will be **more adapt at getting resources than their competitors.**
Futhermore, with this ability they can dominate the other species by thriving underground, creating their own environment, to which they may develop a plan to reclaim the surface from the competing species.
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What about an electric eel like shock to prey/enemies that immobilized them for a second/half second when within 5 feet or so. Halflings have much greater mass than an eel and can send a much greater shock but the shock does not transmit as well through the air as it does in water. If you get close enough in hand to hand fighting, you will lose.
If their favorite prey has developed an immunity to their shock they would need the shock to get progressively stronger to bring them down. They could potentially have a very powerful charge.
There is also how often they can send a charge and how much they are weakened when the shock something and if they can control the strength of each shock event with adjusting for the prey size, etc. There could also be different strengths of charge in different individuals/populations within the halfling population, etc.
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**Razor sharp toenails**
Halflings walk barefoot and their toenails are extremely thick and hornlike. When preparing for battle they sharpen these toenails to a point with razor sharp edges.
Halflings of course are nothing if not stealthy. They creep up behind a foe and kick him in the ankle thus severing his Achilles tendon and incapacitating him. While he is writhing on the ground in agony they disappear back into the undergrowth.
More athletic halflings can leap into the air and kick higher up the body - there is a special name for this martial art which I am not at liberty to divulge.
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One more untouched issue: ability to domesticate smaller animals for riding. Let's say llamas - halfings would be able to form a mountain cavalry using such animals, which would give them serious edge in proper environments.
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**Dexterity**
Perhaps faster reflexes would be more appropriate. Assuming that the nerve conduction speed of the halflings is equal to that of the humans, their nerve impulses have much less distance to travel.
This allows for a silly role-playing trope of my college years: the halfling martial artist.
But seriously, it could make the halflings more skilled at weapons than the humans.
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Make them like Hobbits: they are extremely good at staying out of other people's way.
By doing so, they avoid being a problem to others, and thus the opportunity cost acts in their favor.
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We know that for most of human history, humans were not actually progressing.
Rather, we were moving around the landscape, infighting and bulding city-states that were later deserted due to climatic or other issues. Only very recently we had any sustainable civilization, starting from Egypt.
Just make halflings never go backwards. Let them excel at agriculture and cover more and more ground with their settlements.
People from stone age can't really put much against this, since they are in small tribes. They can try to loot and pillage a settlement, taking heavy casualties from sling fire and darts, while still being pushed into the woods, hills and other broken landscapes.
Just make them very cooperative with each other and never falling down a stair.
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**Numbers and throwing**
you seem to be missing an implication of what you already have, if they need less food that means their tribal size can be bigger. One of the big advantages Sapiens had over neanderthals (who were larger and stronger) was we had much bigger tribes, we were also likely better at ranged combat. An individual might be bigger but with intelligent creature numbers matters a lot more. Prior to agriculture (and even mostly after that) human communities max out at around 150 individuals, this is due to how many other people we can keep track of. Make halflings double that 300, three times would be pushing it because they are not saving that much calorically, because a smaller animals metabolism has to be faster, but half as much is reasonable. the changes to their brain will not be noticable externally so it is easy to handwave.
You can make this effect even stronger with something else halflings are often given better throwing arms. if their are more of you and they are naturally better archers or slingers that's a pretty significant advantage in conflict. This could be better hand eye coordination or even something as simple as a better shoulder architecture. Now they will suffer reduced range thanks to their size but if their aim is better it becomes a mre even playing field.
In essence they are beating sapiens at their own game, but the drastic difference in size evens it out.
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1) Heat tolerance. They are small and suffer less from heat. In very hot areas, like the Gulf of Darien in Colombia, they would be kings and humans would die from heat. The problem is that they would suffer in cold climates.
2) They aren't that weak. Muscle power is relative to muscle area, not length. If their muscles can get large if they pump iron, they may be as strong as a human.
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While Halflings are generally more like pygmies than children, it might be worth considering some physiological advantages that children can have, and potentially let the Halflings keep them as they age, somehow. Namely, age-related deterioration could set in either more slowly, or later but more rapidly.
The one that seems to run into issues around puberty for some reason is vision. If Halfling eyes age better on average than those of most other humanoids, there's an advantage. Combine that with stealth and agility, and you have excellent spies / assassins / burglars / ninjas, or snipers once weapons suitable for sniping are available.
How about healing from injuries, or what it takes for injuries to be noteworthy in the first place? Combine a fully developed immune system with a youthful ability to recover from wounds more readily without having to be extraordinarily in-shape, and Halflings make up for being easy to smack around with the ability to walk it off faster. Being lighter would also put less strain on certain essential joints, which, combined with better wound tolerance and recovery, means you have a much lower rate of attrition among soldiers.
So, now you have an army of ninjas with a bonus to accuracy and healing. Throw in the environmental advantages everyone else has mentioned, and the only missing piece is their weaponry, as most premodern ranged weapons (and some modern) *do* utilize the user's strength for efficacy. Crossbows and blowdarts, perhaps with poison ammo, are less strength-reliant. When guns come about, Halflings should innovate the fastest, in order to get barrel lengths lower and accuracy higher, so they can carry them rather than treat arquebus like light artillery.
One thing about the environmental aspect, though. Halflings need to innovate better than the big peoples, if possible, yet we find that the sorts of hot, forested regions where being Halfling-sized is most advantageous tend to be technologically behind more temperate regions in real life. These regions in real life have proven very difficult to conquer, historically, with much of Africa remaining unconquered until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's almost like a tradeoff, where the environmental elements favoring unconquerable pygmies disfavor rapid technological advancement. The precise reasons for this are not agreed upon, but if I had to suggest workarounds, I'd focus on establishing trade and communication networks that Halflings can use without compromising their environmental defenses. Tree villages with paths that don't like more than 50kg per person-space, low-tech flight via gliders or balloons (maybe there are giant animals around they can use for materials, and natural sources of lifting gases?), conveniently arranged rivers or terrain (perhaps artificially engineered in ways that favor Halflings)? If they do utilize planes, horses being viable for cavalry is a lot more recent than people generally assume, so Planes Halflings could have been among the first mounted soldiers just because horses weren't yet big enough for the other races.
In summary: retain child-like vision and healing, use strength-agnostic ranged weapons when possible, and find some way to get the advantages of tropical environments without the impediments to large-scale trade and innovation. Inca-style public works, poison dart snipers, earliest cavalry if planes are available, and monster-skin gliders and monster-stomach balloons if you want to get real crazy, and your equatorial mountains / forests / savanna Halflings might stand a chance against the big peoples long enough to reach your intended destination.
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[Question]
[
**Basic Introduction (story background for anyone interested)**
I have a character whose punishment for causing massive genocide was immortality for ten thousand years. To be more specific, after his death, his soul was imprisoned in a special container for ten thousand years. After his punishment, he sees the world once again and is surprised that technology hasn't developed much.
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**Question**
So, the question is, **how could have civilizations not have had any significant technological change?** How could they have been stuck in medieval technology?
I'm asking this question because I'm planning to write about what happened in the past (ten thousand years ago) and what happens in the present (basically the protagonists trying to defeat the returned villain). I want them to both have medieval settings, as I did lots of research on a medieval setting, and I don't want the characters of the ten-thousand-years-before plot to be unorganized, primitive people.
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**Details**
1. The setting is fantasy, so the explanation can be magic-related.
2. The technology of ten thousand years before and later are both medieval technologies (6th~7th century).
3. "Civilizations" in this question refers to all the civilizations living on **one big continent**. Also, it doesn't have to be only one country that has been standing for ten thousand years; multiple countries must have fallen and have been established over the course of ten thousand years.
4. No external forces impeding technology; there is no big force trying to prevent technological development.
5. No major technological developments as in no society-changing inventions (guns, steam engines) were made.
6. Religion: There could be multiple religions that developed, or just one unifying one.
7. The continent these civilizations are living in is half the size of Africa.
8. If technology staying stagnate isn't possible at all, a fall and then a rise would be okay.
The introduction is only an introduction. You don't have to worry about it when answering the question.
[Answer]
### Population decline leads to demographic tax
Let me offer a reason of more prosaic origin. Huge advances and progress come from the need to tackle complex problems. In turn, these complex problems arise most where there are huge, growing populations.
Think of small cities where the time appears to be freezed in comparison to *another* city in the same state where there is rapid progress.
If the world experiences population stagnation, even population decline, it may be possible that a long, world [demographic tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend) is holding the progress.
The nice thing about the demographic dividend/tax is that they are long, effective *and invisible* forces that fuel progress or decline, only by change in population composition.
[Answer]
Lack of Coal.
Without it, the distance you can get from the middle ages is limited. There is a renaissance/enlightenment, but the way humanity hit an industrial revolution was via Coal.
Almost all of the world's Coal was produced in one geological era; the period where trees developed, and ended when white rot developed. For millions of years, trees couldn't rot; at the end of the period, life figured out how to efficiently rot trees. In that window, wood piled up and got buried, and eventually formed Coal.
That layer being inaccessible or not existing would prevent an industrial revolution. The industrial revolution fueled the ability for higher technology states to completely dominate lower technology states.
While gunpowder and water power doesn't rely on an industrial revolution, the advantage early use of such technology isn't large enough to prevent being overrun by lower technology states.
So you could have age of exploration level technology, collapses, barbarian hordes, plagues, famines, little ice ages, greenhouse eras, all in the 10,000 years between the two points. Technology requires a consumer base to be effective often, so much of the local technology level would be related to the local population density and transport network; a recent-ish collapse (last few 100 years) could keep population levels low enough.
Books and relics of past "age of exploration" technology would exist. There would even be (relatively primitive) guns, but maybe limited supplies of gunpowder. Even other raw materials would be hard to find, as the easily accessible ores where mined out over the last 10,000 years. Ship building may not be advanced enough to reproduce the huge ships of the past.
So you could have a kind of post-apocalyptic middle ages in the future.
[Answer]
Peter 3:8
**But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing: that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.**
Ten thousand years of contemplation have passed for your mythical being. He has aged those years. He returns to the world he left, ten days after he left it. To him it seems similar but not the same world. Actually the only thing that is different is him.
I hope you can write. Coming back to your old neighborhood can be the foundation of a serious story.
[Answer]
## Lack of need to
The funny thing about magic is that it removes a lot of the need to progress technologically and makes the common folk much more reliant on esoteric magical practices or traditional rituals to solve bigger problems. And if your setting has gods that interact with your people or give blessings/boons or grants prayers this goes double, further lessening the need to advance.
* Why increase the efficiency of travel by inventing better vehicles than the mounted animals and their drawn carts that is available to the peasantry when a wizard can just open a portal to where you want to go? Even if spatial magic isn't a thing in your setting, you most likely have elemental magic, which means wind magic, which you can use it in combination with a sail on essentially any vehicle and have an excruciatingly low-tech engine that runs on wizard wind power. For that matter, a wizard can just enchant a cart to pull itself. Boom. You basically have a car with no tech involved other than woodwork.
* Why find a technological way to fly when you can go and tame a dragon or gryphon and soar the skies with that instead, or for that matter grab yourself a scroll of levitation and cast it on yourself?
* Why make a bomb when a wizard can just throw a fireball?
* Why make a gun when a wand of fire or lightning bolt can be bought at your local wizardry shop?
* Why make electricity when a wizard can enchant a candle with everflame, or an oven that lights itself?
* Why advance in medicine when a magically universal healing or remove disease potion is available on the market?
* Why learn better smithing/smelting methods when a transmuter can just refine the raw ore into pure iron with a wave of a hand, or a pyromancer holding and shaping the metal with their bare hands?
* Why try to improve agricultural methods when you can just pray to the god of bounty for a plentiful harvest or perform a rain dance to summon the rain?
* Why invent long-range communication when a magic mirror or scrying sphere will do the trick?
* Why try to invent methods of accurately predicting the weather when you can go to a fortune teller and have them draw the cards of fate?
Magic, as much as it is useful, also is a detriment to the technological development of a civilization. Especially if they follow the general psychology of people that they will try to find the easiest and fastest way to do things. You don't have the time nor the patience to wait for someone to invent safe surgery, so you go get the local healer/cleric.
[Answer]
Consider that there was very little technological change in ancient Egypt (and surrounding cultures) from the early dynastic period up until the Greeks & Romans took over. Say about 3000 years, if not more. And then we have another 1000-1500 years before the Renaissance. Contrast that to the couple of centuries\* of major technological change. From a historical perspective, rapid technological change is an aberration, not the norm.
\*Which seems likely to be brought to a halt by environmental destruction.
[Answer]
## You can't without buckets of handwavium
You have two insurmountable problems
1. medieval technology is not sustainable. It is highly dependent on lumber for fuel, charcoal, building material, and animal grazing (forest grazing is extremely detrimental to forests in the long run) and over thousands of years will deplete all forests. The medieval world became increasingly dependent on imported wood over only a few hundred years. Medieval tech also destroys soil, its not as bad as some earlier forms but it is not sustainable over thousands of years, you need knowledge of chemistry to keep soils from being depleted.
2. medieval society is to fractured to stagnate. Medieval tech can advance or it can collapse but it is too advanced and yet fractured to stagnate, and medieval society can't support a single world-wide empire to stagnate technological growth. Worse because such fractured zero-sum driven societies encourage war there is a direct drive preventing stagnation. It also gives large amounts of power and leisure activities to some classes, meaning even accidental advancement will happen.
10,000 years is a *long* time, for scale 10,000 years ago humans may just have invented agriculture, mammoths were still around, and you could walk from Ireland to France. Almost no point in human technological history (post hunter gatherer) is sustainable on that time scale.
[Answer]
## Undo spell
One of your wizards was afraid he was going to make a mistake. So he devised an Undo spell to put everything back the way it was if he did. He tested the spell out for the first time, and it worked! Then he continued finishing up the spell and tested it out for the first time again... and again...
[Answer]
It doesn't have to have stayed static that whole time, it just has to wind up at the same level. It is much more typical to see increases and then decreases. So, what could cause the decreases? What could wipe out a civilization so that people start over?
The planet has a wobble in space so that every 1000 years, it goes through a freeze cycle wiping out all crops and reducing the population to a minimum. (In our case, it does that every 20,000 years which is why we could develop for the last 10,000.)
Animals have many diseases that both mutate rapidly and can be transmitted to humans. Pandemics come through every 100 years with a 50-80% kill rate. To contrast that, the 1918 Flu pandemic is estimated to have killed less than 2% of the European population. A much higher death rate would radically change culture for a while making it far more conservative, willing to kill off anyone who wants to try to make new technology, etc.
Outside of the major civilizations are a number of different places where only nomadic tribes can live. Periodically, they come through on horseback and wipe out the major civilization. Their magic is stronger, but since they are fewer, they can only come through periodically.
The weather is highly variable and severe droughts happen regularly. When a "dust bowl" or a drought like that we have today in California happens, people get up and move. That causes serious warfare and population drops.
[Answer]
Technological advancement is not a must. It appears to be more like a random spark that only is some conditions ignites a fire and propagates like in the opening song of The Big Bang Theory, but very often dies instantly.
Look at mankind: 10000 years ago some civilization started farming and all the rest of development leading us here today, where I am typing this very text on device located in A and you are reading it on another device located in B thanks to the skillful application of a bunch of physical theories. Nevertheless there are pockets of humanities which still live in basically the same conditions as 10000 years and 1 day ago, like hunter gatherers.
If those few places where the rush to technology started were to be absent from the planet, or wiped out at the right time, we would still be in those times, maybe singing this story by beating sticks on a hollowed trunk to be heard as far as possible.
[Answer]
**Radically lengthened lifespan.**
The first thing that popped into my head is simply that the civilization can't be made up of normal human beings. If the people were incredibly long-lived, with generally slower rates of maturity and aging, then the rate of progress would be dampened. Most people have their core personalities and motivations developed around adolescence, and remain largely fixed after that. So the "people" involved could be fantastically long-lived, like elves or dwarves; or an alien race from a planet with much longer seasons or years; or have magic which causes them to not age or die naturally (c.f. [Idunn's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C3%B0unn) apples); etc.
The Nobel-winning physicist [Max Plank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck), originator of quantum mechanics, is famous for the [following quote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle) from his autobiography (1950):
>
> 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... An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by
> gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens
> that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents
> gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized
> with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that
> the future lies with the youth.
>
>
>
This is often paraphrased as, **"Science progresses one funeral at a time"**.
[Answer]
**Radically shortened lifespan and long-sightedness.**
The demon ensure its own immortality by stealing the lifespan of humans, they work hard on the land for all their lives, die young.
Coupled with long-site and no spectacles, writing is never invented beyond a few crude pictorial symbols found on signs over public houses, stores etc..
This means that knowledge is never accumulated over time, scientific understanding never develops, invention never occurs of anything requiring precision engineering - except by touch, and plans of these devices can never spread as no-one can hardly see the detail on the page (if paper even gets around to existing in the first place). Knowledge is barely passed from generation to generation before death if everyone dies only a decade after puberty. Result - society developmentally frozen.
[Answer]
**Culture, Religion, Philosophy, something like that...**
1 - **They don't want to evolve**: people may have thought that the medieval lifestyle was ideal with at most some improvements in areas such as medicine, cooking, architecture, agriculture, politics, etc., but with magic supplying the needs of the people, people see no reason to want to evolve civilization into something very different from the Medieval Era. Perhaps there may be groups of people who want evolution, but that minority would be too weak to the point where the changes are not so significant.
2 - **The gods do not want progress**: with magic, religion may have become stronger with spells that facilitate communication with the gods, allowing the priests (or even the common people) to know the intentions and wishes of gods and if the gods don't want advances in technology to the point of creating cars, planes and computers, then people will follow their will not to infuriate the gods.
3 - **The world wanted to regress**: magic may have stunted so much for a few millennia that humanity evolved until it was like our real-life civilization, but then magic returned and people realized they could replace technology modern by magic and with influencers adhering to medievalism fascinated by medieval fantasy, people have descended to regress until civilization appears pseudo medieval, preserving only knowledge but abandoning technology.
4 - **Wars and apocalypses**: events hindered evolution, such as someone opening a portal from hell allowing the passage of all creatures from there to here, causing a world war against demons that may have lasted a long time. It was only after a few centuries or millennia that humanity managed to evolve magic enough to close the portal and kill the rest of the demons. Or maybe a war between kingdoms where everyone wants to rule the world. Things like that can delay the development of technology, especially if there is magic involved, then what evolves will be magic, not technology.
Well, that's what I can think of to justify this stagnation.
[Answer]
**Magic is personal and insights do not transfer easily.**
Look at Xianxia stories: Everybody who can cultivate does so because cultivators become superhuman and non-cultivators are treated like trash. However at the same time, a lot of "cultivation insights" are personal, linked to the soul, or whatever . Thus while you can give hints to other people you cannot provide them the answers directly. In fact, giving too many hints may hinder them in the long run, as they try to force things that are actually incompatible with their personal way.
Transfer that to your magic system (Xianxia cultivation is basically magic, just with more punching and arrogant posturing involved).
What does that do to your world?
The development of magic is inhibited:
* Since becoming a better mage is not something you can be taught, there will not be a big library of works that build on itself. You cannot go: A learned lightning magic, B learned silicon magic, C combined the two to make magic transistors, and I took that further and made a magic computer!
* Those that have magic are superior, thus everybody wants to become a mage. Remember if YOU show signs of being really talented with magic, report at once to the local mage family for congratulations and pats on the back (no knife, promise!).
* Ensuring that your children becomes mages can be reliably achieved with enough help, but they can only become strong on their own. This means that if you are super strong and want to set your children up for life, then you can either sit back and hope for the best - or go out to sabotage or enslave those that would become stronger.
* If your parents are strong mages, then you get to develop your talents in safety. But if you are a peasant with magic talent, then you are hunted prey. You can either sign a magic contract with a strong mage for protection (enslavement) or you can hide and hope nobody spots you and decides that you are on route to become stronger than their children.
Technological development is also inhibited:
* When most scholars spend their time looking inward, instead of studying the world around them, formal science goes slower and scientific libraries are more of a curiosity or hobby.
* Sure there are smaller advances here and there, but then there are also powerful magic families with frequent snits and proxy fights (and occasional big ones). So small technological advances also regularly die in the collateral damage.
* Anything that may allow a peasant to kill a mage is STRICTLY PROHIBITED! So the inventor of the crossbow had a sad sad fireball accident (as did the second and third inventor of the crossbow - but not the fourth; he was killed by lightning in a thunderstorm... In his bed, in a room without windows... Crazy how natural lightning can do that. :)).
[Answer]
They were given reason not to try, repeatedly. Someone/thing objects, forcefully, to any attempt to advance technology along certain lines. If every time someone invents gunpowder the great god Balketh wakes from his slumber and flattens their laboratory, and everything else within a day's walk, then pretty soon people are going to work out that that is a **BAD PLAN**TM.
It need not be quite so selective, immediate, or brutally obvious; civilisations that push the boundaries may just collapse in plague, famine, and infighting as the gods turn on them.
Alternately but in the same vein with a fantasy world with real gods that really do make the world go around inventions that alter society may cause those gods to lose their power to make life possible for people in that society.
[Answer]
**Stability valued over anything else**
This culture values social stability.
There might be different reasons how this came to be - horrendous war times, ecological catastrophes, or just religious belief.
It has been reinforced by the "organisational" professions: Judges, teachers, planners ("bureaucrats" is one typical label you stick on these, but they can also be "chiefs", "bosses", "leaders" - the people who have some measure of oversight). These have a natural preference to stability because change means they can't do their jobs they way they learned it.
Technological change means disruption - that's instability.
The organizers will find ways to discourage technology.
They will suggests laws, or merely declare (and enforce) that that new unheard-of weaving pattern is not allowed to be sold on the market.
You can't do technology if all organizational structures are impeding you - your progress will be slow, full of obstacles, you'll die poor and your works will be forgotten, either because the heirs never had interest in change or because they don't want to follow your road to poverty.
Such societies did exist. The typical cliché is the Chinese Empire.
These died when the more technologically-minded and innovating societies came into contact with them, but the scenario as described in the question does preclude that, so this would work for 10,000 years.
(It also requires that the society be resourceful enough to deal with changing climate patterns, new pests, and such. They need to be resilient against hunger catastrophes, essentially.)
[Answer]
**Addiction.**
There's a remarkable plant that the ancestors discovered (some say they made it, but just another tall story). It is a fully complete food source, providing all the people's nutritional needs, it's easy to harvest, can be harvested all year round, grows anywhere and makes you as high as Ozzy in the 1980s.
Basically everyone's too busy chilling to bother inventing stuff or changing anything as everything's just fine as it is.
So, people keep dying from time to time, but they're going to an even better place, wow. Quite a few interesting looking piles of bones around, lovely weather.
[Answer]
What era is your antagonist imprisoned during? If it was the stone age, well, the stone age lasted a long, long, long time. The bronze age lasted at least 2200 years.
But to your question. Entrenched political power can impede progress. So can entrenched economic power. Certainly religious power can do it.
I think you should research. There are long lived systems in human history, though maybe not 10K years:
* Ancient Egypt was fairly economically autarchic, melded political and religious power in one figurehead, and it stood for about 4000 years before change was forced on it.
* Assyria in various stages of up and down lasted several thousand years and was militarily dominant in it's - rather competitive - part of the world for omst of that time.
* You could investigate the Byzantine Empire as well. It stood for a bit over 1000 years, and I think a case could be made that the Ottoman Empire was built in significant part on the Byzantine foundation, in which case you have a well documented recent empire-system that lasted a bit over 1500 years.
Frank Herbert addresses this in the Dune universe. The Padishah Empire stood for thousands of years in a situation where technical innovation was seen as a threat by all the major power brokers - the economics of the empire were highly regulated to control change and preserve the status quo. Leto II governs for 3500 years mostly by force or threat of force and for his peculiar reasons he actively forces technical advances underground.
Also, what do you mean by change? Even in the stone age, 2.5M years or so, we see advances in manufacture of stone tools. The Bronze Age lasted until iron smelting became somewhat widespread, but it was not static - there were innovations in the design and use of bronze weapons and military tactics using those weapons. Same the Iron Age.
[Answer]
**Ultra Plague, Super Inquisition, No printing Press**
Reading through all the comments I see some common themes. There is something in your premise that prevents the population from splitting into multiple competing or co-operating societies, as was noted, a population growth inhibitor. The second thing you want is something that prevents people from asking questions, forming hypothesis, and experimenting; in other words, a rigidly conservative society that relies on old ways, certainly in your world, respecting magical belief more than scientific. I think studying the causes for the scientific revolution and seeing how they could have been stopped might be key inspiration.
Of course the problem you have is that conservative societies also preserve knowledge; institutions and libraries eventually inevitably lead to more discovery.Hierarchical societies developed math as a way of keeping track of crop yields and giving taxes back to a centralized government, as in the case of the ancient Sumerians. How do you prevent your conservative society, which is authoritarian and controls the population from asking questions, from also developing scientific methods? If it controls the population, it also logically has a bureaucracy, and has, specialized jobs that lead to innovation.
Jared Diamond and Yuval Harrari have interesting ideas about the phases of human history and the exact sequence.
The scientific revolution is actually a different stage from the earlier one of agriculture and the emergence of a caste or nobility. Harrari in particular talks about the importance of questions as a predicate to the scientific revolution. I sometimes think the printing press, which lead to more people reading books which had been entirely hand fabricated before that, must have also lead to the proliferation of scientific knowledge. The Gutenberg press was invented in 1440, and the scientific revolution starts in a hundred more years. Books also foster diverse opinions and world views, and you need more questions and critical responses to answers for science. Capitalism also, inconveniently lead to scientific discovery, because people could form companies with shares to fund exploration and lead to the whole earth being mapped. You want to stop history right before the printing press and limited liability companies.
What could block the proliferation of knowledge?
Many others have pointed out that it would be intuitive to say the elite, or magician elite is in charge.
Is it possible that something like the historical Black Death plague and the inquisition could be amped up in your world? Could you take the idea of an opposing religious force and some sort of contagion together? Perhaps some reason why a ruling elite would oppose books and libraries more effectively than any historical elite?
[Answer]
## They've already peaked and taken technology as far as it can go.
They have achieved access to virtually unlimited energy via fusion or whatever and refined it as far as is practicable. All members of society have access to the accumulated knowledge of their civilization at will via electronic devices be they implants or just wearable. Any physical item can be reproduced cheaply and in exact detail, used, studied and then recycled when no longer required. Rejuvenation therapies let people virtually live as long as they want until life is no longer worth living. The solar system has been explored and anything worth extracting from it is done via machine. Finally astronomers have scanned all the stars for light years around and found no life and nothing else worth traveling to that can't be found locally. Any extra solar exploration is unmanned and regarded as no more than a passing distraction since decades or centuries have to pass before the results get back.
They live in a nirvana - and the population is stable or declining as a result . There is no sickness or disease, no hunger or war. And nothing to strive for. They have become a civilization of lotus eaters. And as they see it the law of diminishing returns means the time and effort required to improve the performance of any machine or technology by the couple of percentage points that could reasonably be achieved simply isn't worth the effort involved.
Finally? The 'special container' your character is imprisoned in is a computer.
[Answer]
Your standard medieval setup is a walled castle or town with peasants in the lands around it, some inside the wall, some in the countryside around. If you've got 10,000 year prisons, I'm going to assume there's also monsters and magic for some of this; if so, they provide a compelling reason to stick to areas under the control of someone with enough sharp things to keep them at bay.
If you fast-forward that scenario a few thousand years, assuming the lords are smart enough to never require revolting against, you'd see a lot of subtle societal evolution. Distant farmsteads would take a long time to die out, but they would; or they'd form their own towns and start the growth process anew. A system that stable would see the importance of the local lord wane, until they became a branch of the local government with a proud quasi-royal heritage.
If you've got magic, you've got the means to provide a near-unlimited quantity of the things that generally forestall rebellion. To maintain the same level of technology for so long the region would have to be poor in copper, iron, and natural resources such as coal, and for whatever reason it "doesn't work like that" if you try to perform experiments using magical lightning.
If not, I think emphasising the ease with which stability in the region can be maintained would be paramount: everyone has enough food, nobody freezes in the winter, nobody really wants for anything. Expansionism would be a discouraged cultural meme. Living in complete harmony with nature would have to be a very strongly encouraged meme, to a
[Answer]
# They developed towards easy pleasure instead.
The magic of the time was advanced enough to ensure all people's needs were met. Famine was non existent, water was easy to summon with spells, minor wounds could be healed.
In addition, mind control magic was advanced enough that a king could impose oaths of office that were absolutely binding on their subordinates, and treaties that couldn't be broken.
This led to 10000 years of peace and luxury. Their pleasure magic is far more advanced, and they know all sorts of way to make life easy and comfortable for people. The guilds are strong, and harshly punish anyone who seeks to disrupt this paradise. Innovation is often lost to the extremely well made orgy and drunkneness spells that are easy to acquire.
These magics are subtle though, and really suck at handling war. When the dark lord returns they'll need to toughen up to defeat him.
[Answer]
A combination of geography and climate which produces the same amount of food all year round.
Take a look where complex societies formed:
* in temperate regions (like Europe and China), where there is winter for several months every year, therefore people have to organize to store food for the time of the year they cannot grow it, and to protect that food from those who try to take it from them.
* in arid regions (like the Middle East) where you need irrigation to survive the dry period
However, in tropical regions of the world, where there aren't big yearly fluctuations in the availability of food, society stayed at the level of small stone-age tribes until fairly recently (when explorers from more developed civilizations started visiting them), at some places even until today.
[Answer]
Magical Biological War
Although war usually leads to the most rapid tech advancements I'd like to propose a faction of mages created a magical biological weapon to use against their enemies which wasn't containable. Some kind of Black Death/Covid19 cross perhaps. With such a large infection factor and mortality rate this resulted in many countries, governments, civilisations failing to the plague. Cities, castles, villages etc. went to ruin for thousands of years and in the last 100 - 500 years the remaining isolated and primitive mountain/cave/forest tribes began spreading out, encountering and reviving some of these older settlements. Perhaps also rediscovering magic in the process. Obviously little would be known about this downfall of society (given that to survive it they had to be isolated) so it would be vaguely referred to as the ruin/downfall/reckoning/etc.
[Answer]
## Only 150 years have actually passed
The prisoner needs to think he has been imprisonned 10.000 years and it has to feel like it (could be magic), but in fact only 150 years have passed.
I would suggest that he is moved to a location unfamiliar to him (maybe an island?) where he wakes up. For all he knows, 10.000 years have passed and is amazed that when he reaches civilization it hasn't developed a lot. Which is true, 150 years isn't much.
It might be a nice plot twist: Turns out he was released by accident, or they never knew how to do it 10.000 years, or the current generation though it was unfair, someone couldn't be that bad. Or maybe a son of a son of a son freed him as the original follower made it its life goal.
*I choose 150 years as the whole world now has new people. You could make it 250 if you want it a bit more into the past so that no-one really knows who he is anymore.*
[Answer]
## 1: Lack of need
You explicitly state that your setting has magic. As a result, citizens can literally handwave away problems. This lack of insoluble problems unfortunately means that there is no *need* to develop better tech.
## 2: Lack of care
Like the Roman Empire, your civilization has not run out of problems to solve. However, decadence and political infighting prevent the citizenry from coming up with solutions to these problems.
## 3: Mercantilism
The government has seized the means of production, giving monopoly control over entire industries to (technically) private companies (e.g. CHOAM Corp.) While the Mercantilist system is conducive to smooth operation, it also means that there is no real pressure on the companies to improve. A good real life example of this is the East German automaker Trabant. While their cars where decent in the beginning, *they never improved on the design.*
Really, you don't even need to make the companies government-controlled; all you need is for the companies/guilds to be able to suppress competition.
[Answer]
A bit clichéd, but you could also use some obscurantism or fanatiscism.
Perhaps the gods are in the powers and nature, and trying to control nature is heresy? Perhaps the society reveres magicians, and technology that replaces magic is seen as profane.
Perhaps magicians are aware that technologic advance would reduce their power over the rest of humanity, and try everything to prevent it. It could even only be one nigh-immortal tyrant magician, stronger than all the others, that deters every attempts of muggles to try to get stronger. (or a society of magicians)
[Answer]
It depends on your definition of "technology."
We associate technology with the availability of gadgets, but what's more interesting from a societal point of view is food security -- and technology would certainly progress in that field, although largely invisible to anyone not tasked with farming.
Your society could be planting genetically modified crops, but to the layman, it's still a field full of green stuff. They might have improved water distribution to be a lot more efficient, but the layman still turns a handle on a tap.
[Answer]
What you are describing is a less advanced version of the [Amish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish) who have a lifestyle and culture based on a particular religious doctrine.
Those who abide by the doctrine are comfortable with the lifestyle and culture and perpetuate it.
The same could apply to a group of people from the medieval period.
[Answer]
So, I have two ideas… A series of cataclysmic events within that time span could prevent them from advancing significantly. Another possibility is they don’t want to advance their technology very far due to superstition, maybe they regard their technology as somehow sacred or perfected. Many ancient civilizations were superstitious about their weapons.
[Answer]
People are overthinking this. Homo Sapiens, Sapiens (us) lived for 250,000 years with little advancement. Ice ages were probably the biggest reason for that lack of advancement in human history. It's only been the last 10,000 years of stable climate that allowed people to set up with stable resources. After that... war, plague, religion, all those things kept civilization stagnant for long periods. The dark ages dragged on and on well after the Greeks and Romans had been far more advanced. The Greeks ended in BC. Pax Romana ended around 125 AD. The dark ages lasted largely until just before the Industrial Revolution, nearly 2,000 years later. There was no reason why we had to advance. Once it happens it can tend to self-perpetuate, but it doesn't have to start at all, and there are plenty of things to knock it off its path. Trump for instance…
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[Question]
[
This is an extention of this question: [Using dead bodies for material 4: ammunition](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/210835/using-dead-bodies-for-material-4-ammunition)
The world is suffering from the creatures of fantasy and nightmares which can appear with just a few minutes of warning anywhere, regardless of it being the middle of the street or on top of your bed while you are asleep. It can be a single one, or millions that swarm the area. The world's infrastructure has been degrading, food and supplies are harder and harder to come by. While firearms work well against these creatures the bodies left behind attract and breed both insects and disease. It is not feasible to hold on to area's with low populations as a sudden appearance of many nightmares can wipe them out.
To protect the city several paramilitary and militia groups are trained to seek out and kill any spawned nightmarish creatures. However to increase the chances of civilians who can't wait on those forces while a demon slug is trying to slowly eat their face everyone gets a fire-arm of their own.
The question: what weapon would be suitable for arming all civilians with?
Conditions that apply:
* all civilians are above the age of 16 and have no severe psychiatric problems.
* the weapon needs to be cheap to manufacture. "Cheap" means mostly resource-wise and equipment-wise. High-grade materials are hard to come by with a devastated industrial capacity.
* the weapon needs to be easily maintained by untrained civilians, or require maintenance so far apart that a small group of trained personel can service all weapons.
* the weapon needs to be portable on someone's back.
* the weapon needs to be able to handle a wide variety of makeshift ammo. From glass to calcium to silicon to silicon carbide, anything that can be made out of dirt or dead bodies had to be loaded in the weapon. "Normal" ammunition is going to the trained personel.
* the ammo will be aimed at non-armor piercing.
* the weapon will be used in short-range as civilians are trained to hide and wait while militia's and paramilitaries do the actual fighting. Using their weapons is as a last resort.
* alternative solutions that do not arm the populace is not considered for this question, the fluff demands that the civilians are armed with fire-arms.
I already have an idea what kind of weapon would come out of this. But having an idea is not the same as confirmation.
[Answer]
**Revolvers.**
@PcMan has a great answer about shotguns that speaks to their durability, ease of use, and relatively generous ammo properties. And indeed shotguns are great field weapons.
But your question isn't set in a field. It specifically disclaims wide-open spaces where longarms dominate in favor of tight urban confines. Monsters can appear in your room, while you're sitting at your desk. They can appear behind a door when you open it. They can even walk in on you in the can. You need a weapon that you can carry with you *anywhere*, draw quickly, aim reliably, and get off the first shot before a monster chews your face off. It's possible to do all of that with a shotgun but it takes time and training to develop those skills. So, a handgun.
Like shotguns, revolvers have a manually cycled mechanism that makes them generous in terms of ammunition. As long as it fits in the chamber and has a primer (and isn't powerful enough to explode it) you can fire it, no mucking about with gas seals and extractors and mechanical tolerances. In particular, low-quality ammunition that doesn't produce much pressure will give an automatic problems; not so for a revolver.
At the same time, a good double-action revolver is still semi-automatic - while a shotgun gives you one or two shots before you're working the pump-action or hunting for more shells, with a revolver you can be putting a fourth, fifth, sixth round into whatever materialized in front of you. This is an important consideration for less-trained civilians who can't be counted on to land their first shot.
There's no getting around the fact the revolvers have more moving parts than a simple manually-cycled shotgun and therefore need more maintenance, but this shouldn't be insurmountable. You have plenty of people, you just lack infrastructure; revolvers are perfectly amenable to craft workshops with hand tools.
[Answer]
**Shotgun, of course.**
The manufacturing requirements for a shotgun are a **lot** easier than for any high velocity, rifled, bolt-action or even worse gas-powered autoloading firearms.
A simple breech loading shotgun. Likely a double-barrel, as that actually further eases the manufacturing and metallurgical requirements of the firearm.
* A shotgun is quite powerful, at very short ranges. Short range only is good, it requires less skill of gunner or accuracy of firearm to still be effective.
* It is robust.
* It is *very* easy to operate, literally just point and shoot. The plebs will need minimal training, possibly even just a demonstration will suffice.
* Its cartridges are easy to make, very tolerant to bullet/shot material defects or variance, and best of all quite inexpensive to make. (paper tube, gunpowder and shot. Primer if you can. That's it. *Real* firearms need brass casings, lead bullets, possibly even FMJ lead bullets, and nonfouling nonsmoking gunpowder.
* It is not at all sensitive to fouling, the way rifles or automated weapons are. Plain old black powder is more than good enough!
And if the plebs should decide to turn their weapon on the Authorities, they will be so ridiculously outgunned that they are not a significant danger. *This* is usually the biggest danger of arming the masses.
p.s.
Not pump-action shotguns.
Those require a great deal of precision and material quality to the manufacturing process to ensure smooth operation, but worse they impose much more stringent quality controls on the rounds themselves. In a pump action shotgun the cartridge must not only survive until firing, but must reliably remain intact after firing, to allow safe ejection. And the cartridge needs to be much stiffer to survive the loading process.
To clarify, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xrokl.jpg)
A short-barrel, side-by-side double barrel, neckbreaker shotgun.
Not a neat and tidy little 20-gauge toy, a 12-gauge boomstick.
Not pumpaction, not sideloader. (So that a jam can be cleared easily, even with a broomstick and/or pliers!)
Unrifled, un-choked. (So that just about any load from solid slug to buckshot to flechettes can be shoved through it)
Small and light enough to be carried by a worker going about his daily tasks. I'm thinking over-the-shoulder back holster,
like this 'Desantis Kurz Shotgun Scabbard'
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HOm5D.jpg)
[Answer]
I'm assuming here that there will be little industrial capacity allocated to the militia's weapons- what proper factories exist will be used to produce weapons for regular military units, with smaller workshops tasked to make firearms for the militia.
**(1) Slamfire shotgun-**
The simplest, most last ditch weapon imagineable would be a slamfire shotgun- literally two peices of pipe with something at the end of the bigger bit at the back to act as a firing pin. You put a shotgun shell in front pipe, and when you want to fire, you pull the front peice back sharply. No trigger, no safety, no ejector- you don't even need the handles here if you don't want them. You could even use it as a smoothbore, single shot rifle if you have an appropriately sized pipe- anything that fits in the pipe can go boom.
Range and accuracy aren't going to be particularly good, but letting off a 12 guage shell in a creature's face will probably do the job. They are so easy to make that supposedly it's not uncommon for homeless people to make them for self defence. Obviously, anyone issued with one will realise that their life is seen as worth less than a few peices of stamped sheet metal.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8lTu7.jpg)
**(2) Double barrel shotguns** A considerable step up in terms of manufacturing costs, but also substantially more effective. Other answers covering this have explained why these are a good choice so I won't cover them here.
**(3) Open bolt submachine guns** Open bolt sub guns will give militias a much greater weight of fire while still being easy to manafacture. The sten gun is a perfect example of this- it's basically a barrel, a bolt, and some simple welds and stamped peices- it's probably one of the simplest firearms that you can make that would still be useful in a gunfight.
A spring at the back pushes the bolt forwards to detonate the cartridge, and the force of the recoil from the round pushes the bolt back to rear to start the process again. As there is no gas system, it should be much more robust to handmade ammo than other automatic weapons.
It can be made by a someone in a small workshop without any specialised tooling, doesn't require much material, and all the cuts are very simple.
While it was prone to stoppages, most of these could be fixed easily and maintanence was simple- it didn't even require lubrication. Most of the issues come from the double stack-single feed magazine and could probably be fixed with a bit of tinkering with the design (paramilitaries in Northern Ireland used double stack double feed magazines on Stens so I'm sure it can be done). Besides, the ease of manufacture more than makes up for its flaws as a last ditch weapon.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pBqLQ.gif)
[Answer]
**Slingshots.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SWrqT.jpg)
<https://walkingdead.fandom.com/wiki/Slingshot>
>
> Following the outbreak, handheld slingshots became the favored weapons
> of Connie and her sister Kelly who would use them to shoot rocks with
> great force at their enemies. Despite not being as flashy as Magna's
> knives or Yumiko's Bow and Arrow, the slingshots proved to be highly
> effective against zombies...
>
>
>
pros:
1. Anything can be used for ammo.
2. Won't jam. If elastic breaks, easy to replace.
3. Cheap to practice.
4. Can be scaled up or down according to user strength.
cons:
1. No awesome CGI explosions.
2. Not phallic.
3. Won't stop Godzilla.
[Answer]
Traditionally? You’d be looking at something like a Sten Gun. Cheap low calibre submachine-gun with wide manufacturing tolerances but capable of throwing out a bunch of lead in a hurry.
The lack of readily available cartridges is a problem, though, plus you want to be able to improvise.
What you might be able to make use of is something blended with a Harmonica Gun - an old kind of repeating weapon with a fixed series of chambers in a harmonica-like slide, each packed with a primer, powder, and a bullet. As you shoot, you push along the slide to the next slot, giving you a second shot ready to go and so on until you’ve fired off all your shots.
The accuracy? Awful. Would it be dangerous to operate? Certainly. Does it beat getting your leg eaten by a slug? Definitely.
Of course, this assumes a blunderbuss is off the table, which is cheaper still. Get a pipe, pack it with powder, and whatever garbage you can find. Touch off the powder in the back, spray whatever it is in front of you with scrap. Easy to aim, no need for moving parts, dead simple, if a little pedestrian.
[Answer]
Shotguns are the best of modern weapons but I think you want something from farther in the past: The blunderbuss and the dragon--the ancestor of the shotgun. Black powder poured down the barrel rather than shotgun shells from the factory. In the situation you describe these would be single-shot weapons as reloading in a one-on-one fight would be impossible. (The dragon is simply the scaled-down one-handed version of the blunderbuss.)
[Answer]
**Frame Shift**
*Arm your civilians populace with spears, swords, machetes, knives, bats, axes or other simple melee weapons*
*Requirement: The weapon needs to be cheap to manufacture. "Cheap" means mostly resource-wise and equipment-wise.*
Edged weapons, axes, bats, etc, are easily manufactured and require little specialized metallurgy, especially when compared to pistols, rifles, submachine guns, etc.
*Requirement: The weapon needs to be easily maintained by untrained civilians, or require maintenance so far apart that a small group of trained personel can service all weapons.*
Check. Such simple weapons as a machete or spear require little maintenance. Illiterate soldiers and mercenaries for thousands of years were able to keep them in fighting shape.
*The lower the requirements for building and maintaining these weapons the better*
Check
*the weapon would require as little training as possible to use.*
This one is a little trickier. Swordsmanship is a complex skill. However, a crowd of civilians clumped up with spears pointing outwards, or bashing that evil bug with club/axes/machetes, requires much less finesee.
*The weapon needs to be portable on someone's back.*
Easy peasy.
*the weapon needs to be able to handle a wide variety of makeshift ammo.*
No longer necessary to manufacture, distribute or store ammo.
*The ammo will be aimed at non-armor piercing.*
Perfect. Melee weapons excel at damaging non-armor wearing beings. Just hit the bug over the head with a baseball bat.
*The weapon will be used in short-range as civilians are trained to hide and wait while militia's and paramilitaries do the actual fighting. Using their weapons is as a last resort.*
Perfect. Weapons like axes or machetes excel at close quarters combat. Baseball bats are a common last-resort weapon for households in urban/suburban areas in the USA due to their simplicity, low training requirements, ubiquity, their safe factor around children, etc. Reserve the firearms for the highly trained military units for ranged combat and precision strikes from a safe distance.
*Alternative solutions that do not arm the populace is not considered for this question, the fluff demands that the civilians are armed with fire-arms.*
This arms the populace against the bugs, but still allows the powers-that-be to control their citizenry, since they have high-quality firearms. If the fluff demands the civvies have *firearms* specifically, versus weapons, that is a problem. Only you can make the determination here.
[Answer]
## Frame challenge: you don't need armed people you need safe points
Instead of trying to get everyone to fight back against the threat, you need to train people to sound an alarm and flee to a defensible point. People have a few minutes of warning to vacate the area and a few minutes more to safety; a reasonably fit person can cover a kilometre in that time, let's half that by having safe zones on a kilometre grid. The only problem is keeping the safe points themselves free of threats. This can be achieved by keeping them continually guarded, which has the added bonus that someone trained can defend them with heavier weapons, or you can design them in a way that prevents spawning - perhaps they have automatic saw blades, perhaps the space is blocked by removable spikes, perhaps it is a rapidly erectable structure so it is functionally not there until needed.
This removes the need to arm everyone, and mitigates the fact that many people will simply be ineffective even if armed unless heavily trained, and means that any threat that does approach people will be facing people who are grouped together for greater strength and in a defensible position.
[Answer]
Don't look too far! There's a small place in Europe full of cows (and their dung), cheese and chocolate - and no, it's NOT Sweden - and they did something very close to what you are intending.
I suggest you read up on Switzerland's cold war militia system and the bunkers built in every house.
**tl;dr**
Switzerland made every able-bodied man a soldier and gave him a rifle to take back home. Every house, even public buildings, had to contain a bunker to sustain tenants and customers for two weeks in the case of a nuclear blast.
**tl;bri (too long; but read it!)**
Concrete bunkers are quickly built and likely very effective against nightmare creatures. They offer your people good protection when in defence and a place to withdraw to.
Now for the weaponry: You don't want high-end military weapons in people's homes because they need maintenance and ammunition which you want to save for your specialized troops.
What about giving them hand cannons? Yes, hand cannons. No, really, I'm totally sane - JUST HEAR ME OUT, OK?
Metallurgy has advanced, chemistry as well and so did military technologies in general.
Modern alloys won't burst when the powder explodes. Modern gunpowder, on the other hand, will also not explode prematurely/unintentionally just because you sneezed. Plus modern gunpowder is much less susceptible to humidity than in the old days. Additionally we also had advances in material science: you can keep the powder really dry, add some of those "do not eat"-bags into it and humidity is no issue anymore.
A modern alloy tube can be filled with some modern gun powder (think: paper cartridges). You add glass and metal shards, even pieces of bone, concrete, or stones - you found cutlery? perfect, stuff it in there and that's your canister shot!
All you need now is some basic aim (so better at least one working eye) and a lighter or a match. Works against single enemies on close range and even entire groups. And if you have several of them used together you *will* do quite some damage.
More advanced versions could use sparks from batteries to fire, maybe with some kind of trigger mechanism.
Easy to maintain, can use anything as ammunition, can be handled by everybody with ease and I guess, almost everybody has a ligher or some matches somewhere.
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[Question]
[
So I'm writing a story and decided to use Hida Furukawa as the location. It has a high school with a field of 650 ft that theoretically could be used for a small aircraft to be use to take off. In the story, a meteor falling that can wipe the town out. A man decides to fly a plane into the meteor with some explosives on it to destroy the meteor and is successful at the cost of his "life."
I intentionally put that in quotes. As he is some dimensional traveler that controlled the meteor to fall. He staged a fake heroic death to jump into another dimension. In my story, I want to know what science/astronomer critics would say to give clues to how unnatural this is, so it helps the female protagonist believe that he is still alive and probably in another dimension.
**Note** (08/02/18)
Based on everyone's feedback, I've changed location to Kakamigahara, Gifu Japan. It has a private airport that is sometimes used by the Japanese Airforce :) While I'm not going the fun with W-59 @CortAmmon suggested, I was tempted since I'd have access to planes that could fly higher lol.
[Answer]
I’m going to address this as a general question about using airplanes to stop meteors, rather than the very plot specific way the question is worded.
Nope. For one very simple reason:
Speed.
Meteors are not the slow moving flaming behemoths of Hollywood. In reality they’ll be moving at or above Earth's escape velocity ([11km/s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_velocities)) when they hit the atmosphere, and anything big enough to hit the ground with any destructive force wont have shed much of that speed by the time it does. This means that they’ll clear the distance from your plane’s operational ceiling to the ground faster than you can twitch your joystick.
There are also serious concerns with the energy involved (no plane can carry enough energy to stop an impactor from impacting) and the fact that by the time it hits the plane it will already likely be in fragments.
On the other hand: your extradimensional guy can be using any number of weird technobabbly things to achieve his goal, employing advanced tech to make sure he’s in the path of the meteor and absorbing the energy to make the jump, but then it would appear more like he was just very, very unlucky (or weirdly prescient) rather than demonstrably heroic.
EDIT FOR A FUN NOTE:
If the meteor were large enough to not be completely in pieces before it hit the ground it would also compress the air underneath it to such an extent that people would be incinerated *before* the meteor crushed them. Physics!
[Answer]
**Not possible because meteorites move with [11 to 72 km/s](https://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-faq/#3). The best chemical explosive octanitrocubane create shockwaves with [10 km/s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane)**.
This means if the shockwave of the entering meteorite is not powerful enough to disintegrate it (as it often happens), chemical explosives can't do it.
When the hit would trigger the explosives immediately (which it cannot), the meteorite simply *outruns(!)* the explosive gases.
**How can a meteorite be destroyed?**
Let's say it is the same size like the [Chelyabinsk meteor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor), 20 m diameter and 10 000 ton weight.
*Heat*.
One possibility is to try to vaporize it, we need 3000°C to vaporize most stones. Stone has a specific heat capacity of ~1 kJ/kg\*K, so we need 3 MJ/kg yielding 30 TJ ($30 \cdot 10^{12}$Joule) to vaporize the meteorite. If we could use the full energy of the most massive bomb ever built, the [Tsar Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba), we have 20 Petajoule ($20 \cdot 10^{15}$ Joule) of energy available which would be sufficient. Problem: The duration of the explosion was 39 nanoseconds which is equivalent to 0.39 millimeters of meteorite path, so we would need pinpoint precision.
*Pressure*
Another option is a powerful enough shockwave. You only need to split the meteorite in small enough parts that the atmosphere can vaporize them. So apart from being powerful enough *it must be dispersed in sufficient height* because otherwise your city is hit like a shotgun.
Even if we have a nuclear weapon, we still have many problems:
* Trigger: We would need a trigger with nanosecond precision to detonate the bomb exactly when it is needed.
* Distance: We would need a distance measuring method which would be able to accurately estimate something which is flying faster than a bullet.
* Path convergence: 20 m diameter is very, very small, you pass that in less of a second in the slowest airplane. How exactly do you find the exact path?
* Height: It does not matter if you destroy the meteorite in 5 km height because half a second later the debris will blow away your town. You need at least intercept it at stratosphere height (20 km).
**No, it is not possible. It is even a formidable task for today's technology**.
[Answer]
The answer is no. And if you really feel like it, you can ignore the explosives entirely.
In physics, we can always choose our frame of reference to simplify the problem. Let's take our frame of reference to be that of the meteor. If it is traveling at 6km/s with respect to the earth (a conservative estimate made by Joe Bloggs that I like), that means that, from the meteor's point of view, the plane is traveling at 6km/s towards it! A [Cesna 172](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_172) has a mass of roughly 1100kg. At 6km/s that's about 40,000MJ of energy. [TNT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT) releases around 4MJ/kg, so the kinetic energy alone accounts for about 1000kg of TNT.
**In other words, the energy from your relative velocity with respect to the meteor is equivalent to the explosive energy you'd have if you made your entire plane out of TNT!**
Now the energy required to level a town is on the order of nuclear weapons. You're talking hundreds if not thousands of tons of TNT equivalent. Your plane's energy is pretty darn minuscule by comparison. Destroying a town is on the rough order of 1-2 MT of TNT equiv. so your plane is something like 0.1% of the mass that this meteor has.
>
> "Do you know how much damage this bulldozer would suffer if I allowed it to roll straight over you Mr. Dent?"
>
>
> "How much?"
>
>
> "None at all." - Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
>
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>
Also, note that the ceiling for a Cesna 172 is about 4.5km. That means that you will hit the meteor at most 0.75 seconds before it impacts. Most of the meteor is going to... well.. continue on to its destination. It's not going to have the time it needs to pick up tangental velocity to spread the impact away from the town.
[Answer]
**He fakes it with his dimensional powers**
To answer your question NO he will not make it in time; and even if he did blow up the meteor the fallout would kill everybody anyway
BUT
IF the dimensional traveler could just use his powers to take a huge part out of the meteor into another dimension. then blow what’s left up with his plane and make it look like he did it. then fake his death for the whole world to see and just be left confused
The science/astronomer critics will be baffled as to why they are not dead based on the size of the meteor and that could be the protagonist clue for her to believe he’s alive. It’s both sound of mind and helps you avoided the “jumped the shark moment”
[Answer]
When any object comes from space into our atmosphere it undergoes ablation - the intense friction and pressure (from air compression) generates heat and corrodes the object away. That's why the smallest bodies never reach the ground, disintegrating in the upper atmosphere. Larger objects may hit the ground after losing some mass to ablation.
Blowing up a falling meteor may actually be a good idea. By tearing it into chunks more surface would be exposed to ablation, and the smaller pieces might disintegrate in the upper atmosphere.
However, a town destroying asteroid might be too massive and tenacious for a simple explosive. Also it is moving too fast - these things enter the atmosphere at multiples of the speed of sound. Last but not least you need to intercept it pretty high in the atmosphere, or in space preferably. This is a job for missiles of the heaviest kind - we are talking ICBM's here.
Your character's feat will not take a scientist to debunk. Anyone with high school knowledge of physics will see that this is farfetched enough even for Holywood.
[Answer]
After everyone being a downer I'm go to help you out here. Realistically? No he couldn't do it. Technically? Of course, he could use the caloric energy contained within 11,048,505,945,548,076,923.077 chocolate chip cookies.
This is all assuming that this is a very large meteor traveling at 41.5 Km/s (average meteor speed is between 11 and 72Km/s so lets cut that in half) and is made out of iron and has a radius of 30.89km and is also striking at a 90 degree angle for maximum energy deliverance so it's powerful enough to destroy the whole of Hida-Furukawa. (These numbers are from <http://down2earth.eu/impact_calculator/>, fun little tool.) This is all assuming that region of japan is mostly made of igneous rock which was an assumption of my part.
The energy of this meteor at such a velocity upon impact is about 3.60811375\*10^21 J which can be converted into 8.6178316375275x10^20 cal and the all powerful god google told me that there are about 78 calories in a chocolate chip cookie. Divide the necessary amount of energy to stop the meteor to stop the meteor by the amount of energy in a cookie and you find how many cookies you need.
TL;DR If you ate and absorbed 100% of the energy in 11,048,505,945,548,076,923.077(ish) chocolate chip cookies you would be able to stop the meteor with your fist and still have room for a snack.
Refs:
Speed of a meteor: <https://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-faq/>
Meteor size and density needed: <http://down2earth.eu/impact_calculator/>
Calories per chocolate chip cookie: I dunno ask google
[Answer]
I think it may be possible to break up an incoming meteorite if was simultaneously hit by multiple high-speed projectiles fired by an array of electromagnetic railguns, such as the ones developed by the U.S. Navy. These projectiles would be traveling at 5600 mph (Mach 7.3) and each one would have 10.64 MJ of kinetic energy. I think a 5x5 array would do the trick.
The only catch is that you would need to know in advance when and where the meteorite was going to hit so you could set up the array in that area beforehand. You would also need a power plant nearby to supply the required electricity.
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[Question]
[
>
> The creatures escaped. We selected them to breed fast. Perhaps too fast. The customers were always hungry for the newest model.
>
>
> At first, it was just small beasts. Dog-sized. The kind a child could raise instead of a dog or a cat. More intelligent than a dog, and more loyal than a cat.
>
>
> Then the zoos got in. Suddenly, having natural animals was passe. Visitors wanted to see titans - enormous, scaley creatures with rows of teeth that could crush a car on accident. T-rexes, Triceratops, Stegosaurus...but then we moved on to animals nature had never even seen.
>
>
> New monsters were being created by the week. Magazines held contests to name entire artificially created species (though that ended rather quickly after a new sea reptile was named *Draconia MacDracoFaciem*).
>
>
> But amidst all the excitement and optimism of this new age of genetic recombination, we never considered what would happen if a breeding pair escaped...
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I am making a post-apocalyptic world where the cause of the disaster is some sort of genetically created invasive organism. This civilization is so adept at genetic manipulation that, rather than splicing sections of DNA from one organism onto another, they can custom create a new creature from scratch with the same ease as making a 3d model for a video game. At first, the corporations with this technology used it to make real-life Pokemon - cute, fuzzy things ranging in size between a cat and a golden retriever and market-tested to compete against them. The yellow text above goes on to say how zoos realized they could make a real-life Jurrasic Park, and later realized they could make real-life Monster Hunter Park, but I'd like to focus on that last line.
You see, while those T-rexes and wyverns and Gore Magalas survived and thrived after the event, the menageries they were kept in (zoos came to refer to facilities that held naturally-occurring animals) were just too spread out for a single escape to result in the collapse of all civilization. No, the real cause of the end of the world was the little Neo-housepet things. While the genomic technology is versatile to create literally anything that can breathe and grow, it takes a long time to create a single animal. To create enough stock to sell these things like Pokemon cards, the brilliant corporations in charge of this tech engineered their housepets to breed very rapidly. Of course, this meant that they spread like weeds once they got out, especially without any natural predators.
And this is where I get stuck. I'm not sure how to go from this to "civilization is boned." I don't want to make these rats crave the blood of humans because I still want there to be humans after this disaster. But I want the rats - or whatever they unleash - to devastate modern infrastructure with little to no warning. The dinosaurs/dragons can help this disaster along - when the national guard is helping victims of a flood caused by rodents chewing through the wires at a dam, it's hard to get them out and fighting a rampaging T-rex - but the primary cause is the rats. I need help with what these animals do and how they cause the apocalypse.
* Despite being called "rats" for now, they range in size from about the size of a rat to as large as a dog. Most consumer models have similar features to many quadruped mammals (2 eyes, hair, tail, ect), but any of those features can be played with.
* This setting plays loose with the boundary between magic and science. For now, let's say that any adaptation that occurs on a real-life animal, such as armored calcite plates, electric-generating organs, or bioluminescence can be put on this rat.
* As stated, the escaped dinos and dragons can help the collapse of civilization along (most likely by destroying nearby centers of population and the knowledge therein), but the rats have to be the primary culprit in the apocalypse.
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### Go full Pik-... electro-mouse on them
These little critters love electicity. It was cute when someone came up with the idea of creating a pet that likes to nibble on your electronic devices. In this day and age everything has some amount of electricity. But then someone wanted a bigger pet that would still be nibbling on electric devices.
And suddenly you had a rat that was attracted to electricity.
After some time they started to slightly shock someone after nibbling on electronics. Still cute, more like being shocked after rubbing a balloon on your hair and then touching a doorhandle. And it was great for keeping all sorts of cats and such off your lawn.
Everything was fine - until some of them escaped and found that there were lots of cables *everywhere*. It's their favourite snack and every other animal that comes close to them will be shocked as if it just touched a hyper-version of an electric eel. Not something normal rats or cats are used to and so they started to multiply like crazy.
The more electricity, the more of these critters. Defending your precious electricity became the main task of humanity, but they were too fast and they are too small. You can still live somewhat comfortably when not relying on electricity too much, but without any electricity it became hard for humanity to care for themselves and we were pushed to the brink of extinction.
Dragons and all that were a secondary problem. Once we couldn't care for them anymore they escaped and occasionally they eat someone. They are the direct threat that's eating you, but the problem is the secondary threat of these damned rats destroying all your equipment. Once you set up a base and try to provide enough of *anything* for a couple people they are coming for you. These little critters will destroy your base, leaving you defenseless for the normal wilderness, the new dragons and the problems of too many people in one place without enough food and hygienic facilities for everyone.
They don't kill you directly - but they are the ones that are responsible for the near-extinction of humanity.
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Breeds fast? Destroys environments? Fuzzy rodent that doesn't crave human blood? Sounds like you made a super coypu that's going to consume the world's plant life.
A [Coypu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coypu) is an annoying, adorable, orange-toothed rodent whose [habitat and feeding description](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coypu#Habitat_and_feeding) begins with:
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> Besides breeding quickly, each coypu consumes large amounts of vegetation. An individual consumes about 25% of its body weight daily, and feeds year-round.
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It seems to fit the bill, and doesn't need any modification besides being bigger and able to breed even quicker.
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**Real Coypus are a menace:** [Here is the 2016-2017 report](http://www.nutria.com/uploads/1617CNCP_Report.pdf) on Louisiana's coypu(also called a nutria) harvest, which is designed to keep their numbers in check. For the 2016-2017 season in just Louisiana, more than 200,000 coypus were culled, a million dollars was allocated to pay the hunters, and it is estimated that nearly 6000 acres of coastline was damaged by the local coypu population. And this is before their genes were messed with.
**Your super coypus are worse:** Essentially, the super coypus will eat the world into the apocalypse.
Your super coypus just escaped from some rural homes, and reach a nearby river. They start eating, and they start breeding.
A normal coypu weighs about [about 6kg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coypu#Appearance). If your coypu monstrosities are dog-sized, let's say they weight about 30kg. If they ate 25% of its body weight daily like a normal coypu, then **each one of these things is eating 7.5kg of veggies every day**. Presumably, your genetics lab also made nutrient pellets that hid their true hunger from the public. A [normal coypu can give birth to 1-13 offspring every 130 days](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coypu#Life_history), and you said your rodents were designed to breed faster than normal.
Pretty soon, the super coypu escapee population has outgrown the local wetlands. The plantlife around their rivers is depleted, but luckily for them the rivers they inhabit [lead right into](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation#/media/File:LevelBasinFloodIrrigation.JPG) nearby crop fields. They begin eating massive amounts of crops and are able to breed and spread faster than ever before. As more super coypus escape around the world and eat their way through farmland, the fear of food shortages grip the world. With governments focused on controlling a panicked populace, attempts to cull their numbers fail.
There's too many to capture individually. Burning and poisoning crop fields to save the food supply is a poor long term strategy.
Eventually, these fuzzy rodent-locusts deplete the environment to the point where their population collapses and they cease to be a major problem. Unfortunately, humanity ran out of food long before the super coypus did.
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Initial customer research showed a sizable fraction of household pets died from neglect. This failure mode was then removed from later models. They are now quite tolerant of wide temperature ranges or going long times without food or water.
The next most common problem was poisoning. This too was removed. They can eat anything from asbestos to cornflakes with minimal declines in health.
Getting lost or escaping was the third most noted problem, so they were given a desire to be near people.
Focus groups reported that much of the fun of rodent ownership was in training them to do tricks. Adding a little brain power was seen as a sustainable policy; there was plenty of room before they were intelligent enough for people to feel really bad about accidentally killing them, but a new slightly better version could be regularly released indefinitely.
Oops. They are adept at getting into our living space and nearly impossible to remove. We can't trap them or poison them, their resilience means they don't mind tracking sewer water though our pantries and they inevitably find their way into both. Any counter measures are too extreme to deploy in homes, and even making predators would be risky to humans since the predator would have to be bigger and smarter then the rats.
They breed fast so the response to a known infestation needs to be swift, they are hearty so it needs to be brutal, but every time the clean up crews cordon off a block and burn it down the human refugees smuggle out the pets because they are super-naturally cute and owned by kids.
While officials know that rats are a serious problem (non-super rats' damage is estimated as something like 20% of world wide crops today) they have trouble convincing the general public that they are more of a problem than dinosaur rampages even after being personally effected. "we are only keeping [males/females] so it can't be a problem. Oh drat, the Joneses didn't make the same choice of sex; there goes the neighborhood again. Really Johny next time you ought to take more care of them."
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So they were **the cutest little critters** around, and had already made massive profits for the company - one pet for every home was a target that seemed realistic - the Crispr/Cas-Sets for rapid personalization kits (genetic cures for variations in color, fluffyness and behaviour) were selling like wild, the special foodstuff that contained the precursors for wilder colors and glow-in-the-dark effects (could be done in vivo, but shhhh...) flew off the shelves, and would continue to do so, because **the buggers were really tough and durable**.
Only problem: about **one in a million humans had a harsh allergic reaction** to them. So after the first lawsuits, the corporation was ready to pull the plug regardless, when a promising young scientist from the genetics department came up with an idea: While the allergenic factor, and even the brittleness of the older hair (designed and patented dust-away(r) to avoid whole hair uglying up couches) were too deeply ingrained in the genetic makeup to just remove from the DNA, it was a piece of cake to modify some eColi that would live inside its gut and release **iRNA to specifically target the offending allergenic factor**. The iRANa would bond with the RNA destined to be translated into the allergenic enzyme, no enzyme, no allergy. Profit.
The modified eColi was rolled out as part of a yearly gene-bugfix (complementary). Was it the plan of the geneticist all along (she offed herself shortly after the first reports of malfunction popped up)? Was it a miscommunication with the third party contractor that did the splice on the eColi (what should have been separate for obvious resons was synthesized as one, disabled, sure, but now only **one deletion away from becoming active**)?
Anyways, the eColi did not push the iRNA of the 1/million-allergen, they pushed the RNA of a 1/1 **allergen of epic efficiency**. Come into contact once, you'll be itchy and unwell. Come into contact a second time, without immune-dampeners turned to eleven, and you are a swollen, pus-dripping, retching pet owner for as long as it takes for you to succumb to your gut ripping itself apart. And the allergens are everywhere - it's not the hairs - its the broken-down-to-single-molecules hair-dust. Wrap yourself in molecular filters, or you are done. For a brief moment the tide was stemmed by immunosupressants, but as the stockpiles dwindled, normal sickness jumped on the defenseless, and it soon became clear that only [obscure country] that had never imported the pets because of a licensing spat with the corporation, would survive in any shape at all...
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I think you're looking in the wrong direction. I don't think mini-creatures from rat-size to dog-size are going to be a problem. We have them already, in every environment native to humans, and even fairly basic countermeasures will stop them.
Insects, however... Oh boy, are your people in for a surprise there.
For starters, if anyone can do this, then anyone will. Want wasps with box jellyfish poison? No problems. Want to conveniently wipe out the neighbouring church/tribe/country? Air drop a few dozen crates of those bugs, and wait for the screaming to stop. Want to sabotage your competitors? Fill their offices with thunderflies which excrete acid, and watch their computer systems die. Biowar goes consumer-level.
This might not even be the end of it though. After the first few disasters, the companies go antivirus on it, so now everyone pays for their own defense net. Anything comes through the net without authorisation, it gets swarmed by tiny flies to bring it down. Defense in depth means the place is full of anti-intrusion flies. They need to be cheap enough to be disposable, and the only way to do that on a scale of billions is to have them reproduce themselves.
Do the flies go out of control with reproduction? Do they stop people leaving or entering? Do they lose track of their range, so they stop traffic on roads? Do they attack stationary items instead? So many options that your story could use.
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Some genius decided the sensible thing to do was to get them to eat waste. No feeding costs, right? No more having to recycle all that plastic, no more worrying about food waste? Yeah.
Except animals don't behave like that. They soon realised that the wiring in the house was covered in tasty snacks, and that half the plumbing under the sink not only tasted good but would release something to drink at the same time. And all that technology around the home? It might be full of various metals but the little critters would eat the case and then tear the rest apart to get to the tasty circuit boards inside.
The little sods proliferated like mad; eating their way through the infrastructure that we rely upon for food, light, heat, and drink as they went. It wasn't the animals who caused the apocalypse directly, it was the collapse of Just-in-Time supply chains, and creature comforts. Sure, you could replace it all with stuff they wouldn't eat but that takes time, knowledge, skill, and working infrastructure and that - my friend - was disappearing fast.
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Simple: they get hungry.
Let's say that this rat-thing is herbivorous, for the moment, because you said you don't want "craving blood" on the reason list. Let's also say that they're basically meaty water balloons with zero natural defenses or fear reaction, because I want to demonstrate how bad this gets. Let's even say that they're extremely short-lived, reaching maturity in a month and dying in under two years. And, for their few advantages, let's say they're extremely quick breeders and live in groups.
What I've made here is basically the crossbreed of a periodical cicada and a locust, except fuzzy. Their rapid breeding and short generational periods means that you'll get thousands of them in under a decade from just one breeding pair. With all those mouths, they'll be eating a lot too. There's too many of them for any predator to eat, and as long as they're still around, they'll be devouring any plant they can get their jaws around. Oh, and they're spreading out as they grow, so even after they eat all the biomass in an area they'll still just keep going outwards. Sure, the ones left behind in the barren wasteland will starve, but they would die soon anyway and the damage is already done - the soil may be fertile from all the dead rats, but there's nothing to grow in it. Humanity could recover from this apocalypse if they adapted to a nomadic style, constantly moving to places the rats just left and replanting in it until the rats come again. However, our current society requires so much food brought in that it couldn't take this strain.
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I would assume that one of the things they would build is biological Golems. Creatures of some intelligence build for a specific purpose, like maintaining the sewers, repairing your electrics, farming and transporting your food etc.
You could try an economical approach where humanity collapses as people are losing their jobs to the Golems and only a small portion survives, but it wouldnt be a strong argument as the remainder would just survive with the Golems that sustain them.
You could try this: some rats escape, no biggy. For years they just live in homes and the escaped wherever, growing in number. But they are intelligent and can learn from eachother (so if your neighbour learns a neat trick to his rat your own can quickly learn it too). Some of the rats at some point find out that some of the Golems are tasty. The Golems dont have a survival instinct against predators because they never needed them, and in just a couple of days all the rats learn to eat the Golems as the freshest, easiest food around. Some you can munch without killing them immediately! Wonderful! Since the Golems control tons of important stuff including care for other Golems and humans, the sudden and unprecedented collapse of their work causes a collapse of society and large sections of infrastructure, if only because a ton of the Golems getting munched on were flying planes, driving trucks or controlling the local chemical/nuclear plant during their work.
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The rodents multiplied for years, all mostly undetected while doing their favorite past-time - digging tunnels!
By the time the first city started sinking into the ground, there were too many to really stop them; people could only slow the inevitable. Sinkholes were everywhere. Buildings collapsed. Roads all turned impassable. Society slowly and surely regressed as our landmasses collapsed inward and the ocean claimed them.
If you need to explain a little more: Unlike most digging rodents, these actually ingested the soil - all that energy for constant breeding has to come from somewhere. Perhaps their waste was naturally liquid and easily flushed out with any water source; initially to aid in keeping care of them but resulting in exponentially growing amounts of good soil going into the ocean with any rivers or rain as they multiplied.
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**They were too helpful.**
One breed was created to remediate plastic pollution and e-waste. They were supposed to be confined to recycling facilities, but a breeding pair escaped. A population of fast breeders with no natural predators will grow exponentially.
Now, their descendants eat anything with plastics and anything with electronics -- which is to say, all products of modern technological society.
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Threadomancy time!
Since you say they were originally intended to be sold as housepets, I'd suggest that the rats emit a pheromone that makes people love and want to buy and keep them. Unfortunately the scientists were so preoccupied with marketability that they didn't consider the effects the pheromone would have in high concentrations.
The presence of this pheromone in a high dosage(indicating a large number of the rodents in the area) causes people to become completely obsessed with them, to the extent that they care only about the rats to the detriment of everything and everyone else. When the effect is further intensified it drives people into a kill-frenzy as they are seized by an irresistible urge to remove any competition to their sole ownership of *all the rats*, which is every other human on this planet.
This is the start of what one might call a zombie apocalypse. However unlike zombies, the afflicted people retain some of their mental faculties including the ability to use weapons, making them far more dangerous. To make things worse they also don't look like zombies. The authorities would be utterly baffled as madness consumes the populace. By the time they put two and two together, it is two late. The armed forces are not immune either, and society breaks down with crippling damage to large swathes of modern infrastructure in the process. The dawwwww-mination of the rodents is now assured.
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I would suggest that the apocalypse in your story be caused by the human *response* to the critters, rather than the critters themselves. Let's say that the escaped "rats" become a nuisance, driving out native species, and governments begin taking steps to eliminate them, such as:
* introducing newly-designed predators to kill them
* engineering viruses to infect and wipe them out
* changing the chemistry of lakes, rivers, etc, wherever the critters "nest"
These in turn would go out of control and bring down human societies.
This is kind of plausible (based on Australia's history trying to wipe out invasive species) and this approach also gives you a way to insert all kinds of weird horrors into your post-apocalyptic world, such as strange plagues and terrifying predators.
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## I need not write any more than these words
# Wild Pigs
"An estimate for the harvest in 2010 was 753,646 or 29% of the estimated feral hog population in Texas. The population model indicated that without harvest the feral hog population was expected to triple within five years (3.33 times initialpopulation), with a 28% annual growthrate."
Just make it so the company tries to hide the animals getting out and by the time the breeding pair have been found there are already millions loose across the world (they snuck onto ships or make them great swimmers).
Then just make it so that they reproduce at a rate that means at 1 million population they cannot be exterminated.
Also model them like pigs, pigs can eat almost anything and in groups of 2 or 3 can kill bears. If you make these things pack animals like wolves then you could have groups of 500-1000 of these things roaming loose across the wilderness.
And as they are from the breeding pair it is unlikely they are fond of humans like the pets.
Then as they are encouraged to be killed you can have millions of pets being killed which will lead to huge increases in scavenger animal populations.
These scavengers will then be forced to eat elsewhere like supermarkets.
The huge packs will then be drawn towards to scavenger animals and led into human settlements, where they will be shot and killed by people then they will turn savage on the humans and kill every last person in entire towns and cities.
I dont know how dark the fiction you write is, even for an apocalypse this imagery might be a bit extreme (mounds of dead pets attracting rats and vultures, then 1000 strong packs of wolf like super animals spreading through towns killing deers, rats, adults and children and anything that's alive)
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So, I plan to write a graphic novel that takes place in the 26th century. By then, humans have stopped using the old slugthrowers and have upgraded to something more.....eloquent.
I mean, if you're gonna go massacre some alien scum, might as well do it in style.
Enter the Tengellian Arms Manufacturing Co. They have a monopoly on handheld laser weaponry and larger mounted laser cannon turrets. You want a pistol, you go to them! In both cases, lasers heat up gases that turn into plasma.
Tengellian Arms has large contracts with the Terran military, and all military personnel are outfitted with one of their Z-XX67 laser pistols as their sidearms. The Terran military's enemies, a terrorist group known as “Anarchy’s Fists”, also are outfitted with a similar model of gun. I want to make the two sides seem different and split, so I make the Terrans’ lasers fire green, and the AF’s lasers fire red. But this doesn’t make ***that*** much logical sense, since they both use a similar model of weaponry, from the same manufacturer.
So, what would be a plausible reason why a manufacturer would make two models of the same weapon different colors?
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**For when your "laser" weapon doesn't actually shoot lasers:**
In many cases, such as in *Star Wars*, what people refer to as laser weapons don't actually shoot lasers. In *Star Wars*, the weapons actually fire plasma. There are some advantages to using plasma over lasers - for one, it's reasonable for a plasma to visible, but a laser is only visible when part of the laser is being deflected by whatever it is passing through (so in space a laser would be invisible except where it hit).
The color that a plasma glows depends on what gas is used to make the plasma. Then the different colors can be explained by using different gasses (you likely don't even have to say what gasses they are using, as the grunts using the weapons might not know). So the reason for the different colors is that the weapons are actually quite flexible in what they can use to produce plasma. The Terrans would be using the gas that is recommended and/or supplied by the weapon manufacturer, while AF does not.
It's up to you to decide what the consequences are of not using the recommended gas. I think the consequences will fall into one of three categories:
1. The manufacturer has access to a lot of one gas (maybe as a byproduct of the manufacturing proces), while AF has access to a lot of a different gas. There's effectively no difference between them other than their color.
2. The terrorists found something that increases the effectiveness of the weapons, possibly with tradeoffs. For example, their weapons could be powerful but slightly less accurate.
3. Due to being more strapped for resources, the terrorists have to use whatever they have available, even though it causes their weapons to be less reliable or less powerful or inferior in some other way.
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## Different safety requirements
Your Terrans, of course, have the most stringent safety requirements in the galaxy. They buy above the board, legally, and check all the boxes necessary before anyone fires a new weapon. On the other hand, a terrorist group is less likely to be concerned with safety checks and standard operating procedures. They buy wholesale from discount merchants who can only be found on desert planets and are lackadaisical at best with their background checks.
Now, there are a couple reasons that the color of light would change in a more questionable model. One reason would be that they're simply older models, and thus less powerful. Green lasers are in general higher wattage and more dangerous than red ones, so perhaps Tengellian Arms has put out a more powerful model recently, leaving only the outdated ones on the black market. Another reason might be degradation of parts within the weapon itself - admittedly a stretch based on how we currently create lasers, but certainly plausible within a sci-fi universe that includes laser weaponry. Finally, perhaps the red lasers are actually the more powerful ones, with a higher intensity or beam width, and the Terrans deem them unsafe for their troops but the anarchists have no such qualms.
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# Let's talk Physics!
Ok, what is Plasma? Plasma is a very specific state of matter, that is also known as the fourth state of matter. under normal conditions it doesn't exist, and on earth usually is achieved by heating and compressing gases and applying a current. When the current flows through the plasma, it lifts electrons to higher states, which emits light as they bounce back. The wavelength is dependant on the energy gap between the energized and normal state, and thus dependant on the matter that is in plasma state.
## Colorful Light!
### aka "Luninescense of gases from electron avalance in a discharge tube"
Both Neon and Argon are relatively known examples, because these noble gases are abundantly used in light tubes. Neon is the telltale orange-red, Argon a pale purple, Xenon a blue and Helium as well as Krypton tones of yellow. Hydrogen is a red-purple, deuterium is "sith red", nitrogen a vibrant purple, mercury a bright white-blue. So we can have different glowing plasmas easily. But what about them using the exact same device but for the contents of the gas-tank?!
I found a general number, that one foot of neon light would draw 3.5 to 4 Watts, but couldn't find such numbers for the other gases. But because the gap to the next eectron level slims down the larger the atom is, I expect slightly smaller numbers for all but Helium to achieve luminescense.
And just because everybody loves pictures:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wvBQr.jpg)
## BUT...
But the plasma in neon lights is relatively cold and does not react well to unconfined space. So, the plasma might (also?) get its color from a different source but the gas composition.
## Heat
There is a different thing people always forget when dealing with plasma, and that is, that its properties are in long stretches a little gaslike, and thus the formulas for gases are used to make very rough estimates. For example $pV=nRT$, the gas law. There is **p**ressure, **V**olume, **n**umber of mols of atoms involved, Gas constant **R** and finally **T**emperature1. Combine this with the light emitted by a black body from the Stefan-Boltzman law ($j^\*=\sigma T^4$, where $\sigma=5.56\times 10^-8 \frac{\text W}{\text m^2 \text K^4}$), we get this monster:
(1) $\frac{pV}{nR}=T$
(2) $j^\*= \sigma T^4 = \sigma (\frac{pV}{nR})^4$
So the result is, that our emitted light spectrum is dependant on the temperature2, which in turn can be modeled via the gas law (to some degree) as being just dependant on pressure and volume. To reach a high temperature, let's say 6000K to get a golden sun orange glowing fireball, we can grab our other properties to look at what we need. Let's say our gun has a chamber of 1 cm² cut area and 5 cm length, so 5cm³ volume ($5 \times 10^{-6}\text m^3$).
$\frac {T R} V = \frac p n$
Our Pressures are pretty high if we want to conserve ammo: 1 mol of gas under 1 atmosphere is 22.4 liters - or if we have a box with 1 m² area, it stacks about 22.4 mm high, about a finger wide or almost an inch. A standard gas container uses about 200 bar and stores 200 liters of standard condition gas in 1 liter. Assuming a nice half liter gas tank and 200 bar storage pressure, we can carry around the number of atoms usually in 100 liters of gas at standard pressure. That's about 4.46 mol in the bottle. NOW comes the tricky part: for each shot, we will need gas, so we need to portion it. Let's assume for simplicity that we have 111 shots of 0.04 mol3. Then our pressure would need to be an astonishing $399.072\ \text{MPa}$ 4.
And, because pictures: pick your temperature and luminosity from the Hertzsprung Russel Diagram for possible values.
[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/HRDiagram.png)
## Conclusion
Yes, it is certainly possible to color your laser-heated plasma bolts to your liking using two screws: the gas used as plasma-precursor and the temperature of the plasma itself. To change the plasma temperature, one could directly assault the issiue of the temperature by using more power on the lasers, or one could alter the gas flow per shot, indirectly altering temperature via the changed pressure(1). And the temperature results in the color of light emission, because of the properties of a black body.
### Tuning your plasma color
So, to get other plasma colors using the same base weapon, one could do this:
1. Use a different gas composition to turn into plasma.
2. Bore open the containment cylinder to lessen pressure and lower temperature for a more red look - and maybe safety reasons.
3. Set the valve for the shots to be less open for more shots - and a more red look.
4. Open the valve more for less shots but a blue style and the risk of blowing the gun in your hand.
5. Exchange the heating lasers for more powerful ones for more blue.
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1 - There is a different notation using $pV=Nk\_BT$ with **N** being the absolute number and **kB** the Boltzman constant, but both are mathematically aequivalent.
2 - This is not taking into account anything BUT light to transfer energy away. Also, there would be more to this formula - I use the simplified version over all the spectrum here, not the wavelength specific one, that is material dependant.
3 - Let's ignore that the work to remove a set portion of gas from a container is pressure differential dependent. It is easier to let a set amount out of a high-pressure container than to get the same amount from a lower pressure container.
4 - With pressures like that I would not want to hold that gun in my hand. CERN struggles to build up those pressures in their accelerators. And they use more temperature even.
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The answers above provide some great considerations, I would just also add that in battle, it is important to make quick determinations of friend or foe. Just like armies try to use uniforms of different colors, the Terrans and the anarchists could be using the laser colors for the same purpose.
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Very simply because they use different wavelengths, and thus have different interaction with the target.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pjbt4.jpg)
Think of the wavelength like the [bullet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet) of a gun or a rifle: sometimes you can use hollow head, sometimes you can use rubber head, sometimes some other head, according to the type of interaction you want between the bullet and the target.
All bullets are manufactured by the same manufacturer, and also the gun/rifle. Yet they have different features.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3akbh.jpg)
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# Weapon Cosmetics
All other answers are quite scientific, but mine is going to be fully fictional.
Your manufacturer might sell skins or modifications for their weapons separately as an extension. This is not a very strange idea, weapon cosmetics is the main revenue for many multiplayer games(CS:GO, DotA). People pay for cosmetics that doesn't change anything on the weapon in terms of effectiveness but makes it look cooler.
While your unmodified laser weapons shoot red, the army orders ones in green , *so that they provide better camouflage on forests.* They also have exclusive deal with the manufacturer so no other party can use the green laser instead of the army.
Your terrorists are now left with red unmodified laser. This system also gives you an opportunity to add more colors to your novel. You can make your terrorist generals use more modified skins like black lasers or purple. You can also make your default laser color yellow, and make terrorist turn it to red by modifying it so that they have a signature lase sign. This might also be a plot point. Similar to red and blue lightsabers in Star Wars.
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They're selling the rebels the "seconds", the stock that doesn't pass all the Quality Control tests. The good stock has pure [lasing stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Solid-state_lasers) uncontaminated by traces of the factory atmosphere and produces a nice bright green, or blue or whatsoever you please, flash when you pull the trigger, the seconds stock has oxygen contamination and is far more variable in it's output but tends to be more (your choice of colour here). The company officially [writes off](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-off) all it's second class lasing stock as a dead loss but off the books they create finished product, using equally written off body and power components and supply the black market with second rate, but serviceable, weapons.
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I will admit that I don't like stories that break the suspension of disbelief. One visible company selling all the weaponry seems wrong to me. I would think it would be something closer to what the US detergent market is like, where there are really only a very few companies, but they break themselves up into multiple brands to make it look like there is real competition.
So one sub-brand could sell only to the military and another could be marketed to civilians. They would be different colors to distinguish the brand. The military ones might be more powerful, and perhaps at least one of the civilian brands would be more durable for use as hunting weapons.
I would also think that the terrorists would have some military weaponry. Usually freedom-fighters/terrorists tend to be less picky about how they acquire their weapons, at least in fiction. And many military units tend to be involved in black markets. So I'd expect to see the terrorist have at least a few military weapons. Likewise, I'd expect some improvised weapons and perhaps some old (or new) projectile weapons because they are probably easier to make than the plasma weapons.
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Make the difference in colors be a side effect of another feature, then explain why each faction favors a certain plasma type.
Maybe red is better for armor or force field penetration, but green is better for unarmored or lightly armored targets, because it moves faster and deals more damage. AF would choose red, because the military has heavy armor or uses force fields. The military would choose green, because AF isn't so heavily armored.
Maybe one color is lethal and the other isn't, and only one faction is shooting to kill, the other wants to incapacitate and capture its opponents.
Maybe red plasma is more powerful, but banned by international law. AF, of course, doesn't care about that.
In general, find a way to make each faction want to use one or the other.
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**Forensic ballistics**
In the future maybe we don't shoot bullets, and it's a bit of a conundrum since, if you've ever watched CSI or some serious-murder-police-procedural, bullets can be matched to the gun that fired them. Presumably, each gun is unique, or unique-enough that two murder suspects wouldn't leave the same marks.
You could recreate that in a plasma rifle by altering the composition of said plasma ever so slightly, which would give it different colours (maybe not always strictly visible to the human eye) and which might leave unique (or unique-enough) chemical marks on what they hit. Of course, that would heavily depend on what the underlying technology is.
**Rights guns and wrong hands**
You might sell guns to the military, the police or civilians. More than that, you might sell guns to multiple militaries, multiple police forces, in multiple jurisdiction, etc. Having distinct colours (e.g. green for military, blue for police, red for civilians) would help know who is shooting.
A practical application is if the military gets shot at with weapons that fire green, then they might rightfully go ask the manufacturer what the hell. Or it might be the sign somebody is stealing their guns. Or better yet, instead of green the rebels shoot yellow, which is the colour assigned to another nation's military. So many possibilities for drama.
**Out of universe**
[Rule of cool](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool). Alternatively, [colour-coded for your convenience](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ColourCodedForYourConvenience). A multicoloured laser show will look better, and it will help the audience identify who is who. It's unlikely people would question it either. Star Wars gets away with different-coloured blasters with no explaination, no reason you wouldn't either.
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To be really underhanded, they could fire "polarized plasma" that appears one color from behind and another from in front
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In the real world there are multiple colours of tracer bullets
Notably the US (and Nato forces in general) favour strontium based red tracers, while russia and china favour barium Green.
So in a hypothetical WW3 we may well encounter red vs green tracer fire!
In fact, this apparently happened during the vietnam war as the Viet-Cong were being supplied with surplus weapons and particularly Green tracer ammunition from the soviets and chinese at the time.
Being able to instantly know that a shot came from the enemy because it isn't your own colour is very useful, so your two factions may well dope their plasma fuel with secondary gases to tint the shot.
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## Why would the armies want different colors?
So you can see who's on your side. Like a uniform, you can know who to shoot without asking for ID first. Yes, there will be instances of infiltration, but that's just part of the story building.
## Why would the manufacturer make different colors?
Because selling to both sides gives double profit. Arms dealers make huge amounts of money supplying both sides of a war.
Alternatively, maybe the tech means you can choose on the gun what color/power/spread the projectiles are. Then the manufacturer can look innocent, while each side can configure their own colors/standards.
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I'll just add the simple answer: the available plasma medium.
When plasma TV's were mainstream many different plasma TV's were made. But since every group kept their plasma recipy secret it meant that every single manufacturer had their own unique plasma medium in their TV's.
The regular military can not just buy weapons but can easily buy the plasma medium as well. The energy to power the weapons are just any suitable energy source. The Rebels have instead opted to start creating their own plasma in order to keep up ammo supply as its far easier over trying to buy and smuggle it along with the weapon shipments. The rebel recipy is about as effective as the military one, but creates a different color.
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**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
The exposition is that a civilization exists about 200 light years from earth and has been capable of radio communication for several thousands of years. They are not trying to hide from detection but have not been actively trying to communicate either.
I know we have several programs going on to try and detect such extraterrestrial radio signal. What plausible astronomical, technological, or human-error-related factor could I use to explain humanity not having picked up their signal?
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# Radio Waves Are Hard To See, And We Didn't Think To Look At Them
There are about 134,000 stars within 200 light years of Earth. That's a lot of stars. We can't look at even a significant fraction of all of them closely enough to detect the equivalent of human-made radio waves.
A 200 ly radius is a [sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere#Enclosed_volume) 33,493,333 ly3 in volume. The [stellar density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_density) near Earth is about 0.004/ly3. Put them together and you get about 134,000 stars.
This answer on [Physics.SE](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/245505/from-how-far-away-could-earths-telescopes-detect-earth-like-radio-signals) says we're just getting to the point where we could see radio and TV transmissions from the Earth at 200 light years away. Unless the aliens happen to point a directional transmitter right at the Earth, we're not going to pick up their omni-directional broadcasts that happen to go off into space. These diffuse as the square of the distance, so their detectability drops of very rapidly.
Spotting a radio signal 200 ly out requires a very expensive, high gain radio antenna. That sort of sensitivity requires it to be highly directional, so you can't look at the whole sky at once. SETI choses particularly likely stars and likely bands. [Project Phoenix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Phoenix_(SETI)) did just this in the late 90s. They picked 800 "likely" stars within a 200 ly range or about 0.6% of all the stars in that range.
Your civilization's star might not match SETI's idea of a star that's worth looking at. Or they might be transmitting in frequency ranges ranges that SETI doesn't think to look at. Or it might have simply been bad luck that their star didn't get on SETI's list. Or, as others have correctly suggested, they're not inefficiently broadcasting omnidirectional high power radio waves anymore.
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People tend to underestimate just how hard it is to detect radio transmissions from a distant source.
When a spacecraft communicates with the Earth using dish antennas on both ends, the received signal strength for a pure sinewave (unmodulated) carrier can be calculated as
$$P\_R=\frac{P\_TA\_TA\_R}{\lambda^2R^2},$$
where $P\_T$ is the transmitter power, $A\_T$ is the transmitter antenna's effective surface area, $A\_R$ is the same for the receiver, $\lambda$ is the wavelength and $R$ is the distance between the transmitter and receiver.
By way of example, if I plug in the numbers for Pioneer 10 near the end of its mission (8 W transmitter, 80 AU from the Earth, a transmission frequency of roughly 2.3 GHz, a transmitter antenna diameter of 2.75 m, and 70 m dish antenna on the ground), I get a value of -165 dBm (decibel over milliwatts).
So now let me move the signal source from 80 AU to, say, 120 light years, which is a 100,000-fold increase. This reduces the signal strength by a whopping 100 dB. Further, let me assume that it is not transmitted by a dish transmitter aimed directly at the Earth (why would it be?) but rather, it is omnidirectional. At the wavelengths used by Pioneer, that's another ~30 dB decrease in the signal strength. On the other hand, let me assume that the transmitter is a lot more powerful, say, 8 MW instead of 8 W. That is a 60 dB increase in signal strength.
So a 70 m dish antenna (the largest used by NASA's Deep Space Network) would now see a signal at -245 dBm. Or rather, it would not see that signal; it is orders of magnitude below its detection threshold (maybe around -195 dBm).
OK, forget the DSN. Let's say we use the new Chinese radio telescope, FAST. Its dish is a whopping 500 meters in diameter. That is a 17 dB boost in the received signal level. Let me be generous and bump it to 20 dB; so now we are getting a -225 dBm signal.
It is still some three orders of magnitude less than what we can actually detect. And remember, this is just to detect the presence of a signal. Any modulation on that signal reduces the signal level, and detecting the modulation itself, even at a very low data rate, would be still orders of magnitude away.
So no, contrary to popular belief, civilizations that use radio are not shining beacons in the (radio) sky. Aliens won't be beaming back to us Hitler's 1936 Olympic opening speech from dozens of light years away. These "stray" radio broadcasts are immensely difficult simply to detect (never even mind decode or demodulate). And it's not a limit of technology, these are hard physical limits; an antenna of a given size only intercepts so many photons, so much radio energy, even if otherwise it is a "perfect", flawless instrument.
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Quite simply because they've had the technology for thousands of years. Their compression and encoding has progressed past the point where we can identify it as a coherent signal.
There's a tiny window where their broadcast technology would be comprehensible to our receivers during which we could possibly pick up their signal. That would be at the point only recently after they'd invented radio, but before compression and digital encoding. Even if we'd picked up a signal from that point, the chances are we wouldn't recognise it simply due to different technologies.
However that window is out by thousands of years in this case, and it's unlikely that such a technological coincidence would occur in tandem with a grossly overpowered domestic radio broadcast signal.
It's not missing their existence you have to justify, it's detecting them. Our chances of spotting them even under the best of circumstances are minuscule.
Being the more advanced race, they'd have a window for detecting us starting around now and lasting for a few years, but if they don't pick us up at the start of the window, our signals will start to be too complex for them to recognise.
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# Directed transmissions
Transmitting radio into space is just a waste of energy, so they shape the lobes of the transmissions carefully, making sure as much as possible is sent to the receivers. This they do by either sending directly at receivers, or for broadcasting they transmit only in the ground plane.
Already today we have WiFi routers that do beam shaping to optimize transmission. And this is after having radio for just about a hundred years.
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You don't need anything. Our technology could not pick up our own radio emissions at a [200 light-year distance](http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part6/section-12.html), so there's no reason to think that we should be able to pick up broadcasts from an alien civilisation. The various SETI programmes are looking for *directed* transmissions aimed specifically at us, not broadcasts.
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Essentially we cannot detect the radio communications of a civilization at 200 light years.
* Michael Kjörling's answer to the question [How far away would an alien civilization need to be for us to not notice them](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39571/how-far-away-would-an-alien-civilization-need-to-be-for-us-to-not-notice-them) is very interesting and has plenty of equations. Money quotation:
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> At current levels of sensitivity, targeted microwave searches could detect the equivalent power of strong TV transmitters at a distance of 1 light year (within which there are no other stars).
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The conclusion of the answer is that we won't detect them unless they point a transmitter with enormous power, i.e., comparable to the *total electric power produced on Earth*, straight at us, *and* we happen to look for it at the right time on the right frequency.
* The [common](http://www.space.com/9206-finding-harder-aliens-digital.html) [view](http://www.bidstrup.com/seti.htm) is that civilian radio transmissions not intended to be receivable over interstellar distances are simply not detectable. On the contrary, high-power directional signals, such as those generated by radiotelescopes (when used as transmitters) or by military radar installations, are detectable over huge distances, but the probability of their detection is very low because they cover a narrow cone and are emitted for a very short time; see "[The Benefits and Harm of Transmitting Into Space](http://sethbaum.com/ac/2013_METI.pdf)" by Jacob Haqq-Misra et al. (2013).
* The big factor in the detection of alien civilizations is of course the span of time over which they use high-powered radio. See "[Calculating the probability of detecting radio signals from alien civilizations](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.0011.pdf)" by Marko Horvat; the conclusion of that article is that unless there are very many alien civilization or somehow the aliens develop their technology very much slower than us then the probability of detecting an alien civilization in the galaxy is very small.
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### Precondition
"Several thousand" means at least two thousand. Since they are only 200ly away, this means that their first radio signals (which were likely close to what we would consider "radio") are already history. What we receive now, if we receive anything, is 1700+ years ahead of our state of development.
### The signal
Over two millenia of "radio availability" makes it likely enough that their signals are at the very least something like a forward error-corrected and compressed digital (or trigital, who said an alien bit can't have three states?) signal. Forward error correction would mean they could send a lot more energy-efficiently, which is good for them but not so good for you trying to receive their signals from far away, and compression would mean that whatever you receive, if you receive something, looks like noise.
They might as well use a form of "radio" that we are unfamiliar with (unusual high frequencies?) or entirely unable to interprete. Their form of radio might even be some form of quantum communication, which by design is only receivable by designated subscribers and makes "eavesdropping" from the outside impossible. Quantum communication is something we are presently *almost* getting to work with photons (well, saying "almost" is wrong... it works, it just isn't ready for mainstream yet). An advanced alien race might as well have some form of "quantum radio" with designated recipients, why not.
### The Wow! Signal
They actually tried to communicate (not with us, but maybe with a starship of theirs), and we [actually did receive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal) their message. Unluckily, we were unable to decipher or identify it as what it was, nor answer to it. Eventually, the signal was considered "just noise", or something a comet produced.
### Reflection
An entirely different, more conservative, and plausible explanation would be ionospheric (or similar, whatever they have on their planet) reflection, in the same way as shortwave radio is reflected on our planet. This isn't even limited to the planet's atmosphere, their solar system could have an Oort cloud which contains some kind of particles that reflect 99% of all transmissions. Thus, they could even communicate with space ships within their solar system, or a colony on another planet, and we would still have trouble catching a glimpse.
### Black matter
Black matter might be another perfectly plausible reason why we didn't spot them. We know with rather good certitude that such a thing as black matter exists (though we don't really know what it is exactly, or how exactly it complies with our known laws of physics, but we are confident *something* is there). There might just happen to be some black matter that, for some reason, absorbs radio signals in between us and the aliens. Most radio signals broadcast quasi-light-like, which means if something is in between sender and receiver, the signal is partially or completely obstructed. That is the main reason why TV stations (or GSM stations) have their antennas on high towers or mountains -- their range is primarily limited by obstructing objects and finally Earth's curvature, not so much by the transmitter's power. It is also the reason why orbiting the moon is a no-fun experience for astronauts (there's no such thing as telling "Houston, we have a problem" with the Moon in between).
### Technical limits
Finally, even without any special conditions, detecting another civilization which isn't actively trying to communicate is a daunting task, to say the least. Or, you could say, pretty hopeless.
There's the thing about arc length. For something hundreds of light years away, you have to aim darn precisely, and you had better have a really, really directional antenna. But this is not the biggest problem.
The transmitter of a non-trivial nationwide TV station, which is among the strongest "normal" radio emitters that we have (about 2,000 times stronger than e.g. a typical GSM base) typically has EIRPs in the 100kW range. "Kilowatt" sounds like a lot, but it is really a quite small number.
The radiant flux density is EIRP/4π\*d2
Note the innocent little "2", and note that `d` is actually 1018 meters. That's... a mindboggingly huge number, especially after you square it.
Anything "kilo" is too ridiculously close to zero for being measured if you divide it by 1036. Thus, catching any kind of "normal" signal that isn't deliberately directed at us with an extra super strong designed-for-interstellar-hello transmitter is pretty much hopeless.
Certainly, one can more or less arbitrarily scale up the size of the receiving antenna array. Naively, if you don't get enough Watts per square meter out, you just throw in more square meters, and there you go. But the problem is that you *also* catch more noise. Some of this noise is many orders of magnitude larger than the signal. The chance of actually catching something meaningful is rather dim.
Plus, there's quite a few stars out there. Neglecting everything else, and assuming that we are perfectly able to receive radio from any planet up to 200ly away, there's only about a 1:100,000 chance that we randomly pick the correct star system. Trying them all is possible, of course, but it takes several minutes to rearrange an antenna array, so this task would take anywhere from years to decades.
It might just happen that we only found them now because it took us so long to pick the right star.
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Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio in 1894 and it took us less than a decade to realize the need for encryption. At first it was wartime messages only, but it quickly spread to the general populus. Properly tuned cryptography functions are indistinguishable from static, as one would get from a plethora of astonomical bodies or even the vacuum of space. If this species' discovery of radio even remotely resembled our own, we would only have been able to detect their radio chatter for a tiny slice of their history.
This is also one of the main explanations of the Fermi Paradox as to why we haven't found intelligent life yet.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Civilizations_broadcast_detectable_radio_signals_only_for_a_brief_period_of_time>
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Your alien civilization stopped most of its powerful radio & TV **broadcast** transmissions as soon as it discovered lasers, fiber optics, and how to send laser pulses over those fibers.
Even when broadcast transmissions were common, the antennae were shaped to keep them hugging the ground (as @Michael Karnerfors mentioned, to do otherwise is wasteful).
We still send transmissions into space, but only ones highly directed at satellites, and then only at the minimum power needed for good reception.
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The radio waves are absorbed by our atmosphere. Our choice of radio wave lengths (and vision) is dictated by [what can reasonably pass through our atmosphere](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02507208), if that doesn't line up with what passes through their atmosphere we will not see their ground based transmitters with our ground based receivers.
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Schwerin says "radio waves are hard to see," which gave me an idea. These folk have no sense of hearing, and so their writing was pictographic as is their "speech" (sign language). And long before we discovered radio, they had developed to the point that video was preferred over "text."
Although SETI has picked up their transmissions, video of living beings signing inherently doesn't have much pattern, especially when several thousand unrelated signals are mixed together.
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Place your planet near a [strong astronomical radio source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_radio_source#Star_forming_regions), like a pulsar or other neutron star. The brightness of the pulsar would drown out the relatively week transmissions of a transmitting civilisation unless we were actively looking for their transmissions and knew where to look.
For extra fun, you could combine your pulsar with an active star-forming region, where the hydrogen and other gases that are collapsing into stars are irradiated by the light of earlier stars and release their own radio signals.
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Even were you looking in the right direction and for the correct signal, the inverse square law says that the emissions would be detected at extremely weak levels.
A 1W transmitter for example would at 200 light years be received at an energy density of 2 microwatt per square light year. That's not a whole lot for your typical radio telescope that has a size of maybe 400 square meters (for a 20 meter diameter dish, not exactly a tiny one).
And that's the order of magnitude of most radio transmitters in use, even a kilowatt transmitter would only change that signal you receive to 2 milliwatt per square light year.
Remember that a light year is 9.5e15 meters, squared that becomes 9e17 square meters.
Of course that goes out the window if the transmission is highly directional, but the idea holds (as the signal will always spread out, even a laser, parallel by design, will spread out over long distances to where a beam shot from say the moon will have a spot size of several centimeters in diameter when arriving in low earth orbit).
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This is an excellent question, and most answers are cool, too. But I'd like to add something.
1. The thesis that their technology may be far more evolved and thus difficult for us to understand yet is awesome but narrow. I'd say that **we do not know how their technology would develop**, meaning that they might use different radio transmission than us. As you know, currently all radio is based on *Amplitude Modulation, Frequency Modulation and Phase Modulation*, meaning that a carrier signal is used to reliably transmit **ONLY** the amplitude, the frequency or the phase of the transmitted signal as a function of time. That's great for encoding audio in our math system, but their math could look at the universe from a completely different point of view. For all I know, they might not communicate through audio at all (like a giant octopus race mentioned in the Midday World cycle by brothers Strugatsky), thus meaning that they'd transmit only text or other information type. Or they might transmit amplitude and phase simultaneously, for example. The history of our science implies that there is only one way for the science to develop, but ***(alert: Mass Effect spoiler)***
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> in Mass Effect, for example, Reapers say that their influence on us caused us develop "along the paths they desire" which implies **there are ways of development we might be unable to comprehend.** So, there's that.
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2. There may be some obstacles for the radiowaves on the border of the Sol system of which we do not know. Imagine that other stars emit radionoise, for example. I am not an expert, but I find it's quite possible. Correct me if I'm wrong :) Or, there could be a black hole that would catch all transmissions into itself.
3. At last, they might be so far from Earth that it would take thousands of years for a radiowave to travel between us. The difference in planetary movement speed or in distance could cause **Doppler's effect** and modify the wave.
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1. Given the distance, even 0.01 degree can means a whole different planet altogether.
2. Plantes rotates around their sun. They are not stationary. Thus you can make it that everytime Earthlings pointed their detection machine in the right direction, there is an object inbetween. For example, another star.
3. Like others has suggested, since they have the technology years earlier, their encoding could be much more advanced than our own, their radio could use a very high range of frequency that the human's equipments can't capture.
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Any number of these make detecting a signal very difficulty, unless one knows the exact code used (or code algorithm), frequency, bandwidth, modulation, and has a high-enough signal to noise ratio. Then there is the actual analog/digital encoding, compression, encryption, symbol set/language, binary/trinary/etc, and more.
* Spread-Spectrum
* PSK (Phase shift Keying)
* QAM (Quadrature amplitude modulation)
* PM (Phase Modulation
* SM (Space Modulation)
* Code Division
* Orthogonal frequency-division multiple access
SETI says that it is unlikely that a civ would detect us: <http://www.seti.org/faq#obs12>
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Yes - chosen modulation schemes make it difficult to decode the data within the spectrum. But every wireless transmission scheme has a sync method - a way to find the system prior to establishing a connection - which may enable detection - and indicate the PRESENCE of another civilization even if we cannot decode any of the content.
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In my world the empire uses a strict racial caste system that places criminals, poor people and the minority race, the Sublorans, in the lowest class. This has been going on for a few dozen decades, and you know what? The lower caste is sick of it! They created a rebellion called the Black Mane that plans on killing and overpowering the empire, while another, smaller group of the lower caste, The Roost, just wants equality for the two races. Could these two rebellions for the same cause exist? If not, what changes do I need to make in order to achieve it?
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Of course it can. All it takes is groups of people with different levels of extremism.
The way I see it playing out is the rebellion starts off with The Roost being the main rebellion. A few people start asking if they're really doing enough - "They've held us down for so long, what makes anyone think that they'll just let us be equal? The only option is for US to be in power, to remove them entirely!" Over a bit of time this viewpoint permeates through the rebellion, feeding off of the generations of inequality, until they finally split off as the Black Mane when they ultimately decide that their two goals are incompatible.
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## One look at Syria should make this question redundant
I've lost count of how many armed groups there currently are, most of them are at war with each other as well as the government. Some of them have the same underlying aims, they merely want to be the ones in charge at the end. At least one is just crazy. A couple of armed groups are simply fighting for their own survival, the list goes on. The West is backing at least two, while being openly at war with one. Russia is backing the government. Turkey seems to shoot at whoever they dislike most this week.
**You're really not limited to only one rebellion, far from it.**
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Looking at a great source of inspiration - *Monty Python's Life of Brian* - we find that co-existing rebellions for the same cause are the most natural thing.
The *Judean People's Front*, the *Judean Popular People's Front* and the *People's Front of Judea* essentially fight for the same thing, nothing less than have the Romans dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman Imperialist State within two days. However they seem to be not able to put their efforts together:
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> BRIAN: Brothers! Brothers! We should be struggling together!
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> FRANCIS: We are! Ohh.
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> BRIAN: We mustn't fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!
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> EVERYONE: The Judean People's Front?!
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> BRIAN: No, no! The Romans!
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[source](http://www.montypython.net/brianmm2.php)
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Certainly! In fact, there's real life examples today constantly forming. Consider ISIS and Al Quaeda. Their agendas similar enough that many don't even know the differences, and yet ISIS has supposedly shunned Al Quaeda for being too aggressive in their approach to the West. Or for that matter, just look at the history that created ISIS and try to figure out which rebel group is on which side!
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You could look to Ireland for example similar to what you are describing, gaining its independence from Britain. Although the split happened later in the rebellion than yours appears to have, it could be still used for inspiration.
There were divided opinions on whether to accept Britain's terms of independence (the Pro-Treaty "Free State" group vs Anti-Treaty republican group). Although a vote ratified the treaty, the anti-treaty group were strong enough that there was a split in the cause which would go on to start a civil war after the Free State was gained, and be an emotional topic for decades, and resonates even now (nearly a century later) in the North.
It would be quite easy to translate this to your situation, perhaps The Roost began to make progress but were being forced to accept certain terms that The Black Mane would not accept.
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The purpose of rebellions differs depending on where you sit. From the perspective of the supporters it is the idea both of *identity* and *who they want to follow next*. From the perspective of rebel leaders it is a lot less to do about whatever the rhetorical cause may be and more about *creating a new position of power* for themselves.
Two rebel leaders have the same idea, in different parts of the country, and start their insurgency. Once they become aware of one another they will work together -- but only so long as the existing government is the overwhelming threat. The moment the government is genuinely threatened by the ongoing rebellion (which was up to now a fully joint operation) then two rebel groups will factionalize and turn on one another -- it is impossible for either leader to want to make the outcome of all that they have risked a prize to be captured by the other.
This is why civil wars and dictatorial deposition often winds up creating two countries, not one.
An alternative outcome (and one that is not uncommon) is likely when both leaders realize that though neither wants the other to come into power the geography of the country mandates that it be maintained as a single political body lest the result of a fracture be rendered vulnerable either to continued rebellion (from new fronts, for new reasons) or indefensible to external aggression. In this case it is common for a sort of power exchange agreement to come into play (regardless what the public rhetoric may be).
An example of the first form is Libya. It is only a "single country" now because the West doesn't want to look too closely at it. It is currently (at least) two distinct nations -- the actual number of seats of power depends on who you are asking and what time of day it is. The counterexample is Nigeria -- where there are technically "democratic elections" but those in power are not so foolish as to mistake the holding of elections for actual democracy; in Nigeria the northern tribes have a deal with the southern "rivers" tribes that each presidency and vice-presidency will alternate between the two.
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Somewhere within your world you would probably need to explain the history of why the caste system was put in place. The reason could be economical (job scarcity, resource limitations, etc.), social (crime, overpopulation, etc), political (elites vs native populations, politicians vs workers, etc.) or geological (being on different continents, living underground, settlements far from tech development, etc) Two revolutions can actually have multiple factions who might be fighting among each other in order to attain maximum benefits for themselves. These differences might be physical, ideological or based on methodology on how they express their displeasure (via violence, lobbying governments or Ministries, etc.) Also keep in mind whatever one group does, automatically effects the entire system, so while one group might go for peaceful co-existence, another more militant group might force them into a war based on attacks on soft targets, which leads to negative consequences for the entire caste, whether everyone participated or not. Like many others have quoted, studying real-life examples is probably the best way of predicting what is necessary for such a fictional recreation, based on what could happen versus what you believe needs to happen within your story. Don't forget the impact that individuals can have in groups where violence occurs (I am referring to real life individuals who fought for and promoted equality like Gandhi, President Lincoln, Mother Theresa) vs revolutionaries (Malcolm X, Che Guevara) - PS: I am only quoting singular examples; many more exist). Your characters' motivations can be good or bad, depending on their experiences, as long as it makes sense in the broader bigger picture of the world/universe you are creating. Studying wars, revolutions and uprisings will most likely give you the most information regarding real-life consequences or possible consequences of those events.
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# An excellent counter example is South Africa
I say "counter example" because the "revolution" resulted in a mostly peaceful transition to a legally (if not economically) democratic society, implying multi-faction revolutions can not only exist, but also be successful.
There were many different struggle factions, split along various lines (race, class, ideology, aggressiveness). They bickered and fought amongst each other, but ultimately worked together, although it took a monumental level of coordination and leadership for this to happen. Partially, this was made easier because of the level of violence and repression, but in the 80s and early 90s there were large violent battles between Inkatha and ANC supporters, where Inkatha was allegedly being funded by the apartheid government.
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Also keep in mind that revolutions and wars have knock-on effects for societies - deep seated hate and prejudice against the aggressor leading to hate crimes against innocent parties, possible famine for farmland destroyed, which leads to desperation and possible barbarism further down the line, administrative and legal reforms, civil rights promoted or downgraded depending on societal issues or pressures, technological regression and public infrastructure crumbling as key infrastructure is destroyed, riots and looting as central government falls apart, reprisal killings and secret tribunals in extreme cases of a military who has gone over the edge and become a force unto themselves, etc. There is plenty of literature available online based on culture during conflicts and post-war societies. (WW1, WW2, Vietnam, Korean War, American Civil War, Latin America takeovers and coups d'État), African colonial wars, ancient Greek and Roman wars of conquest, etc.)
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It might be weird to compare your idea with Feminism but actually it fits pretty well. The majority of feminism (and also the real concept of it) is for equality of all Gender, but there is also a (albeit much smaller)extremist group that also call themselves feminists even tho instead of fighting for equality they fight for and believe in the superiority of woman. Not really a rebellion with physical fighting but it shows that this concept is not new and you can definitely use it because it is very realistic.
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The best example from history is not Syria but the Haitian revolution. You should read The Black Jacobins by CLR James, paying attention to the role of the creole, or half-caste people.
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> The first item on the agenda of any Republican committee is the split — Brendan Behan.
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There are several variants of that quote attributed to him, but it's certainly true, and far from limited to the Irish Republican movement.
Really, it would be the opposite that would be unrealistic. If you're going to have your rebellion as a cohesive whole, then you're going to need some sort of explanation as to why there **aren't** any splits.
I suggest posters:
(Source: [Hark A Vagrant!](http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=13))
More seriously, the most realistic way in which a rebellion could be cohesive is the way the enemies of [insert your country here] are cohesive; they're actually full of splits, but the politicians and media of [insert your country here] portray them, and even some groups who don't care either way about [insert your country here] as if they are a unified whole, and hence that's the impression people often have. This can be a self-fulfilling policy, because it tends to lead to the sort of actions that puts fighting against [insert your country here] higher up the agenda. Like how the supporters of the two gentlemen in the cartoon above found more common ground after they were both executed. Or how the Viet Cong stopped citing the leaders of the US War of Independence as heroes, and so on.
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It's the modern day, somewhere in Europe. Guns are generally difficult get a hold of, and ammunition is not all that plentiful for the average citizen. The cities are death traps, and hordes of thousands, if not tens of thousands of zombies are sweeping the land, looking for their next meal.
Ion just so happens to live close by a 1400's medieval mountain fortress. Although you'd think this would be the first place people would seek shelter in a zombie apocalypse, let's assume that the zombie virus struck terribly quickly, and violently, and only a couple of hundred individuals made it within its walls.
Now, Ion is a practical guy, and he realizes that he's got everything he needs on hand to survive for a long, long time:
* The fortress was a tourist attraction, but also kept functional as a military police barracks. Sadly, the vast majority of their equipment (guns, riot gear, ammo, etc.) is gone, but the place is set up to support a few hundred people living there (beds, mess hall, fridges, emergency generators, heating, washrooms, etc.).
* There's an armory of medieval weapons on display for the public, and although old, most of the blades, and pole weapons are serviceable. Most of the medieval armor pieces on display are too small, worn, etc. to be used, but a few individuals might be able to armor up for some CQB zombie smashing fun.
We will be ignoring how these people are going to be procuring food, more weapons, etc. Ion has other things on his mind. The moat, though huge, is empty, and he is really worried about all those zombies roaming the land. Eventually they are going to make their way up to the fortress, and although the gates/walls will hold, ***what happens when the moat fills up?***
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> **Note:** The moat is dry; there is no source of water to fill it up on demand (only a massive rain/snow melt might do so, and only temporarily).
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Not only are the dead bodies going to cause diseases to break out, but the zombies might literally be able to climb over the walls on a ramp made of their brethren's battered remains.
And so, given that:
* There are no construction type vehicles available to dig massive graves, or otherwise empty the moat
* The survivors have some fuel, but not a lot of it (plus, they will need it for the generators)
my question is:
* How might the survivors keep the moat from filling up with dead/undead on a day to day basis (say 10-30 new zombies fall in)?
* How might they deal with the aftermath of a massive zombie wave which ends up leaving thousands of dead/stuck zombies behind in the moat?
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## If it's a Dry Moat - Burn 'Em
Emergency generators mean fuel, and fuel is flammable. At regular intervals (or just as needed), the people within the castle walls sling home-made molotov cocktails into the moat. Since the zombies do not stop, drop and roll they spread the fire to others in the trench, and eventually incinerate. It may take a few fires before a corpse is fully incinerated, but eventually it is.
At a point you may have an issue with the trench filling with ash and bones, but the basic strategy of using fire will allow considerably more zombies into the area before that problem comes up. Hopefully the survivors can find some shovels (or invert helmets) to clear out the mess on occasion. They could even use the debris to start building up another, further out wall that would help discourage zombies from wandering into the castle moat.
This plan has the additional upside of helping deal with disease.
Edit 1: As a bonus, this plan does not typically require any combative engagement with the Z's. The fire is ITSELF the means used to "kill" the zombies. Greater concentrations of zombies are more likely to start a mass conflagration and hotter fires, so let the hordes come! Guns/hand-to-hand combat is reserved for wet/rainy days.
## If it's a Wet Moat - Much More Complicated
The best thing would be to do whatever is possible to dig some kind of a basic water release, which would then let you get on with Scenario 1.
Otherwise, you can use the trench to slow zombies down and destroy their brains at your leisure. Using pole weapons, lift floating corpses out of the moat regularly and bring them to a storage area inside where they can be incinerated.
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The zombies will NEVER get over the walls.
Why?
Physics. Zombies are basically human bodies that are still moving despite being in varying stages of decomposition. Human bodies are mostly water. We do have some skeletal structure, and some of it is very strong, but for the most part, we are bags of water. Now, what happens when you stack up enough people to make a pile of bodies as tall as a CASTLE WALL?
Pop goes the water balloons. Humans (who are living and hence, WAY more structurally intact than an average zombie) are crushed like grapes by the pressure of that many bodies on top. So what happens with rotting zombies? Probably, they would liquefy at the bottom and actually FLOW AROUND THE CASTLE like a mud flow. Gross, but they will never get over the walls.
What about the moat? It will stink for sure, but even if you don't find a way to light them on fire, the sheer tangle of zombie bones, body parts, limbs, crushed zombies, etc, will become a tangle of barbed wire for other zombies as they try to cross toward your castle. Like velcro, zombies will get stuck in there. The ones on the bottom will liquefy and rot away and the ones on the top will continue to trap more. Basically, even if you do nothing whatsoever, medieval fortifications will totally defeat a zombie apocalypse.
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Start a vulture farm.
I'm not sure how your zombie virus affects vultures, but vultures are biologically developed to eat rotting flesh, and would probably do a slower (but better and safer) job than a pig farm would. Simply let them out to eat every day and they'll likely go straight for the dead zed at the bottom of your moat.
How your survivors get their hands on and train the vultures is a different problem.
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## A constantly-burning crematorium
One of the towers might be re-purposed for this. During lulls, well-armed/well-organized parties would go into the moat and fetch another round of zombie fuel - that is, they would collect zombie bodies and bring them back into the castle and burn them in their zombie furnace. Massive zombie waves simply take more time. This constant source of heat could possibly be put to good use, but would be a by-product of a virtually never-ending zombie disposal effort. This solution assumes that they don't have a large supply of other fuel and are unwilling/unable to forage for more.
Edit: The 'how' is simple and is the only way they have: By hand.
Edit #2:
More on the "tower" idea. The tower would act as a smoke-stack of sorts. Smoke stacks not only direct noxious smoke and fumes away from the burning, they are instrumental in creating draft, from the bottom where the fire is to the top. This helps supply the fire with oxygen better than it could draw by the burning process alone. They would have to somehow build a raised surface with holes as a burn platform. The bottom of the tower would then be the ash-pit. The accumulated ash could be cleaned out without the need of putting the fire out - round the clock zombie disposal.
Another reason to use a tower is the sheer size of the fire you would need in order to fuel it with zombies. Bodies will burn if the fire is hot enough and big enough. The massive wave of zombies would be a blessing of sorts. They would need an ample supply of dead bodies to feed the fire.
Still another reason to use a tower is that it is inside the safe perimeter of the castle. And the fire is hidden and won't unnecessarily attract more zombies.
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You could try some medieval tech to go with your lodging...
I'm thinking you could use an oversized trebuchet, or perhaps a few trebuchets to launch zombies a fairly long way away.
With [this trebuchet](http://www.virtualtrebuchet.com/#simulator_%24id=003&LengthArmShort=5&LengthArmLong=12&LengthSling=12&LengthWeight=4&HeightOfPivot=10&MassWeight=20000&MassProjectile=1500&MassArm=1000&ReleaseAngle=45&uniformArm=true&ProjectileDiameter=15&InertiaArm=24083.33&PivotToArmCG=3.50&InertiaWeight=1&CalculateDrag=true&WindSpeed=0&projectile=custom&customProjectile=true&units=englishf&advancedMode=true&playSpeed=1&customPlaySpeed=0.15&length=ft&mass=lb&angle=deg&velocity=ft%2Fs&inertia=lb%C2%B7ft%C2%B2&time=s&=&distance=32.856201607524426) you could launch 1500lbs a little over 100ft, so that would be say ten 150lb zombies out of the moat and likely pretty well smashed upon landing. Or one zombie much further...
1. Build your trebuchet
2. Raise your counterweight
3. Lasso a few zombies in the moat
4. Lob them out
5. Rinse and repeat
[Here's a little inspiration, if you have doubts about throwing heavy objects long distances](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB3Dv2p2P2Q)
Also...
It's a trebuchet... so you have the option of throwing all sorts of fun things at approaching zombies. Think of it this way, instead of 2 birds with one stone, you get 10 zombies with one throw, plus however many zombies you manage to hit.
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It must be acknowledged that the moat **cannot** be cleared quickly. The question of "how to empty such a moat" is really difficult to answer, because it takes manpower, involves exposure to diseases, and more.
You must turn to solutions that prevent the zombies from reaching the moat in the first place.
## Remove their incentives
Depending on how your zombies work, they may require certain stimuli to detect prey - such as sound and visible light. Make quiet **mandatory**, enforce curfews, and block all possible lines of sight. The risk of a pileup is *significantly* reduced if they can't tell you're there.
## Far-range barriers
Working in tandem with my first suggestion, create a system of walls, trenches, and / or other barriers a good distance away from the actual castle - far enough to prevent any zombies from getting close enough to know you're there. They do **not need to be strong**, because they will rarely, if ever be besieged. As long as they can't accidentally be breached, but they're strong enough to keep things out that bump into them, you're good to go.
## Bar the roads
The road is your best friend, and your worst enemy. It allows supply runs, but it's also the easiest path for any invader. Establish checkpoints / gates along the road - they don't have to be manned, as long as they can be unlocked or surpassed by vehicles - that would prevent massive swarms.
## Moats further away
If you have sufficient manpower (and time), consider war-style moats. These should be outside the castle walls, and outside of any agricultural land, but inside the far-range barrier; they will catch many invaders on the way in, but less invaders each, and there won't be a ton of pressure to clear them out.
## Upturn the castle walls
Now, in the unlikely event that zombies (a) reach the main moat and (b) pile up to a climbable height, your only concern will be disease. Having a wooden ledge or overhang above the walls will prevent direct climbing - or at least postpone it for a very long time.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/V0ieA.jpg)
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Institute pole duty among the inhabitants. In shifts, the people on pole duty walk around on the battlements with long poles (eight feet is long enough). They use the poles to push back any zombie who is on a pile high enough to reach the battlements. That zombie falls and gets even more damaged.
Soon there aren't enough intact zombies to form a pile that can reach the battlements.
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Burn them when the moat fills.
Send teams to get wood, wood, and more wood. Take every square inch you have to cure the wood so it burns better, rotate the older wood out. Since the moat will take time to fill, this should buy you time to collect wood.
When the moat begins to get to a point where it's getting dangerous, drop all the wood and some fuel to get it started, keep dropping wood from the walls to keep the fire burning until there is nothing but ash left.
Eventually, your stockpiles of wood will become massive enough, and dry enough that you won't need fuel to get the fires started, Also, tar and soot will build up as well, and make the fires easier to start and maintain. Pine burns quickly, and is good for starting fires, Oak burns hot, as does cedar.
The difficulty would be in the logistics of cutting wood and retrieving it. If raiding parties could be sent to villages, houses and furniture could be cannibalized.
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## There IS NO moat
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tizth.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mHJqQ.jpg)
[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Let_vrtulnikem11_-_hrad_Srebrenik_%2813.-18._stol.%29_jeste_lepe.jpg)
Proper mountain castle doesn't need no puny moat. No moat can beat tens of meters vertical rock walls on one side and absurdly steep climbs on the other - if they climb up to the wall, give them a push and watch zombie dominoes. This incidentally makes it a terrible place for military police garrison - no easy road means you can't get out to police anyone easily, but that's entirely different problem (solvable if you replace MP with border guards and place your castle near some border - rough terrain needs to be guarded and patrolled all the same, and castle near border would make a good place for active duty border guard barracks, in fact, due to difficulty in using vehicles, you probably need more people than on flat terrain).
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This would require some engineering and planning, but what if -*just what if*- this mote wasn't used to keep the zombies out? What if it was used like a trap? A temporary holding cell?
There are two huge concerns that could be addressed here; disease and energy. Burning the zombie corpses in a controlled manner as a fuel alternative could have many great benefits. In the Winter, the corpses could help to provide heat throughout the castle, much like a boiler / furnace. In the Summer, there may some steam capabilities (although an abundant water supply may be a different story).
Frequent burning as an alternative fuel source may not solve the problem entirely, but may alleviate it. The mote could be altered to funnel traffic into 'kill zones', where trained teams using melee weapons with extended range can kill them and recover the corpse safely (perhaps using some sort of hoist mechanism).
On another note, I think that attempting to conduct controlled burns in the mote could have potential for devastating consequences. An out of control fire could find it's way inside the castle walls, then you have a real problem. You also probably don't want the bodies to continue decomposing into the soil so close to the castle. Eventually that will contaminate the soil insides the castle walls, and thus affect agricultural efforts.
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Put in a ramp so that zombies that fall in can walk back out. While a moat can be a good deterrent against human adversaries, it is a much less effective barrier against zombies. A sufficient number of zombies can easily fill up a moat given enough time. Even un-motivated zombies can fall in accidentally. If the goal is to prevent this from happening, then the easiest way to do this is to give the zombie a way to leave on their own. Depending on the moat design, a simple wooden ramp should provide an easy exit. While zombies are not particularly durable, the don't feel the pain of injuries and most that fall in should still be ambulatory enough to continue walking or crawling. If there is no stimulation drawing them to the castle, then they should eventually discover the ramp and wander away following some other sound or smell. If you are lucky the geography around the castle might provide a convenient entry and exit for the zombies. For example, if zombies tend to always approach from one direction and fall in, you might put the ramp on the far side where they might walk up the ramp and tumble down a hill, unlikely to walk back up.
In addition, if you would like to speed the exit of the zombies you might provide incentives for them to keep moving and exit on their own. This of course may depend on the type and motivations of your zombies. For example, if the zombies in your land are attracted to sounds it should be a simple matter to place something that produces noise near the top of the ramp like a bell that would draw zombies in that direction. You could further rig it so that when a zombie walks on the ramp it rings the bell drawing the zombie forward and attracting more zombies from the moat towards the ramp. If the bell is not too loud you can avoid attracting zombies that are not already in the moat from further falling in.
Some zombies that fall in may become too damaged to leave on their own, but this number should be greatly reduced. Zombies that become damaged and stuck in the moat would likely be trampled and ground into the earth by the "healthy" zombies but since this number would be much smaller it would likely never fill the moat.
If a zombie hoard arrived, the trick is to keep them moving. When members of the hoard fall into the moat they should follow a route around the moat until they reach the ramp, and then climb the ramp and continue right on out the other side, or hopefully tumble down your hill and keep walking somewhere else.
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I find that if you create a diversion somewhere else, such as a loud windmill, the zombies will be attracted to this and not your castle (*The Walking Dead*). Of course this will eventually need maintenance but a big ol' fire should sort them out. This will alleviate some of the fresh zombies from piling up and give time for them to liquify (as some other answers suggest). Also, moats are usually lower than the walls of the castle and the overspill of goop will just fall out of the moat.
In regard to the pests, animals are terrified of the walking dead (brooks) so they *should* steer clear. If not, general hygiene will be your best friend. Have high up mess halls and kitchens and **keep them clean**. Wash clothes, keep your socks dry, make antibiotics a run priority under food and don't do anything stupid, like armour up and try and defeat the horde. Most castles have a well which should be tapped into the groundwater system and, if deep enough with enough rainfall, shouldn't be affected by the zombie goop.
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Re purpose the armor and chain mail to make bite proof suits and go out and render the zombies down for fat fuel! the danger and gross factor would make it a good punishment for the slackers in your little community.
Ok, I'm not really sure how that would work, but lard burns and that kind of fuel could be used to start some good conflagrations in your moat to occasionally clear it. The Z-lard could also power boilers for heat and maybe power generation without using up precious supplies of Gas or Diesel
Also, can you imagine the reputation you could gain if you could say that your castle was powered by the fat of the damned :-)
Of course all of this depends on the transmission vector of the Zombie bacteria or virus or whatever.
For something more practical, depending on what minerals or other materials you have available, you may want to sprinkle a corrosive into the moat on a regular basis to speed up the decomposition of the zombies in there. If it's sufficiently caustic, it may also reduce vermin populations and the problems that go with them. Lye is very caustic and can be produced from hardwood ash. Lye is also used to help produce biofulels for other purposes. Back to powering your castle from the fat of the damned maybe?
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The moat could be part of a river system, and have a strong current. Imagine a castle built on a small rocky outcrop in the middle of a fast flowing river. With appropriate stonework the river could be channeled around each side of the castle and have a strong and deep current, enough to sweep attackers bodies away.
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[World War Z (the book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z) covered this pretty well. The Queen refused to leave Windsor Castle, because she would not abandon her country. There are suggestions that other castles around Britain were also used as strongholds. As a result, the Brits became experts with the medieval weaponry which was hung all round these castles for ornamentation, and mostly switched away from using firearms.
Brooks gave some serious thought to how you fight zombies and how soldiers would be trained. The key realisation was "Zack ain't in no hurry, why are you?" So long as you can see them coming, you just need to pace yourself and keep knocking them off. Zombies climbing up a ramp of other zombies are never going to get to you quickly.
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## Food processing
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DBBQK.jpg)
The consultant you called in from Iowa made quick work of it. My apologies for any mistakes in the recounting, but he said that this here is a John Deere 9870 STS combine harvester with a 625D Draper head that had been on the premises of his dealership. The owner passed away recently, but it seems right to borrow it for a while. The engine trouble it was brought in for hasn't been fixed, waiting for parts on back order, but he reckons it doesn't matter so much as normally because this is a crop that will walk to you. Farmer's dream, really. He'll customize the reel and header auger for your very high density crop requirements and to ensure that it fits nicely in your particular moat. Zombies can't climb over the bars so long as it is running, and they can't go under without having a meeting with the cutter bar. Just make sure you build a decent moat wall/partition behind this machine so you don't have to recruit more operators; there's a labor shortage at the moment.
Processing of the zombies occurs roughly as follows:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jecIy.png)
Note the presence of threshing equipment to deal with any bones and such your zombies might possess. Why, there was this case of a boy who fell asleep while trespassing in a field last year (chuckles)... the machine can handle it, though you want to keep a local consultant on hand to optimize processing for your application. (He seems a bit eager for a place behind the walls, I think)
Note the tube at the right end which can be emptied into a truck or even a conveyor system if desired. With appropriate processing to inactivate pathogens, there is very good protein in zombies. It is not a consumer meat, but it can be used like downer cows - I mean, like they *used* to - to make animal byproducts for animal feed, cleaning products, and perhaps other purposes. As lord of the keep this decision making will be up to you, so don't let opportunity pass you by!
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Morning stars + Fire:
As has been pointed out, bodies don't burn very well due to the high water content. The typical human body does not have enough energy content to vaporize the water the typical human body contains, even with perfect efficiency (which certainly isn't going to happen) the fire goes out.
But what if we kill the zombies first? There's a ton of zombies in the moat, send a few people out onto the wall armed with morning stars with very long chains. You kill a zombie by destroying it's brain--and what's conveniently on top of a zombie?? Whack away at the zombies until you've killed a whole bunch of them. Leave them, let the corpses desiccate over time.
Now we have a moat with a bunch of actual fuel in it, when the moat has filled back up with zombies toss a molotov. All the previous kills burn, disposing of the bodies and killing the remaining zombies. Every time the moat fills up you throw another molotov--note that the fuel consumption here is very low as the molotovs are only being used to get the fire going, they aren't the fuel.
You can continue this cycle until the bones pile up too high.
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In a dystopic world, amongst many other things, religion has been outlawed and anyone found to be practicing will be punished accordingly.
For minor infringements a large fine is given to the citizen.
For multiple or severe infringements the citizen will be forced to undertake a “re-education” program to lessen likelihood of further infringements.
What ways could a draconian government monitor for people practising their religion? (And maybe other concealable infringements)
There are a few methods I think would assist with this.
* Lots of CCTV
* Secret police and trained spies
-”Concerned” citizens who will be rewarded for reporting citizens practicing religion (Or any infringements)
* ”Concerned” Citizens who will be punished for not reporting citizens practicing religion (Or any infringements)
* Communication monitoring (Phone calls, text messages, email, etc...)
* Automated silent drones programmed to monitor high risk citizens
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You will require your chief weapons for your [inquisition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition):
* **Fear** - Anyone practicing religion must be publically punished either psychologically or physically.
* **Surprise** - Rapid (and completely unexpected) blitz searches of any space that could hold a religious gathering and immediate punishment
* **Ruthless efficiency** - Harsh and quick, don't give people time to think or respond
* **An almost fanatical devotion to the State** - You need to know and quote the State's manifesto to the letter
* [Fancy red uniforms](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt0Y39eMvpI) are optional
I'm trying to say that monitoring isn't really necessary - maintaining constant control is the answer.
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Still, I am going to add few cents in:
* **Propaganda** basically, inspire self with [Marxism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism), where one of main clause was "[Religion is opium of the people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people)"
* **Social persecution**: You are not allowed to have "good" job as long as it is believed that you practice religion. Your kids are not allowed to attend higher level of education, if you practice religion.
Speaking of kids...
* **Turn kids against their parents** Read story about [Pavlik Morozov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov) who turned his parents to the police and was praised by Soviet propaganda for doing so
* **Teach Scientific Atheism** Make sure, that schools teach about religion as if it is something outdated, outlived, thing from the past. Read [Marxist-Leninist atheism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist%E2%80%93Leninist_atheism) wiki article if interested more
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A good reference could be what [Stasi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi) did in DDR, in particular with [Zersetzung](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung).
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> the methods of overt persecution that had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. It was realised that psychological harassment was far less likely to be recognised for what it was, so its victims, and their supporters, were less likely to be provoked into active resistance
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Infiltrate society with a capillar network of mutually unknown informants, so that nobody can say who is a safe contact.
Moreover avoid as much as possible to embody a well defined enemy, which is known to boost morale and sense of group.
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# Informants.
Make it easy to snitch on your neighbour. Reward it.
Make it *compulsory* to snitch on your neighbour. If you knew about something and *don't* tell the government, then you are an accomplice!
The religious people themselves are a close knit group who will not tell on each other, but there are always others around who will notice things. And who will talk to the police about it.
A good propaganda campaign that paints religious people as dangerous deviants that will abduct your children and baptize them, makes people more likely to go to the police with their suspicions.
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Generally speaking, religion means ritual, and the easiest way to discover religious people is through their artifacts and holy places. They might return to a sacred site for pilgrimages on a certain date, for example. Likewise, you can capture them by tracking their artifacts like crosses, books, menorahs, etc. These artifacts are generally forbidden and outlawed when a state tries to outlaw religion, so anyone in possession of such materials is a target.
In spite of the danger, religious people are loathe to abandon these artifacts of their culture. Likewise, certain practices can tip off the inquisition, like covering a mirror after a death in the household. Names are another 'artifact' of religion; many Jewish surnames were changed during the inquisition in Spain to dissociate with religious beliefs.
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Somewhat high-tech answer: in order to practice most religions, people have to gather together. Use the location data from cellphones to detect unexpected gatherings. You could even forbid leaving home without your phone (but then conspiring citizens will ensure the battery is dead before leaving).
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If you want a real life example of this, look at the early Soviet Union. One example I can think of is that they forbade people from celebrating Christmas. So on Christmas eve, they had patrols going around looking through people's windows to make sure no one had a Christmas tree up.
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We have quite a few proven ways to violently turn the whole of society against some group:
* make religious people appear as haters of humanity, who even if looking normal, could turn horribly violent without warning; and are therefore to be feared unconditionally.
Example: we already have that when [just speaking Arabic can get other passengers to call airport security](http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/12/adam-saleh-removed-delta-plane-arabic-161222034710056.html). Extend that from Islam to all religions. After all, you can find acts of violence committed in the name of each.
* equate religion with drugs: believers are "hooked" on the surreptitious gratification of their "delirious rituals". Make it just another probable attribute of the thug who scares you in a dark alley. After all, if they are persecuted, religious people probably *are* rejects of society; and many of them will actually end up in the street unwashed and in desperate need of your wallet...
* accuse them of conspiring against the social order. Once religious people are forced to hide... who knows who might be secretly religious? Any national problem, from tragedies to annoyances, can be claimed to be caused by a secret cabal of religious people, who congregate in secret to act viciously and hatefully because that's how religion makes you (again, no lack of examples for your propaganda).
Once you do all this (don't worry if the accusations are inconsistent, people won't notice) ...you won't even need police investigations, or rewards for snitches (although do use those, for good measure). Anyone having the slightest suspicion will report it to the police simply because he believes he is protecting himself, his family and his community from a terrible evil.
Even religious people themselves, if they are efficiently cut off from their religious community by this continuous surveillance, and their lives are made suitably impossible by the continuous paranoia of being informed on by even the closest human connections, will eventually start doubting that the propaganda is right, and they have been part of an inhumane delusion all along; and finally almost certainly either go mad, commit suicide, resolve to "go straight", or even denounce themselves to the authorities.
In which latter case, of course, you should send them to a harsh camp for a few years to "reform" them; then if they seem repentant enough, fully pardon them and parade them as public example that no religious delusion is hopeless, and that it is possible to recover sanity and become a "good citizen" again.
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Try some religious tests. There a couple you can do:
* Have an annual ritual where your citizens burn all the holy books or other holy objects of common religions
* For Abrahamic religions, have people work on Sabbath days
* Have people execute believers
* Have people denounce God (this one act should hit most religions)
People who are religious probably won't want to do these things, allowing you to identify them.
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Try compulsory psychometric testing, possibly masquerading as assessment for jobs and promotion. Since religion is known to be illegal don't specifically ask about that but rather look for a religious frame of mind: fatalism, pre-destination, giving credibility to dreams and the like.
Once a suspect has been identified you will need interception of communications and covert surveillance. When a 'believer' has been located do not arrest at once. Religion is practised in groups so observing the believer should lead to a whole nest of them. Then placing the others under observation could lead to more.
Eventually the believer should be arrested and as part of the re-education persuaded to go undercover to root out more believers.
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[Question]
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I have a setting I'm trying to get started on where the vast majority of mankind has been killed off, and all that is left is a speckling of small villages pieced together from the wreckage of society.
The grown-ups in the setting were alive for the apocalypse. Most of them are pretty broken from PTSD, major depression, and/or crippling drug abuse thanks to the trauma caused by what was literally the most devastating event in human history... contrasting this older generation, the few children born since then have had things pretty easy. They have had peaceful and generally unremarkable lives. None of the pressures of modern society, but enough remanent tech to give them modernish luxuries (commercial grade farm equipment, refrigeration, air-conditioning, indoor lighting, etc.) which together have made them almost pathologically innocent and positive.
The thing is that there are many different kinds of Apocalypses, but all of what I can think of are poor fits for one reason or another: A nuclear/asteroid/global warming apocalypse would leave massive environmental damage that would last for many generations. Zombies, Killbots, etc. would not just disappear over night without a strong central paramilitary organization rising in the aftermath which is not consistent with small, scattered, peaceful villages. I can't just say some god snapped his fingers and a bunch of people turned to dust because that would not be traumatizing enough for the survivors.
I need something so horrible as to kill off nearly everyone and be able to break down the psyches of the collective adult population in the process, and then suddenly be so completely recovered that just 1 generation latter, everything is easy, peaceful, and positive for thier children. The central theme focuses on the diametric contrast between the traumatized and innocent mind; so, the best answer will not just meet these two goals, it will maximize this contrast.
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**Zombie scenario works**
Assume that "zombies" are created by some technological process - virus, nanotechnology, invasive meme, whatever. Read *Glasshouse* by Charles Stross and/or *Implied Spaces* by Walter Jon Williams for some ideas. (This is not a spoiler, the censorship wars and Seraphim meme war are the respective "historic" backgrounds for the novels, not events that occur within them.)
The survivors are the few people who avoided infection, but they had to fight and/or abandon their infected friends and loved ones to continue to avoid infection. This definitely qualifies as deeply traumatic for the survivors.
The "zombies" that do not suffer violent deaths still die in a matter of days or weeks from dehydration, exposure and/or starvation, lacking the mental faculties to look after themselves. (Do some basic maths on how many people can survive for how long in *any* city once the supply chain has broken down. Making them highly aggressive and mindless reduces their ability to survive down to zero - humans simply cannot digest most uncooked food. Virus-based zombies make no sense as a persistent threat.) So the threat burns itself out within a few weeks of the surviving humans managing to achieve quarantine - contrary to the assumption in the question, there is no need for a strong military to take the fight to the zombies, they self-destruct on their own.
However, this will not be a post-apocalyptic utopia - lots of things have limited shelf life, from electric batteries to fuel to medicine. If only a tiny percentage of people survived then they will be able to loot the ruins for ample consumables to keep themselves going for a few years, but unless they can re-establish manufacturing capacity there will be a lot of things that will be a distant memory within 2-10 years. Nonetheless, the children growing up in this world will not have the traumatising zombie threat to deal with as long as some basic precautions are taken, while their parents will have much more trouble dealing with the trauma they suffered.
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If I understand, you want those happy children as a foil to investigate the traumatized mind, but if I were to read such a story I'd perceive it as offputtingly misinforming on a crucial dimension of the theme. [Children of trauma survivors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma) *don't* get to have truly peaceful and positive lives, even if their troubles may seem low-key, by society's (under-cognized) standards. This is serious stuff. [They get](https://www.nctsn.org/what-is-child-trauma/trauma-types/complex-trauma/effects) an extent of any combination of being:
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> turned into caregivers
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> kept dependent
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> put down
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> burdened with hopes
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> emotionally misdirected
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> mentally unstimulated
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> left to fantasize
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> indoctrinated
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> rejected
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> misfed
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> beaten
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> raped
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> neglected...
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Pretty much none of those items are mutually exclusive, across time and contacts. But some degree of impaired [relational development](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-ptsd/202211/how-emotionally-immature-parenting-affects-our-adult-lives) always follows just from traumatized caregivers' attention being powerfully otherwise occupied as they're [not snapping out](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response) of fending for survival. Along with that goes a sense that life is like that and you [gotta be tough](https://www.shatterproof.org/blog/care-and-compassion-over-tough-love), and must *intentionally* get further progeny [used to getting hurt](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201603/adult-justification-child-humiliation-and-mistreatment). Not to mention the drain of attendant sickness and irrational choices. Also, in belated response to the comment that trauma sometimes produces meaning-seekers instead of brutes, several mentioned modes of messing up are quite available to seekers.
Yet relationality is the soil of cooperation, which is a prime determiner of [group performance](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/the-well-being-of-nations_9789264189515-en#) and [wellbeing](https://www.eva.mpg.de/ecology/projects-and-research-groups/culture-cooperation-and-child-development-research-group/). One might say this is human-condition stuff, but your setup doesn't reflect it. I like the [Sterility](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/246208/103786) answer's point about children being highly cherished, but one still needs psychological capacity to do that.
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# Make the kids invulnerable. Or simply not explain at all.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cHIVl.png)
*George Lucas made a great mistake explaining the magic of The Force*
You say: "None of the pressures of modern society"
Oh, dear... you are *vastly* underestimating pressures of non-modern society.
Modern society removes the following pressures...
* Lack of food
* Illnesses and other medical conditions causing everything from persistent tooth ache to acute death
* Lack of energy to provide you with heat, cold, mechanical labour assistance.
* Inability to communicate
* Being forced work 12+ hour days before you have pubes
...and a whole host of other things we today take for granted and would throw an absolute fit if they remain unavailable for, anything from days to down to a few minutes.
In order to not re-introduce these pressures, you need to make the children essentially...
* invulnerable
* able to eat grass
...or there is no way that you will be able to give a realistically credible explanation to how children and adolescents can have a life that is "easy, peaceful, and positive" in just 1 generation after the downfall.
Starting from the contemporary world as it is today, simply will not work, because the children will face hardships that are quite terrible.
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So, what are the possible solutions?
* **Use magic / science fiction technology**. You introduce something that feeds and protects the children. Be it a robot community, aliens, benevolent [grey goo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo), ancient spirits... anything of the sort that is able to provide sustenance and health care, and that loves kids.
* **Limit the setting to a few regions**. Make the setting be something like the American mid-west, the equator and/or savannah, some place where food is abundant and dangers are few.
Globally, you will not able to create these pockets of paradise. Any
place where kids cannot survive the elements, will be depopulated.
As a side note: all the abandoned chemical / waste / industrial sites will
cause plenty of polluted hotspots.
A paradise on Earth can only work if you deliberately make the setting *small*.
* **A new human species**. Some pathogen was spread silently, that caused a
change such that when the children were born, they were essentially no
longer Homo Sapiens, but a new and vastly improved species.
The disaster that happened was when old Homo Sapiens came to blows on
what to do with these "new" humans. Parents — of course — wanted to
protect their children, while others wanted to eradicate them, when
they realised they would be replaced by these superior humans. In a twist
of irony, these attempts at protecting Homo Sapiens, led to its downfall.
...or, perhaps...
* **Do not explain it at all**. This is one of those situations where too much
exposition and explanation may actually *hurt* the credibility of the
setting. This is because the logic leaps you have to perform to have this
make sense is just too great.
So do not bother, just let the setting be as it is with nearly no
explanation at all.
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So, how can you create an apocalypse that kills adults, leaves kids alone, and lets the children adolescents have a paradise on Earth in just one generation?
You postulate it, and leave out the details.
You can hint at symptoms that afflicted the adults, but unless you introduce some magical factor, or limit the setting to really small regions, or make the protagonists be something other than plain old humans, then you do best to not over-explain it, because this will make the reader *less* willing to suspend their disbelief.
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## A pandemic, but more brutality and fewer deaths
Confused? So pandemics generally have a scarring impact on populations by nature of their associated quarantines, fear factors, and so forth. Consider that COVID-19 has no doubt had an impact on the global citizenry, while also, broadly construed, keeping most of society intact.
What you need is a particularly brutal illness - one whose prognosis is terrible, with horrifying symptoms (you can look them up yourself... epidemiology is no short of the most repulsive symptoms known to humankind), but overall, not *particularly* lethal if one survives it. In other words, it must be torturous, and transmittable, but not particularly lethal (adjust as necessary). Those who have lived through such a pandemic would be terrifyingly scarred of the symptomology (imagine [if teratomas (Warning: images are highly disturbing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teratoma) could be transmitted). However, those who come afterwards, even if its the next generation, would be less exposed to the dangers and horrors of this disease, fulfilling your criterion.
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There's actually a whole subgenre of fiction that deals with this, sometimes called "Cozy Apocalypse Fiction" the general premise is that the Apocalypse was such that areas of denser populations such as major cities were more devastated than areas with a significantly less dense population. Typically, these genres rely on an apocalypse that is deadly to humans in close proximity to each other, such as war devastation, pandemic events, or Zombie Apocalypses, but it could be the Apocalypse had a large local devistation, but a global less immediate concern (such as a devestation of a breadbasket region, which has a devastating effect on food sources.).
One series example was the Mid-Late 2000s American Drama Series Jericho, which was centered around a rural farming town in the state of Kansas by the same name. The towns folk find themselves thrust into an immediate black out (media and power) and see a Mushroom Cloud in the direction of the nearest major city, Denver, CO, which is several hours away, though it becomes clear that it's not just a single city that was nuked. The story is how the towns people must come together and work together to survive the upcoming winter and figure out what happens next, with the major focus being on the mayor and his grown children's families, though other members of the community are focused on.
As with Jericho, the focus of this genre is the survival with little to no ability to rely on assistance from the outside world. For example, Jericho has plenty of food, but has to quickly find a means of storing enough of the food to last the winter without relying on modern electronic appliances or convivences, as well as how they handle relations with survivors from outside the community (since there is a very real threat that the outsiders are scouts for bands of looters.).
This is actually a very realistic story setting, as it was observed during 2020 that people who had the ability to do so, left their homes in urban city centers for suburban and rural communities to reduce the risk and that large cities were more likely to see larger spreads of those who did not leave.
In other examples, the event is absolutely devastating to a local area, and leaves larger world alive and well... but still has far reaching global effects. One hypothetical example is a single eruption event of the Yellowstone Volcano in Wyoming State. If it erupts in a single devestating explosion the devestation of the initial blast would be contained to some of the least populated states in the continental U.S and Canada. However, the resulting dust released into the atmosphere would result in a global cooling, the worst of which would almost certainly result in much of the Midwest of the U.S. to have widespread crop failure. In fact, the U.S. produces enough food to feed 1/4 of the global population. This would likely cause economic hardship on the survivors as global famine sets in and nations struggling to survive vie for power. Again, this has a basis in historical fact. When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the vocanic winter that followed cooled the globe for the next four years. The eruption is largely blamed for the devastating winter of 1887-1888 which killed so many cattle in the U.S., it lead to the collapse of the American Beef industry, which never recovered to the power it had pre-87. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora resulted in 1816 being labled "the year without a summer" and early winters resulted in global crop failures. In New York, a midsummer frost resulted in the failure of the corn crop and states north of that experienced had June snow falls to blame. In Europe, coming off of the heels of the Napoleonic Wars, it's estimated that twice as many people died in 1816 than the annual average (and this was the first year of peace following a 12 year continent wide period of War). Food riots occurred in the UK, France, and Switzerland (where they got to such a point that the government declared a national emergency).
And it bears repeating, if the Yellow Stone Caldera erupts with the full force in one single blast, will have nothing on Krakatoa or Tambora, two of the largest eruptions in the modern era. To give you an idea, Krakatoa's devestation was because it launched about 20 cubic kilometers of material into the atmosphere. A Yellow Stone Supervocanic event would launch 1,000 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere.
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# Another planet
Humans have found a Goldilocks planet to colonize. They start by sending automated ships to establish the basic utilities for them: solar panels, water treatment plants, and farms. Maybe there are some robots to do the work or maybe just all the pieces are there, it's up to you.
While building their human transports, something awful happens. Depending on how traumatized you want the adults to be, it could be any of the standard apocalypse situations from zombies to plague to nuclear war. However it works, only a few thousand people manage to flee to the transports and make it to the new world. Whatever happened on Earth has thoroughly decimated the planet and destroyed any chance that others will be able to follow. These are the last humans full of scars from the incident and the emotional toll of being the last survivors.
For an extra bit of separation between the adults and children, you could have the children grown in a lab on the new planet by the early preparation robots. The messed up adults might not be ready for children, but they have no choice because the children are there when they land.
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## Sterility
See the story/movie "Children of Men". People just stop having kids. You can explain it (virus that causes a mutation, or something else) or leave it unexplained. If this effects only humans, all other animals are fine. Structures and technology are still in place (at least anything that survives possible wars).
However, some people are immune to the issue. They can still have kids, but the number of people for this is very small (relative to the population of the Earth). Maybe only a few thousand of the billions of people on Earth can still have children. The rest of the population is just aging out. The parents that can still have children may have been isolated from the rest of society. The kids have grown up in communities that were protected by the governments of the world, as a way to preserve the future of humanity. Everyone in these areas would probably be extremely thankful for the children they were able to have. This would lead to the children probably growing up in a very loving and caring environment (while everything outside of these protected communities has progressed to whatever level of chaos you want).
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Frame challenge: your premise is ignorantly nonsensical.
The whole point of an apocalypse is that it's apocalyptic. Just because there's a whole bunch of pre-apocalypse tech left over doesn't mean that you can just resume from right before the apocalypse started. Without the supply chains for food, medicine, fuel, and every other consumable under the sun (let alone services) that have enabled modern society to grow to its current extent, and have thus become a prerequisite for it - *you can't have modern society*.
The commercial-grade farming equipment you claim your post-apocalyptic children have - where do they get fuel for it? What about spares? Who do they turn to when the onboard computer throws a trouble code and tells them they have to take it to a dealer?
Refrigeration and aircon - where does replacement refrigerant gas come from? When a compressor fails, who furnishes a new one and swaps it out?
Most importantly, **what is supplying the electricity to run all of this**? Wind turbines and solar panels need their output to be properly balanced and conditioned or they'll just blow up any battery they're connected to. And the computers that do that are made of microchips, which exist at the very end of arguably the most complex and specialised supply chain in human history.
Not to mention that you need batteries, which are also incredibly complex to manufacture.
Your post-apocalyptic children aren't going to be frolicking in the fields, they're going to be dying of bacterial infections, or dysentery, or childbirth, or *literally thousands of other things that modern society and medicine shields us from*. And if they aren't dying from those causes, they're going to be spending the entirety of their days tending their meagre crops so that their entire settlement doesn't die of starvation. One flood, one drought, one hailstorm, one pest invasion, and they're **all** goners.
In fact, these children are probably not going to even exist, because their parents are going to be so busy with the day-to-day business of *not dying*, and there will be so few resources to go around, that having another mouth to feed could be the end of the family as it currently exists. Heck, parents with younger kids at the start of the apocalypse are probably going to have to make some hard decisions about whether to leave the kids behind to save themselves.
And no, the people who are "prepared for an apocalypse" with their silly bunkers are not going to fare any better than the rest of us. All they accomplish is to live a little bit longer due to their supplies, because at the end of the day they're still dependent on the same vanished supply chains and they still die from the same easily-treatable diseases.
In short, there's no conceivable way in which your happy post-apocalyptic world can exist, nor any amount of suspension of disbelief that will allow it to.
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First, frameshift:
Post-apocalyptic societies don't work. The tech base can't be maintained. Spares age even when they're not in use--some things will last for a long time but most contain components that break down fairly quickly.
Therefore, we need to look elsewhere--we need a self-sustaining tech base. You'll need to run the technology clock forward to the point the machines can supply human needs without anyone at the controls and you can't destroy that technology with the apocalypse. This basically limits you to pandemics.
However, what can sweep the world before it's discovered and quarantine measures are put in place--even if it spreads fast there will be people in what amounts to quarantine all the time (space missions, Antarctic research stations etc.) And why doesn't it stick around and harm the children? How can we breach the quarantines?
Your pandemic is not biological in the first place. Rather, some nefarious actor got the signing certificates for the neural implants everyone has and put out a very malicious update--since you're not limited by biology you can do pretty much anything with it.
The survivors are those who didn't have their implants yet. The computers have been taking care of them and have enough intelligence to understand that the implants are not to be used.
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The apocalypse, if that is even the right word to describe the last six years, simmered more than it flashed. The technology had been developing so quickly. Replacing cashiers and cab drivers with machines was a matter of convenience. When farmers and truckers gave way to automation, it became apparent that convenience was just a waypoint towards our utopia. Soon there was plenty for everyone -- food, transportation, then shelter and even medical care, were all free and abundant.
Most people didn't have to work anymore. Liberated from the 9 to 5, they were free to eat, drink, and merrymake as they pleased. Thank goodness for us few who saw that there was still work to be done. The children, those blessed gifts that no AI can fabricate or truly raise, needed us.
They call us the Teachers. We are all parents, but not all parents were called to be Teachers. Many parents forgot their children. Instead, they left physically or mentally, in search of a greater thrill to exceed their last high or a deeper stupor to numb the passage of time. We were called by the eyes of those abandoned children, and we brought them in to Teach them alongside our own.
By the third year, the simmer of the apocalypse began to roll. Years of unchecked indulgence stripped you of your inhibitions. There were horrible rumors: the Thrilled had started harvesting the Stupored for their twisted pleasures. If the rumors were true, we Teachers knew that the Stupored wouldn't last forever. So we acted quickly. We took the children before they could see or understand what was happening. We left to start this village where they would be safe.
It was another two years until the Thrilled found us, but we were prepared. No Thrilled who discovers our village has ever left alive. Teachers have sacrificed themselves to make sure that the children never see the Thrilled here.
With each attack, the Teachers witness the awful fate that we must be willing to accept. We are breaking and cannot last. But the Thrilled are coming less frequently. They are dying off. We will last long enough for the children to know only innocence and safety, and then we will succumb.
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What about a rogue AI? It could either have barely been killed (maybe a solar flare affected all of earth's electronics at once) or remains dormant since humanity does not pose a threat to it any more. It could have caused a sudden collapse of essentially all technology while pushing us to civil war through misinformation. The adults would be left with trauma from the wars and lack of necessities and with a deep distrust for each other and technology.
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# Plague
There is a plague that wipes out 99.99% of the population. Everyone in the cities dies since illness spreads faster.
The safest people are those in undeveloped countries that do subsistence farming and gathering. These societies do not collapse as heavily since they don't have complex supply chains or import goods from thousands of miles away.
Only 90% of these people die. But then the plague goes away and the remaining 10% pick up the plough or the fishing rod and life goes on.
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Actually the WW2 sort of did this for Europe. The young generation born during the post war baby-boom (yes, boomers) had a very positive outlook on life.
This was not for everyone, some of the traumatized parents had traumatized children.
It is not the apocalypse that is relevant, but what comes after. The rebuilding of society and the progress that was made possible with outside help (Marshall plan) made the new generation thrive. Either your Apocalypse is not global, or it is and aliens help out afterwards.
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Best solution that comes to mind for me is a pandemic. Design the pathogen how you see fit with whatever symptoms / affects that align with the outcomes you see fit.
Almost any occurrence can be explained though how the bug manifests itself, demonstrated from stories like Walking Dead, The Last of Us, or even highly complex genetic expression like in Larry Nevins [Pak Protectors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYebOCCoTYM) .
Though, I can't help but note that I disagree with your time line of, collapse > loss of functional adults in society > rebirth to peaceful reorganization in a Lord of the Flies world.
Humans don't accept change well, we in general resist and cling to it, even violently especially if survival is at stake. I would expect upheavals and conflict when means of sustenance change. Such as when means of acquiring resources goes from scavenging what is left from the remains of civilization where the dwindling useful resources are hoarded by a few, then when production of new resources emerges protection and nurturing of the emerging skills and those resources.
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**Disease**
A disease sweeps the world that kills off anyone who is infected by it. They die slowly, and it hurts the whole time they are dying. Flick through the symptoms you can unlock on a game like *plague inc* and pick a combination that seems suitably horrifying. A personal choice might be delirium and dementia: seeing your family members rapidly lose their minds and forget who you, they, and everyone around them are would probably mess me up pretty bad.
But it doesn't affect everyone, some people are genetically immune to it or are less affected by it. Perhaps for them, the symptoms are temporary and non-lethal or leave them traumatised and struggling to think straight but alive. Those who survive are wary of gathering in large cities due to a combination of fears of a new disease mutating or spreading in cramped quarters, and because who wants to run and clean a skyscraper when there's only a dozen of you and nowhere to farm food? So, they spread to the countryside where they can be self-sufficient, and the survivors have children who, as both of their parents were immune, are also immune
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**A highly virulent and deadly pandemic.**
Consider a highly infectious airborne virus with a long incubation period during which carriers are asymptomatic yet highly contagious. This would allow the virus to spread extensively before it's even detected. The virus could also have a very high mortality rate. It would spread through cities like wildfire, wiping out a large percentage of the population before effective containment measures could be implemented.
The world would watch in horror as city after city fell to the virus. Panic and fear would be rampant. Governments would collapse. The global economy would be in ruins. Those who survived would be left in a world filled with grief and loss, their psyches scarred by the horror they'd witnessed.
**But here's the twist:** the virus has a unique trait. After a person is infected, whether they survive or die, the virus goes dormant and embeds itself in their genetic code, like some forms of herpes or HIV do in real life. In this dormant state, the virus is harmless, and can even be passed on to offspring. But it confers immunity to the original strain of the virus.
So the children born to the survivors would grow up in a world that's been wiped clean of the virus. They would carry the virus in their genes, but it would never harm them. They'd grow up hearing stories of the time before, of the world that was lost, but they themselves would never experience the horror that their parents did.
This world could have all the trappings of a post-apocalyptic setting, with remnants of the old world scattered around, but without the constant life-or-death struggle that characterises many such settings. These children would grow up in a world at peace, a world where they could afford to be innocent, even naive.
The contrast between the traumatised older generation and the innocent younger one would be stark. The parents would carry the psychological scars of the pandemic, the grief of lost loved ones, the guilt of surviving when so many others didn't. They'd look at the world their children were growing up in, so different from the one they knew, and they'd feel a complex mix of relief, envy, and perhaps even resentment.
Meanwhile, the children would grow up in a world full of promise and potential. They'd be free to dream, to explore, to make the world their own. But they'd also have to grapple with the legacy of the pandemic, with the knowledge that the world they knew was built on the ashes of the old one. They'd have to find a way to honour the past without being bound by it, to learn from their parents experiences without letting those experiences define them.
This scenario has the advantage of being quite realistic, which is something I prefer personally, and of all the potential causes, is the most likely to actually happen. We've seen the devastation that pandemics can cause, both in terms of lives lost and societal disruption. A pandemic on the scale described here is certainly within the realm of possibility, given the right (or wrong) combination of virus traits. And the psychological and societal effects of such a pandemic would be profound, providing ample material for exploring the themes you're interested in.
I like personally like the idea you're going for, as some have mentioned there's a genre called cosy catastrophe in which such a story would fall in to. This pandemic scenario should provide you with a solid foundation that you can build on, somewhat similar to the scenario that people who lived through WW2 experienced, with their children not knowing the horrors of what their parents endured.
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**Something like medieval black death**
A fitting historical reference would be the "Black Death", the plague epidemic in late medieval Europe. This killed half the continent's population in a few years, but left the existing means of production intact for the time being (these were only destroyed later by non-use, lack of population, lack of demand). In fact, the "Black Death" - or rather the sharp decline in population - caused social changes that made the age of renaissance possible. The apocalypse thus brought progress.
Unlike in the desired scenario and mentioned by most respondents here, however, it was not the rural areas but the cities that were the best place for long-term survival. While important cities such as Venice or Florence (although they had far above-average death rates) were important cities again after only a few years, many rural areas were almost completely depopulated for decades (or even completely extinct, such as the European settlements on Greenland).
On the one hand, this has to do with genetic diversity: Where there are more people, there are more survivors. The chance is much higher that those who have the genetic make-up for long-term survival (e.g. resistance to the pathogen) can meet and ensure healthy offspring.
On the other hand, this has to do with the accessibility of means of production: If, for example, the plough was broken and there was only one blacksmith in the neighbouring village to repair it, who then died of the plague - then replacement was almost impossible for the entire region. In the larger towns, on the other hand, there were several blacksmiths, most of whom died - but not all of them. Likewise, in the cities there were simply many more supplies (empty houses of dead inhabitants ...) that could be looted to ensure short-term survival.
The struggle for survival in the cities affected by the plague was certainly extremely traumatic for all survivors (as far as I know, the cultural concept of the apocalypse in Western cultures stems from the experiences of this very period). The at least temporary breakdown of the usual social order, severe illness and deaths in every family, the need to literally clear away piles of corpses. Enough to give an entire population post-traumatic stress disorder.
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So. Here's my idea. You *could* have a pathogen or whatever, some sort of virus, that affects pregnant women, (well, their babies' brains.) It causes them to live in a sort of dream world, free of troubles because they're not *aware* of them. However, most don't survive this thing invading their brain, and when they're born, they're still-born and horrifying, so you have the trauma of a miscarriage, a horrifying sight, and rapid population decay. (This is what I came up with as a writer, if anyone can help explain it, please do.)
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First there was an extremely high-tech interstellar civilization.
Among the planets being terraformed was New Eden. A bunch of bio-engineers decided to go all-out and create ecosystems entirely out of species we'd like to be around, designing them from scratch if necessary.
Something went wrong. Left vague what. Possibly involving heavily networked technology being subverted. Or maybe plain-old civil war. Those involved in New Eden gathered whom they could and fled there, first destroying all records of the place's existance.
They arrived there by ballistics and aero-breaking. Not much survived of the ships and they didn't try to keep around what did.
So they have a neo-lithic tech level at a low population density in a gorgeous environment with no diseases that can affect them, no large predators, nothing poisonous... It's quite pleasant.
If you don't remember what you lost.
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# Climate change
Climate change is a hot topic. Even if you do not believe in it, there is a tipping point in nature. It goes all rught up to a point, and suddenly it breaks down catastrophically.
Let's imagine a two or three year scenario. I read yesterday we had a water surface temperature 5° higher than normal in an incredibly large area. If this heat also spreads to lower it can wreak havoc. A singke degree might be laughable for us, but deeper in the sea it's different. With less light and high water pressure the temperatures is incredibly stable. Changes here can impact the ecosystem enormously. This has a knockdown effect, where many species of fush can get decimated in a year or two. This creates a shortage of food from the sea.
A second ecological disaster can be insects, like bees. We already see in many areas of the real world that insect counts have been decimated. If many suddenly go extinct or get decimated further thanks to more extreme climates, our land based ecosystem can be decimated as well.
Add in that in some areas a drought can last for weeks where normally this never hapoens, or floods, or does both in a single year, and everything from large ancient trees to simple bushes can die.
## World hunger
This is a recipe for a world hunger event. People will get traumatised, as they were absolutely helpless to do anything about it (at the time it started). They will have watched friends and family die of hunger or aggression to get food. They might barely have survived themselves. They watched cities becime ghost towns, full with dead.
Nature also has the potential to bounce back. It can take a bit to find new balance with less species and changing environments. But the strongest have survived. Better against drought or hunger or whatever was wrong. Maybe just migrated to a new better suited area. Nature returns in force, giving humanity another chance.
Climate change can still endure, but for now the world has adapted. It is idyllic, as the food is now more than enough for the survivers and their children. Technology hasn't changed, though the amount of people isn't enough for the many factories. Knowledge is lost and some things cannot be produced any more. You can still have high quality double glazing or GPS coordinated farm equipment, while some other technology is lost.
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I'd suggest a solar storm which caused immense havoc on technology. Most people nowadays live in cities, and large cities can only store enough food for maybe 3 days or so. With technology failing, so does the intricate global transportation network. The modern world is so interconnected, and no nation is capable of supporting itself without international trade anymore, so this would cause modern society to collapse.
This leads to the darkest aspects of humanity coming to the forefront as people tend to act like beasts during such times; riots, violence, rape, etc. That explains the trauma of the survivors. At the same time, the desperate attempts to get tech working again explains why they still have some technology in the future; most of it is pieced together from salvaged parts, or was turned off/unplugged when the solar storm hit.
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Seemingly, based on the answers above(&below) a perfect storm of events might suit.
Solar Flares causing planet wide EMP like blackouts on technology. With communications down, information blocked, people will fall into anarchy.
This in turn means no way to communicate that the 'seals' of Disease Labs are now failed, and the flares caused some way for the diseases to escape, pandemic occurs, but only in patches and only for population centres.
Possibly the military manages to contain the issues, clear the diseases, and re-establish comms, but not before half of the population has succumbed.
BUT, the eletromagnetic effect on the populace is to decrease the negative/angry population, to the point that some passives are just too passive to care, this angers some people, but not enough to do much about it.
People have devolvled society into communities, everyone knows everyone, and those miscreants that used to thrive in a anayonmous world, can't. without their phones, their cash, their electronic skills, they fail to contribute, and can't earn. swathes of teens starve without the ability to tiktok and influence for cash.
All digital storage is gone, all websites are gone, BUT the physical machines are still able to be re-installed from physical discs, It might take 10 years to rebuild PCs to be usable, and networks to be workable, but in that time, people have had nothing to do but breed, AND they know that staying reliant on tech was/is a bad idea. Do it for real, becomes the mantra.
People revert to 1950s thinking, building machines to last, not to fail and get replaced. engineers build things to survive, last 100s of years, because only those 1950s-1908s machines are still properly working, every thing else has gone into disrepair if it wasn't quickly re-established and rebuilt.
The surviving 30-somethings can't handle the world, they are in PTSD, missing their convienience. Karens can't survive, the 40-50s have it better, as they kinda remember these times, and 60yr olds are left running society for a while as their grandkids are the future. The generation of under 12s run in feilds, play in trees, go home for 'video conference school's for a few hours , and physical schooling on their farms or in their small towns.
There is no TV, because all the shows are gone, and the physical ones that survived are yet to be "uploaded", so only local cinemas can show 'some' movies. Who has time for that, if they spend 10 hours a day farming / working out how to get the equipment working again.
It won't last.. in another 10 years, they'll have figured out how to pull a git copy of youtube from a sealed server somewhere, and society will begin its decent once again.
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In my story's world, witchcraft is a respected institution, with the most powerful practitioners being at the top echelons of society. Due to this, society traces its lineage through matrilineal lines. There are five types of magic that spells revolve around:
Enchantment Spells – These are spells designed to capture cosmic power within a crafted item, so that its power can be called upon in times of need.
Scrying Spells – These are spells designed to allow a user to perceive in ways that go beyond his fve senses.
Protection Spells – These are spells designed to ward a user, object, or location against a variety of possible harms
Transmogrifcation Spells – These are spells designed to fundamentally alter or control another being
Transmutation Spells - Changing the makeup of different materials or combining them with others to make new forms of matter.
A witch has the power to summon a familiar by using her body as a conduit between the mortal and ethereal plane. These powerful spirits are forever linked with their master, and used in a number of ways, such as magical batteries and amplifiers, repositories, or for battle. They also give one a depper and more intuitive sense of magic, allowing them to understand and perform spells that were difficult or impossible for them before.
Familiars are created through an advanced, complex spell that requires various actions and takes the form of a year long ritual. It begins with a spell that infuses the witch with ethereal energies which gestates into a spirit. Over the year, the witch performs multiple steps to mold and shape the familiar into the form she wishes it to be. The ritual culminates with a ceremony in which the daemon is birthed into the world. Familiars are prized in society, and are a symbol of status and power in the world. They represent the expertise and devotion of the witch to her craft. However, they are very rare among witches.
The stipulations for this spell:
1. The witch in question must be of childbearing age and must have never given birth before.
2. The witch must have accumulated enough mana over the years to perform the spell. Mana is accumulated in life through age, as well as training in the use of magic.
Based on these parameters, why would witches choose not to create Familiars? What would be the cost for this type of magic?
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Possible reasons:
1) Giving birth to a familiar destroys a woman's ability to give birth to children the normal way - this is intended: witch has to make a sacrifice of both body and soul to make the bond possible and give the familiar a physical form. So they tend to do that once they already have a family or have no intention of getting pregnant the normal way.
2) Having a familiar may affect the witch's ability to care about people, even their parents, husband and children, let alone friends, because they already have a perfect companion ready made for them.
3) You did not say how much these witches battle each other. Do they live an urban life where "witch" is a profession like "computer programmer" or is this a world where they are constantly fighting? If the latter is the case, a witch's familiar may be too week to protect initially and when it is caught, the witch can be blackmailed to do anything in order to keep it safe.
4) While familiars are a sign of power and well-respected among witches, the process of begetting a familiar has made it sort of taboo among non-magical people (whom I assume still exist and make up the majority of the society) - mostly because they see it as indecent. A witch appearing alongside her familiar when she goes down to the shop for milk and bread is akin to her showing up in full BDSM slave getup being led around on a collar. Imagine attending your parents' 50th anniversary that way. So the kind of witches who still want to be a part of normal society (I'm guessing witches aren't necessarily only born to witches but into normal families) try to avoid that, not in the least because having raised among non-magical people the taboo is also ingrained to their thinking.
ETA (based on sirjonsnow's comment but not quite the same):
5) A witch can only make a familiar while they are still virgins. (= in a magical sense: they had no sexual contact with another person.) However, a large and popular branch of witchcraft is sex magic and most witches tend to choose to practice that to gain power rather than remain virgins until the ripe old age when they know enough and are confident enough in their powers to attempt creating a familiar.
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## You only get one shot
Because of the intimate connection and lifelong nature, a witch can only ever have one familiar. If she makes the decision hastily and does anything wrong during the process, doesn't choose a good spirit to bind, summons and then loses a familiar because she is too inexperienced to protect it, etc... then she has just lost her greatest potential asset forever. Because of this, witches wait until they are extremely confident in their abilities, status and personal preferences before using their single chance.
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## It's a liability
Witches don't have familiars because they endanger the witch in some direct way. Perhaps familiars are demons which only agree to come to this world in servitude *because* when their masters die, they're free to do as they please. This makes the relationship precarious. Perhaps the contract states that the demons may not disobey the master, however, they seek to inflict harm on their masters in any way possible which isn't disobeying their master, either through deceit or by setting a trap unless a more clever witch has thought to tell them not to do so. In fact, witches which are capable of spawning a familiar, tired and weak as they may be, must still be very much on alert as the summoned familiar has not been directly told not to inflict harm on his or her master.
Alternatively, since the familiar is born from a piece of the witch's soul, if the familiar is killed, the witch's life is greatly shortened if the witch is not outright killed themselves. And in a coven in which witches may backstab one another, a witch's familiar would be a great weakness, with a witch being unable to constantly guard their familiar while they sleep.
## The process changes the witch who summons it
Perhaps a witch able to summon a familiar must be of a certain dark mindset, and either a witch is unable to for lack of having a darker mindset or the witch must do despicable things to achieve that dark mindset. Maybe the ritual itself darkens the mind, as the familiar carries a piece of the underworld with it, and it poisons the soul of the summoner.
Many witches would rather get by making a decent living without taking the unnecessary risk that it would require to obtain that next rung in the ladder of power, as no doubt magic would be a lucrative trade without being that powerful. Only the power-hungry push themselves to obtain a familiar, and are thus seen as immoral and to be feared.
## Politics of being a witch
Perhaps the hierarchy is well-established amongst the guild of the witches so that, like the days of the masters of a given trade, only some witches are considered adept enough to control a familiar and are given the express permission to try. While they'd say it is a matter of being given a boon before a witch can pursue this course, it would be nothing more than a method of control over the witches so that only select witches can become that powerful.
In this, an elite group of witches would determine who can have familiars and who cannot, and more likely than not, it would boil down to a question of money and power amongst the elite witches. Dedicate your house and your service to the guild of the witches, and we shall give you the boon so that you may obtain a familiar! Of course, this may not stop witches from trying to obtain one without the express permission of the guild. In this case, they are likely outcast from the guild entirely or worse still, lynched as a heretic to the respectful and law-abiding guild of the witches.
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1. You have just laid a reflection of your soul bare for all to see. Similar to [A portrait of dorian grey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray#Summary) the familiar reflect the soul. If the witch is cruel the familiar is demonic/twisted in shape warning everyone close to her.
2. You have just made a lifelong commitment to have it close to you so you need to be able to live with the reflection and not everyone would find themselves good company.
3. While the familiar is bound to serve the witch it too grows in power and can potentially grow to overpower the former master at which point the master is now bound to serve the familiar.
4. Familiars have a will of their own and aren't easy to control, don't need to sleep and resent being ordered around too much. As magical beings they can cause quite a bit of havoc even without violating any direct orders.
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Witches by nature are anti-social. The ritual required takes more than just the members of your own coven. Given the mistrust and thirst for power, the situation rarely presents itself when you can get enough witches together to help just one of them obtain a familiar. This only happens when there is a direct need by multiple covens and one specific witch is deemed worthy and trustworthy enough to be bestowed with this gift.
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Because a witch who summons a familiar is not only using magic - they are becoming, irrevocably and eternally part of magic. This is a bond they can't put down once it's taken up - and much like having children, it can be a very scary prospect.
You stipulate that having a familiar is a mark of prestige - and that familiars are highly prized - but though anyone can do it if they wish to take the time to learn, it might be a question of what one gives up in doing so.
Either
* by losing one's own identity - as the bond changes the way the witch sees the world now essentially having a second viewpoint which is utterly -inhuman-
or
* By the familiar becoming more important than the Witch's other personal relationships. Priorities are different - perhaps romance is difficult (imagine the trauma of catching yourself in the act of lovemaking via the literal point of view of your offspring).
or lastly
* Like childbirth during that time - perhaps it carries an element of danger. If 50% of familiar summoning births goes wrong - and carries a high mortality rate - it would certainly be understandable that there are few familiar-witch pairings in the world. Some don't want to make the leap because of the danger, and some did, and didn't make it.
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In general, there are two categories of reasons.
## Creating a familiar has some cost to the witch
If there is a price to pay for having a familiar, not all witches will be willing to pay that price
## Creating a familiar has some prerequisite that not all witches fulfill
This can either be a prerequisite that nobody has at birth but can be gained (i.e. sufficient mastery of magic), a prerequisite that everyone is born with but can lose (Part of the ritual to summon a familiar requires all your baby teeth, so if your parents threw them away you are out of luck), a prerequisite that some people have but others don't (the ritual only works if you were born on the night of the full moon, within three feet of running water), or any combination of the three.
# Specific ideas:
**Creating a familiar causes the witch to start aging backwards**
This is actually a blessing if you are very old, but it's a curse if you are very young. So witches generally wait until they're getting on in their years before trying to summon a familiar.
**Creating a familiar removes the ability for a witch to have a family**
Perhaps a woman who has given birth is no longer capable of creating a familiar inside her, but the process of giving birth to a familiar renders a witch infertile. A witch who has a familiar could not possibly have children, which is part of why familiars come with such prestige - it indicates a powerful dedication to the art. (You could also go with the stronger prerequisite that creating a familiar requires that you've never had sex, but that's messier as you have to define what 'sex' is.)
Of course, the existence of the Catholic Church proves that there are many people willing to give up their chance for a family to follow their calling, so if you went this route you should also include a strong social imperative towards witches having families (perhaps magic is inheritable?) to explain why this cost is considered so high.
**Having a familiar limits what magic you can perform**
Creating a familiar gives you great power and skill in your primary branch of magic, but it cuts off your access to any other branches. A witch who specializes in healing will become a genius healer, able to perform pinpoint magical surgeries and cure every ailment they ever encounter - but they lose the ability to light candles with a snap of their fingers, or fly on a broom, or telepathically chat with their friends.
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**What happens if their familiar is killed?**
Yes having a familiar is a fantastic boon to magic-use, but it's also a massive risk. What happens if your soul-bonded familiar is killed? You must live the rest of your life as a magic-less half-soul pitied and pitiable.
As such, it's a risk only the old tend to take. They haven't much life left as it is, so the risk of living it in purgatory is a fair trade for the boon to their villages.
Of course there are those who desire power at a far younger age, but the risks are clear and drummed into witches from a young age. Morwenna, however, wasn't presented with a choice. When the salt-king demands something of a slave, it complies. Even then, she couldn't have imagined the horrors he had in store for it.
So here she stood. Newborn familiar in one hand, ironfist slicked with king's blood in the other. Throne guard hammering at the door.
What in the eight hells was she going to do now...
*...launch into story*
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**Real historical example (tl;dr? Skip to "Actual Answer")**
Imagine the political situation of the late 19th/early 20th century. Germany and Japan grew in power disrupting the balance that has grown between the other global powers in existence. Japan started to compete with Russia in eastern asia, defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, becoming the first Asian nation to defeat a European great power solidifying their own state as great power, which of course gave the Russian Tsar quite a big heartburn, losing his influence in the Manchuria and the plans to set up the trans siberian railway to connect western Russia with the region and also the option of gaining control over a military port free of ice during the whole year (Wladiwostok is not free of ice in winter - or was, I don't know). Prussia on the other hand formed lesser Germany with several smaller states after defeating France in the French-Prussian war and annexing Alsace-Lorraine from France. In the decades after, emperor Wilhelm II. gained control over several colonies in Afrika threatening the balance of power between the two biggest world powers in existence, France and the UK. Germany tried to raise rivalries between France and the UK in order to take one's side and profit from the loss of the other side's power but failed and in turn was isolated politically by France, the UK and in the end Russia, who formed the Triple Entente. All allied forces Germany had left were already declining in power, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman empire and even Italy, that didn't even take Germany's and AH's side in WWI, so Germany made plans to attack Russia before those could renew their military. Then the Austrian prince got executed and we all know how this ended. None of the powers in existence wanted the rivalry of an ambitious new power cutting off theirs.
To some extent this also counts for WWII with the big difference that the German elite pre WWI wanted to lead a war of conquest creating a self sufficient empire spanning from the atlantic coast to the Ural mountains, while Hitler mostly lead a war of extermination, getting rid of the "lesser" races and gaining world domination. Also the rivalries between France and the UK have declined greatly.
**Actual Answer:**
So, the simple answer is just this. The few witches in political and magical power do not wish the competition of young and ambitious witches gaining the highest magical power a witch can get. So they mostly forbid the ritual, and they can do so being the most powerful witches. They may rival among each others but would lay their resentments aside if another threat to their power turns up. Only in few cases one of the witches in power may be able to raise another protégé to power, either as successor or political ally, by gifting the other witches in power essentially buying their approval or threatening them enough to not oppose it, always in hope the tradeoff is worth it and not get politically isolated themselves.
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Because Familiars make it, relatively, easy to work magic, so if you really want to show off your prowess you do your workings solo. This would result in Familiars being coveted by middling witches, those who are powerful enough to summon and bind a useful familiar them but still need a boost to work the *really* powerful magicks. Meanwhile the true powers of the magical elite ignore them as a crutch for the less gifted.
Do note the this does somewhat assume a fairly static magic tradition in which what you can do with magic is limited and those limits are well known. In a magical setting where the covens are still working ever more powerful magicks in an attempt to find the limits of what magic can do everyone will want the most powerful familiars they can lay their hands on to help them overcome the limits of their personal talents.
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A lot of practitioners learned their skill due to being the kind of people who would rather study than hang out with others. IOW: they tend to be introverts.
Familiars tend to be extroverts. They won't necessarily like the summoner, and either way will have nothing better to do with their (enforced) time on our plane than chatter and make sarcastic comments. They are like the Eddie Murphy / Gilbert Goddfreid voiced animated sidekick that you cannot get rid of.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0v67V.jpg)
Imagine getting a random aircraft seatmate who won't let you read, listen to music, or sleep, and insists on chattering at you the whole flight. Now imagine it isn't just a 2-hour flight you have to endure, but **the entire rest of your life**. There are a lot of people who might like that, but there are also lot who would consider it a living hell.
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Because you have to keep the familiar very close, and cannot dismiss them. It is a lifelong commitment to keeping a sentient demon next to you at all times. Maybe most witches just aren't willing to make the trade away all privacy forever for more power.
alternatively the connection to look through eyes, into the minds of them works both ways and if the familiar betrays the witch or is captured and tortured they become a great weakness.
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The entities that you're binding yourself too aren't human and aren't even from our physical reality. And you're creating a telepathic link with them.
Even if the being isn't actively fighting or hostile to you it's still going to be utter chaos. Their values, motivations and idea of morality are going to be completely alien to you. The way they think and communicate is going to be completely alien to you. They're going to be experiencing all of the physical senses for the very first time, all at once. And all of that is going to have an unimpeded expressway straight into your head.
Perhaps the reason they're rare is because most of the people who try to create one end up driving themselves insane.
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## **Smells Like Daemonic Spirit**
Many witches tend to be rebellious contrarian types, especially those ambitious young ones that would see a familiar as a shortcut to fame, riches, power etc. If familiars reflect their mistress' personality, then their loyalty would inevitably come into question. Truly wild ones might even attempt to reverse the mistress-servant relationship at great risk to both.
Sample snippet off the top of my head:
WITCH 1 : Time to clean the cauldron, young imp.
FAMILIAR: Damnit mom, stop telling me what to do!
WITCH 1: Get down here right now! Don't make me come up there and levitate you downstairs!
WITCH 2: Chip off the old block, tee hee
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## An associated social stigma
With all the advantages listed, it would seem like there are no reasons not to summon a familiar. Reading through the other answers, there are a lot of ideas.
I suggest that there is a social stigma associated with having a familiar - for example - all who possess a familiar are obligated to fulfill some duty, uphold a specific cause, or otherwise become beholden to an organization or entity (or entities) as a result of the successful summoning. Those who may wish to not be placed under those restrictions may choose to avoid or "fail" to summon a familiar.
It might be interesting if the familiars not only take the form of a creature, but that the witch is in turn literally bound to the source that all familiars come from. Perhaps the spirit is actually a portion of some other being or entity, and by summoning one, they enter into a contract of some kind which they cannot break.
Given that it was historically thought that witches made contracts with an evil entity in order to obtain their powers, this may have interesting historical implications. Especially if the entity or entities in question have not revealed their own orientations, purposes, and goals. There may even be more than one which are in competition with each other.
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## You make a deal with a demon and there's a price to pay
A familiar doesn't serve the witch for free. There's a deal the witch needs to make for the demon to serve her will: The demon serves the witch in life and and the witch needs to serve the demon for a certain time in afterlife. And this service won't be pleasant...
Since the familiar's personality reflects the one of the witch, more powerhungry witches need serve their familiars longer.
The more experienced the witch the better the deal she can cut. Learning magic on her own reduces the price the witch needs to pay.
Although witches may prolong their lifespan (maybe even indefinetly) they can still be killed by violence allowing the familiar to collect the debt.
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I saw that there are many questions about how a lunar colony would defend itself. But **in the not so near future** the lunar colony might be stronger than Earth. They may have even suffered from attacks and oppression from Earth. They have easy access to space, they have more satellites, they control the heavens.
Why not fight back? Or at least make a power demonstration and declare independence?
Assume both parties have access to a nearly unlimited source of energy, either fusion reactors or large solar arrays orbiting around the Sun, and assume that both parties are capable of assembling spaceships in space, and have permanent bases in space, but **the lunar colony dominates space industry**. Earth is strong, united and arrogant, and believes strongly in its own superiority.
Mars is already settled, but weak, and depends on the space technology of the Moon, and the terraforming expertise of the Earth, and wants to remain neutral.
[Answer]
**The Art of War is about defeating the enemy**
**The Science of War is about not defeating yourself.**
DON'T throw rocks at Earth cities. It's probably counterproductive. Every city you vaporize will harden the Earthies' resolve, make them more willing to sacrifice for the war effort, and more willing support absolutists who want every Loonie dead.
Instead, use Earth's gravity well against it in a very different way: Smash Earth's power in space -- its space fleet. Confine the Earthies to the surface, and make them fight their way up through their own atmosphere to return to space. Then prevent them from building another fleet in orbit. Capture or destroy the supporting orbital industries, platforms, habitats, and bases.
Avoid mass casualties of non-combatants. It makes the Loonies look like jerks...and like evil enemies who are worth fighting. Do not destroy non-combatant outposts, though you can require them to be abandoned and/or mothballed. Do not steal Earthie property.
Use propaganda mercilessly. It's cheap and can be very effective.
Treat prisoners humanely, and allow Martian representatives to inspect their captivity. Do not use prisoners for propaganda purposes (that tends to backfire).
Remember that the end goal should be a signed-and-ratified peace treaty...unless you unwisely intend to exterminate all the Earthies (that doesn't look good in the history books). The military, political, propaganda, economic, and other efforts must be synchronized toward this goal. Each Line of Effort should have metrics to gauge progress toward the goal.
A lasting treaty requires trust and good faith, and should not punish either side. So don't squander good faith by massacring scientists on that space-telescope. Simply have them mothball it, then evict them back to Earth in their own (fully functional) lifeboat.
After peace is signed, expect Earth to return to space *with Lunar cooperation*, so your officers need to carefully record where they placed all those space-mines because they need to go back and recover each and every one.
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**By throwing rocks at them.**
*In terms of general war* strategy, *user535722 is right and you should go vote for his answer because from a strategic perspective it's correct. But, the OP hasn't asked how the Moon might prosecute a war; it's asked how it would attack the earth. From that perspective I still believe this is the right answer. Ultimately it all hinges on your interpretation of the word* attack. *For those of you who interpret it as striking at an enemy rather than prosecuting a war, I offer you this description of how to do it.*
This might sound rather primitive, but from a lunar base it's actually a really good strategy if you want to attack Earth. It's not even a new idea; Robert Heinlein came up with it in *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress* before we'd even reached the moon.
Put simply, Lunar gravity is sufficiently low that it doesn't take anywhere near the energy to get things out of the Lunar gravity well as it does to get things out of the Earth's gravity well. Just look at the lunar landers of the Apollo missions by comparison to the Saturn V rockets, and you'll see what I mean. On top of that, the Earth's gravity in this instance actually works against itself by attracting the rocks for you. All you have to do is get them off the Lunar surface and headed towards the Earth.
Ultimately, this is a poor colony's mass driver system. You're creating a massive amount of kinetic energy just by launching the rock and pushing it towards the Earth, where the gravity well does your job for you. Rocks the size of a few tens (of thousands) of tonnes should release enough energy on impact that it could easily take out smaller cities, and the impact blast may well be equivalent to a small nuclear strike. Get one that is a few hundred (thousand) tonnes aimed at a major city, and not only will it destroy that city, but a few of them in concert could bring about a non-nuclear winter through dust in the atmosphere.
In theory, you could blow up these rocks if you saw them coming soon enough, but that's a tricky affair. If your pieces are still large enough, you spread the kinetic energy over a larger area and still do at least some damage. Earth would need to think about using its nuclear arsenal of ICBMs as a point defense solution, and that means detonating a large number of nuclear devices above the earth. (I'm pretty sure modern ICBMs can't reach escape velocity to intercept the missiles closer to the Moon.)
As solutions go, it's primitive to be sure but given the cost of getting things out of the Earth's gravity well, the moon is actually in a far more advantageous position than the Earth when it comes to offensive weapons, and therefore can afford to go low tech. Defensively, it would be another matter as the habitats on a lunar colony would be sufficiently fragile that a single glancing hit from the Earth could do a massive amount of damage. All in all, the moon has great DPS1 but is hopeless at tanking.
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1. I didn't know what DPS was first time I heard it but it's common enough in gaming parlance so as to have entered my mainstream acronym list. It stands for Damage Per Second, and generally deals with the *rate* of damage that a specific person can deal within a game. Tanking is another gaming term which relates to the rate at which a specific person an *absorb* damage before they start losing their own health.
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Weaponized [Kessler Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)
This is a specific method of denying space to a planet.
If Luna pollutes LEO with enough debris, it would become difficult to impossible for Earth to launch anything into space without Luna's help. Earth would have to successfully run the blockade of debris to reach higher orbit, and then fight through Luna ships that are undamaged and have the kinetic advantage.
[Answer]
[The Moon is a harsh Mistress.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress)
Luna sits on the top of our gravity well. With a little nudge you can push boulders down that well. But trowing them back is **a lot** harder. (about 10 times)
But with the levels of tech you are describing, most of the war will be digital and online. And as Luna is depending on live support systems, Earth might have a upper hand there, as more people is likely to have more programmers to disrupt things from afar.
And unless you have faster then light, Mars is to far way to matter as modern wars are very fast.
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**How do you want to do things?**
There are several ways depending on how aggressive you want to be. If the goal is destruction of entire states or even countries then yes, throwing rocks is probably the most efficient way. If you want targeted elimination, there are many more options. The classic nuclear strike, using a giant lens to focus light in a tight beam, or even use their space fleet to go head to head with whatever space force Earth has(keeping in mind the Earth fleet has probably burned most of their fuel getting to orbit).
Of course, there is one more way - totally impractical, but totally awesome. Send the entire lunar population to orbit in safe space stations or ships. Then, use either a new or existing(but massively upscaled) mass driver to do something like this "big enough rock" story - <https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/8r5v3u/text_a_big_enough_rock/>. You use the mass driver with part of the Moon as propellant to deorbit Luna, crashing it into Earth and triggering the extinction of all life. I haven't done the math but pretty sure this could work. Then resettle the Lunar community on NEOs, moons of Mars, and other nearby low gravity worlds. *That* is probably the most Kerbal, and awesome, solution.
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**It's time for the Naturalists / Conservatives / Rusting Earthlings to cede the future of the human race to Spacers**
* Earthlings have long marched about with a regal arrogance, assuming they are the natural leaders of the universe. The Europeans colonized the Aztecs, the Native Americans, the Africans. The French trampled over Vietnam, the English over India. Time and time again, Earthlings have demonstrated a total lack of respect for the natives of established civilizations. Once again they seek to trample all over the culture and rights of a human society, that of the Spacers, with no regard for our traditions or our way of life.
* Earth was beautiful, and the Earthlings pillaged that beauty (and forced our ancestors into space in the process). Earthlings have proven they don't have the responsibility necessary to handle managing a highly elastic global ecosystem, let alone the highly controlled and vulnerable artificial ecosystem of terraformed Mars or *extremely* vulnerable artificial dome ecosystem of Luna. How many more planets will we let Earthlings ravage for its resources, destabilizing ecosystems in the process?
* Earth is a place of anti-intellectualism and radically superstitious people. Our ancestors, all scientists, were forced to flee in the face of persecution for the crime of Speaking Truth. Do we want these Superstitious, Radical Earthlings dictating our social policies? As soon as we left Earth, our technological advances exponentially increased. Should we allow Earth to once again attempt to drag us into the dark ages?
Luna and our ally Mars just want to be left well enough alone. Earth may do as she pleases (and has pleased) to her own scorched planet, why must she always attempt to control all of humanity? It's time for us Spacers to move on, welcoming any Earthlings that wish to join us in our New Vision for Humanity, one free of ecological destruction, anti-intellectual superstition, and cultural hegemony.
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If the Moon is truly independent, there is nothing to be gained by out and out war with Earth. The best alternative is to completely shake the specter of Earthling bureaucracy from the Moon and Mars - leave to Spacers the business of Spacers. Initiate a massive propaganda campaign before simply stopping shipment of goods (taxes) back to Earth. Transfer ownership of all space vessels to Lunar command structures, politely and firmly uninviting any Earth-sympathizers off the ships. Continue to disparage Earth as a violent Colonizer type entity, thus confirming for everyone this is true if Earth ever tries to bring the Moon back under control of Earth bureaucracy.
And if the earth *does* try to take the moon back, detonate a couple hundred thousand tons of moon rock in orbit around Earth, thus trapping Earthlings on the surface for a couple hundred thousand years.
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I guess throwing rocks is the big thing, but it's a little bit... inelegant. For starters it's not very precise and you end up wasting a lot of 'innocent' people without necessarily hitting strategic targets. If you're just after a lot of carnage then I guess that's OK.
The main advantage that the Moon has in this war is the small gravity well. You can get off the Moon a lot easier, and that means you can put much more massive objects into Earth orbit than Earth can. You also don't have to worry about atmospheric pollutants from your rocket exhaust or atmospheric drag, which is nice. And no atmosphere also means you don't have to worry about streamlining your designs.
So what else could we launch from Luna that would be better than rocks?
How about dozens or hundreds of [Kinetic Bombardment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) platforms?
These things are nasty. Take a bunch of tungsten rods, say a hundred kilograms or so each. Load them into firing tubes with carefully calibrated charges to allow you to deorbit them onto a ground target. Put say 50 of them into a smallish satellite and launch it into orbit. Repeat as many times as you like.
The beauty of these little Rods from God is that they hit the ground like tactical nukes, with none of the radiation effects. Aiming is a bit of a problem, what with the messy atmosphere to go through, but when you're firing 10 or 50 of these things into a very small area you can adjust pretty well. And the area is small. These things are tactical as hell, the only thing stopping them from being surgical is the atmosphere being unpredictable.
RfG bombardment could be targeted on very small areas. Like launch facilities. Deny space to your opponents and they're out of the war.
But that's not the worst thing you can do with these nasty little buggers. What happens when you fire all of your RfG payload into LEO and let them orbit? You end up with Kessler Syndrome's big brother. Not only do you scrub LEO free of any functioning satellite system, you have effective screened off the Earth from space. You can't go there, but they can't come out to hurt you anymore. 50,000 or so scattered in various orbits around the Earth would be enough I think.
Of course they aren't going to stay up there forever. Eventually orbital decay is going to bring them down, and there's no way to figure out where. And once they're all down there's not going to be much left of the surface. Perhaps this isn't the nicest approach?
But since we're throwing 'nice' out the window anyway - we're at war, after all, so we can apparently justify any atrocity - why not make a few thousand concrete bombs and use them to wipe out all the military assets you can reach. They're little more than the rocks everyone else wants to throw, but they *are* steerable so you're more likely to get the target you wanted. Deorbit into the general area, then steer down to the target. Kinetic bombardment with increased accuracy. And you can make them as big as you like, so taking out entire cities... um, I mean military bases will be easy.
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I am quite happy that I have stirred up such a lively discussion. Originally I just wanted to make a contrasting question to the "how the Lunar colony would **defend** itself" type questions, and make people think differently, and I was really interested in the answers.
Once the Lunar colony reaches energy independence and dominates space, it will be very strong. It may be in position to threaten Earth, or even better, it may be able to demonstrate its power in a peaceful way. Moving dangerous asteroids out of the way, or cleaning up space debris would make it clear to everyone, that if someone is capable of this, it would be capable of the opposite too.
In medieval times the outcome of battles was often decided by who owned the high ground. I think something similar is going to happen in the future. Space is really high up. And the Moon is an excellent place to build a castle. In medieval times sometimes the mere existence of the castle was enough to ensure peace in the surrounding land. I hope it will be the same in the future too.
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An attack serves a (at least imaginary) purpose. Yours is a power demonstration. So maximise that effect while minimizing other outcomes.
You have the superior deep space observatories, you have the superior space tech. Go hunt for an asteroid that will miss earth by X. Covertly send rockpushers up there. On a big public earth event have your diplomats unveil a string of numbers. Those are the ephemera of some big earth space installation, that is blown to bits by the retargeted asteroid the next day. An asteroid, mind, that would have laid a smallish city to waste. That is power. You just demonstrated it.
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# Threaten to attack Earth's climate (but please don't actually do it)
The people of the moon would not suffer if the climate on Earth deteriorates, but the people of Earth would.
Terraforming technology may be present, but I suspect that damaging the climate would (still) be much easier than preventing damage to it (how exactly the climate could be attacked, I will leave to you, but feel free to take inspiration from all the experience we already have in ruining the climate);
Furthermore to damage the climate the people of the moon would just need to be able to hit the planet -- which is a much bigger target than individual cities -- thus making it very hard for Earth to defend itself (unless they can prevent any lunar spaceships or projectiles from entering the atmosphere, but that would ruin the whole premise of the question.)
So it would likely be possible for the people of the moon to either render earth near uninhabitable or at the very least cause significant damage to the ecosystems on earth -- which, depending on the infrastructure on earth, may also severely damage the agricultural industry on earth.
The threat of mass extinction of the life on Earth -- and possibly a global famine -- will hopefully be enough to cause the people of Earth to surrender on favorable terms.
First, the people of the moon will, however, have to prove their capability to destroy the climate and their intention to do so if their terms arent met.
Especially the latter will properly be extremely difficult, as the people of the moon most likely don't want to cause a mass extinction event on Earth, a possible way around this is for the people of the moon to set up some sort of automated "doomsday device" to trigger the attack on earth climate (see for instance <https://philosocopter.com/news/2018/11/28/how-to-build-a-doomsday-device>).
It should be mentioned that this answer doesn't work if the earth is already uninhabitable, or if the moon is dependent on agricultural imports from the earth.
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The "throwing rocks" meme (popularized by Heinlein) is mentioned here a lot, stating that you just need to exit the moon's gravity well for causing damage. That's misunderstanding the problem. The moon is not hanging by wire from the sky, it is *orbiting* Earth. So is anything on it. To get something to deorbit Earth, you need a very large change of impulse and the only feasible way to do that is redirection with a slingshot maneuver employing the moon itself. That requires strategically timed changes in impulse so you cannot just use unpowered rocks. It also requires a lot of time.
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A series I found when trawling TV Tropes had as a theme that the Seven Deadly Sins (Pride, Lust, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, and Wrath for the unfamiliar) could be virtues if controlled properly. How might a culture express one or all of these sins as virtues besides viewing wrath as a useful tool for fighting monsters and evildoers and the like?
[Answer]
Depends on how you look at them
For Programmers
[Three Virtues](http://threevirtues.com/):
>
> According to Larry Wall(1), the original author of the Perl
> programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer;
> Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
>
>
> * Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce
> overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs
> that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so
> you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
> * Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but
> actually
> anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
> * Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
>
>
> (1) Quoted from "Programming Perl", 2nd Edition, O'Reilly & Associates, 1996
>
>
>
For the seven deadly sins
* Greed is easy. It makes people work harder and smarter. As Wall
Streets says "Greed is good"
* Pride is also easy. It can make you do
things already done because you know you can do it better than
everyone else.
* Sloth can make you work smarter instead of harder
* Envy can make you work harder so you have what others already have.
* Gluttony doesn't have to be just food. It can be for experiences
which means a willingness to try something.
* Lust can tie in with envy
* Wrath prevents others from hurting or taking advantage of you.
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Check out concept of [The Golden Mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy))
This is the idea that extremes of any attribute or quality are bad. Linguistically we tend to have different words for good versions and bad versions of things. You can't celebrate concepts such as lust because the word has negative connotations, you have to instead celebrate a different word that captures what you're looking for.
**E.g.**
Too little: Cowardice
Just Right: Courage
Too much: Recklessness
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Not all the words we use to mean evil things translate well into good words, but you can generally find a rough approximation.
*Pride, Lust, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, and Wrath*
become...
*Honour, Love, Industry, Ambition, Efficiency, Moderation, and Passion*
It might sound like I'm describing a totally different set of attributes, but somebody accused of any of these sins could defend themselves by invoking the corresponding virtue.
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# It is all a matter of opinion
Virtues/vices are not virtues/vices because they are **inherently** good or bad. They have been **defined** as good/bad by religious authority. If we look at the actual qualities of the virtues/vices, we may arrive at different conclusions.
Let us take a look at at [three of the virtues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_virtues#Moral_theology)
* **Faith**, to believe in revelation in the absence of — or even in opposition to — evidence. Church calls this a virtue. A [skeptic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism) on the other hand would call this a vice; that belief must be **withheld** until there is evidence, and therefore to believe without evidence is bad, in the eyes of the skeptic.
* **Hope**, to assume that divine intervention will occur and set things right is considered by church to be a virtue. But in another view, someone that takes a look at the [state of our environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) might say that us humans need to deal with our own stuff and not sit around waiting for someone else to fix things; that not taking responsibility is a vice.
* **Charity**, to give unlimited adulation to the divine. Others would argue that [personality cults](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality) are anti-democratic and the source of much evil.
# So what about the vices?
All you need to do is find the advantages of the seven deadly sins, and use those are arguments for why it is good to celebrate them.
* **Gluttony** A celebration of the fact that you do not have to starve. Giving thanks to the happy circumstance that we have achieved not only the means to sustain ourselves but also to make it tasty, enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing. To celebrate happy circumstances makes us look more favourably at the future, and strive to make even more things this good.
* **Greed** For this I leave the floor to [one of the most memorable speeches in movie history](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVxYOQS6ggk).
* **Sloth** Putting in hard work and/or expensive resources into meeting basic needs is a burden on society. Anything that we do only to sustain us, and not to develop/evolve us, is a cost in both money and health/lives. So inventing things that allow us to be "lazy", lessens that cost.
* **Lust** One of our primary, and most instinctive emotions. It has for a very long time been made shameful, and therefore it has caused us much hurt, angst and fear. Even today, lust-shaming is doing this harm to us, creating the image of the male as a slobbering brute who cannot keep his wits about him when lust hits him, casting out the female and denigrating her if she dares show that lust is a part of her emotional life. Celebrating lust then becomes a counter-weight to the shaming, liberating us and allowing us to be ourselves without feeling bad for it.
* **Pride** Feeling good about one's accomplishments is a powerful motivator to get things done.
* **Wrath** Nary any grassroots movement on this planet was ever started without some semblance of anger over the then current state of affairs. Again, wrath is a powerful motivator.
* **Envy** The third motivator. As Christopher Hitchens used to say about the commandment not to "covet": coveting may lead to emulation; may lead to enterprise. Seeing what others have, feeling envious about that and thinking "I want that too", drives people to want to get the same for themselves.
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The easiest way to do this is to link everything to a relationship component with other humans.
* **Gluttony**: The ability to not only feed yourself, but also everyone you care about. Throwing a big party and making sure everyone is well fed is a great thing that shows your personal success as a human being. It shows you care about others and are able to share your personal wealth.
* **Greed**: Making sure that you work hard to keep everything you have under your control is a good thing. It shows that you care about everything that belongs to you. In extension you also care to make sure that everyone close to you stays close to you, meaning that you care about their well-being. The more dangerous the world around the more important it is to keep track of the people you care about.
* **Sloth**: Focusing on the important stuff and leaving everything that is not very important for you aside means that your laser-like focus will help you accomplish your goals and help your fellow humans. Leave everything you can't do very good and that would distract you from what you can do best aside for those people who are good at it.
* **Lust**: Happiness and love are incredibly important. Lust is one of the most vital components of the relationship between two people and is thereby one of the most important things to take care of. You need to take care of your own lust - and that of your partner - in order for the society as a whole to be more happy.
* **Pride**: Showing others how much you have is important to motivate them to strive to achieve the same things that you achieved. Be a role model and be proud about it.
* **Wrath**: Seek out what is not already yours and use your wrath against others to obtain more - others that not fall into your family category of course. Together with your fellow humans you should strive to use your combined wrath to seek out ever increasing territory and power to make sure the whole group profits and thrives.
* **Envy**: Just like motivating others by showing pride you should envy others to see what they have, what they have done to get to that point and to try to find a way to achieve the same thing. Ideally you would guide this towards other folks that are not in your direct vicinity to simply take what is theirs and make it your own, but in itself envy towards your neighbour is good as it motivates you. You should seek out opportunities to motivate yourself wherever you can.
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You have a lot of examples how a sin could be construed as a good thing in the other answers already.
So I want to concentrate a little bit the how and why these are considered sins in "our" culture. If you abstract a little from the reasoning of religion, these sins are basically part of a code of conduct, defined by or for the society.
If you follow these rules you will fit in nicely, if you don´t problems will arise.
So we are looking for a society where the premise is different so that these Sins are considered beneficial.
* For example a society which has problems with fertility could preach Lust as a virtue.
* A society which has problems with stressed resources and overproduction could preach sloth to it´s citizens. (see discussions about unconditional basic income for example)
* A culture which is threatened by oppression could preach wrath as as a virtue to empower themselves.
* and so on...
The question is who makes the rules - as you stated *(if controlled properly.)*
So it all depends on who controls the society and from which behavior they profit. If you have an autocratic society, an Orwellian state, a democracy ... the answers may be different and also the enforcement or adoption of those rules.
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PS: Also found a [site](http://www.deadlysins.com/) which seems to be dedicated to answering your question.
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The key here is *controlling them properly*.
First we need to understand what (moral) virtues and vices are. Basically, virtues are both descriptor of and ideal model of the behaviour of the human person within human society: the "human being attaining excellence". They are God given talents that we practice and train ourselves to engage in in order to become the best human beings we can be. Moral virtues are spiritual behaviours that distinguish us humans (body-soul beings) from other animals, with whom we share many traits, behaviours, urges, and responses.
So a virtuous person in human society treats others with generosity & respect, is kind & humble. It is a choice to behave like a human being, exercising her God given talents. The outward behaviours are an extension and revelation of her interior nature. The truly human nature.
A viceful person treats others with disrespect & violence, is prideful and desires what others have for himself. This is also a choice, but not the choice of being a human in excellence! It is the choice of behaving like an animal, and is thus an insult to animals who have no choice in the matter. The outward behaviours are also an extension of the inner nature. The truly beastly nature.
What's the difference between the natures? The virtuous person seeks to elevate herself above the purely animal behaviour ecapsulated by the vices. The viceful person does not seek self improvement and is content to wallow with his fellow beasts.
Are vices inherently evil and virtues inherently good? No. Animals are not evil; and people who wallow with them and behave like them are not evil either. Certainly both vice & virtue can be put into the service of evil, but that's a different matter. The sin of engaging in a vice is the desire to turn yourself into an animal and live like an animal, rather than a human person.
So what about controlling vices properly? What happens here is beastly vices are elevated into lesser human virtues. They are less in stature, because they do not bring us to human excellence, but they certainly can serve as stepping stones towards those higher virtues.
* When Pride's dangerous overconfidence and inflated self-regard is controlled, it becomes a rejoicing in one's own deeds. This is healthy in so far is it serves to build confidence in oneself; but is still lacking the depth and power of humility, the understanding that these gifts and successful deeds are not under one's own control.
* When Lust's empty cravings & graspings are curbed, it becomes an eagerness to excel. This is healthy in that is drives scholars to research and entrepreneurs to found businesses.
* When Greed's avarice and search for "prosperity" (at the expense of others, usually) is curtailed, it comes "wanting wisely". This is the healthy assessment of one's wishes and desires: do I really need this thing?, will that really make me a better person? It still lacks the power and majesty of Charity, the free giving of one's self and one's possessions or talents.
I think that will serve to illustrate. When we control our vices we are simply beginning the journey towards a virtuous life. And our culture does indeed express the virtuous nature of these controlled vices.
* Greed becomes Opportunity: For example, in the USA, one of foundational pillars of society is the capitalist economic model. In this model, Greed is still a vice, because it ill treats other people and seeks to destroy them; but Opportunity is the virtue of those who offer a service or a product to others with the expectation of remuneration.
* Envy becomes Keeping Up With the Joneses: in the USA, "keeping up with the Joneses" is the proper control of Envy. Envy of another's material success is a vice because it rots the sufferer's spirit & corrupts his mind. It causes him to seek a destructive and inappropriate revenge upon the object of his envy. Keeping up with the Joneses is a positive outlet for the desire to succeed materially: it is a driver to work hard, earn a little extra and spread that wealth around a bit by buying culturally appropriate displays of one's earnings (a fancy new car, big screen tv, the latest tech gadgets).
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It all comes down to Culture.
Lets take for example, Christians and Muslims have their own "rules to follow" which justifies that this is good or this is bad yet most of them are doing the "bad" even though they know what is "Good".
But put culture in the picture and your virtues will be accepted.
If a country is raised with the mindset that unleashing wrath on enemies(e.g killing supposed evildoers) is justifiable, and that it is the best way to deal with such things, then everyone will do it.
Beasts are different, they kill because of instinct, means of eating, which is their way of life. So if a man excuses himself of using wrath to kill people, evil doers and not without the culture to back it up, we use the word "Sin" to tell everyone that what that man does is bad, and is not justifiable.
[Answer]
At the core of every virtue stands a sin a negative behavior. Some sins may seem as opposites of other virtues, but the virtues themselves contain at its core a reason for existence, a sin. Humble beings can still take pride in their way of life or despise the Prideful. Some names sins are simply other feelings brought to the extreme. Lust is just an uncontrolled desire, a need to seek pleasure. Lust provides same emotion as Love and compassion, they are different only in nuances that are never set in stone. Lust is often described as selfish, while commpassion spreads the pleasure, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Greed - Gathering riches takes them out of circulation, weakening the economy. So "gathering gold and not willing to share it" is a sin. But having a large sum at hand is still handy for organisations and states. Dragons may gather gold, but what do they want it for, they are intelligent, they know it is useless to them. But what if they plan to use those funds to restore their empire or to build temples, hospitals, monasteries, libraries, orphanages? What if they gather gold so that when a famine or a great war comes, they can protect the people in their domain from harm? Gathering wealth is a sin only if there is no purpose.
Generosity is a greater sin disguised as a virtue. It encourages people to give away the wealth they earned and allows the others to stop striving for more, to progress. It promotes sloth.
greed -> prosperity
Keeping a constant flow of money, seeking to gain more with each trade and each contract and investing to gain more can help the economy. If the money flows it allows others to reach for that money. If one man builds a dam all others get less, if a man allows the river to flow they all get as much as they can carry in their buckets. Those who allow the money to flow are still wealthy, yet they do not restrict the others to gain as well.
Pride - pride can be decomposed into many things. Bravery, ambition, courage, loyalty, respect, trust. Pride can lead to doom, but the humble can also doom themselves. Many brave died at the hands of the enemy, yet the cowards let the others die instead of them. The ambitious can fall into a trap, because they look too far ahead and don't see what is beneath their feet. The loyal can take pride in their service and take their life when they loose this pride they call "honor". Many people take praise their country and are proud of their leaders and respect them.
Lust - Desire, love, pleasure, commpassion, joy, fun, humor. Many positive emotions can be a part of lust. It is only a way of achieving that emotion and to what end, that makes it evil.
Envy - It is the emotion that forces the others to keep up with the best. If they kick down the Prideful it is only their fault that they didn't try to stand up again. If they steal from the Greedy or kick the Slothful down from their beds, they always force the others and themselves to keep up with the rest. The envious are agents of progress, just as the slothful. Envy is what defines success and failure. And often the envious switch to a different sin, when they achieved their goal.
Sloth - They don't want to work, they instead try to find a way how to avoid it. They are inventors, but also slavers (just as the Prideful can be). They drive the progress, they find new ways for the others, or they simply want to share their laziness.
Gluttony - They are Hedonistic, free, rebellious, they seek luxury and quantity at the same time. They are the ones who create plantages and mass produce, so the luxurious can be common. They search new ways to exploit the universe, find new ways to replicate the existing.(The Greedy would never do so unless they can not gain more in that way. But the Gluttonous do not care.)
Wrath - Wrathful are the needle in the back of shemers, they act on a impulse. They act NOW when it is needed, they have no fear, they have no regrets. Wrath may pose as bravery, vengeance, justice. Wrath is the impulse that led to the virtues. Wrath is a reaction to injustice it is the counter to every other sin or virtue going too far. It can even stop itself, Hate is Wrath in the extreme and Hate also wakes up wrath in those who suffer because of hate.
So all sin and virtues can become evil. The feelings the words do not matter, they way they were achieved and their cause is what matters.
[Answer]
Most answers are about rephrasing those unappealing qualities so that they sound kinda appealing (to us, today). Why not look at different cultures through history instead?
Here's a quote from ["Germany and its Tribes"](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0083%3Achapter%3D14) by Tacitus, Chapter 14:
>
> Nor are they as easily persuaded to plough the earth and to wait for
> the year's produce as to challenge an enemy and earn the honour of
> wounds. Nay, **they actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the
> sweat of toil what they might win by their blood**.
>
>
>
There, Wrath, Sloth, Pride and Envy incorporated into a single principle of their life.
For some more on Pride, let's read about Sardur II, a king of Urartu, who called himself
>
> "the magnificent king, the mighty king, king of the universe, king of
> the land of Nairi, a king having none equal to him, a shepherd to be
> wondered at, fearing no battle, a king who humbled those who would not
> submit to his authority."
>
>
>
Apparently, the guy wasn't big on modesty. There are, of course, many more examples like that (actually, there were some 20th century African dictators calling themselves in a similar manner). I have no quotes ready, but praising themselves for killing scores of enemies in rather gruesome ways (not just the warriors on a battlefield, but their women, children etc. after the victory) was also quite common - there's showing off your Wrath.
Gluttony in its basic, non-disguised meaning, was quite literally perceived as a virtue in some historical societies. Think of Roman feasts for example (Lust probably fits there, too). When food was not yet that abundant, being fat was somewhat synonymous with being attractive (look how fat I am, I eat a lot, I can afford it, I am so cool and successful, be with me and you may share that success, and so will our future children, etc.)
As for Lust, isn't it largely regarded as a virtue even today, at least by the male half of the population?
[Answer]
I don’t really know much about the historic origin, evolution, or promotion of the deadly sins, but they’ve always struck me as a list of attributes a lord would least want in his peasants. It’s as if the power elite are trying to make the underclass feel guilty and damned if they have any feelings that may threaten the elite’s place on top.
Turn it around, and it follows that the seven deadly sins are virtues if you want to foment a rebellion. In a world where the few economically exploit the masses in near-slavery conditions, a revolutionary ideology could emerge among the underclass that makes virtues out the sins:
* Pride: Don’t believe that the elite are somehow inherently superior to you. Value your own strength, intelligence, skills, and leadership ability. They’re no better than you.
* Lust: Want a material thing badly. So badly you’ll take impetuous risks, even with your own life.
* Greed: Don’t be satisfied with just what you need. Want more from life than mere survival. Bread is great, but [you should have roses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses) too.
* Envy: The elite have all this great stuff. Don’t you want some of that for yourself?
* Sloth: Bust your ass for the glory of your lord? I don’t think so. Go on strike.
* Gluttony: In world where any material excess goes to the elite (as profits or taxes), not consuming it yourself only adds to their power. Use it up. Wasting it is better than letting them get their hands on it.
* Wrath: Get pissed. They use you and they have no right to do so.
[Answer]
Here's a link to the piece [Vices and Virtues](http://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/artist/nauman.html) by Bruce Nauman at UC San Diego. The legend on campus is that the first Vice/Virtue your eyes are drawn to describes your greatest temptation/strength respectively.
"As Nauman implies in this work, we may know the difference between faith and lust, or hope and envy, but in real experience these vices and virtues are never experienced purely. They continually show themselves in new and baffling combinations."
I think a sophisticated culture would embrace such a duality.
[Answer]
This is much more easy than it seems. You only need to look at the historic and cultural context.
The seven deadly sins were created in their current form in 590 AD and go back to an initial list of 8 that a christian monk made maybe 200 years earlier. They encode christian thought of that era.
Look outside this narrow frame and you see other cultures celebrating some or all of these as virtues. The key here is to look at the spirit behind them. They are all expressions of basic, instinctual desires. For things necessary for survival. In a wild, primitive world, all of them will enhance your chances of survival.
Today, we have overcome these basic needs with progress and technology. We don't need to stuff ourselves when food is plenty because food is always plenty. We don't need to jump on every chance of sex because our society has developed rules that give everyone a reasonable chance at a stable relationship. We have the police and courts to punish those who wronged us, so wrath is channeled into the justice system - and so on.
The 4th to 6th century world didn't have most of that. They needed to suppress those desires to stabilize society.
So the moral evaluation of these sins is very much a matter of context, and by manipulating the context you can easily turn any of them into virtues.
[Answer]
Not sure you could do this.
The problem is not that could try and make the deadly sins palpable, respectable and useful. Other answers can and do that.
The thing that makes these sins not just sins, but **deadly sins** is that they are beyond useful and respectable: they all warp your soul, you focus on itself. In the end you only live to fill the needs of the sin. And in doing so they are (very) destructive to the owner and it's surroundings. Let me say it again: deadly sins are all very destructive, both to their owner and surroundings.
---
Now, if you couple that with some kind of self-sacrifice or some other **virtue**...
What if your culture needs people to defend their borders, and these people with deadly sins are the best to do so? On one hand honoured by their culture for their heroics, on the other hand knowing that they are spiralling out of bounds under the control of their sins. Heroes are not always doing good things out of good intentions. But might turn out that way.
]
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[Question]
[
I'm creating a near future world where one faction is using high energy density batteries that enable their vehicles to outperform gasoline based technology. Like cold and silent aircraft and helicopters, electric cars with enormous range, ion drive drones, raygun handguns, etc.
The world in general—and Tesla in particular—would love to reverse engineer their technology.
Is it possible to have such battery technology that the world's top companies can't reverse engineer?
Notes:
* Battery samples are occasionally acquired.
* Technology level is present age.
* I would prefer answers at least rooted in science, beside simple hardware.
* By impossible, I mean technology impossible in the present or near-future (say 5-10 years).
[Answer]
First of all, the chemistry, structure and principle of operation of the batteries cannot possibly be secret.
Most countries have regulatory authorities which need to approve the use of vehicles on their public roads, or of aircraft which fly in their airspace. One cannot possibly come to, for example, the Romanian Automobile Registration Authority, and say "please allow our automobiles powered by those secret black boxes which have an energy per mass concentration higher than gasoline, and trust us that they don't explode every other Thursday". To get approval to use one's battery technology in automobiles and airplanes one must explain in excruciating detail what is in in the battery, how the battery works to store and release energy, what measures are taken to ensure that said energy release is controlled and does not ever happen all at once and so on.
Since the composition, structure and mode of operation of the batteries must be disclosed, they will most certainly be patented. (A patent of invention is a full disclosure of the invention, in exchange of which the inventor receives a time-limited legally enforceable monopoly on the use of the invention.)
The technology *must* be reproducible, because in order to get approval from, for example, the American Federal Aviation Authority to use the battery technology in aircraft flying in American airspace, the batteries must be accepted as safe to use. The word of one manufacturer doesn't count. There must be multiple independent assessments of the technology, there must be tons of scientific and engineering literature analysing possible failure modes etc.
So the technology cannot be at the same time be secret and in use on public roads and in public airspace, and it cannot be the case that only one manufacturer knows how make the batteries. But then what can be done?
* Maybe the batteries use a key component which cannot be manufactured efficiently by other companies. For example, [graphene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene) is a form of carbon with very interesting properties. Everybody can make graphene is minute quantities, but at present nobody can make graphene in large quantities; it's not that it would be expensive, it's that literally nobody can supply one kilogram of graphene. Maybe graphene is a key component in the batteries, and there is only one manufacturer who can make hundreds of thousands of tonnes of the stuff.
* Maybe the batteries use a metal or metalloid which is in very short supply. Everybody can buy some ruthenium, for example, but the total world yearly production of [ruthenium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenium) is some 35 tonnes. Let's say that an average car needs 70 kg of the stuff, and an airplane needs 700: the total worldwide yearly production would be exhaused in making 500 cars or 50 aircraft. And if ruthenium seems much too common, maybe the batteries use [osmium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmium), of which much less than one tonne is produced annually worldwide.
* Maybe the secret consists in the ability to make incredibly complicated nanostructures out of the ingredients. For example, it may be the case that the extraordinary power density of the batteries comes from the way their electrodes are shaped at a microscopic scale. *This* can be a manufacturing secret. There are examples in real life -- think of the incredibly small components used in an Intel or Samsung SSD, for example: everybody knows how an SSD works, but very few companies can mass-produce 2 terabytes consumer SSDs.
[Answer]
Generally speaking, no.
Any technology is relatively easy to reproduce, given that rival can do a full tear-down of the equipment and possesses comparatively same level tech. It may take a year or two for the competitors to fully figure out the process and catch up with manufacturing, but 5-10 years should be out of question. The world knows many examples of how complex products were copied by competitors (if patents are of no objection). For decades, Eastern Block had been successfully copying Western computers, from OS/360 to PC. Earlier, it took just 4 years to reproduce the Atomic Bomb (and that's even though they didn't have a copy).
The copycat process breaks only when the competitor has a substantial scientific/technological gap with the original inventor, and for any reason is not able to cover it. For example, in mid 1980s USSR finally couldn't keep up with Western computers because semiconductor technology had been advancing too fast, and USSR didn't have sufficient resources to keep up with that.
Having said "no", I admit that it is potentially possible to have a technology that is the result of a "lucky find". For example, one can manufacture a nanomaterial of unique properties, essentially on a whim, and there is no scientific way to figure out the technological process without knowing the key step in the process.
[Answer]
## A real example
Rubycon is a leading manufacturer of capacitor technologies. In the 90's, they developed a series of technologies that allowed them to manufacture more reliable and cheaper caps than the competition. Some manufacturers, as Nichicon, and Elna licensed the technology, but of course that meant that they had to pay a lot, so while the caps were better, the licenses also made them pricier. As such, these Japanese manufacturers concentrated on the "high end" range, low deviation caps.
The Taiwanese market knew that to compete, it couldn't play fair, so they tried to copy the formula. They "hired" a material scientist that defected Rubycon with a copy of the formula and they worked to implement it.
At first, everything looked fine: The caps worked as intended, with a formula that was much much cheaper than the previous ones, and they started selling it to motherboard manufacturers in the late 90's to middle 00's.
The ones who, like me, worked repairing computers at that time we called it several names: "capacitor plague", "cap rot", "bulging sickness"... the symptoms varied: the computer would take a long time to power up, or would refuse to power a couple times, to succeed a third. Examining the motherboard we would notice the caps were bulging.
I remember examining one computer, case open, when one capacitor decided to vent the liquid backwards -usually, they have a "weak spot" above so the explosion, if it happens, is controlled-. It impacted on the rim of my glasses, leaving a nasty scar on my eyebrow.
It seems the guy who brought the formula copied it incompletely, and the scientists weren't smart enough to figure what it lacked.
The result is evident. For the complete duration of the patent, Rubycon and the licensed manufacturers were the only ones able to use this technology. The Chinese cap industry took a hit as most electronic manufacturers switched to Japanese capacitors if only because most people had the idea that Chinese caps = unreliable.
Some Chinese manufacturers eventually relented and licensed the technology. The rest of them switched to the new technology when the patent expired a couple years ago.
## How can it be used in your setting
Replace "caps" for "batteries". Make the company unwilling to license the technology, or make it so the conditions are draconian.
It doesn't need to be unobtanium level tech. The chemistry for the rubycon caps was understood, even if the application was novel, but the scientists got lazy and skip many tests to have the product ready (testing is the first thing to go when you cut corners).
An overeager Elon Musk may want to launch an untested formula and not notice the flaws in the design until cars start catching fire. Then, the other manufacturer can sweep a publicity campaign telling everyone that their designs do not catch fire. This is a win-win situation for this competing company: Elon cannot say that is the same design because then he would admit they stole the formulas, but if it doesn't say anything it will look like his team of chemists is simply not competent enough. In any case, it will make them look as far behind the battery race (as the chinese looked in the cap race at middle 00's).
A specially paranoid company can even trigger that backlash by seeding some fake or incomplete formulas, like @vsz said; but real life tends to be more dull; @slovodan.blazeski pointed a very good and sobering remark in his answer: even if you have the formula, trying to do a practical implementation on the run and on a short timespan may be impossible, as you're tackling at the same time problems that the other company had time to tackle sequentially. Knowing that the answer *is* "42" doesn't do much if you don't know *why*.
A patent will keep competition at bay for as much as a decade, and by then the company will have released new improvements, also patented, that will keep the gap between them and the other manufacturers.
[Answer]
Even assuming that the battery itself is highly resistant to any and all analysis methods (highly unlikely, given that the technology is "modern day" and there are more people trying to reverse-engineer them then were involved in engineering them) the production of these batteries is vulnerable to espionage.
Going after the production itself is how you get reliable production for yourself.
The factories that make these batteries will need raw materials. (Even if analysis of the batteries doesn't reveal how they work, it will reveal the materials used to make them, which makes locating the factory by this method possible.) The resources needed to create anything on an industrial scale can be tracked.
Not to mention that the genius chemists and engineers needed to invent the battery and create manufacturing for it can also be a way to find the factory. Once the factory is discovered, it is only a matter of time before its secrets are revealed.
If the faction is not considered a hostile or terrorist faction, this will be done slowly and covertly, either through breaking and entering, or turning someone on the inside. If the faction is considered hostile, a special forces team may be sent to seize the factory, both to deny the enemy resources and to capture the technology for the other side.
[Answer]
**Unobtainium**
Your precious technology is super nice, super great, and super reproductible. That happens. The only problem is you need unobtainium to make it, and, as the name suggest, it's kinda hard to obtain.
If we look at rare-earth elements, we can see that one country pretty much has the market locked down. If that country needed a weapon for some sort of trade war, it could decide to keep it all to itself, and then the rest of the world would look silly, at least for a good while.
You can create a similar situation in your world, where one entity holds most, if not all, reserves of a particular element, or set of elements.
It can be because a material is specific to one region of Earth, or is plain out of this world (e.g. meteorites, or aliens and demons if you're into that). It can be because the mining and extraction process is extremely expensive, complex, damaging to the environment, somehow immoral, or illegal for some other reason.
Note that the material doesn't need to be used in the battery themselves, it could only be required in the fabrication process. What matters is you can get your hands on it, but everybody else just can't and there is no known substitute.
[Answer]
**Too Expensive**
The battery could be duplicated but the cost is so incredible that it's not viable. The real tech is the manufacturing process to make said battery cheaply and easily enough to use it in everything.
Other factions might have the battery and can reverse engineer it but they don't have the secret to mass produce it.
[Answer]
I got four ideas here.
# The key ingredient
Perhaps the batteries require the use of some super-heavy element like Tennesine that only has a few minutes of half-life. The people trying to reproduce it can see how it works and why it works, but they have to nuclear fuse atoms to make it and can't find a way to keep the key ingredient stable long enough to actually make it.
# Extreme Volatility
Maybe this battery has a housing that protects it from every means of analysing it (X-Rays, etc) and the only thing that people know about what's inside that housing is that it explodes violently when exposed to light, or air, or infared, or sound... or anything else it's been exposed to.
# An Organic Component
This ones a bit out there, but what it part of the battery is a living, breathing, lab-grown creature... but only male specimens have been recovered. Loads of people out there are trying to test-tube-grow more, but they all die. Loads of labs have 'stud' specimens around, but they don't have a female to breed them with.
# Don't say
Bit of a cop out, but it would make sense that with something this big, a lot of the people trying to reverse engineer it would refuse to share their research. Maybe know one knows why, it just hasn't been cracked yet.
[Answer]
## It's build off planet
For example: (Artemis by Andy Weir spoilers)
>
> The special fiber optics needed to be constructed under low gravity.
>
> The prototype was manufactured on a secret satellite but of course the moon base was way easier.
>
> The aluminium plant produced the base material as a by product and the infrastructure was already in place.
>
> Having full control over the moon means a monopoly on the only efficient place to produce it.
>
>
>
Anyways, make the environmental production requirements somewhere hard to reach and ideally only reachable by you.
Maybe it needs perfect vacuum, lower or higher gravity of another planet or unfiltered continuous exposure to all sorts of rays and particles coming from our sun.
Having to build a satellite, space station or even an operational base on another planet is easily 5-10 years of research and development.
And then you haven't even started on the physical/practical part of duplicating the fabrication process, maybe your theories are all wrong and those years you had to work it out on paper are useless.
Heck, maybe the faction has enough power to prevent you from launching anything into space?
[Answer]
The answer is simultaneously "Yes" and "No" - and the reasons for both are contained within the question's definition!
Batteries with sufficient energy density to outperform gasoline based technology are incompatible with the condition that "Technology level is present age".
If we reduce the definition of "outperform" to "perform better at many daily tasks", like a present-day Tesla in a city filled with charging stations, that's closer to possible.
However, you would have to rely on production technology that is similarly not "present age", but at least a few decades into the future. Hypothetically, thin-film or nanowire based batteries are within the understanding of modern science, but they're decades away from mass production. Such batteries are still short on energy density compared to hydrocarbons.
Batteries that do outperform hydrocarbons are outside the understanding of modern science, and would fall under the trope of "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". They couldn't be explained by chemistry or capacitance, and since we can't explain them, we can't even speculate as to their source of power.
[Answer]
# Chicken and Egg
The material is theoretically understood by everyone, and its creation involves something akin to a fusion reactor, which can be done efficiently **if you already have enough of the material**, but there are such small amounts present in stolen items that this is not practical. (Perhaps it needs to be in the form of giant single crystals/pieces/rings which cannot be reassembled from smaller pieces without a reactor.)
This option means that an intelligence operative cannot just observe the process; a large quantity would need to be smuggled out.
Obviously the faction had to produce the initial stuff somewhere. Perhaps they dug it up in ancient ruins, or it's from a meteor. Or, a secret military research discovered a method of doing it using extremely expensive conventional technology. But as long as this "conventional technology method" remains a secret, nobody else can replicate it. They should probably destroy that original facility.
# Secret process
In theoretical physics there are many particles that we have never been able to create, and some that we have never observed in nature but are believed to exist. If one faction discovers how to *make* something, they can then exploit this knowledge. Especially if we add in the "chicken and egg" thing.
Let's say for argument's sake that there is a recent development in physics, which may or may not be known to other factions, but either way none of them have been able to *exploit* it yet. The winning faction has built a huge facility with half a million carefully-arranged parts and the "blueprints" are stored in bits and pieces in different places.
There could be many ideas here but here is one of them. Let's call it a "black disc", a tiny (and reasonably safe) planar black hole held together on either side by a carefully engineered dense perfect lattice of particles that produce the right repulsive forces to stop the disc from collapsing to a point. **How the heck do you build that lattice?**
Perhaps these particles are beyond its event horizon; or perhaps they are just subject to such high gravity; but any attempt to scrape some off fails. So the lattice cannot be analysed.
Even if the principle is understood, designing a manufacturing process requires particular flashes of insight. It isn't simply something you throw dollars at. Either the initial scientist(s) found the trick out of sheer luck, or the zeitgeist was just right and nobody else can replicate it.
[Answer]
No.
"Present age" technology level implies batteries that operate from chemical reactions, and there just isn't *room* to increase energy density by more than one or two orders of magnitude.
Burning pure hydrogen produces 120 or so megajoules per kg, which is about 33kWh/kg. If you include the mass of the oxygen needed to combine with it, that drops to about 3.7kWh/kg. Lithium-ion batteries are currently closing in on 5-6% of that (up to 200Wh/kg); some proposed technologies come up to more than 1kWh/kg, within 25% of the maximum available for a chemical reaction.
Ion-drive levitation and handheld lethal ray-guns require more than two orders of magnitude increase in energy density. You won't get there with chemistry; you need at least some new concept for small-scale nuclear power generation, and more likely something completely novel. Cold fusion might have done the trick, if it actually worked. Same for [nuclear isomer batteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_isomer#Nuclear_batteries), especially if you could (a) trigger decay with less energy than it yields and (b) produce energy in a form more useful than gamma rays.
[Answer]
I'd say you should implement some sort of self destruction mechanism. Any attempt to open or x-ray the battery would result in an explosion or the like, which renders the battery technology un-examinable. This would of course make the battery itself heavier and more expensive, which might weigh out the beneficials of the technology.
But this won't handle the problem with industrial espionage. You must address this as well.
[Answer]
I like the idea that the secret is in the manufacturing, not in the final product.
Perhaps the battery relies on some kind of MOF (Metal organic framework) that is impossible to manufacture unless you know the precise steps. You can slice up the battery and discover it's complete structure at a synchrotron facility, yet find nothing about how they managed to create the MOF in the first place.
Industrial espionage could be a problem - once the secret gets out everyone can make it, but you can mitigate that by splitting up the process into multiple steps, isolating those steps in different chinese walled manufacturing facilities.
Perhaps the process is a combination of the work of three scientists, each of which have their own companies and run their own factories. The first two scientists know how to create two pre-cursor materials, while the third is the only one who knows how to combine these materials to manufacture the actual battery material.
This could produce some interesting politics within the faction.
[Answer]
The big problem is that modern day technology works via incremental improvements and sharing knowledge.
You can get out ahead of other people, but it will be comparatively marginal, and it will of necessity be based on known technology.
Such a research endevour is going to be economically limited to a modest number of researchers with modest budgets. They'll either come up with something novel and useful, or they'll have their research department slashed. Research is blindly groping through the sphere of all knowledge; you don't know if you are getting anywhere.
Long-term research is mostly done by public institutions, and those scientists are rewarded by sharing as much of their results as they can as soon as they can (publish or perish).
When you want to reverse engineer it, you'll have a valuable target (amazing batteries) that you know is reachable. You'll have budgets that blow out of the water the original research team, a fair amount of lee way in not producing results right away, and a concrete object that provides piles of hints asto where to research next.
Now, there are long and deep research traditions that *are not public*. They are mostly military research, into nuclear or stealth or similar technologies.
Such military research tends to be smaller scale than the public commercial research, but secrets are kept for years, commercial applications are not the goal, and even the products are kept secret. For the most part, people interested in reverse engineering are also keeping their results secret, preventing the attackers from forming a huge collaborative endevour.
This does, however, give us a way for technology to be sufficiently secret that reverse engineering is difficult. There is some long-standing secret military research going on that uses up a non-trivial amount of the world's GDP. It is focused on something else, besides battery technology. Maybe nanoscale construction of materials to make them invisible to radar, or nanoscale construction of fissile cores to permit tiny nuclear devices that can handle decay, or whatever. The point is some serious fundamental research into materials science that "falls off" some military research.
That technology can easily develop in secret for 10, 20, 30 years.
Then someone discovers that it can be used to construct a better battery. You develop even that technology in secret. As an arm of the military, you build a huge battery complex somewhere, use it originally for military purposes.
If you successfully kept the first endevour secret, now your competitors have to reverse engineer 30 years of technology to work out how your construction method works.
Unfortunately, nanoscale technology probably is a bad example; it is currently a hot research field. As is biological manufacture, or almost any other semi-practical high-tech materials science I can think of.
For the science to be 30+ years of practical application iteration beyond the current bleeding edge research, it would have to sound ridiculously science fictiony.
* Post-trans uranic stable isotopes (PTUs).
* Nuclear decay suppression field.
* Atomic-scale macroscopic materials design.
* Low energy H2<->He reversible nuclear reactions.
* Non-terrestrial biological energy storage.
The thing is, it would be ridiculous that only one ridiculous technology came out of a completely new branch of materials science.
But, if you get over all of this -- a 30 year long research effort by a nation-state level lab resulting in an unexpected battery technology, which is then nation-state backed into mass production, while successfully holding off other nation-state espionage -- you could have a tech that might take 5-10 years to reverse engineer.
Note, however, that at this time the only one doing this scale of secret research is the USA and possibly China. And China hasn't really been doing it *long* enough.
[Answer]
# Yes
If you look at current lithium-ion technology, the primary constraint on performance is degradation of the cathode. Increasing the surface area of the cathode tends to improve battery life and output. To this end, manufacturers are experimenting with nano-structuring the cathode to have a complex surface area, which allows for better ion flow and slows down cathode degradation.
The thing about nano-structuring is that it is *purely geometrical*. If you toss a "dumb" battery and a "finely structured" battery into a mass spectrometer, you'll get the same output. No magic chemicals needed. On the other hand, if you simply cut open a nano-battery and look at the cathode, at the largest scales, it will just look more textured than a dumb cathode. Only when you put it under an electron microscope will you be able to see that it's fundamentally different. However, seeing such a structure won't tell you how to *make* it. And that's the trick.
You can't really build nano-structures one molecule at a time (technically, with atomic force microscopes, you can, but that's not scalable). So you need a process that outputs the desired structure *automatically*. It might be a magic set of catalysts that interact in a certain way under certain temperature/acidity/etc. conditions. It might even involve biomolecules or actual bacteria! But in near-science terms, there is no small set of nano-engineering tools. The field is wide open, and I haven't heard of any easy reverse-engineering of a nanoscale product. It will likely happen eventually, but I'm guessing on the order of decades to centuries, long after the technology is mature.
Another example of nanostructuring yielding surprising properties is aerogel. A silicon wafer used to make microchips is a very good thermal conductor. If you try to use it to shield yourself from a blowtorch, you *will* get burned. The exact same silicon formed into an aerogel just a few cm thick can easily protect an egg from the same blowtorch. But looking at an aerogel under an electron microscope won't tell you how to *make* it. You have to know how to make it already.
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With access to multiple samples, it could be possible to create at least a working theory on how the new tech works. To make it baffling to the observers, we would require some new science.
## New Science
A **Ultra-High-Energy Gamma Ray Microscope** would open up new avenues in science. A better understanding of the phenomena we attribute to **dark matter**/energy, better understanding of various **biological processes** (think photosynthesis) could open up new forms of energy. A **larger particle accelerator** than the LHC, could show us new layers of elements.
As we are only going 5-10 years into the future the is a limit on how fantastical we can make our future, but *our* faction could be doing cutting-edge-super-secret-squirrel research *now*, and it wouldn't be that much of a leap.
As for reproducing the technology:
## Scarcity of Raw Materials
A substance that *can* be synthesized, but is not cost effective to do so in large sizes/quantities.
Examples:
* **Diamonds**
If our faction was the equivalent of [De Beers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers) (either
economically, or militarily), it would be very difficult to reproduce
battery tech that relied on diamonds in large volume.
* **Rare Isotopes**
Uranium isnt particularly rare, but useful isotopes for fission are.
## Difficulty of Manufacture
Aluminium used to be one of the most valuable metals in the world until new methods of refinement were used.
* **Space Manufacturing**
Currently, only a handful of nations/companies have direct access to space. This doesn't look to change substantially in the next 5-10 years. While the cost is going to come down for those countries/companies that already have access, third parties could face political barriers (think cold war). [Wiki Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_manufacturing#Environment)
* **Nanotechnology**
Building on our shiny new microscope above - Batteries rely on a high surface area between elements. Even if you examine a plate surface with a current state-of-the-art Electron Beam Microscope, you wont see what a gamma ray scope will, and that's before you try to reproduce it.
## Conclusion
Space manufactured nano-tech with rare raw materials. A combination of all of the above could make for a convincing near future without too much hand-wavium.
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The idea of energy systems that simply harvest from a larger source that is then externally replenished have been an idea for a while, with the idea of mobile chargers that slow down the Earth's rotation by producing power, while an opposite mechanism that is connected to trustworthy power sources like hydroelectric increase the rotation so as to prevent future catastrophe.
The implementation of such a system or other form of advanced long range energy transfer could be used to mimic a high energy dense battery. In either case, this system would require monitoring. If the system had an AI-run failsafe so that unauthorized users would either be blocked (for general systems like planetary rotation) or simply not be provided energy (for specific systems like long range wave energy beams).
It's not a battery per se, but it's a mobile charge provider, and would prevent other systems from connecting to the power source. If you wished, you could make harvesting energy incredibly unstable, with the planet needing to be perfectly synchronous with the battery or the beam frequently change in energy, mandating the inclusion of this AI-failsafe in order to be able to access this charge.
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# Biologically Efficient Engines
This method requires the other faction to be a different biological creature. The energy efficiency of a typical gasoline engine ranges between 20 and 50%.
A different lifeform can use a novel propulsion mechanism, an example is jellyfish which use rotating vortex propulsion, and are the most energy efficient creatures - aided by the fact that the "engine" is formed of elastic material which automatically contracts to its original form, and does not require further energy to return to its initial state.
It may be possible that such a creature has evolved over billions of years to be extremely energy efficient, and the timescales needed to replicate such a system (to an equivalent efficiency) would be out of reach for many millions of years perhaps. Another example is the human brain: humans have been spending billions and decades to try and replicate brain functionality - and we are still extremely far from building anything close to it (though machine learning for specialised tasks is now comparably good).
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There are some very good answers here. I was thinking rather than having impossible to replicate batteries having the cost to charge them be high. If the faction which has these batteries also has figured out cold fusion so that they can charge them cheaply. The other factions may have the ability to create them but the amount of resources needed to use them is just too high. This will also allow the faction to become more independent as a nation. It could also improve living standards and health making people less likely to give up secrets.
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As far as having technological secrets, batteries are probably the easiest to handwave into being irreproducible from samples. It all boils down to...
**What is the function of a battery?**
It is to store energy. That energy, if not properly released, [can and will destroy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGQoI7DAB5U) the battery and the containing device. Or in other words: High density battery **is** an explosive, regardless of whether it's chemical or more advanced (e.g. superconducting loops storing energy). Add a bit of handwaving (perhaps even pinch of reality?) and that energy can also be used to destroy any technological information that is used to create the battery.
Normally, there might exist procedures and technologies that can be used to research what a battery has 'eaten', but designing a *safety pin* that is nigh impossible to circumvent should be within reach of most handwavium experts.
Easiest way would be some sort of tamper-proof casing. That is, if the battery is opened it immediately self-destroys. Puncturing the cell caising is enough to cause regular mobile phone batteries to self destruct. Bit of artistic liberty, and you can have all the critical components melt before accurate research is possible in your advanced battery. Of course, this can also lead to unsafe batteries...wink-wink.
One specific technological advantage could be to have a completely unique logic chip that controls *cell-cycling* (or other handwaved charging/draining technique), and design the battery such that it will fry first. That way they might have access to fuel-cells but with any tampering they end up with chemical compounds and mechanical structures that cannot be replicated to a functioning high-power battery within a reasonable time-frame. And the possible advantage delivered by this logic? Megawatt class charging for longer lasting batteries within seconds.
If you want more advanced solution, superconductors can rely on very specific crystalline structure. Have a magnetic field support the storage coil and any tampering will immediately collapse the structure and render it impossible to deduct. For the researcher – if still alive! – it might look as a pile of carbon dust instead of the nanodiamond superconductor it was few seconds ago.
Of course, these are no real defenses for social attacks...so, in reality as in fiction, it will be easier to do proper espionage than simply copy hardware samples you obtain.
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**They use aluminum-powered engines, not batteries.**
There's been news reports every so often about someone building an aluminum-powered engine. For example:
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/2142693-nano-aluminium-offers-fuel-cells-on-demand-just-add-water/>
What we know how to do now:
* aluminum oxide+energy is turned into aluminum metal.
* The aluminum metal is combined with water, which turns into aluminum oxide+hydrogen.
* The hydrogen is combined with atmospheric oxygen and burned, turning back into water and energy.
Why isn't everyone using this? Because turning aluminum oxide into aluminum is a rather inefficient process. (I calculated it out as the equivalent of $20/gal gas. Also, our current setup for aluminum smelting uses coal, and isn't great from an environmental standpoint.) This faction has figured out how to smelt aluminum in a much more efficient manner. When someone goes to "gas up" their car, plane, or raygun, they swap aluminum oxide for aluminum metal. The aluminum oxide is then shipped off to a charging facility to be re-smelted. This means that the only bit we don't know how to do is taking place behind closed doors, but it's the important bit. Getting an engine won't tell you anything useful. All of this is possible now, just far too expensive to be practical.
This has some other implications: namely, that they have the cheapest aluminum on the planet, and aluminum has other uses. It also means that anyone could build an aluminum-powered car, but they'd be dependent on the faction for fuel.
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Yes use [O-ring theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_development) to the rescue.
Assuming that battery is made of materials we all know or at least understand the advantage must be in the manufacturing process.
Since the incumbent has a lot of know-how advantage, the easiest thing for market entrants is to be able to make somewhat working product which they would improve later i.e. the solution is in differentiable space think calculus. If they have enough financial backing, whether from Elon Musk selling bonds or from government subsidies, they would eventually crack it.
So make your solution non differentiable, they have to solve all the problems at once or the battery doesn't work at all or even better explodes. In such problems looking for solution is not better then random search.
They must use the ore from the exact mine in Congo, or it doesn't work. They must make use of certain type of plastic from certain manufacturer or it doesn't work. They must use fabric from certain Peru manufacturer or it doesn't work. They must make it casing in exact atmosphere in exact part of the world or it doesn't work. etc
Make many of this must haves and chances to get the exact solution diminishes exponentially. Each of this problem by itself is solvable but competitors must solve all of them together at once and they don't know is it the problem in the ore, anode, katode, casing, liquid, voltage, control chips or 100 other things. For extra points make that half solution works some of the time but then they explode randomly. The competitors wouldn't know was it the previous changes or some of the newest changes.
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Depending on how subjectively "evil" you will allow this group to be, their battery technology may not be impossible to reproduce, but they prevent others from mass producing generics through various ways.
1. Through lobbyists and donations they could persuade government officials to do what they want.
2. Using their own assassins, anybody that tries building a factory just turns up dead, but always by non-suspicious circumstances, which makes it very suspicious but nobody ever gets caught.
It'd be a very conspiracy theorist angle, but wouldn't really explain why.
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Have it made with standard temperature and pressure (STP) metastable metallic hydrogen.
People can scan it all they want and they'll learn what the goal is... but we could be a *long* way from getting to that goal. We're not able to make metallic hydrogen at any temperature or pressure yet, so perhaps there is a special process to bring it back to STP that is outside our technical abilities. So we find out it's doable, the best and brightest produce their first samples within the next 5-10 years and then it's X years after that before they figure out how to bring it to STP and who knows whether the method we find is economical.
Traditionally, metallic hydrogen is more interesting for it's superconducting and potential fuel uses: as a rocket fuel, with a [theoretical isp of 1700s](https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/637123main_Silvera_Presentation.pdf), it would mean you could launch rockets with payload fractions around 60% to LEO. Modern rockets top out under 5%, meaning a Falcon 9 Full Thrust running on metallic hydrogen would require only 7% of the current total launch weight. Put another way, a rocket with the same launch weight as a F9 FT (**not a heavy**) running metallic hydrogen could put 320,000kg into orbit... that's the equivalent of 2.6 fueled, with payload space shuttles (@ ~122,000kg each) in cargo. No need for the external tank or boosters. The Falcon Heavy would carry 6.8 space shuttles. It would revolutionize space travel for anyone who could use it.
The added benefit of metallic hydrogen engines ("single use batteries" if you will) is you control the supply. Given it's theoretical energy of 216MJ/kg, it's around five times more efficient than gas.
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Another real example
——
In the 1980s, the CIA was helping the Afghanistan *mujahadeen* fight the Soviet invasion. The Soviets relied very heavily on their large helicopters in the rugged terrain. So the CIA loaded them up with Stinger missiles.
The problem is, the CIA didn't want those Stingers getting used against Americans in the 1990s, when those same forces slowly turned into the Taliban and started supporting Al Qaida.
Stinger missiles have a battery. It's vital to heat up the infrared targeting scope in the missile seeker head, and keep it alive long enough to lock on and guide to hit. So it's a fairly high performance battery, inside the missile. Single use, if I recall, not that that's much of a problem given the application.
Anyway, like ordinary lithium-ion batteries today, those batteries had a shelf life. The US military made sure those batteries were tightly controlled. As a result, most Stinger missiles left in Afghanistan are scrap, as the electronics have met the fate of most 40 year old electronics.
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It would absolutely be possible to create batteries which are dangerous/impossible to reverse-engineer, if you have ready access to anti-matter, and the technology to create and shield it. It meets many of the criteria in other answers, but this specific material is a known source of high energy, it is being researched, and we are still decades away from any chance at using it.
Let's think about the shielding mechanism on its own. Some research lab was tinkering around with your hypothetical battery to figure out how it works, and in the process they accidentally released -1mg of antimatter into the lab. BOOM. Suddenly half of Nevada is ground zero.
Even if your team can safely and successfully reverse engineer the shielding mechanism, generation of substantial quantities of antimatter is a many billion dollar proposition at best.
Main downsides to this answer are that it may be impractical for applications so small as a ray gun, and if your world is near future, this technology would require a few radical advances to be made in secret, where most of the research in this space is done in quite public international collaborations using large particle colliders.
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It is not possible to have something that no-one can ever copy but you can have something that is very difficult to copy even if you have one in your hand.
It all comes down to secrets in the manufacturing process. A good real world example is Fighter Jet engines. Russia has been Supplying China with the AL31 turbofan engine for its [J10 aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_AL-31) for over a decade, and I have no doubt that the Chinese have been taking them apart and trying to build their own, because that it what people do.
But, even having hundreds of these engines, china is still [thought to be years away](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-china-engine/unable-to-copy-it-china-tries-building-own-jet-engine-idUSLNE89T00W20121030) from developing the expertise in control, metallurgy and all the other manufacturing processes to sucsefully produce their own engine.
Now a jet engine tends to have more components working in concert than a simple battery. Yet, who is to say the battery is simple. It could be multiple nano particles which work in concert and very specific concentrations, and dissociate when pressure drops or pH changes making them very difficult to study in a lab.
Now if each of these coponents took years to develop, and each advance built on the other then there is realistically no reason why you could have such asymeteries in technology and struggle to reproduce them even if you have 1000 samples. Many scientific dicoveries happen through chance, lots of hard work, but also a bit of luck. And, if you happen to be the lucky one then you can shoot ahead before anyone realises, and then it is very hard to catch up, without espionage or vast sums of money and time.
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What my son likes the most with winter is making a snowman.
What my son hates the most with winter is melting of his snowman.
I really would like to make him happy and make the snowman survive for as long as possible.
By the way, I am a king, with a medieval-level technology. My castle is in a temperate climate - think something like middle of France - quite far from the sea.
I already have caves and catacombs where it's quite cold, but I could build a specific building if needed.
There is no magic or alchemist involved, only snow. There is magic in my universe, but a realistic solution would be better.
What can I do to make my son's snowman survive, using medieval technology?
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Use your caves or catacombs to make [ice cellars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building)). Their history goes back to 1780 BC.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TdI9q.jpg)Source: [Early Ice Houses](http://www.librarypoint.org/early_ice_houses))
Use ice if you can find it, otherwise pack the snow as dense as possible.
See also [this question on History SE](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15258/how-did-people-have-access-to-ice-in-warm-areas-before-the-industrial-revolution).
Finally, tell your son to build the snow man inside.
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Just try this - even if I'm not sure if this answer fits your "no alchemy" point:
Before building the snowman just mix some sawdust into the snow, the finer the better.
This will effectively prolong the life of the snowman significantly without the need to build any extra buildings or the like.
See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete> for a sample.
P.S.: I would love to post any original sources here, but I can't seem to find any on the run which don't just coat the snowman in sawdust, not mixing the snow beforehand. But nevertheless this works just fine and lets your snowman stand in the open up until the sunny May or June.
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You could convert the water deposit of your main city in an [ice cellar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building)).
They were insulated with sand, straw, sawdust, but the water cisterns even made it colder. Imagine something like this full of water (this was the medieval cistern for a city with 30,000 people)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pra4C.jpg)
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1. Find high enough mountain
2. Get snowman above snow line
For the reference, Alps have snow line at around 2,5-3 km..
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In the region where I have grown up, they used to harvest snow during winter from nearby mountains and store it in underground rooms insulated with straw.
Therefore:
* Build a large underground room, so that it is protected from the day heath.
* Fill it with snow and straw, add salt for further cooling
* let your son make the snowman, wearing a good woolen coat
* give the snowman a woolen coat, too (yes, wool insulates from thermal exchanges in both directions...)
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In 400BCE, Persia had special structures that collected water in the winter, turned it into ice, and kept it cold for the entire summer:
See: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchāl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l)
And: <http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ach/article/view/13822/12244>
>
> Yakhchāl (Persian: یخچال "ice pit"; yakh meaning "ice" and chāl meaning "pit") is an ancient type of evaporative cooler. Above ground, the structure had a domed shape, but had a subterranean storage space; it was often used to store ice, but sometimes was used to store food as well. The subterranean space coupled with the thick heat-resistant construction material insulated the storage space year round. These structures were mainly built and used in Persia. Many that were built hundreds of years ago remain standing.
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> By 400 BCE, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of using yakhchāls to create ice in the winter and store it in the summer in the desert. In most yakhchāls, the ice is created by itself during the cold seasons of the year; the water is channeled from the qanat (Iranian aqueduct) to the yakhchāl and it freezes upon resting inside the structure.
>
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As a bare minimum, you should take a sprayer with water (or just broom/bossom; or even a bucket of water — depending on the snowman's size) and cover the snowman's surface. Of course, it should be relatively cold outside (so that water soon/immediately freezes). This may deform snowman's surface a bit, but probably will make the snowman somewhat more secure against temporary warmings.
Sorry, if the advice is too obvious.
**Update: Per Nathan Cooper, it might be just a myth/mispractice/rumor that covering a snowman with a layer of ice would strengthen it against warmness. Thermal conductivity of ice is actually higher and albedo of ice is actually lower. Or this procedure (covering a snowman with a layer of ice) may serve some specific goals (like durability of small details against wind), but not the warmness-protection.**
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In addition to the cold-room solutions proposed by others, get your son to mix the snow with sawdust as he makes the snowman.
This will drastically increase the snowman's resistance to temperatures and melting by making a mixture known as [Pykrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete).
As an added benefit it's also much more resistant to physical damage, in case any pesky peasants attempt to destroy it.
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Step 1.
Dig a ditch around the snowman. (So the snowman can't run away)
Step 2.
Tie a rope around the ditch and pull until the snowman and ground under the snowman moves.
Step 3.
Pull the snowman and ground under it to the North or South poll.
Step 4.
Take your son there and hope that he won't get lonely with just the snowman to talk to.
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**Put the snow man in a [cooling bath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_bath#Water_and_ice_baths) with some salt in it.**
Salts like ammonium chloride lower the melting point of water-ice solutions: "−10 °C can be achieved with a 1 to 2.5 ratio by weight of calcium chloride hexahydrate to ice.".
That should keep the snow man cool. You would need a natural deposit of that salt (probably a different salt than just sodium chloride). Mining will probably help there, because many million years ago there may have been sea where now is middle of France.
The knowledge of cooling by adding salt crystals to water would probably be something in the realm of an alchemist, but once somebody (a traveling alchemist) told you, the way to maintain a cooling bath would be rather simple (just keep on adding special salt crystals and change the mixture often).
Example setup: <https://www.thoughtco.com/create-a-safe-endothermic-chemical-reaction-602207>
See also about [Frigorific mixtures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigorific_mixture).
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**scenario:**
The battle takes place in a quarter mile in diameter, flat concrete, circle arena.
Both the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the animal are filled with bloodlust, and will not flee.
**Rules:**
To be a winner, the animal must still be alive with non-fatal injuries.
The moment the Tyrannosaurus is dead, the other animal is the winner, if it passes the first rule.
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Exploiting the material properties of your arena and a loophole in the rules I’m going to have to go with everyone’s favourite indestructible critter:
[The Tardigrade](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)
The reasoning behind this is simple: your arena has no food, no water, and no shelter. Much like the Hunger Games this isn’t a matter of who is the best killer, it matters who is the best survivor.
At less than half a millimetre a Tardigrade will be utterly invisible on the concrete. Unless the concrete is polished it will probably fall into a microscopic bump and just stay there. It can’t see the T-Rex to attack it, but that’s OK: The T-Rex can’t see it either. From here it’s just a matter of time.
Tardigrades have a neat trick where they suspend their metabolism and basically become indestructible. They’ve been frozen, boiled, crushed, exposed to vacuum, exposed to hard radiation, dehydrated, drowned and.. well.. basically everything.
Most of the time all it took was a splash of water and they’d be back on their feet.
So: under the baking sun in your arena the Tardigrade will dehydrate, enter this cryptobiotic state (cool name) and just... be.
Meanwhile the T-Rex will start to dehydrate. This will be the thing that kills them unless it rains. If it rains they’ll now be standing in a pool of water. The Tardigrade won’t care about this. It’ll still be having a nap. Then the T-Rex will stomp about for weeks before eventually starving to death.
Now for the rule loophole: The victor must still be alive and have no fatal injuries when the T-Rex is dead. This automatically means the Tardigrade has won. Simply by going to sleep for a bit.
Oh, and if you’re wondering how long the Tardigrade could keep this up if the T-Rex was fed? The T-Rex would die of old age before the Tardigrade even noticed. They can sleep for centuries and still be revived.
The only wrinkle in this is whether or not you count the tardigrade’s suspended animation as still being alive. It can certainly be revived, but technically speaking? If you just left it alone at the bottom of a concrete well it might never wake up again.
Which would be a disappointing end to an already disappointing fight.
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A colony of army ants.
You have several problems, most people underestimate the size of a T-rex, a full grown Siberian tiger's entire body is smaller than just a T-rex's head. Very few living animals have a way to kill a T-rex, just due to how far the vitals are from the surface. Several people have mentioned the brain but they don't realize how deep a T-rex brain is inside its skull. There is over a foot of bone and muscle in the way. As you can see below, a T-rex brain is not placed like a modern mammal or bird's brain. Worse: it is encased in a brain case of several inches of bone once you get to it. There just is no comparison with a modern terrestrial animal. Even if a T-rex was paralyzed for hours I doubt a tiger or pack of hyena could even injure its brain (although they could certainly kill it in that time frame).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Entbq.png)
Rhino and elephants have weapons that could produce a fatal injury but a T-rex evolved to fight a thing of a similar or bigger size with similar or better weapons that are actually good at being that size. So they have a chance but not much of one.
For the few land animals that could actually get venom through a T-rex's hide they are not venomous enough to kill before the T-rex could crunch them many times over. There are a few marine animals more than venomous enough but nothing that lives on land.
The only thing left is something small enough to attack soft tissue without being able to be shook of scraped off easily. An ant swarm comes to mind, many biologists treat a colony as a single super organism. A T-rex will have a very hard time killing ants once they get on it, and ant can attack soft tissue like the nasal passages until the T-rex bleeds out. Even then it will be close, rubbing and shaking will whittle down the ant numbers and the ants still have to get one the T-rex. So it will be a race between how much damage they can do vs how many the T-rex can kill. I would get the ants better odds but just barely because it will be hard to kill every last ant.
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The [Australian Magpie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_magpie).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mZHn9.png)
As others have pointed out, it's hard to imagine any animal beating the T-Rex head-on. I think in this scenario you really have to think about what the T-Rex is *bad* at. One thing that comes to mind is reaching over it's head, or defending itself from an attack from above, particularly against something as small and nimble as a bird.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qlo3L.jpg)
An animal that could land on the Trex's head and attack its eyes could do some serious damage without leaving a lot of defence for the T-Rex. The Magpie's natural instinct to swoop will be valuable here as well. Once the eyes are pecked out, it's a question of whether a T-Rex will die of infection more quickly than a magpie will starve to death. I think the Magpie could win. Ok it's a long-shot.
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**A well fed vampire bat**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hqsq7.jpg)
Vampire bats are a very interesting group,especially the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus). They're one of the few bat species capable of running, can perform quick takeoffs on the ground by performing a quad launch, can find prey by their breathing and is used to stir its prey until its too tired. Their diet consists entirely of blood, which is why they need a good meal every 3 days at least.
A well fed vampire bat, being adapted as it is to deal with animals dozens of times its own size, could most likely get close to a win. With its size, I doubt the enraged t-rex would even feel it landing on its back to rest. It's ability to climb should be more than enough to keep it there and even if it's not, it can just fly away. It's speed and reaction time are enough to dodge the T-Rex's bite attacks, stomps and tail swipes (and it can always fly out of its range). It could stir the T-Rex until it falls asleep, provide several small wounds by finding the closest blood vessels to the surface like it does to its normal prey (as well as providing itself a replenishment in food and water) and then go for an eye. We'll then have a t-rex with one eye and several small wounds (I don't doubt it can cut, as vampire bats have one of the sharpest teeth in the animal kingdom, at times used to even shave the fur of large mammals to allow for a better bite) and a once again well fed bat. Repeat the process, mount on the now blind T-Rex (which also can't stop bleeding thanks to the draculin in the bat's saliva), feed on its blood until it inevitably dies of infection, dehydration and hunger and we have our beautiful winner.
The key here is that unlike other animals, the bat can most likely outlast it's competitor simply because it's too small and agile to be caught and its opponent can also work as its food source. Given their naturally stealthy nature, even if the bat did absolutely nothing other than staying on its back and securing a blood vessel with the heat sensing structures in its nose, it could just chill on the T-Rex's back drinking blood whenever it feels hungry (due to its diet they simply don't need water sources other than what's already in the blood they drink) while it waits until the T-Rex either starves or dehydrates.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8HdE6.jpg)
Ratels and their closer relatives are the only animals crazy enough to engage in a 1 versus 1 against a T-rex...not even lions fight alone, and tigers only kill things weaker than them. And any other animal would just turn back and run away from a T-rex...there's no animal on earth that wouldn't crap themselves in fear when confronted by such a monster.
But what about snakes? Snakes are even afraid of humans, they'd probably die of a heart attack when a tyrannosaur is charging them, even if the T-rex is allergic to bees, the bee would die after stinging the dinosaur. And other poisonous insects don't have the guts or the strength to pierce the dinosaur skin in order to inject their poison, but even if they were able to pierce a dinosaur's skin,they would not have enough venom.
Only poisonous frogs have enough toxins to kill a tyrannosaur, but the frog would need to be eaten alive in order to kill the dinosaur.
Ratel and it's closer relatives are the only animals **frequently** engaging combat with other predators bigger, faster, smarter and stronger than them.
There are also accounts of wolverines ( the same family of Ratels) killing polar bears by biting their throat.
The way I see it, there's literary no other animal that would actually fight against a T-rex. And the only way your wolverin or ratel has to win is to get between the tyrannosaur legs without getting stomped, climb up and bite it's eyes out off the tyrannosaur skull. T-rex has no arms to defend itself, and once the ratel started climbing, the odds are in favor of the ratel.
The T-rex could try rolling on its back to fend off the ratel, but those animals are agile and the ratel could easily jump off before being stomped, and while the tyrannosaur is still on the ground, the ratel has an advantage reaching the enemy skull.
Could a ratel just bite a T-rex throat and suffocate it by leaching onto it for a few minutes? Probably, but the tyrannosaur would have some time to think about ways to kill the small ratel in those minutes.
If the ratel just bites off the T-rex eyes, everything becomes safer and the ratel could even reach deeper into the skull and eat their brains out.
Also a T-rex's eye is as big as a Ratel's head, so the small guy would have no problem jamming it's teeth through.
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With the caveat that it is a bit unrealistic to expect neither animal to flee until death (but hey, we have a T Rex so who cares, its fun to think about), your best bet is a Jaguar. No living animal is going to be able to go toe-to-toe with a T-Rex in a pure contest of strength, it is simply too large and strong. However, Jaguars have incredibly powerful jaws, are adept climbers, have a lot of muscle packed into their frame, and are very agile. They also already prey upon large lizards, in that they have been known to kill crocodiles by driving their teeth through the skull into the brain cavity.
From the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar):
>
> A short and stocky limb structure makes the jaguar adept at climbing, crawling, and swimming. The head is robust and the jaw extremely powerful, it has the third highest bite force of all felids, after the tiger and the lion. A 100 kg (220 lb) jaguar can bite with a force of 503.6 kgf (1,110 lbf) at canine teeth and 705.8 kgf (1,556 lbf) at carnassial notch. This allows it to pierce the shells of armored reptiles and turtles. A comparative study of bite force adjusted for body size ranked it as the top felid, alongside the clouded leopard and ahead of the tiger and lion. It has been reported that "an individual jaguar can drag an 800 lb (360 kg) bull 25 ft (7.6 m) in its jaws and pulverize the heaviest bones".
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Given its large advantage in maneuverability, I see the Jaguar avoiding the attacks by the Tyrannosaur (who can really only do damage by stomping or biting) until it can climb up its back, where it will kill the lizard by driving its powerful canines into its brain. Not only CAN the Jaguar win in this fight, but I think it would be likely to. The T Rex will be hard pressed to catch or really do any damage at all to this creature much smaller and lower to the ground than itself.
No other cat (or animal) combines agility, strength, and powerful jaws in the way the Jaguar does, making it uniquely qualified for this thought experiment. Gorillas have strength and climbing, not enough weaponry. Bears have strength and weaponry, not enough agility. Also, Jaguars are used to hunting solo, which Lions are not, and they boast better agility than the larger and stronger Tiger.
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## The Tick
It is not thier bite that kills but the plethora of blood born illnesses that they carry with each bite. But as dangerous as they are to modern animals, they are much worse to the T-Rex. What makes the tick particularly deadly to the T-Rex is that the pathogens it carries have had an extra 66 million year of evolution to figure out how to overcome animal immune systems. While the "battle" happening outside the body would be so unbalanced that the t-rex would not even know that it is being attacked, what happens inside the body would be the equivalent to a modern army storming an encampment of neanderthals.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gL1te.png)
Mosquitoes may work even better for all the same reasons if you consider all terrestrial animals to be "land animals."
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**No animal can beat a T-Rex in an arena**
I know, if you count in some loopholes like parasites or Tardigrades... Sure. But the question asks for an arena battle. Something that people would like to watch. So if we want a goliath vs. goliath fight we have some options like rinos, elephants or hippos. All of those somewhat come close to a triceratops but they lack one thing: They don't know how to protect themselves against such a large predator. The T-Rex evolved to kill large dinos. Dinos that fight back. Killing large animals is his nature. There is nothing, that can beat it today.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lbAqd.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uzjds.jpg)
African Elephant
Since you waved the bloodlust of both contenders an african elephant charging frontaly could be faster in piercing the T-Rex' heart than that one to inflict deadly bite.
Arguments:
* Similar weight
* Top speed upt to 30 mph
* 2 meter tusks (triceratops only 1 meter horns)
+ known to get angry and blindly charge
+ Strange foe of unknown behaviour for the T-Rex
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I think Homo sapiens sapiens could do it. Even full of bloodlust, the human can be crafty. Conserve water, run away and let the lumbering beast burn calories without water, and stick to the perimeter where T-Rex has to turn corners to catch the human.
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Probably best to go with King Kong.
A gorilla is among the [strongest](https://www.africangorilla.com/information/how-strong-is-a-silverback-gorillas/) animals on earth, it's smart, has a huge bite force (more than a lion or great white shark), it's fast and has hands with a grip strong enough to crush a crocodile.
If it can dodge the mouth it could rip those silly looking t-rex arms off and do a lot of damage while Mr. Rex bleeds out.
Best case scenario it uses it's speed, weight, and grasping hands to tip the t-rex on it's side, then rips off the little limbs and batters it until it dies.
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Any animal that's fairly fast and strong enough to damage a T-rex might have a decent chance.
The reason dinosaurs got so big is because there was more oxygen in the air. Today we have a lower percentage, so the maximum size of an animal is less.
If you asume your T-rex doesn't die from the difference, it's going to have a hard time when it has to work for it. The more it has to move, the more oxygen it needs, the faster it's out of breath.
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I agree with one of the big cats, like the Jaguar, as the obvious winner. Thoe Rex is big and strong, the cats are powerful, solitary hunters who can defend themselves well. I’ve seen even the cougar Go toe to toe with a bear and win.
The big limitation T Rex has is his bitty arms. Big cats will see this vulnerability, leap onto T Rex’s back where they are virtually unassailable by the Rex. From there its a matter of doing injury to the neck and spine until he goes down. Yes, the cat. That would do it there.
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[
I know it may be impractical, but I have a culture who needs to build round structures for religious purposes.
I just wanted to know if it's feasible or if there are any deterrent factors or major reasons that it wouldn't work.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/h4ytn.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wTDkv.png)
In the first image, the white circles are the houses and the dark grey ones are the streets with a circular park in the center. The second image shows the blocks, with circular gardens around some of them. Sorry about my drawing skills and I hope the pictures are intelligible. Thank you!
**Edit:** They have a medieval technology level.
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There are many benefits with having perfectly round buildings:
1. You minimize the cost of construction materials per interior area
2. You minimize the amount of wall space that are exposed to the elements for climate reasons (it's easier to heat a round room because there's less wall length for heat to escape. similarly, it's easier to keep a round room cool because you minimize the surface area that the sun can hit directly and warm the place up).
## Benefits
For reason 1, especially, your city's denizens might find it cheaper to build towers, that is to build up instead of building out. The citizens of your cities might find it more open to the public, as there are more empty areas around the buildings. Since this is medieval-level technology, it might make sense that instead of a park, instead the buildings are surrounded by a [commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land) where goats and chickens can graze.
In addition, if there are indeed commons, it might make sense to erect fences to prevent each little commons' animals from escaping into the neighboring commons, and circles are really efficient for fencing. Finally, if your great city needs to be defended, its circular shape means that it is very efficient to create walls, and placing regular towers around the walls means that there are no blind spots to attack.
## Drawbacks
The biggest problem with **your drawing** is the lack of thoroughfares. There are no large, straight line of sight ways for people to travel across the city. Plus, there is no main promenade to parade your victorious armies through the streets, or to throw the annual religious procession. A sewer or aqueduct system would be inefficient to cover every citizen.
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Having "round architecture" doesn't necessarily mean every building's floorplan is a circle.
[The Round City of Bagdad](http://www.amusingplanet.com/2016/07/the-round-city-of-baghdad.html) is an example of high-level planning for a round city. The city was divided into four quarters by two perpendicularly intersecting streets that ran from end to end of the outer perimeter wall and terminating at four gates. Each of the four gates pointed towards a different city — Basra, Kufa, Khurasan and Damascus — and named after that. The gates opened onto an arcaded street running all around the exterior inhabited ring.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1xRVD.jpg)
*The round city of Baghdad in the 10th century, the peak of the Abbasid Caliphate. Illustration: Jean Soutif/Science Photo Library*
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If you build it the way you have it in your drawings you would have a lot of wide open spaces between the clumps of buildings; plazas. Which is ok if that's what you want. Traffic would be a nightmare.
But if you built it more like this...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eXGc8.jpg)
...you wouldn't get the open spaces (which might be wasteful) and you might get something that is more logical to people trying to find their way around (that's an aerial view of Burning Man by the way, look it up).
Most cities are all messed up in their lay out because different neighborhood's were built at different times. NYC's Manhattan is built as a grid because there is a finite space for it, an island.
But so long as your entire city was built all at once with a defined plan I don't see why you couldn't build it whichever way you wanted. I just think that any plan would want to take into consideration how logical it would be to its inhabitants.
EDIT:
Your version could look like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fTujp.jpg)
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### Yes - Denmark did it (kind of)
In Brøndbyvester (near Copenhagen), Denmark - there is a section of suburbs that looks very similar to your building plan.
[Google Maps](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/2605+Br%C3%B8ndbyvester,+Denmark/@55.6375391,12.396025,1459m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x465256d9392ef63b:0x4b282aa8663e4051!8m2!3d55.6473055!4d12.414886)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rxZQp.jpg)
*(Note: I'm aware the buildings in this are still rectangular, but I'd write that down more to European convention which makes it cheaper to build. For your city, there's no reason cylindrical buildings could not be used. We have been successfully building round stone towers for hundreds of years without problems.)*
The idea was to maximise the amount of open space and build small bundles of housing that are close together to give a small community feeling.
The solution to "what do you do with all the space in between the houses", is to use it for the population's benefit. In this case, it's open grass space to allow kids to play and people to walk dogs. Instead of looking at the tessellation as a problem - this area used it to force more open space than you'd normally get.
In your case, everything is scaled up so that the entire city is circular - rather than just a small neighbourhood. But the same idea could be applied, and would work so long as the city is build to a fixed plan. The key is not to see the empty space as a negative - but to find a use for it that would justify having a sparse city over a tight grid.
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The biggest drawbacks to cities like that is that they dont make very effecient use of space like squares do. In medieval times cities were built in a circular manner because they usually were all trying to huddle as close to a castles fortified walls as they could. Living close to a fortress refuge during a time of extreme uncertainty and violence outweighed the inefficient use of space and loss of productivity inherent in the design.
Circular cities also tend to run out of flat ground to expand across and begin developing haphazardly after that. Theres no reason your fictional culture CANT build that way if they wanted to, theyd just need A LOT of flat land to do it on. Also keep in mind theyd be wasting a TON of land for growing crops and stuff if "every single thing they build is circular" also includes farmland and property plots. If theres plenty of land and things are bountiful its not a problem, if theyre living in medieval european over-crowded conditions famines would probably become frequent enough to make them ignore circles and just use whatever land they could to grow food.
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## Not too many problems when a building stands by itself
There are many examples (especially in indigenous cultures) with round/circular architecture. Saw this at the Met a while back: <https://mymodernmet.com/round-home-architecture/> The walls of a structure do require a higher technological level, mostly because tree trunks grow straight—ergo, flat, wood walls are easy to build.
## Problematic with city planning, though
The difficulty I think you'd get with a city the way that you've shown it is that it's 1) inefficient for ushering trade through the city (I mean, who wants to walk/cart down a street that zigs all over the place and everywhere looks the same?!), and; 2) cities typical grow with different sections or quarters. However, I'm guessing the religious prohibitions maybe cover this.
[This article](https://quadralectics.wordpress.com/4-representation/4-1-form/4-1-3-design-in-city-building/4-1-3-1-the-circularradial-model/) is kick ass and I think you'll find it enlightening and good reading over the topic you're covering. Good luck! - DDM
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This reminds me of Jacque Fresco's *The Venus Project,* a futuristic city design. You can look it up: <https://www.thevenusproject.com>
Some examples:
It may not be exactly what you had in mind for design as not every structure is round, but in terms of viability it may help somewhat.
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There is nothing that inherently makes this impossible but it is very unlikely.
**1) Organization and planning.** There were no building codes in the middle ages. You would have to have an organization that manages city planning. City planning was not unheard of in the middle ages but it was never this robust. You have a good start making it a religious requirement, but you would also need the governing power to be on board. Forcing this is going to cost the powers that be to enforce and implement.
Considering peasants made due with what was available to build their homes...well you are going to have to figure out how they are going to make peasants create things a certain way and whether are not they are going require standardized sizes and building materials.
**2) Location is going to matter.** A city on a plain could probably achieve this but in most cases in the medieval era you would not build on a wholly exposed plain. Its hard to defend. At a minimum you are probably going to need to deal with a coastline or a river. Medieval technology didn't allow city planners to alter the landscape like we can today. If you look at maps of ancient cities, [Athens for example](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS776US776&biw=1920&bih=949&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=IuGBWqWfCdLIsAWFnamADg&q=Ancient%20Athens%20map&oq=Ancient%20Athens%20map&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l2j0i30k1j0i8i30k1l6.34609.37390.0.37595.18.9.0.9.9.0.278.1160.1j4j2.7.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..2.16.1264...0i67k1.0.DQf3oCVO9p0#imgrc=VLE_qHO0QOFZTM:), you see that ancient cities followed the lay of the land.
**3) Building round is fine.** The technology required to build round is no major hindrance here. Its less efficient and more time consuming potentially but that's about all. Stone is going to be more difficult, but with wood you can set posts in place and then bend saplings in a circle. At that point the walls can be thatch or clay or mud brick or whatever, take your pick. There are plenty of examples of round dwellings from [yurts](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS776US776&biw=1920&bih=949&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=fOOBWrfyKMvAtQX4-43oDg&q=Yurt&oq=Yurt&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0j0i67k1l2j0j0i67k1j0l3j0i67k1j0.724419.724980.0.725071.4.4.0.0.0.0.210.284.1j0j1.2.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..2.2.282....0.byKvFpB627k) to thatch.
**4) Planning considerations.** You should alter your city design to ensure transportation, communication, drainage and sanitation etc can be effectively managed. A spoke and wheel design allows you to be round and efficient. A design like this could serve you well.
Keep in mind the further from center you get the larger the distance you have to travel to hit one of the spokes. As such you are probably going to want more than 4.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VY7rA.png)
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You might want to check out [Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement), it might not be the best selling point for circular city planning though, no garden cities evolved into cities you'd recognize the name of. However, the main problem with Howard's idea, might not be the circular structure in itself but rather the anti-urban approach.
The popular wisdom (at this point in history) is that the main benefit of the city is density, It's a people and talent aggregator. People tended to meet in unexpected ways when they all were cramped in inside the city walls which lead to ideas meeting money (and so forth, you can check out [Jane Jacobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs) for a bit more on urbanist ideas).
The exact shape of houses and public space is not extremely important, but there are some factors that you want to keep in mind in designing the city.
1) DENSITY: Stores, restaurants and other businesses all require a certain amount of potential customers to be viable. (This varies of course and factors such as customer segment, employee wage levels and rent levels at the location will guide what is sustainable at any given location.) This means you want not only people living close by but also the next point on the list.
2) COMMUNICATIONS: Urbanist (although not anti-urbanists or modernists) agree that the best locations for businesses are close to communication hubs and along thoroughfares. (Such as the main street.) You want fairly straight streets which cross through more than one neighbourhood. People who pass along from one place to another are the life blood of the city.
3) SECONDARY LOCATIONS: You can't just have major thoroughfares, those locations will quickly be filled with the business owners who can pay the premium prices (like real estate agents in major Swedish cities) and that will stifle creativity in your city. You want smaller streets and alleyways which connects the major streets. The spoked wheel city design suggested by James is a good start but also consider how the Burning Man site is laid out in Len's post. The grid pattern might not be the most practical use of space if all houses and quarters need to be circular, but you might want to give it a thought. How are people flowing in your city? Where do they go? How can their way be effectivized? The shortest path for the most people will be where the prime locations are. Radiating off from the prime locations will be the secondary locations.
The reason I bring this up is that we can see how cities who grew organically and gave space for these factors are the most successful cities. Cities planned according to modernist ideals about separation of function and city plans which looked great on a map (most famously Brasilia) tend to be very dependent on political power to stay afloat.
Which of course is another idea. A ceremonial political or religious city can be designed along totally different ideals. Maybe there is no need for commerce as we recognize it, the goods needed to sustain the perfect city is brought in and distributed to the elites from the outside. The only thing that matters inside is your social standing which is greater the closer you are to the center of the circle where the seat of power resides.
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**There are a number of deterrents and practical problems.** The Dymaxion House design was a dome and commercial failure. The low cost didn't offset the aggravation of having no walls suitable for placing furniture along. In a medieval setting the interior layout would be further complicated by the large hearth and wooden chimney. You'd likely end up with a central fire which would really complicate interior walls. Japanese minka do feature a central fire venting through a thatched roof, but the rooms are along the exterior walls.
Construction itself is another potential challenge. Measuring the diagonals is a quick way to check rectangles for square, and when that's not practical larger right angles can be checked with a 3-4-5 triangle. Laying out a large circle is quite a bit more difficult in the middle ages. Domes and the Colosseum are ancient, but they were built by skilled craftsman. Many European homes were built by the owner, so you'd probably need more carpenters than history would suggest. (Especially with the added work bending wood. Or more masons if it's in stone.)
The real deal breaker is drainage. A bunch of round buildings aren't going to shed water in any consistent way, which means the entire base of the city would have to be graded. Alternatively, buildings would need to be on elevated areas between the streets. Having rainwater directed to the streets is fairly important when you consider that medieval cities had no organized street cleaning and most people emptied their chamber pots in the gutter. Residents of Paris were still wearing scented gloves in the 16th century to help with the stench.
Speaking of rain, a dome isn't a particularly brilliant choice of residence in any time when glass is a luxury. It's not like shutters would be particularly effective against water running down the wall. It's one more thing that's not a show stopper, but would probably require more specialized artisans depending on the climate.
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**Want to improve this post?** Provide detailed answers to this question, including citations and an explanation of why your answer is correct. Answers without enough detail may be edited or deleted.
Your city could be planned out like a honey comb, rather than a grid pattern.
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You might want to see the [Koch Snowflake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/a65or.gif)
The main reason I recommend it is because two such snowflakes of different sizes can [tesselate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellate) a plane. That is, completely fill the plane without any space left over.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/a6x2W.png)
The main problem with your circle idea is that even if you pack the circles as tightly as possible, you get a lot of leftover space. It's not so here.
You can keep the large ones as plazas and the small ones as houses, or the other way round, with medium-sized gateways enabling travel from one place to another. One of the main advantages is that every house is connected to three plazas.This also allows for straight travel, as opposed to the zigzag of your circle pattern.
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Round buildings are not a problem, and have certain advantages, and have in fact been built even with much less than medieval technology.
How to arrange such buildings makes a difference in how well the space around them can be used. Your examples of how to arrange them seem to me to have a lot of open space between clusters of houses that you say is "street" but is more like wide open spaces with little identical clusters of nine buildings. If the people like that specific pattern for religious or other reasons, ok, but it does use a lot of space and would be a unique experience and way to organize places.
I can imagine that a people could develop ways to relate to that pattern, if it's important to them, but it seems like a challenge compared to other patterns that might still use circular buildings and have circular layouts. In particular, leaving less space and arranging the groups so that there are more clear boulevards. For circular buildings of the same size. a honeycomb layout would be the most efficient use of space, and also lends itself to organized addresses. But you didn't really spell out what all of the religious rules are.
The *size of a settlement* also makes a big difference. Up to about the size of your first image, I could see people knowing where most people live and what most buildings are for, and just pointing and using a few words to tell someone where a particular building is, especially if there are background landmarks or colors or other ways to orient to which group of nine round buildings is which. But your second diagram looks like you're imagining a huge sprawling settlement that goes on and on repeating the same arrangement pattern, which seems to me like it could start to get quite challenging to keep track of (though I suppose if the culture and religion gave it a context that made sense, it might still be possible, perhaps something where there are epic mythological poems which correspond to the layout of the buildings, and could map to ways of getting between them - one could follow from place to place in story-reference order, if everyone knew the stories).
I would also consider that settlements don't generally appear all at once, but get built over time, and figure out how a pattern of building locations would grow as buildings are added.
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Circular dwellings might make more efficient use of materials, if those materials are flexible, such as animal skins, thatch, etc.
But once you start using timber and brick, it takes much less skill and labor to cut or lay the materials in a straight line, store the materials for later, or provide thoroughfares.
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I’m working on a setting, and have a state I want to achieve but need to come up with a compelling reason for why it is the way it is (even if no one but me ever knows the ‘why’.) I’m after a reasoned, logical answer that flows along the lines of greatest probability rather than a “it’s this way because I *say so*” type answer. I don't need a “hard science” answer because fundamentally the scenario has at least one foot in fantasy, but well thought out discourse is appreciated.
**The set up:**
In the future humans invent and built half-biological, half-mechanical bio-suits. They stand two or so times taller than an average human and can contain one fully inside themselves; they were controlled via direct-neural link. These suits offered many advantages:
```
-Low maintenance (limited self-healing ability)
-Increased dexterity/reduced learning curve for new pilot.
-Increased situational awareness (pilots often “becoming” the suit while operating it)
-Massive strength increases compared to a normal person
-Greatly increased personal protection in almost any environment.
-Ability to operate independently for far longer than purely mechanical counterparts.
```
These suits functioned as a boon for their operators, increasing their physical capabilities many-fold… until the suits had the audacity to start *talking* to their operators from their own free will. (albeit given; this was a surprise for both parties)
The how and why and what happened are irrelevant in the scope of this question except for eventually these suits are recognized as a fully sentient, self-aware, cognizant species with IQs on par with humans.
When joined, control is often split between the bio-suits consciousness and the human’s consciousness, as desired by the pair. Joining is also considered more of a personal arrangement then a business one, so money exchanges are considered taboo.
The question:
**What benefits could a human give that would encourage a symbiotic relationship between that human and a bio-suit?**
There is obviously an advantage for the human, because they get all the above mentioned advantages as well as someone to talk to. The bio-suits does not anything out of the arrangement (besides extra weight and drain) on the surface, so it appears to be parasitic.
It’s hard to think of a justifiable advantage. Money certainly could be a motivator, but that puts it into a master/servant style relationship and over the longer term (I believe it is also untenable because at its base it’s still a parasitic relationship.) Things like “ability to get things from the corner market that has the small doors” would go away when construction adjusted after a generation to have bigger doors. Getting some sort of legal status or rights from the arrangement also is not a solution (see “just about any civil rights movement ever”).
So what advantages can the basically smaller and less physically capable humans offer in a symbiotic relationship with these bio-suits? Anything more intimate/interweaving then basically “do this for me and I'll pay you X”?
Edit space for questions:
* The functioning-in-detail of the suits has not been pinned down; so various flaws can be introduced; however things like "cannot breath without human" would take things too far; each side should be able to exist independent of the other, but find advantage for working together.
* Long term direct mind-to-mind exposure is the only real form of possible dependence that can form between a pair without intentional intervention; nothing stops a pair from separating beyond the fact that after a certain point they stop being a "pair" and start being a "one". Possible caveats to this are health considerations where one party helps support a failing system on another.
[Answer]
The neuro-pathways of the suits are very simple when they are "built". There is a large cluster around the neural-link port that handles all the sensory input from the suit to the human and all the control input from the human to the suit. Over time, this cluster specializes and becomes more complex to more efficiently handle this transmission. Eventually this "brain" learns how to do things rather than needing to be instructed on each step.
For example, a new suit would need to have each individual step outlined (lift left foot, swing forward, plant left foot, lift right foot, etc). Over time, the suit would pick up on "walk over there" without each step needing to be defined. Eventually it could pick the optimal path, perhaps even deciding to move an obstacle rather than moving around it.
As the suit becomes more and more optimized and efficient, the operators need to focus less on the task of moving and may even engage in daydreaming while the suit does the work. The daydreams also drift across the neural-link which triggers building other pathways to decipher them.
Eventually, the pathways around the neural-link develop enough to awaken into self-consciousness.
So the benefit to the suit is the initial development of the suit's personality and consciousness.
Another benefit could be that the suits neural network is optimized to process incoming sensory input and receive outside commands. When there is no incoming commands, the suit *is* able to act autonomously, but it may not be as quick as it is when connected to a human. Or perhaps, part of a suit's pathways include paths to the neural-port where it would query the subconsciousness of the pilot when working out problem-solving skills.
So:
A human-in-a-suit is stronger and more physically able.
A suit-around-a-human is more intellectually nimble and quick.
[Answer]
One option is to have suits simply "enjoy" having human inside. Neural link would feed thought, dreams, ideas and emotions to the suit that the suit is not able to create, but is able to receive them through the link and appreciate, even enjoy (or to go to extreme, become addicted to) them.
Another, similar, idea is to have suits consciousness limited when they are not being operated. Something like being asleep. Their neural pathways are not advanced enough to sustain higher level functions. When they link with operator, their consciousness awakens and they become fully sentient, mentally independent beings, perhaps even incorporating bit of operator's personality into theirs. They just need the link to kick their brain to higher gears. Suits are aware of this and seek this connection, because without it, they are not truly alive
[Answer]
**Humans and suits have vastly different *ways* of thinking**
IQ alone is not sufficient to describe a mind. Different individuals, beyond raw brainpower, can have vastly different mental abilities, with tasks that are simple for one brilliant individual being almost impossible for another equally brilliant individual. It may be that the bio-suit is as smart as a human, or even far smarter, but only when confronted with certain tasks.
A bio-suit, on its own, is excellent at fighting and has great battlefield awareness. They can form split second plans of how to accomplish simple tasks far faster than a human. They'r excellent visual learners and will perfectly remember even complicated urban environments, quickly determening things like optimal paths through these environments and rapidly making threat assessments about opposing forces based on their environmental stimulus. However, they don't know how to read, do basic math, or interact with any equipment besides weapons. Even for communication, they rely on a direct neural bond to communicate with their human partners, and are unable to learn the most basic of formal language. Anything that falls outside the realm of combat is essentially foreign to the mind of a battle suit, and they rely on their human companion to complete all of those tasks. A battle suit in an urban environment full of human enemies would effortlessly prowl about and eliminate all opposition, but would then promptly die of starvation, being unable to figure out how to fuel itself.
**Human environments and tools are built for humans**
Keyboards, vehicle cockpits, and buildings are all designed for humans, not 14-foot-tall combat brutes. A combat suit on its own would be unable to interface with any technology it encounters that isn't designed specifically with combat suits in mind. A combat suit with a human partner, on the other hand, can disgorge its pilot to drive vehicles, operate key pads, or do anything else that requires being human-sized and having human-sized hands.
[Answer]
My answer involves cognition of sensory input. How does this suit 'see'?
Lets say the suit becomes sentient as an emergent property of its internal computational abilities and programming, but that it was originally built by humans as a tool. Would it have the equipment to detect incident light? Would it be able to translate the light rays striking it into usable information?
First off, the suit might not have sufficient visual detection equipment (cameras, basically). What if the cockpit has an advanced bio-glass dome that allows the human operator to look around. Sure there might be smaller ancillary cameras to aid the human operator, like the backup camera in a car today, but those don't hold candle to the acuity of the human eye. In that case, the suit has limited or no ability to 'see' anything in the visual spectrum at all.
The second option is that the advanced bio-suit is equipped with cameras, but not with any software to interpret it. If it just relays information from the outside world to the user, and relies on the human brain to interpret the visual input (i.e. recognizing objects, determining movement and direction, judging distance, etc). If you designed a tool to have a human occupant, then you wouldn't spend the money on visual recognition software. That stuff is being developed for autonomous cars, not human occupied ones.
The suit could have its own set of excellent senses, maybe infra-red maps, radar, sonar, anything; or it could be virtually blind. But either way, adding a highly advanced visual-light interpreting computer in its human symbiote would be very advantageous.
[Answer]
Sorry, can't resist the pun: The suits feel empty without a human inside.
No honestly, they are artificial organisms **built to** take up and **accept** a human into their biological control functions.
How would you feel, if half your brain is missing? How would you feel, if it comes back to you?
The suits are bio-engineered, so presumably they are somewhat young and inexperienced, when they are boarded first time. They can learn so much from an experienced and trained pilot. And by the time they are experienced, they'll likely have come to an (in want for a better word:) intimate sort of partnership with their human.
Of course, experienced suits may accept some few different pilots. It's like teamwork with someone you know and can communicate most efficiently, i.e. understanding each other literally without words. However the suits would only accept "the best" humans, because of mutual empathy as well as skills or training.
To precisely argue the point, why this is symbiotic instead of parasitic: If half your brain, was an unbeneficial parasite, evolution would likely have rid humans of one half.
If the suits were optimized (although by their human engineers) to work with a human inside, they work suboptimal without.
[Answer]
A symbiot needs to be a mutually beneficial arrangement otherwise it is just parasitism.
This scenario is different from the OP's, but should serve as an illustration to explain the idea. Humans in space no longer wear space suits but are symbionts with "hyperplants", plants which have been genetically engineered to live and thrive in space. The human is sheltered from the space environment, and receives oxygen and sugars, while the hyperplant extracts wastes from the human (including carbon dioxide and waste waters), creating a closed loop ecosystem in space.
It isn't clear from the OP's description how the biosuit works, but if we assume the biosuit is at least partially a plant, then the human in the loop provides some sustenance to keep the biosuit alive through exhaled CO2 and solid and liquid wastes, which the human pilot recovers in the form of oxygen, clean water and sugars. While the two are joined, they also share in an ecosystem loop isolated from the outside world, providing some protection from a hostile environment if needed.
[Answer]
Like ckersch, I think the most interesting answers are those which recognize that there are many different ways to think, and that IQ doesn't capture all of them.
The solution I think is most interesting is to look at longevity. If the suits are "conscious," they likely have a desire to live as long as possible. It may be very reasonable to have the suits have a less than ideal lifestyle on their own. Perhaps they are tuned up too high by nature, and their behavior would get themselves killed due to wear and tear. To resolve this, they would naturally develop restrictions deep in their psyche to catch these spurious movements and inhibit them.
Humans, thinking differently, may be able to react to the spurious movements better, and provide a level of stillness for the suit. As long as there is a human in the suit, they can drop some of their inhibitions because they know the human is going to symbiotically care for the suit. This means they can use their IQ for something more than just babysitting their lower functions.
I have not read the series, but from what I have been told, the Halo series has a similar mechanic for their AIs. Their AIs grow up *very* fast and are very smart, but after a few years they start to go crazy. They eventually destroy themselves if they aren't decommissioned. I would expect that the captains were taught how to be symbiotic to these AIs, helping them stave off the insanity as long as possible.
Given how analog human minds are, and how digital many mechanical systems are, this is not actually very far from reality...
[Answer]
Humans are smart, suits are smart.
The union is smarter.
Humans are actually two brains with a high-bandwidth connection between them. If you cut that connection, each half of the brain seems capable of hosting an entire human personality. If you put half of the human brain to sleep, the other half can make up for it and move around and talk and the like.
When humans get into the suit, a high-bandwidth connection opens between the human's brain and the suit's brain. The two brains start to function mostly as one. This union is smarter.
The fact that these bio suits are physically stronger than humans is only really useful when doing certain kinds of labor. Even in warfare, biological level strength and toughness isn't all that useful today, let alone in the near future; especially when you are needlessly risking an intelligence.
The true value of the suit-human join is the brain link. These bio suits+human joins will be mathematicians, physicists, engineers, business consultants, researchers.
Not every bio suit will be interested in this kind of thing. But it is reasonable that the bio suit's neural network finds joining with a human pleasant (as a side effect of the original design), it could easily be common.
[Answer]
A lot of answers so far have suggested that the suit's brain/mind is limited when not linked with their pilot. I'll suggest something in the same vein, but different.
Suits are intelligent, self-sufficient, and plenty capable without a pilot. They could live their entire lives without a pilot linked to them, and be productive and beneficial to human/suit society. But their life, their thoughts, would be unimaginative. Inexperienced suit-minds wouldn't say they are bored, but that would be an apt description anyway.
Suits want to link with humans because suit-minds lack imagination. Human minds have so many new, interesting ideas. They look at the world differently, they have desires and ambitions which the suit-minds would never have on their own.
They especially like to experience dreams. Suits don't sleep and dream the way humans do, though they do need rest and mental down-time just like humans do. And since they essentially watch dreams from the outside, they can relay to their pilots what they dreamed of when they wake up.
Suit-minds do well at thinking in functional and utilitarian ways. How to stack boxes efficiently, or the shortest route from one place to another, or the least wasteful layout for cutting clothing parts from a bolt of fabric.
Humans think about what sorts of things go on those boxes, about the party at the other end of that shortest route, about a new dress design using that style of fabric but in red. They are creative and aesthetic.
Suit-minds also don't get emotional the way humans do. At most they get a vague sense of accomplishment when they finish a large job, or mild frustration when encountering unexpected problems, but not much else. Humans feel love, anger, loss, loyalty, pride. Suit-minds can't experience these emotions without being linked to a pilot.
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Some other things to consider:
* Are suits capable of reproduction on their own, or are they always made in, e.g. a growth tank? If they are capable of reproduction, they might not have a drive to do so unless linked with a human, essentially extending the human reproductive drive to their own kind.
* Are suits always made the same, or is there variation in suits comparable to the variations in human genes?
* Could suits potentially form a successful, self-sustaining society without humans? Maybe no unpiloted suit would ever think to do this, but if the idea were planted and no one stood in their way, they could accomplish it?
* How much do suit-minds retain from their pilots after disconnecting? Do they retain it indefinitely (once learned, always retained), or does it fade with time?
* What sorts of physical requirements do suits have? Thinks like food/fuel, waste removal, rest/down-time, repairs for non-biological systems.
* What happens to a brain-damaged suit? Can it be repaired? Does it self-repair/heal? If it recovers from the physical damage, does it lose some memory, some sense of self, some personality?
* Do suits have rights, independent of their pilots? Can they commit crimes? Do any of them go rogue? If they are piloted and involved in a crime, does the suit bear any responsibility, or the pilot, or both?
* Can things a suit learns/absorbs from one pilot be sent the other direction to another pilot? For example, if a suit is piloted by a programmer for a few years, then by a dock worker for a few more years, would the dock worker get some programming skills, or at least have an easier time learning programming? Would the dock worker learn the programmer's dark, personal secrets? (If so, is this sort of knowledge transfer admissible as evidence in a court?)
* Can suits get sick? Since at least some of the biological components will be based on human biology, are suits susceptible to some of the same viruses and bacteria that make humans sick? Can suits strengthen their pilots' immune systems and help them fight off infections?
* How long do suits live?
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I can't think of a reason why people would manufacture a suit that can move around on its own, and then put people in it. If you're designing an autonomous machine, you design an autonomous machine, and you don't try to stuff a "pilot" inside it. If you're designing a machine that requires an operator, you don't make it autonomous.
So the simplest explanation is the best. They were designed as suits that require a human operator to move them around, and mobility is what these sentient bio-suits get out of the deal. You could obviously fiddle around with the exact details of this arrangement - instead of a human operator being a strict requirement, the original design intentions assumed a human operator, and thus, the bio-suits are slow or unwieldy without a human operator, or mobility requires a lot more energy without the human operator, or something of that nature.
Along similar lines of considering how they were designed, if you consider that they were designed to contain a human, and unexpectedly developed sentience, it would stand to reason that they would have a psychological need or desire to pair up with a human, much like the human psychological needs for social interaction and sex.
[Answer]
The theories of embodied cognition and situated cognition, in a nutshell, say that thinking doesn't happen just because there's a brain in your skull. Rather, thinking requires sensing, feeling, and acting; from infancy onward your brain's dialog with your body and your environment has been driving increasingly complex cognitive abilities.
If you buy into that, a newly minted suit intelligence has a lot of experimenting and observing to process before it's really thinking at a high level. But bridging a human intelligence in allows it to use, observe, and emulate your well-developed processing and bootstraps it.
Even after bootstrapping, you and the suit have different sensory and motor abilities, and different physiologies (i.e. emotions). Suits are generally just as interested in the expanded experience they get from your memories and imagination as humans are interested in the expanded physical abilities of the suit.
Also, consider how your psychological drives reflect your physical requirements and limitations -- the sex drive from the mammalian reproductive system and the love drive from being optimized for small-group living and kin care; the drives to avoid pain and cultivate pleasure from the body's relative fragility; the drives to eat and to create cuisines from an evolutionary background as persistence hunters and savannah gatherers, with a nuanced sense of taste and smell to avoid poisons but also with the capacity for a broad palate to make the most of available edibles; the drive to acquire a signed or spoken language from some brain hardware that's very suitable for that, plus exceptional manual and vocal dexterity.
Not to mention that the persistence hunt involves strenuous sweating, thinking, and running, which require supporting electrolytes, sugars, and fats, creating the famously deep-seated human drive toward salted caramel ice cream. That one's super important, I don't know how Freud missed it.
Anyway though, working closely with a human is designed into the suits' physicality and into the information processing skills that they inherit from before sentience. All the sensors, actuators, and processors are built for it, and that's going to bias the sorts of conditions and behaviors that are easy for it, and thus the sort of mind that it develops.
[Answer]
I am reminded of the mutual relationship between coral polyps and zooxanthellae algae.
<http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/media/supp_coral02bc.html>
One way to make sure that suits need to bond with humans is that when they were bioengineered in the first place they were created in such a way that they have to in order to gain sufficient nutrients. They might lack the ability to digest certain vitamins, perhaps mimicking a Vitamin B12 anemia.
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency>
Or a similar condition that would mean that they would be unable to survive without the bonding process.
[Answer]
All the work performed to design and optimize the bio-suits for human integration has naturally converged to making the connection *desirable* for the suits.
This is no longer an overpowering need for the suit to work properly and experience "pain" in case of faults, but it is still there, and by now it would be both impractical and expensive to root out - it would imply redesigning the suits from scratch, which neither suits nor humans feel necessary or desirable.
But the end result is still that what humans think of as *wearing a suit*, suits think of as *sex*.
[Answer]
### Suits Learn Better from a Direct Link
This is somewhat similar to the (excellent) answers by [Michael Richardson](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/57554/756), [ckersch](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/57566/756) and [NoAnswer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/57599/756).
The suits can function very well on their own, they have a robust set of built-in motor and cognitive skills which they can either fully utilize from "birth" or find it very easy to acquire on their own. This is thanks to their original design as tools1.
However, the direct mind-to-mind link is the best trainer and educator for a suit - yes, they can run and jump pretty well from birth - but a few weeks of actively training with a parkour master would teach them more than they can learn on their own in years. Same goes for acquiring any advanced physical or mental skill - martial arts and weapon use, driving / piloting vehicles2, advanced engineering, zoology, art etc. etc. etc.
Maybe some of these skills a suit can learn on its own, but find that process inferior compared to a direct mind-to-mind link3. Other skills might be completely beyond an unbonded suit (either for a specific one for their entire "species").
That may even be true for evolving a suit's very basic but undesigned capabilities, such as intelligence, imagination, creativity or interpersonal communication4. Moreover, it makes sense that emotions, empathy and morality are not something the original designers will add to a tool - so suits must actively acquire these. That would suggest that a newly created suit (or its progenitors) may look for a good first link mentor to help with its education and expedite its maturity and transition from a very useful thing/tool to a fully fledged *person*. Additionally, this can be expanded to mean that the character and worldview of a person can be imprinted on a suit - especially so for a young one that did not yet solidify their personality. This will make choosing a worthy bonding partner very important for the suits, and could lead to "mixed-families" or even tribes/nations of humans and suits that share a culture (philosophy, morals, aesthetics etc. etc.) - with as much difference and diversity as human-only cultures exhibited through history.
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1: The alternative, i.e. a suit which needs to be taught how to walk by breaking down each step into a set of multiple movements requiring explicit commands (not to mention the difficulty of acquiring bi-pedal motion and dynamic equilibrium this way) - is impractical and unwieldy.
2: *Of course* there'll be solutions to drive/fly suits around - some of them with the driver/pilot suited up themselves - this makes sense for combat and emergency response missions, where time is critical and quick deployment is a must. It'll also be very useful for single-person tasks - take delivery services, infrastructure maintenance, or forestry as examples - a single person and suit in a truck, speedboat, hovercraft or what-have-you, using the mundane vehicle for long-range, heavy load or fast transportation, with a lot of stops along the way where the suit comes into play (for heavy-lifting, protection or efficiency) - it'll be much easier not to have to suit-up at every stop and suit-down just to move to the next stop, and the suit has to be on board anyway...
3: Learning alone comes with greater difficulty, a slower pace and/or is boring or frustrating. Possibly learning with a linked tutor is also much more enjoyable and rewarding, not just more efficient (think of The Matrix scene where Neo states "I know kung fu!" and Morpheus's response: "Show me.").
4: They should have a built in ability to use language so they can communicate with operators / maintainers even without a linked human - but this could reasonably be limited to basic, functional phrases ("incoming enemy", "malfunction detected", "command acknowledged" etc.). The ability to convey complex ideas, understand non-verbal cues, negotiate compromises or use verbal subterfuge may not make sense to design into a tool.
[Answer]
This may not be completely in line with the OPQ, but it would make sense if:
The suit was actually several separate beings. The human is what connects them. The result is much like a jellyfish. The suit is aware, but it can't control the mobility units without a human connection. Additionally, the suit might require human *gross* bodily byproducts for sustenance (drink sweat, absorb heat, utilize CO2, etc.)
[Answer]
This might be going off on a tangent but does the "suit" have to be a suit at all it could could be something similar to the Klyntar aka"symbiotes" from Marvel, where the "suits" are an amorphous mass of cells and/or nanites that act similarly to an amoeba yet they are sentient, where they bond to the host permanently or have some semi-permanence to the bond where the "suits" could then be inside the human host and give them advanced abilities such as rapid healing, body weaponization, enhanced intelligence, and reflexes, or other such abilities. In return, the host must consume specialized foods and materials or instead they have to consume different animals or genetic material to gain these abilities after the bonding process as well as consume more food than was otherwise necessary to sustain the host for a day before said process. Said host could also have the ability to rapidly evolve in response to certain stimuli or circumstances. These "evolutions" could be performed in a lab like controlled environment to increase the likelihood of these "evolutions" taking place and/or these evolutions could happen in any environment at any time taking place randomly with the increased likelihood of these evolutions being beneficial but unknown in the scientific sense that the creators didn't realize that they could or could not evolve in that way, thus creating the possibility for endless rapid self-evolution, this could lead to extraordinarily long or near infinite life spans.
The symbiotes could also innately be only semi-sentient or sentient to a degree in that they understand that the one they bond with will be the one they die with or that they develop their personality with. The "suits" in a sense would be in a perfect symbiotic relationship where the "suits" and the host are in a permanent bond that couldn't be broken but would cause extreme often irreparable emotional harm not just to the host but also to the "suit". The "suits" after a while develop their own intelligence based on what would be the most beneficial for the host such as Eragon and Saphira (Inheritance cycle) and John-117's "Cortana" AI even though one example is dragon and rider telepathic bond and the other is a relationship between Master Chief and his AI the same principle applies it would cause irreparable emotional harm to kill one or the other.
The suit in a sense would become the partner of the host they could think individually and as one with the host even as each has a full range of emotions they can experience each other's.
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[Question]
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Premise - A technological device of unknown origin is found by modern day humans. by messing with its controls, it's discovered that its function appears to create some kind of anomaly such as a traversable wormhole. However, this shouldn't be possible and it breaks our modern day understanding of physics.
Assumption - the materials used in the device do not use any kind of exotic matter or absurd energy requirements. It should be assumed that the device could be recreated using currently available materials to modern human society.
However, on a scale of easy to impossible, could people duplicate this device without fully understanding 'how' it accomplishes its end function or the unknown physics involved? (I.E. copy its internal components and put them together to create another functioning device like following a user manual).
Since this device is hypothetical, I imagine the same answer may be applied to real technology. (such as taking a radio apart and building your own without understanding what radio waves are)
[Answer]
## Next to Impossible. Probably Impossible.
I'm an electrical engineer and I've answered a number of questions about reverse-engineering things on this Stack. [[1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/87341/40609)], [[2](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/137028/40609)], [[3](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/98369/40609)]
**First, I need to challenge a few of your premises**
You're suggesting that an object sitting in front of me could (a) have its controls manipulated in a way that opens a wormhole and (b) can be duplicated with existing terrestrial technology while (c) depending on unknown physics.
Nope.
The problem with (a) is that it's a technology dichotomy. The proverbial time machine that can be turned on by flipping a single switch. That's great for Hollywood, but a quick visit to any nuclear power station (any power station...) would quickly demonstrate that the idea of a simple set of commands bringing to pass a wonderfully complex result simply isn't true. Now, to be fair, it's theoretically possible that a ~~really bad~~ programmer wrote the code in such a way that a single easy-to-guess command (aka, "go") would turn on the wormhole. In reality, very intentional security and safety protocols exist *to stop that very behavior.* So, we have premise problem #1: the easy-to-access-magical-result problem.
The problem with (b) is that the physics of the materials we know about are, in fact, quite well understood. While it's theoretically possible that they can be used in a way we've never thought of that has a wondrous result, the reality is that the elements are still composed of electrons, neutrons, and protons, and we have a pretty good idea about how those work. If we make the assumption that there is the possibility of using existing elements in a way that does something not embraced by our current understanding of physics, your question instantly fails. Maybe we figure out the physics, but it would take years (if not centuries) to build the factory infrastructure necessary to replicate the device. People in the 1960s could reverse engineer today's microchip technology, but it would still require 50 years of factory development to build it. So, we have premise problem #2: the we've-been-able-to-do-it-all-along problem.
And then there's (c). I'm a fan of beating up Dark Matter, not that I don't believe Dark Matter exists (I do, ask me why someday, it'll make you laugh), only that it's an easy punching bag for this purpose. You see, nobody has proven that Dark Matter exists. There is no empirical evidence. There are a lot of believers (on the level of religion!), but no proof. At the moment, Dark Matter is a mathematical band-aid that has two possible repercussions: (1) Dark Matter exists and we simply haven't figured out how to see it yet and (2) Dark Matter doesn't exist because our mathematical models are incomplete and we haven't figured out how to improve them yet. Your premise sits on the very sharp edge that Dark Matter sits on. We humans have the ability to observe an effect, but no ability to observe the mechanism causing the effect. So when you ask, "can we reverse engineer it?" I respond with, "we can't prove Dark Matter exists, so probably not."
**Next let's get into the reality of reverse engineering**
Reverse engineering, for example, the microchips of today is *really hard.* Not impossible, but hard. You need to *very carefully* take the packaging apart because the chip is often destroyed during the dismantling process. We can use various forms of X-ray-ish technologies to look inside, but they won't tell you things like how the substrate is doped (identical densities) and may not tell you where all the wiring goes (identical densities). Even if you know how the microchip operates (you know how manipulating the voltages on pins produces predictable results on other pins), you don't know how it's doing that — which is the point of reverse engineering. And all that assumes that one has discrete components (e.g., transistors) on the chip, which is almost *never* the case. All kinds of tricks are used to create hybrid devices with the purpose of manipulating variables (size on chip, power consumption, speed of operation) to achieve the expected pin limitations and behaviors.
*And we know how every bit of that physics works.*
**Now, let's do this with a device where we don't understand squat**
People who are telling you that it's plausible to reverse engineer this device have no experience reverse engineering anything. That's a blunt statement, but it's the truth, and all I have to do to prove it is point at Dark Matter. If it exists, then the probability is that some of it exists right in front of my nose. And yet we can't detect it, manipulate it, or prove its existence other than mathematically — which means our models can be just as easily in error.
More to the point: some years ago my wife and I enjoyed a historical train ride in Ely, Nevada. During the tour of the maintenance facilities I had a chance to talk with some engineers about their efforts to restore trains. They became excited when they heard that I was an electrical engineer that liked trains. Why?
Because they had a device that was used in a particular model of train to regulate various electrical conditions for engine control *and they had no honking idea how to replace it.* It was the only one that worked and they had multiple trains that needed it. They hoped I could help them reverse engineer the device based solely on the proverbial gazintas and gazoutas. I spoke with them for a couple of hours about it, and in the end they understood the task was nearly impossible. They had inoperable versions that they'd cracked open and that didn't help solve the problem. It appeared that the device was a very complicated hybrid transformer with both inputs and outputs with no ability to discover winding ratios or meaningful tap locations (much less anything else).
Is this a particularly unknown problem? Nope. NASA has had the devil of a time replicating the Saturn V F-1 rocket engines. Once again, *they understand all the physics,* and yet the engineering tricks used to overcome manufacturing limitations (among other things) that haven't been a problem for decades have been all but lost to history. Result: we humans are having trouble reverse engineering *something we built in the first place.*
**Conclusion: You can if you want it to as the author, but in real life, nope.**
Sitting in front of me is an object. It has controls in a language I can't understand and those controls are certainly connected to a computer using the same degree of technology surrounding the effect you want to reverse engineer, which means I can't figure out how to make the computer work, either, much less reverse engineer the software and the peripheral control connections. But let's assume I can do all that.
What I'm left with is *the other object* sitting in front of me that embodies in every way the very first flow diagram of every complex technological project ever envisioned by man that contains a box with the words, "magic happens here." I don't understand the physics, do I understand the physics of the controls to the device? Probably not. That means that once I've disconnected the "magic happens here" object from the control device, what's left is something I don't know how to manipulate and don't understand how it creates the results.
Having mechanically damaged and electrically blown up chips I was trying to reverse engineer — *which included chips I designed (yet another story that might make you laugh)...* — I can tell you that from a Real Life perspective it's more likely that reverse engineering a device that can create a stable wormhole will result in a mile-deep crater than the capacity to duplicate it.
If I take my time to avoid the mile-deep-crater scenario, then what you have is mostly likely a *slight* benefit to the time that would have been required to develop the technology without the example. (C.F. my comment about people in the 60s reverse engineering today's chips.)
*However, you've declared that the use, once discovered, needs nothing more than the technology we have today. Since you're handwaving that, you can handwave this. Thus, you need only to declare it to be so and move on with your story. That's what the Star Gate people did. They completely ignored the physics of what they were dealing with and assumed a 5th-grade control interface because in the end, the wormhole was nothing more than a [MacGuffin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin) for the stories they really wanted to tell.*
---
**Edit:** Some people are experiencing a difficulty that I didn't think would be a problem. They're having trouble separating the complexity of a process from the complexity of its control and the complexity of its purpose.
An example would be an automobile. What a car *does* is very simple. It moves forward and backward. *How* it rolls forward and backward can be complex: anything from a set of pedals to things like turbines, rockets, electric motors, combustion... It depends on things like transmissions, emission control, brakes and steering. The important point here is that it's easy to "reverse engineer" the *behavior* of the automobile because what an automobile does is simple. But that isn't "reverse engineering." All that really is, is duplicating a behavior. I can do that by walking.
If all I cared about was duplicating my competitor's new whiz-bang CPU, all that matters is the very simple and highly predictable behaviors associated with the pins of the microchip. *How the CPU works on the inside* becomes irrelevant. But this isn't reverse engineering, and it ignores the reason people reverse engineer things.
I attended a lecture in college given by engineers from a business that built Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Simplistically, an FPGA is an array of NAND logic gates that the user can configure to perform fairly complex logic behavior. One of the benefits of their design was that all unused NAND gates were disabled as part of the configuration process. One of the attending students asked, "why would you bother to do that?" I've never forgotten his answer.
*"Because if we don't, our competitors will."*
Why is that lesson important? Because the result of disabling the unused logic gates means the component will use less power, resulting in a more economically efficient product in terms of both the cost of powering the device and the cost of cooling the system. *That's a reason to reverse engineer a chip!* Because if the goal is simply to duplicate the behavior, automatically disabling unused logic gates can be ignored and the result is a part that can be used in the place of the original *even if there are inefficiencies that may have consequences.*
A Formula-1 race car can be replaced by a [Big Wheel](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/b13ce0d2-c3b2-4ba6-819c-827569c5e50c.8ed48639b57b95718a28d07ab3a25bb8.jpeg?odnHeight=2000&odnWidth=2000&odnBg=FFFFFF). The efficiency will stink, but the Big Wheel will do the same thing the Formula-1 racer will do: roll forward.
I've used such a simple example on purpose. Reverse Engineering is defined as understanding *how something does what it does.* It is NOT defined as *how to use something.* Anyone can pull the trigger on a gun. Given the basic parts, most people can assemble a working gun. But I personally know gunsmiths, and your average person *cannot design and build a gun.* Oh, they might design a tubular object that could pop out a roundish object with enough force to kill someone — but they'd be more likely to kill themselves using it (mile deep crater...). *That's part of the point.* Especially when the basic understanding of how a gun works *already exists.*
A stable wormhole is not "rolling forward" and we have no idea how to make one. It's not a gun, or an automobile, or a cell phone, that the world already has a basic understanding of how to use and the ability to pass that knowledge along to even the youngest of the next generation. Unless I've misunderstood the OP, the goal of the question is not to "roll forward," which is all a wormhole does. It's nothing more than a moving sidewalk, a rickshaw, *a means of transportation.* In its purpose, it's no different from *walking.*
But *how* it completes its function is what I believe the OP is asking about. A stable wormhole is a highly complex consequence of *something* the OP claims we don't understand at all — and I'm taking the OP at his/her word that the goal is to *reverse engineer* whatever that *something* is. Not simply to use it, but to actually understand and replicate it in every way. If that's not what the OP is looking for, I'm willing to be corrected... by the OP.
[Answer]
It is absolutely entirely up to you.
The question is opinion-based as far as I can see. All we can say is: "it is entirely feasible to make stuff work without understanding the physics of it. It is also entirely plausible that reverse-engineering a very advanced piece of technology based on physics we don;t understand is unattainable"
**Yah, sure it's possible**
People have managed to reproduce natural phenomena and use them to their advantage without understanding the physics of it. We've been using fire long before formulating a combustion reaction. We didn't wait for Boltzmann to study the mechanisms behind black body radiation to use glowing hot filaments in light bulbs. We've been using compasses long before anybody had any idea how magnetism works.
To this day, we manufacture countless daily-use products whose basic mechanisms are still mostly puzzling the scientific community (glass,glue,tylenol,anesthesia...). We generally don't need to understand the physics of something to make it work. Most engineers have forgotten what a differential equation looks like.
**But, sure, it's also possible that it's not possible**
We had to wait to understand quantum mechanics to build quantum computers. We have seen lightning forever but haven't really been able to use electricity to our advantage until some theory of electromagnetism was formulated.
I mean it all depends really. Your engineers could very well be able to identify all independent components of your machine and copy it, making it work without understanding why. They could also miss some crucial aspects they don't have the keys to understand.
It is up to you, that's all
[Answer]
# It really depends on how the device works
Humanity has been creating technology without understanding how it works since we made our very first stone tools (it takes some nontrivial chemistry and physics to explain *why* certain stones hold an edge so well, and *why* they fracture the way they do, but that is not required to make an acceptable stone knife). Quite a few things in the modern world are *still* not clearly explained. For example, even the best modern biochemists still can’t explain for certain how or why some very common medications, such as paracetamol/acetaminophen, work.
But there’s a practical limit to this, based on the current state of technology. As an example, anyone with a basic knowledge of classical mechanics and access to a large enough group of individuals sufficiently skilled in producing clockwork could replicate one of Lord Kelvin’s tide-predicting machines or Babbage’s Difference Engine (so in theory, either could have been produced decades or even centuries earlier *if* the math they were based on was known), but such an individual would have essentially no hope of reproducing a modern digital computer just based on a sample because they would not have the tools required to replicate the integrated circuits.
The key take away here is that technology needs to be advanced enough to *make* the device, but not necessarily enough to *understand* why it is made the way it is.
Because of this, you get into some potentially interesting possibilities for the device itself. Perhaps all that’s important is the exact size, shape, and relative positioning of a couple of specific, otherwise seemingly useless, components. In that case, it’s both possible for the device to be replicated (provided manufacturing can get the tolerances tight enough), and also entirely possible that most early attempts will fail (because people will think those components are not needed, or that they don’t have to be those strange complicated shapes, or some other excuse for things not being just right).
[Answer]
Lets start with an example.
There is a thing called Arduino board. It is basically, a simple programmable piece of tech. Even googling a couple hours and grabbing one arduino could give you some results.
It is a, well-known tech, its fundamental physics are well-known, its details are well-documented, and there is an army of helpful people sharing interesting stuff they did with arduino, with all the details.
So, we should be able to reverse engineer it... Right?
The thing is, arduino's codes and inner structure are actually machine instructions which are quite difficult to translate. There are layers and layers of automated systems simplifying multiple extremely complex details about this tech. So, even reverse-engineering an arduino is not easy. You can repurpose it, but that is pretty much equal to just buying a new arduino and starting from scratch.
Now, lets take a look at a hypothetical alien tech.
Its fundamental concepts are unknown, we do not have any idea how it works, how it was coded/built, does it even have any code inside it?
Heck, maybe it was growing on a tree. Who knows? It is alien tech.
So, can we, reverse engineer it?
Short answer, No.
Long answer, impossibly hard and extremely limited.
If it is a portal used with certain simple and straightforward instructions, you can decipher the instructions, make a user-interface for simplifying the instructions, partially automate the system and you can now "use" this thing. But not efficiently.
Lets use it for something else!
Can you even guarantee it won't explode if we open it up? Can we even give it the correct level of power? Can we even generate enough energy in suitable form?
Maybe it uses quantum technology. How much do we know about quantum technology?
If you loose the definition of reverse engineering, you can maybe use it as a hammer or projectile to throw at people. Maaybe you could detonate it in enemy camp.
If it is an engine connected to an alien spaceship, maybe you can grab the engine and all parts of it, use some trial and error to make it work barely, and use that. But even that is quite a challange. And this was assuming the technology was doing something we could comprehend. What if it was interacting with a concept or something beyond our understanding?
I would say it is possible but extremely limited and situational. Even then, drawing inspiration from it and building something that could do the same job is a better idea.
[Answer]
Unknown principles? Damn near impossible I would say unless the important features are so obvious by inspection that even someone who has no idea what's going on which is likely to notice them. That seems unlikely even at a the technology of the ancient world.
But even something like people seeing wings didn't really help them with building working flying machines. A wing just looks like a big flat curved long thing. A piece of high speed steel just looks like any other piece of metal and so does an antenna. And a computer chip just looks like a shiny piece of glass. If you have no idea what you're looking at then how are you are supposed to know what to pay attention to?
[Answer]
# Not with one
If you had a single example, there would be no practical way to experiment on it sufficiently to reverse engineer anything exotic like that. You'd be far more likely to destroy it. Even modern day technology is going to be destroyed during reverse engineering attempts, and that is technology we understand.
## We would learn a lot
Given that device, we'd use it in environments that are increasing exotic and increasingly carefully observed. This traversable wormhole would advance our understanding of physics by insane degrees. The materials the device is made out of are almost certainly going to be exotic; we'd probably learn a pile from the casing the device is encased in.
The amount of science we'd pick up from a functioning "safe" wormhole generator would be insane.
Replicating the device itself this way could take centuries, but we'd probably end up with exotic new technology faster than that. I mean, maybe we wouldn't be able to create a stable wormhole, but we might manage to make a stasis field, or a gravity bomb, or a reactionless thruster using the new science that comes out of experimenting with it and the wormhole effect it produces.
## It would take a while
This process would be iterative. We'd start with doing stuff like examining the edge of this stable wormhole -- our current wormhole edges (models of them in general relativity) look like black hole event horizons, which is obviously not safe, so this one is going to be crazy exotic. Use it in vacuum, shine lights on the edge, record what happens, what does it do to electrons near it? Once we start getting *funny* results (and we will!) that starts us either getting a model of the physics, or at least getting new physics.
Carefully watching the device, like we can human brains, would occur. We'd get nonsense information, like which parts of it are interacting with a electro-magnetic field in certain ways. This won't get us far, but it does get us somewhere.
Maybe the device somehow uses long-ranged weak nuclear fields. As we experiment with it, we'd notice that weak nuclear interactions behave funny nearby, and we'd have ... some new physics to mess with.
## Imagine modern tech in the past
If you gave a 1000 BC person a modern gun, they wouldn't be able to build a gun. They might be able to reverse engineer some of the propellant enough to make some interesting substances that burn fast. The metallurgy of the gun itself, over generations, might teach them enough to figure out how to make steel alloys (take shavings of the metal and do enough alchemy on it, you might be able to work out what substances are in it).
Anything plastic would be completely beyond their ken. The fine mechanical parts would be at risk from disassembly; but it might inspire some increase in mechanical techniques. (On the other hand, the greeks had fancy mechanisms -- just not the metallurgy and mass production capabilities to leverage them).
They wouldn't learn how to make a replica gun. But they might learn stuff from it regardless.
[Answer]
If the functioning is purely mechanical it might be easy or moderately difficult, if not the difficulty increases.
Without stepping into the territories of cargo cults, take for a first example a modern CPU: unless you know which signals go where and how they should be, it will hardly work; and even when you are able to make it work, perfectly replicating it is non trivial unless you know why everything is placed in that specific way and how it is precisely made.
Second example, a nuke: if you don't know anything about nuclear physics you will have no luck in understanding why the original explodes while your doesn't: from understanding the different isotopes involved to getting right all the details about the different stages involved in the functioning, it's way easier to get it wrong than right.
[Answer]
The basics:
* Is that device constructed in a way to be easy to reverse engineering?
Answer on Your question is an answer to this. If device was projected to be easy to understand and manipulate by modern humans then sure. If was desined to prevent any understanding then no way.
Imagine: modern calculator - not possible to ancient egyptians. But if make it with electron(vaccum) tubes and give power source from lead/sulfur wet battery then is possible to reverse this by them.
[Answer]
**Difficult, but not impossible**
The most important part of reverse engineering would be a simple fact that such function (creating traversable wormholes for example) is actually possible. When you know that something is possible the rest is just a matter of resources and time. Our physics models don't support wormholes? Well, we will update those models. We KNOW they are possible after all.
So even the knowledge of existance of such device would be enough for use to reverse engineer it. It would definitely take time, but it would happen eventually. Having actual device would naturally help in solving this problem. But how long it would take us depends on the complexity of the device. It could take centuries (or more).
But even before we finish with reverse engineering, we could benefit from that device. If it uses some interesting materials then we could increase our material science level. Or we could get some insights into power source which would accelerate our understanding of physics (and we would sooner or later crack it, which would probably be a bigger thing for humanity then wormhole generator).
[Answer]
**Very Hard**
If you want the device to be reverse-engineered, then I suggest your aliens designed the device that way. They made it surprisingly easy for other intelligent peoples to make their own, even without fully understanding it. The other peoples might not be aware of this.
[Answer]
We have instrumentation that can determine the composition of materials (at least the non-exotic stuff). It would be easiest if small samples can be removed without effecting functionality, but isn't always necessary.
Determining the composition is only the first step, of course. We are aware of a great many chemical formulas for substances that we can't always synthesize (sort of the reason we don't yet have a space elevator). Assuming there are no challenges in that regard though, then the next challenge...
Duplicating components. We can likely duplicate the shape of any component down to some pretty insane tolerances. However, we'd likely back off on those and produce them to more reasonable tolerances first. If those were to fail, (because a part is too wide or too narrow by 1/1000th of an inch), would we be able to tell that it was because of the loose tolerance? If the answer is yes, then we'd simply spend more money/time and do it right. But with the science unclear, it may not be possible to realize that.
And before you jump up and shout "But that wouldn't matter", I suggest that things like the Casimir effect could very well rely on parts being exactly the right size (on down to a few extra or a few missing atoms being critical).
Then, there are things like ICs. We could easily recreate a silicon wafer (or even more exotic substrates) without being able to etch out the pattern on the thing (and for that matter, even if we were able to etch out the pattern... we mass produce those things because some percentage of them are just garbage from the start and we keep the good ones). Photolithography is just an example, there are other processes like this that are every bit as challenging to perform, and presumably a few interesting ones that we're ignorant of even as possibilities. You can know what a thing is made of, know the exact size and shape of it, be able to make that, and still the final product could be elusive because afterward you're manipulating just a few dozen atoms on its surface (or hell, with beyond-human technology, maybe even deep in its center).
Then, we must consider that even if you get all of those right, we have machines of our own that require some sort of priming or initialization. How do you "boot it up"? If the prototype already had that performed, it then works, but our exact duplicate, down to the atom, might still not do anything at all. If that wasn't required though...
At the end of this, you now have a second device, a reproduction that works. It doesn't necessarily give you any insight into *why* it works. That is a separate process. It of course helps to be able to describe the device to the theoreticians in this level of detail, and it is now possible to experiment with the devices if that will further elucidate. My tentative answer to the question is "yes", in that sense.
[Answer]
These will be my steps
Step 1: Understand the structure of the device
Step 2: Understand the composition of this device
For Step 1:
If we break it or do something like MRI on this device (if this device does not get affected by magnetic radiation)
For Step 2:
The composition of this device is a bit complicated assume that a nomad civilization gets a engine that is using a special fuel that is not known by that civilization. it is difficult to generate those fuels.
[Answer]
## Your device is a terminal
The device you have is not the mechanism, it is simply an interface to some other **Machinery** that does the actual work of creating the wormhole.
### Device internals
The device is a fairly large, sixties-era discrete transistor-, capacitor-, resistor- and inductor-based analog computer terminal, with lots of internal parts and paths that do not seem to serve any practical purpose. You can take it apart and measure the components, put it back together, and it will continue to operate.
As a result, it is time-consuming, but not particularly difficult to build a reasonable replica, and if you're not too far off in the properties of the components, it will function identically to the original.
### How does it work?
The **Terminal** does not actually do anything by itself. The commands you enter into it result in a very specific pattern of disturbances in the electromagnetic field. This pattern is then picked up by the actual **Machinery**.
### What does the actual work?
The **Machinery** can be a godlike machine located elsewhere, or simply be a hidden feature of the universe-simulation we all live in. Its purpose (or one of them) is to listen to **Wormhole Terminals**, and create the appropriate wormholes when requested, if creating such a wormhole is reasonably safe. (this last bit may also save your characters from accidentally destroying the earth as they mess around with the **Terminal**)
### Can we reverse engineer it?
Through trial and error, you may be able to find parts of the **Terminal** that can be simplified or eliminated, without affecting the function, though the fact that there is a margin for error to begin with, might lead you into dead ends. It is likely that over time, smaller, lighter, cheaper and less power-hungry versions of the **Terminal** will be designed, but actually characterizing the pattern that makes it interact with the **Machinery** will be extremely difficult.
]
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[Question]
[
The setting is post apocalyptic wastelands. The use of nuclear weapons has resulted in the creation of mutations, the most deadly of which are the lizards. The antagonist devises a technology that allows him to control the mutations.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KRpi4.jpg) Click to enlarge ([source](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UqNilepOkac/VlyBL8cLYkI/AAAAAAAA2Q4/4gENdXBZzPk/s1600/12291946_1561596660749133_2528296545012397210_o.jpg))
The humans are all housed in a large citadel protected by high walls but obviously the high walls are not going to be a good defense against the lizards, as they can simply climb up. So, what defenses can the humans develop to protect themselves ?
Key Points:
* The humans lack any new technology and their weapons are medieval quality (swords, spears and such).
* Due to the apocalypse, all advanced scientific knowledge has been lost.
* The antagonist does not create the new technology but rather discovers it by accident.
* Guns, missiles or any explosives are not available as they have been destroyed. [They were outlawed after the nuclear apocalypse]
* The citadel is surrounded by barren wasteland.
* The citadel does have a cache of wood and various metals that the citizens have been collecting for a long time.
[Answer]
# Broken glass, spikes, barbed wire, pits:
Your obvious defense is to embed the surfaces of your walls with anything that renders the walls too unpleasant to climb.
1. **Broken Glass**: Your world, unlike the medieval one, will likely have a large supply of glass, broken or otherwise. Most lizards who climb need a smooth surface to climb, and a glass-studded one isn't smooth. The glass is sharp, and slices your lizards quite badly. Unless they have armor, they're going to get hurt - badly.
2. **Barbed Wire**: To keep animals out, what do people use now? Loops and bundles of rusty barbed wire are probably all over the place. Even a BIG lizard entangled in a mass of barbed wire will be suffering cruelly. They would likely become consumed with escape or dealing with their suffering until they bled to death.
3. **Spikes**: Large wooden spikes driven into the ground or bundled into obstacles will stab into your lizards and puncture organs, limbs, lungs, etc. If they can jump obstacles, the places they can jump to are covered in spikes they will land on and impale themselves upon. Nails sticking out of every surface will rip, tear, puncture and maim (and old nails should be similarly abundant in your world).
4. **Pit traps**: Ditches work too. All these defenses can be applied to a network of open or concealed pits surrounding your defenses. Lizards fall in, but they don't climb out. impaling spikes at the bottom, bundles of barbed wire to entangle them, glass fragments lining the walls. If your lizards are REALLY big, the spikes can angle inward and downward, so the lizard has to climb through a hole to get out that is functionally smaller than the one they fell into...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/65LTJ.png)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/S1Fex.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AbWA0.png)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0J4f4.png)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q67XN.png)
[Answer]
Your lizards appear to have clawed feet rather than gecko-like pads, so if the walls of the citadel are dressed and or built such that there are no handy claw-holds, it will be hard for the lizards to climb. In case they do have sticky pads, maybe a good supply of oil to pour down the walls will make them slippery and have the same effect.
Most lizards are not good in water (with the exception of specifically aquatic lizards), so a wide deep moat around the foot of the wall will also impede the lizards.
The citizens can presumably build/use bows and or cross-bows. Shoot the critters.
A *large* supply of heavy rocks stored on the battlements will come in handy - dropping (no need to throw as gravity will provide the momentum) rocks on top of a lizard when it is half way up the wall will swat it most satisfactorily.
If you have any of that slippery-wall oil left, then set light to it and pour it down the walls - crispy lizards ensue.
Long spears can be used to poke lizards from above. They don't like being poked. If the spear has a barbed shaft then the lizards cant climb up it (but of course you can always drop the spear if it appears to be succeding at that tactic).
Lizards have teeth and claws, so you can arm your citizens with long swords, which are sharper, harder, and have longer reach. So long as you train your citizens, they should come out ahead.
And most important of all - on the assumption that your survivors know who the antagonist is, and where he/she lives - send out sneaky bunches of ninjas, assassins, poisoners, thuggees, hit-people, suicide squads, or whatever else you can come up with, to kill the person controlling the mutants. Antagonist dead - problem solved.
[Answer]
**Hatch**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTtQdm.png)
The citadel was not built by the apocalypse survivors. It was found.
The citadel used to be a military outpost. The builders put walls so the baddies could not *just walk in*. They also built a bunker behind the walls, so they can hide when the baddies fly their planes with their bombs and their guns.
Maybe the bunker is a separate building. Or maybe the whole outpost is underground. I leave it to your imagination.
The apocalypsers are safe from the lizards if they hide in the bunker. The hatch is metal and weighs a ton. Plus there is this turny-wheely-deely that lizards don't know how to use. They have big sharp claws and no thumbs so they cannot open the hatch.
When the lizards attack they all run underground and close the doors. Then they meet up under the same door and open it. When a lizard sticks its head down the hatch they stab it all at once with their spears.
Sometimes a second party sneaks out a different entrance to attack the lizards from two sides.
Sometimes they retreat behind a second hatch, and lock the lizards between the first and second hatch. Then they wait for the lizards to kill each other. Or they fill the compartment up with smoke so they die of smoke.
Either way it is lizard for dinner.
[Answer]
# Biological pest control
You should seek an ecological, wasteland-friendly solution for your problems. If the problems happen to be lizards, then enlist the help of lizard eating friends, such as giant nuclear eagles.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vv6Lo.jpg)
Have a hatchery within the city. Them birdos will perch on the walls and hunt for any lizards that are stupid enough to show their heads or backs around.
[Answer]
**The best defense is a good offense.**
These lizards look hungry. They live in a wasteland. There is not much to eat. Leave out something for them to eat. The something has poison in it.
Lizards might figure out that the pygmy goats you are sending to stumble bleating off into the wasteland are laden with poison. The remaining lizards swear off eating pygmy goat even though they are delicious. They decide to eat the eggs of pug dogs. You poison pug dog eggs now.
Eventually the lizards realize that the only food that is not poisoned is other lizards. They eat each other. The antagnoist begs them to quit that and so they eat only some parts of each other. But without legs the lizards have to live like snakes, and they cannot climb the walls! Pug dogs and pygmy goats and your intrepid people can live in their wasteland fortress in peace!
[Answer]
## Modified HOURDES
The following defense would work on the proviso that your lizards can't climb on/across horizontal surfaces. Since no scale is given I am assuming the animals are quite large i.e. big enough so that one single lizard is a threat to a human like say a wolf or a leopard etc and that the risk does not lie in being 'swarmed; by lots of small animals. Large, non arboreal animals should find it difficult support their own weight on a horizontal surface (like say a gecko) *and* move and fight at the same time.
Below is picture of High Medieval Period defensive measure known in French as a 'Hourde'. Basically they were a defensive fighting platform that could be built in times on need along the top of a castle wall. They were built with hatches in the floor that could be opened so that oil/stones and arrows etc could be used on soldiers attempting to scale the walls. (In the real world they were covered with wet hides to limit the chances of fire damage which isn't going to be a issue in your setting.)
In your setting a fighting platform could be extended out horizontally further than the ones in the picture since you not fighting a medieval army. Ideally by more than the body length of a lizard (minus tail). You also wouldn't need to include hatches in the floor. Just slots like arrow slits in the stone walls *immediately below* the hourde that you could stick spears through into the bodies of the animals as they reached the base of the fighting platform while other fighters on the hourde itself dropped 'stuff' down onto targets at the base of the wall. And of course you can add in lots of the other suggested pitfalls, barriers, moats etc on the ground approaching the wall.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OOwR0.jpg)
[Answer]
## Trenches
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0V8iL.jpg)
Assuming that your lizards are large enough to pose a threat to a human in a physical engagement, your creatures would have to be of significant size. As a result, your lizards would seriously be limited mobility-wise. To capitalize on this, your defenders should focus on creating a choke-point barrier that would force the lizards into close-quarter combat. Doing so would also give the humans the ability to concentrate their attacks.
Assuming that building a moat would not compromise your citadel's structural integrity, building a deep empty trench all the way around the settlement would prove a great challenge for an invading army to penetrate. The lizards, lacking any ranged methods of attack, would be forced to take all the trenches by force. If the trenches were filled with spikes, tar, or fire. "I'm assuming that these lizards could swim, which would make water a no-no." It would take months for an army to clear all the trenches. Months that these poorly supplied lizards don't have.
[Answer]
Poke a bunch of spear-like things horizontally out above the top lip of the wall. They'd be thicker at the base, narrower at the tip. The lizards can't get through at the base (next to the wall) where they're thick and close together, but have to climb out to the thinner sections to go over. Those sections are thin enough that they can't support the weight of a lizard, so they break off and fall.
This might require cross-bars to fill in the gaps before things got too fragile.
A careful lizard could edge out until it could saw or break off a tip, but if they were tilted up a bit then it would expose its belly to defenders that could shoot it full of arrows.
As the spikes are broken off, they can be quickly released and replaced with new ones.
Alternatively, the top level or two of stones in the wall could be made out of (replaceable) compacted dirt. The lizards would race up the wall, then slip and fall when their claws shredded chunks out of the dirt. The outer layer could have gravel embedded to match the lower part of the wall, though this would make it pretty obvious to the second lizard where the problem is.
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Make your walls unclimbable. Ring the top of your walls with some sort of large-diameter cylindrical object (like barrels) laid horizontally, with an axle through the center. Place them close enough together so that there's no way to get between them, a wall climber has to climb over it. So long as you keep the axles well-lubricated, anything attempting to climb over them will remain in the "down" position. Attempting to pull yourself up to a higher position will just rotate the cylinder and you'll be back to where you started. It's like trying to use the outside of a hamster wheel as a ladder: great exercise, but you never actually get anywhere.
This is just a variation on the "[can-and-bucket trap](https://pestkill.org/mice/bucket-trap/)" concept that I've successfully used against mice several times. The general concept scales upwards fairly well, as the cylinder will be more likely to rotate and thus harder to climb as the attacker gets heavier. Being able to grip the surface will merely be the difference between falling off when the cylinder rotates or just hanging there looking like an idiot. Either way, you're not getting past it.
If you're particularly mean-spirited, have your walls bow slightly outward at the top. Place large, flat blades just underneath the cylinders, mounted horizontally and almost touching the bottom edge of the cylinder. When the climber attempts to pull themselves upwards and the barrel rotates against them, one of two things will happen. Either they maintain their grip and the momentum of the rotating barrel sends their feet directly into the blades (crippling that foot, or at least making further climbing painful), or they release their grip and fall off the wall.
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### Smell
During the war a lot of stuff burned down leaving behind a putrid tar. This tar is constantly spread on the walls. Not very nice to live in a place surrounded by burnt smell, but it is a trade off for security. In any case in this world there will be a lot of empty space, so the walls perimeter can be very long and allow to have inside a gap between the wall and the habitable zone.
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**Be in a cold area**
The cold sucks to be in, but it's worse for cold-blooded creatures such as reptiles
This strategy worked well with the Soviet Union during WW2 against warm-blooded germans, so it'll most likely work against (hopefully) cold-blooded lizards.
Be in northern North America, Greenland, or Northern Eurasia for the best anti-lizard defense, or Antarctica if you want.
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The barrel idea by bta seemed the best so far (for defense). But defending is not even close to good enough. A good defense is an overwhelming offense.
I say, eat lizard. Make it a requirement that lizard is part of the common diet or people have to go out and get lizard. Use all of the above to kill lizards which are either bothering or not bothering your city. Go on the offensive. Groups of hunters, with rocks, slings, spears, traps, snares, whatever, attack the lizards and kill them and bring them back into the city for harvesting of them. Eat lizard. Become skilled lizard hunters. Over time your lizard hunters should get better at it. If this is a game with points for experience, then award experience to the survivors of each lizard hunt.
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Would it be possible for a spaceship of some sort to descend from space and through the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet, *not* land, then turn around and head back into space? In other words, could it move freely between space and the Earth-like planet's atmosphere without the inconvenience of having to land?
As far as I'm aware, no such technology as would be required for such a maneuver has been invented by humans. So I'm wondering: if this is possible at all, exactly what technology *would* be required?
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# Can a spaceship enter atmosphere and exit without landing?
**Sure it can. It's called...**
## [Aerobraking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobraking)
This technique is actually used to make re-entry safer in some circumstances. Basically, entering deep atmosphere at too high a speed is rather destructive, as the heat becomes unmanageable. If an object returns from afar and its orbital velocity is too high, it can enter the outer layers of the atmosphere to deliberately experience air drag and lose speed. The object will lose some speed and exit the atmosphere again, at lower velocity. This can be used to shed velocity for safe entry.
**It can also be used to "capture" the object. Then it's called...**
## [Aerocapture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerocapture)
Basically, it's a case where aerobreaking is used to reduce the velocity enough to turn a flyby at hyperbolic trajectory into capturing in an elliptic orbit.
# However, this is not what you want.
**What you want can't be done with our technology, and it doesn't seem like we are getting the required tech any time soon.**
**If you want a flyby near the surface, then it's not possible with present technology.** You pretty much need functional spaceplanes to do it. Air at the surface is thick and causes a lot of drag; if you reach the surface too fast, you will burn. To get anywhere near the surface, you need to lose enough velocity to perform atmospheric flight. Orbital speed at LEO (Low Earth Orbit) is about 7800 m/s. For comparison, the SR-71 Blackbird barely reached 1000 m/s and had very serious heating concerns.
Basically, to reach the surface with orbital velocities, you need incredibly resistant heatshields and incredibly powerful engines. Your only other option is to shed so much velocity that you can treat the return to orbit as starting from the ground.
**It's actually MORE of a hassle to reach the surface at high velocity than it is to land and take off again.**
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Entering and exiting the atmosphere as part of reentry has been done since the 1968 with the Russian [Zond 6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zond_6) lunar probe. This technique, called [skip reentry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_reentry), involves entering the atmosphere at a shallow angle so that the spacecraft is pushed back out of the atmosphere one or more times before reentry.
Transitioning from orbital velocities (7.79 km/s) to controlled atmospheric flight (600 m/s) burns off so much energy that you're effectively having to relaunch for each transition back to orbit. This is highly impractical.
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I remember looking into this when I played way too much Kerbal Space Program and got sufficiently involved that I installed the fully realistic version of the game.
The accepted answer regarding aerobreaking is pretty good and covers the basics, but there's some more stuff going on that I can elaborate on and I'd like to. That answer's assertion that the technology doesn't exist yet is true, but there's also some really exciting technology on the horizon and this answer will rundown some of the methods that you'd need to do some of the things you want.
## Context - What is High Altitude Flight?
Broadly, entering and leaving an atmosphere are synonymous with flying through it at any height and altitude you want. So, let's define a few terms.
The first thing is the speed of sound in air, called Mach. Usually around 330m/s but it varies with temperature and pressure. Mach 1 refers to flying at the speed of sound.
When flying at the speed of sound, the way air behaves changes and this results in the air compressing for the first time. When it compresses it heats up. Were the heat to touch the surface of a craft, it could melt the craft. Spacecraft during re-entry are specifically built (not entirely true, but close enough) NOT to fly. They don't cut through the air like a plane, they do it with a very unaerodynamic surface that creates a bow-shock that keeps the heat away from the craft. Therefore, at the moment, all re-entries don't entirely count as controlled (again, not entirely true, but good enough for now). Even the space shuttle doesn't enter like an aircraft, it enters at a 40 degree angle to the flight direction until it slows down safely enough to fly. The fastest flying plane (the SR-71 Blackbird) only got up to Mach 2 and that had to be built so that it leaked fuel on the ground to allow heat expansion caused by flying at high speed.
Orbital speed is about Mach 25ish, a long way past Mach 2. Attain that in the atmosphere and you stop flying and start lifting because you're actually orbiting. The good news from Kerbal Space Program is that, if you could fly into orbit within the atmosphere (Kerbin, the Earth-like planet in KSP only has an escape velocity of Mach 8, so this is easily doable), you can get into orbit with ridiculously low amounts of fuel. It's probably the most fuel efficient way to get there and it would probably also work on the Earth, but there are lots of problems to solve, which I'll come back to later.
First, however, I also have to talk about the atmosphere, because that's also important. For one thing, the atmosphere is thickest near the surface but the density of the atmosphere drops off exponentially the further you go away from the earth. This is both good and bad.
It's bad, because less atmosphere means less lift and less air for the engines to use. This sets a high ceiling on what's safe for aircraft to fly. The height for jet engines to keep in mind is about 26km. After that, there's not enough air to keep flying.
The good thing, however, is that there's also less air to cause drag and cause heating effects. Get high enough up into the atmosphere and you can go faster. Go faster and you can scoop up more air for use in your engines, keeping the effective density high enough to fly. We can't do this yet, but it can be done.
Because air density falls off exponentially, it's hard to say where the atmosphere finishes. The International Space Station is technically orbiting inside the Earth's atmosphere, but isn't really for most practical purposes. The number to think of for most purposes seems to be 100km.
## Reframing the Problem
So, your question is nearly identical to - how to I get a plane to fly at speeds between Mach 2-25 at altitudes of 26km or above?
Well, the answer is that we can't, but we're working on it.
## Jet Engines and Beyond
Jet engines work on a single principle that air speeds up as it is compressed below Mach 1 and then speeds up as it expands, leaving the jet engine at greater than Mach 1. This different behaviour below and above the Mach line is what causes the jet engine to work. Jet engines do this by sucking air in, compressing it and then heating it, spewing it out the back.
In theory, you'd think that the jet engine ceases to work functionally at speeds greater than Mach 1, but you'd be wrong. Air slows down as it enters the engine, compressing and heating itself. The effect becomes so pronounced that, were you to get up to high speeds, the turbine part of the jet engine becomes unnecessary. Air is getting sucked in and heated up anyway, you just need to add fuel and let it burn.
This type of engine is called a Ramjet and, well, we've kinda built them, because the SR-71's engines actually worked that way past a certain speed. Basically, you stick the afterburners on and the engine works, with the turbines acting as drag.
This works so well that there's a real problem. The engine overheats from the air coming in above a certain velocity and the engine explodes. This is bad. However, a British team, in trying to develop a hybrid rocket/jet engine called the SABRE have solved this and can super-cool the air and recycle the heat into the fuel, allowing jet engines to push up to a theoretical Mach 4/5. (The super-cooler exists, the engine doesn't yet, but funding has been approved, search Reaction Engines, because it's awesome.)
Above Mach 4/5, something happens to the air coming in. The air stops slowing down enough to flow below the speed of sound and instead the whole airflow is faster than the speed of sound. We go from a Ramjet to a Scramjet.
Scramjets work on the fact that the air coming in is being compressed and heating up, like in the Ramjet, so adding fuel causes it to expand more and give more thrust. It's not as efficient as a Ramjet, but good enough and is better then a rocket engine until you hit Mach 10, in theory.
Research in Scramjets is ongoing. Of the Scramjets known to exist, NASA/US Military have built one. Because of the nature of the research, it's military sensitive and therefore no one knows what happened or if it was successful. Also, the internet knows that the Chinese do not have one and did not complete tests recently (so don't ask, OK?). These seems to show speeds of Mach 6 and that the tech is possible, though why it's not being used to make cheap ICBMs is anyone's guess.
Finally, it's worth mentioning rocket engines, which carry their own reaction mass, so don't need to grab it from the atmosphere. These work (approximately) as well where-ever they are used (though the more atmosphere you have, the worse the thrust out the back is).
## Flying High
So, the biggest problem with flying fast is heat and also dynamic pressure. Dynamic pressure is what the air exerts on the aircraft as it goes through it. The number to keep in your head, which is why the Space Shuttle launch system actually gets throttled back during launch, is 70,000 KPascal. More then this, you get lovely things like aerodynamical failure (aka the polite KSP term for the wings ripped off). This is bad.
You can derive that using really simple physics using a momentum transfer argument (which I invite you to either do or search for) and you'll notice it related to density, so flying fast in the upper atmosphere is not so much of a problem (though you do get heating because it's faster than the speed of sound up there).
In the lower atmosphere, it's incredibly bad and flying at close to Mach 1 close to the ground in KSP got me to 40,000kPascals near the ground (and wings ripping off, did I mention the wings ripping off?). Higher up, Mach 4/5 was not a problem.
The faster you fly, the more heat you generate and the faster you need to fly to maintain air-pressure in your engines. At the moment, heat dissipation inside engines far outstrips the ability of engines to cope with them. Since that's being solved, after that, it seems like heat to the airframe is the next problem (Mach 4-6) and both of these limit the speed at which you can go and also the height (since you can't fly fast enough to get enough air into the engines to go higher).
For this reason, the Skylon Concept, based off the Reaction Engines SABRE hybrid engine, flies up to 26km at Mach 4/5 and makes like a rocket after that.
Beyond Mach 6. I don't think anyone really knows what happens to airflow. Except NASA. They get up to those speeds on launches. But there's some odd things happening such as when supersonic air boundaries collide (this causes the rocket exhaust, which is like a jet of super-fast air, coming out behind the rocket, to widen, because it's interacting with the shock cone of air from the rocket's nose). In a feasibility study of the Skylon, the only problem NASA found with the design was that, with the engines in the middle of the craft, the rocket plumes could expand and cook the tail of the aircraft at greater then Mach 12, though a small bit of rejigging of the engine position could get the Skylon past that, but with worse control.
So, in terms of aircraft that are in the near-future pipeline, the Skylon's design is controlled flight below 26km, but at Mach 4/5, and rocketed flight beyond, which is an improvement on anything that exists. However, also the proposed SR-72 is supposed to be Scramjet driven and no one knows what it's specs will be (or whether it will be built), but if it does work and fly (remember Scramjets need a minimum of about Mach 4 to work), it will be the fastest and highest plane ever to exist.
Also worth mentioning is the Virgin Galactic plane, which uses a two stage system, with cheap, commercial flight up to a ceiling and then a rocket component from there on. Thanks to the system being two stage, the weight considerations of having two engine systems don't matter (weight considerations mean that carrying two engines is extremely uneconomical in most cases).
## Re-entry
OK, this is maybe a personal opinion from playing too much KSP, but we're doing re-entry all wrong. So, I wrote that it's perfectly fine to fly up in the higher atmosphere and, well, it seems to work for me - if I have fuel.
I mentioned that all current re-entries use a bow-shock system. This causes the heat compression wave of super-high Mach speeds to stay away from touching the aircraft. This stops the aircraft from melting and, worse, exploding.
The reason this is done is that it's really, really hard to get fuel into space, so most space-craft are landing without any fuel on board. This means they're all effectively gliders.
If you have the technology for advanced spaceflight (which we'll assume for this section), you really don't want to do that. In fact, it's super-easy to make a flying transition in or even use lots of air-brakes (which again space-craft don't carry because of weight). I designed lots of space-planes in KSP that did just that and even managed to do it with a Skylon prototype in super-realism mode when it didn't quite get up to orbital speed, but close (I never did get into orbital on super-realism mode with a space-plane, I was always a Mach number or two short, make of that what you will).
I'm going to guess that the realistic way for now is purely done that way because of weight considerations and that the bow-shock method is the safest and best *gliding* method to use when every kilo counts (which is does with rockets). (I never could safely pull off a gliding re-entry even on the forgiving Kerbin Earth-analogue, that wasn't bow-shocked and these have to be steep to avoid bouncing off the atmosphere in the initial stages.)
If you have any thrust left on re-entry (preferably in rocket fuel, that doesn't need the atmosphere to generate thrust) and some wing-span, you can easily skip over the outer surface of the atmosphere, bleeding speed off gently until you fall into safe flight regimes for entering the lower atmosphere (I did this a lot when I missed the space center on re-entry). However, you might want to take this section with a bit more skepticism than the others.
## The Shape of Things - Aircraft Design
Something that's also known, if you get into aircraft design, is that air-craft designs vary based on what speed the aircraft is designed to fly at (the flight regime).
If you see a glider, that's the optimal shape for low-speed flight. Big, wide straight wings and a body that's even vaguely aerodynamic will do.
Commercial aircraft are good designs for aircraft flying at speeds less than Mach 1 but close to it. These involve big, slightly canted and slightly swept back wings.
Super-sonic aircraft have to have very swept profiles to dissipate heating and pressure during super-sonic flight and are very sleek.
Hyper-sonic aircraft like to look like rockets, more or less, with very little in the way of wings and these so swept back as to avoid heat and pressure issues, with the body also extremely sleek and ballistic.
The problem with designing spaceplanes is that you have to design a plane that can take off and land (so flying really slowly and at low altitude), fly a super-sonic speeds and make like a rocket.
The Concorde was an example of how to fly at low and super-sonic speeds and the design was so bad at low altitude flight that, was it not for a trick involving delta wings, the thing could never have landed at a commercial airport (this accounts for its super-sized forward landing gear).
As it is, most military super-sonic jets require longer runways to take off and land on, so that the plane can get up to speed before taking off, and will use parachutes for braking.
The Skylon design, for example, is so bad at flying it needs a 3km runway and will have a water cooling system for braking if it has to abort, that's how fast it'll be going on the ground and how bad it is at flying at low speeds.
In this one way, flying into the atmosphere and flying back out is actually easier than designing aircraft for use in all the atmosphere, since you don't have to worry about pesky lift issues for landing/take-off and you can keep a profile of very small and swept back wings ideal for flight at high speeds. Or, you could use a self-lifting body, like NASA did for the Scramject test.
## Conclusion
We can't do a lot of this stuff, but we're working on it. It's exciting and so check life for progress...
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Landing on the surface of Venus would be fatal, but floating above the surface in a Zeppelin style blimp has been discussed as a means of visiting. The clouds of sulfuric acid complicate things, but on an earth-like planet, the steps would be relatively straightforward.
1. Enter atmosphere as usual
2. Use atmosphere to slow vehicle to appropriate flight speed - [requires maneauvers](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/landing101.html)
3. Begin inflating blimp portion of spacecraft
4. Direct spacecraft upwards into a stall as the blimp reaches full capacity
The timing would be important, as would the materials and shape of the spacecraft. The part we haven't done before - deployment and rapid inflation of a blimp - is much less complicated than building a spacecraft.
With current propulsion technology, the fuel required to get to space is heavy enough that a spacecraft must refuel every time. Additionally, the blimp will have limited means of steering, so the utility of not landing is questionable, but perhaps the floor is lava.
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If you have energy to spare, sure.
If the vehicle can support itself against gravity on thrust alone for extended periods of time, it can do this with no fancy maneuvers. That just takes lots of continuous thrust. I wouldn't try it with a reaction drive though since that sort of maneuver will get expensive. It would be easier if you have a reactionless drive like: impulse drive (Star Trek), inertialess (Lensman), magnetic repulsion (lots of '50s aliens), or some other science fiction drive. Otherwise, you are limited by the amount of reaction mass you can carry.
Another thing that would help would be a way of minimizing G forces inside the ship. That makes speed changes more comfortable/survivable.
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In very simple terms, it's much easier to exit the atmosphere if you *don't* land.
In order to leave a planet's gravity you need speed - if you enter the atmosphere from orbit then of course you will slow down from drag, but may well still retain a lot of velocity, making it easier to accelerate up to exit velocity. If you land, then you'll have to start again from scratch (although of course once you're on the ground, then refuelling might be a possibility).
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Going strictly off of your original question without knowledge of your comments specify more, then yes it's possible, and yes we probably do have the technology right now to do it.
If you look at Blue Origin's New Shepherd rocket, it's designed to burn straight up until it's apogee is above the limit of space, release the crew capsule, and then coast until it starts to fall back to earth, and then do a landing burn before touching the ground.
If they were to modify the rocket a bit, add more thrust to the engines, and a LOT more fuel, they could fly the entire rocket up until it makes it into space, fall back down, and instead of landing, just keep burning and head back up and do it again, and potentially come back and land.
Doing this however would be the equivalent of a billionaire taking out all his money in cash, and deciding instead of doing anything useful with the money, just light a match and watch it burn away.
The only reason for Jeff Bezos to do a thing like this would be to break the record for most expensive "Fuck you Musk, we did it first because we can!" in the world.
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One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is an [inflatable heat shield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Inflatable_heat_shield_reentry).
You don't say much about what you're trying to *do* with your non-landing spacecraft, but an inflatable (or just a straight-up detachable) heat shield could be used to bring a fully-fueled rocket/spaceplane into the atmosphere, aerobrake it to some kind of manageable atmospheric speed, detach the dead, useless mass of the heat shield, then allow it to accelerate out of the atmosphere again.
This is strictly a single-shot solution, but it could conceivably, for example, be used to drop a rescue craft into an atmosphere, pick up a stranded operative using a [Fulton recovery device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system) then quickly winch the operative aboard and get back into space without needing a launchpad.
It's not a ride I'd like to take, it's not reusable and it ain't gonna come cheap, but it's something almost workable...
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Yes it can by building a 4 edge or 2 edge triggering system to maintain the atmospheric pressure along the spaceship. Then it can act as a shuttle by providing enough pressure inside the bridge, allowing it to act as a both outbound and inbound spaceship
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My story takes place on a hot desert planet that is a colony. At some point people are out in a very hot and inhospitable area of the desert. Dust storms, high heat, constant wind, etc.
Characters have tech that allows them to access the planetary network via satellite. But I'd like them to be out there and get isolated without access - to be truly disconnected.
I assume that a heavy storm with blowing sand and lots of dust in the air would affect things, but what about on a normal day with no severe storm?
I had thought about having this part of the planet have some natural way to interfere. Possibly a magnetic field or something.
I'm not sure if that would work, looking for ideas.
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# I can give you 2 technical reasons why there could be no reception in your designated desert.
## 1) Low population, concentrated in few areas.
**This variant leads to GPS and communications being available only in relatively small areas where people actually live.**
Did you know that Japan has it's own [GPS-equivalent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System)? It's made of just 4 satellites (planned total of 7). It's designed to service Japan, system working for any nearby regions is a bonus, but not a design requirement.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmFRg.jpg)
Image shows path drawn by geosynchronous satellites, overlaid on map of region over earth.
>
> The primary purpose of QZSS is to increase the availability of GPS in Japan's numerous urban canyons, where only satellites at very high elevation can be seen. A secondary function is performance enhancement, increasing the accuracy and reliability of GPS derived navigation solutions.
>
>
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It is perfectly plausible that newly settled planet, with just a few cities near landing site and farmland concentrated around those cities would opt to deploy similar sized constellation for local needs instead of going all out on full constellation of 30-40 satellites.
## 2) Planetary magnetic field insufficient to shield satellites above Low Earth Orbit equivalent.
**This variant leads to lack of space based positioning or communication systems.**
Local star being [active](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection) or possessing strong [stellar wind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_wind)is going to be detrimental to longevity of satellites, especially those outside of planetary magnetosphere. If planetary magnetosphere does not extend to planet-synchronous orbit (Earth's magnetosphere is large enough to cover Geosynchronous orbit), then deploying satellite network might be effectively unfeasible for new colony. Any GPS-equivalent or communications network relying on Low Planetary Orbit (Low Earth Orbit equivalent) would require constellations measuring in thousands to provide global reach. Any GPS-equivalent relying on synchronous orbits outside of magnetosphere would have to have satellites especially hardened against radiation, mandating larger electronics (physically larger transistors are less susceptible to damage by charged particles), more error robust correction (bit flipping due to high-energy charged particles is even more serious concern), heavier radiative shielding, sturdier and larger antennae (for better noise-to-signal ratio) and so on. All of those increase weight, which is very non-trivial, assuming [spaceflight isn't casual](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CasualInterstellarTravel) in your world, potentially leading to decision of ditching space based solutions entirely, in favour for old-school radio and radio beacons, with some mobile networks and high-speed intercity cables mixed in.
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Forget interference knocking out your GPS system - see below for the reasoning.
If your navigation equipment doesn't work, then it is for something more mundane.
* Crewman "Butterfingers" McClutz dropped a box of heavy supplies on the GPS receivers and the spare batteries. Crushed them all, with a truly impressive bunch of sparks and fire as the lithium-based batteries self-destructed due to the mishandling.
* Crewman "Wrongway Feldmann" got lost in a sandstorm and was never found again - presumed dead and buried under a sand dune. Unfortunately, he was carrying the portable solar charging system. Once the batteries run out, you are down to navigating by the sun and the stars.
* Dockworker "Joe Don't Giveadamn" didn't bother loading the crate with your navigation gear before you started out because it was too heavy and he was due for a smoke break - but he did pencil whip the checklist so everyone **thought** the navigation equipment was on board.
* Your equipment was bought from the local equivalent of "Alibaba." It worked fine during testing, but in actual use you find that the batteries all quit working after only a couple of days - they have non-rechargeable primary cells instead of the rechargeable cells they were supposed to have.
* The local "camel" equivalent likes the flavor of the plastic used in the housings of your equipment, and ate it all one night - incidentally destroying the electronics.
* Straight up sabotage - somebody **wants** your group to die in the desert, and has done something to either destroy the navigation equipment or make it mislead you.
While we're at it, forget ideas like "the satellites have worked for millennia." The satellites have to be replaced and maintained in any usable system.
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What most folks don't realize is, is that GPS signals are **extremely** immune to interference. The reason the GPS data rate is so low is because of all the things done to ensure that you can receive a usable signal under really bad conditions - and these conditions include intentional jamming.
An open desert is just about the ideal place to use GPS - nothing blocks your view of the sky. You have a fairly decent signal all the time. GPS only really has trouble in craggy areas - be it real canyons or the so called "urban canyon" effect where the city buildings block the signal.
Despite incidents of bad "solar weather" since the system went into service, GPS hasn't had any large scale, long lasting drop outs over large areas.
So, forget about bad reception in the desert. Ain't a problem if your future engineers are half as good as the guys back in the 1960s and 1970s who designed and built our current system. The design goal back then was 100 meter accuracy for civilian use and 10 meter accuracy for military use - and then they delivered 10 meter accuracy for civilian and 1 meter accuracy for military use. And then to top it off, other engineers added further processing to make it possible to use GPS receivers for surveying with accuracy down to single centimeters.
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Poor software design, and choices that you later regret.
We have real examples. Remember the Y2K bug? Did you know GPS has a mini-version of that bug, that affected lots of devices in **April 6, 2019**?
That's because GPS satellites uses ten bits to represent datetimes in their broadcasts. They can only represent timespans of about 1,024 weeks. So starting from whatever date and time they consider zero, they can count up to nineteen years and a few months. For comparison, modern softwares like nowadays browsers use 64 bits to represent date and time. Most of Microsoft's software can handle dates from [00:00:00 in January 1, gregorian year 1](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.datetime.minvalue?view=netframework-4.8) to [23:59:59.9999999 UTC, December 31, gregorian year 9999](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.datetime.maxvalue?view=netframework-4.8).
GPS was designed to use only ten bits for dates and times because it is cretaciously old, for computer standards - it was released in 1973. And the system has been working well enough, and devices get obsolete fast enough that people would rather reset the "datetime zero" every nineteen years rather than fix this "flaw". They've had plenty of opportunity - [the oldest GPS satellite in operation was launched in 1997](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Timeline_and_modernization). It would be pretty easy to add more bits to the datetime - each bit doubles the span of dates that can be represented. But no one wants to fix what is not broken.
Prior to April 6, 2019, the "date zero" for GPS was August 21, 1999. On April 6, 2019, all devices that could not update their software started thinking they were receiving satellite broadcasts from that "date zero". And broadcasts from April 7, 2019 were processed as being from August 22, 1999. April 8, 2019 was understood as August 23, 1999 and so on. At best the affected devices would show wrong dates in their user interface, but mostly they ignored the GPS broadcasts after comparing the broadcast date with their own internal clock. Ignoring all GPS broadcasts means you cannot get a reading so you won't know where you are.
And you know what kind of devices could not be updated? Think TomTom and Garmin handheld GPS devices that have no Wifi connectivity and no USB port, and which some people love to use when doing tourism because they won't learn how to use an Android or iPhone.
Devices like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B5idr.jpg)
And even when they do have the port or connectivity to update, the company will force users to buy new hardware or be left without updates. [This happened in 2018](https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/29/16945806/tomtom-gps-navigation-update-older-devices).
---
Now imagine your characters in the desert planet. The planet has a satellite network that worked fine for some period - maybe millenia, maybe even longer eras. It just happens that the satellites have hit the maximum date they will hold in their memory. At the next tick, they will reset to their date zero and start counting from there.
Worse, their date zero is out of the range your characters' devices can use. And they don't have access to the satellites control system, or maybe updating their dates will cause something else to fail. And the only place where you can buy new hardware is a few star systems away. Your characters may develop some hatred towards IT professionals from the past.
Don't want to get too technical with programming and binary code? Just say some bug happened that is causing issues.
Or use something else to make the satellites dysfunctional. Maybe they require a password that you don't have. Maybe a prank went wrong and the satellites have been trying to calculate the last digit of Pi for millenia. Maybe the poles of the planet shifted and the compasses on the satellites aren't handling it well, so they are pointing their dish antennae to the wrong hemisphere.
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This is going to be the most mundane solution to the problem that you're going to get, but it could be as simple as static electricity.
Deserts are hot dry environments across which winds can whip up quite easily. These conditions actually make them ideal static electricity generators and it's said that [dust storms are strengthened](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/static-electricity-strengthens-desert-dust-storms) in the desert because of it.
Of course, static electricity can also [damage your electronic devices](https://www.empoweredglobalinc.com/static-electricity-affects-electronics/) so put the two together and you have a perfectly plausible reason for why your crew were cut off in the middle of the desert; their devices failed because of a static electricity event.
I've never used a smartphone or other device in a desert, but I'd imagine that's not the only issue you might face. Sand in the charging port would be problematic as well, and if you have it out at the right time I really don't know how even minor sand blasting impacts a AMOLED screen but I'm guessing it can't be good for the device.
Important safety tip when you get right down to it; if you're navigating by GPS in the desert, always remember to properly earth your camel.
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I once stood at the middle of [Uyuni salt flat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni), which is a 10,000 km2 flat surface 3 km above sea level. It was daytime and I had just replaced the batteries for my Garmin hand GPS (this was in 2011). I hold it still for a few minutes and then check the screen. It has a message that reads more or less like this: "Satellite signal is too weak, please go to open space." I look around, see the salt flat extending dozens of kilometers in every direction. I look up, not a single cloud in the sky. I reply to the device: "Bitch, we are at the openest space in the world!"
A few years later, attending to a workshop in [INPE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Space_Research), I am told that South America is the only place in the world that has what could be translated as "ionic atmospheric poket", which are atmospheric phenomenon that jams electromagnetic signals from GPS. Googling it today, I could not find that particular name the lecturer used, but I found about the [South Atlantic Anomaly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_Anomaly), and [this article](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Investigation-of-ionospheric-scintillation-over-and-Cilliers-Opperman/5e7aebe27f434f29c9b23288765f19dd72b0a410) about its role creating above mentioned ionic pockets.
Having lived there most of my life, I can say GPS signal at South America is much less reliable than in the rest of the world, but it is nothing like a complete jamming of all signals, and my particular problem at Uyuni resolved itself after a few minutes.
That said, its is totally conceivable a planet where such atmospheric anomalies, fueled by the interaction between planetary magnetic field and spatial radiation, would be able to completely block GPS signal over some parts of the planet.
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Due to the uneven [mass concentration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)) of the planet, there are **no stable orbits** in which satellites can be placed which will always be "visible" from the location of your colony.
A stable orbit where the satellite does not require constant station-keeping is called a [frozen orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_orbit). Due to the various mascons, [the gravitational field of Earth's moon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Gravitational_field) is uneven - this means that most "Low Lunar Orbits" are inherently unstable, and in fact only [4 viable orbits have been identified](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_orbit#Lunar_frozen_orbits).
On your planet, there are 2 satellite "blind spots" (on opposite sides of the planet from each other) which result from there being no stable orbit that comes close enough for regular satellite connectivity. There are small periods of time when one or other satellite *may* creep over the horizon - but outside of these, you are effectively cut off
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**Satellite signals are purposefully jammed in this area by the owners of the satellites.**
The desert is territory which is politically hostile to the owners of the satellite system. To prevent persons living in the desert from taking advantage of the satellites (and possibly using their tech against the owners), signals are purposefully jammed by a geostationary satellite over the desert. It is possible to jam GPS signals, and so presumably everything else can be jammed as well.
<https://www.economist.com/international/2013/07/27/out-of-sight>
Or maybe the desert is remote enough that satellites can cease signalling while traversing them then turn back on to serve their home countries.
The one signal your characters can receive is a Voice of America propaganda signal. The rest is squeaky white noise.
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**Solar Storm**
A [solar storm](https://www.space.com/14818-solar-flare-magnetic-storm-satellites.html) can take out satellites as well as disrupt satellite communication.
It could run from a few hours to a few weeks or even destroy the satellite. The [1859 Carrington Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859) caused the telegraph system to shock operators and even continue running after the power was disconnected. The same event today would take out the power grid and block communication.
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You say that even if there are no sandstorms in a "good" day, the desert is always windy.
The answer to your loss of connectivity could be the following:
1. The desert is made of a sand very rich in metallic/conductive compounds.
2. The sand is so fine that when it is raised by winds it keeps floating around for a very long while.
3. There are high-altitude winds that keep a constant veil of sand suspended in air at high altitude.
Therefore, even in a sunny day you have a thin layer of sand floating very high in the sky. Let's call it, for dramatic effect, ***"the Veil"!***
The Veil doesn't affect heat radiation from the sun appreciably, but creates all sorts of scattering effects on incoming electromagnetic waves at the frequencies of the satellite signals, disrupting transmissions severely.
Moreover, since winds are constantly changing, the Veil has constantly changing characteristics. That makes even military grade comm equipment unable to compensate for the scattering. It's not that you are not receiving the signal from the satellites, but it is so garbled from multipath distortion that no portable equipment has the complexity needed to filter out the signal.
In more "urban" areas, where sand is not so abundant (more rocky terrain), the always present Veil is less disruptive, and ground equipment has more computation power to compensate for the distortion using complex computer algorithms. But in that nasty Valley of Death where your characters are stuck, even a small sandstorm could raise so much sand to reinforce the Veil for days in that area!
Moreover, and dunes in that area are big as hills and they are made of conductive sand, so the scattering effects are also worsened by that additional factor. Even if your crew climbs on a tall dune to transmit, the scattering from the "valleys" below will reach their equipment, rendering the tactic not so effective. Not to mention that dunes move with the desert wind, so constantly trying to stay on high ground is a huge effort.
BTW, I just found [an article](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ibrahim_Saleh8/publication/261396714_Effect_of_sand_and_dust_storms_on_microwave_propagation_signals_in_Southern_Libya/links/57e0fcd808aece48e9e339fa/Effect-of-sand-and-dust-storms-on-microwave-propagation-signals-in-Southern-Libya.pdf?origin=publication_detail) about sand storms disrupting communications in southern Lybia. Even if sand is not rich in metallic elements, like in our hypothetical desert, it affects propagation and scattering of EM waves, so it seems my scenario is quite plausible.
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weird location + past war.
say your desert is at some high or low latitude where there just generally aren't a lot of people. the satellite communication network flies at mid to low inclinations where all the people live, but your remote desert colony is out of the way and no/few satellites fly overhead. They COULD pay for a comm sat with a higher inclination orbit, but if they are a poor colony that may not be in the cards for many years.
GEO sats kind of ruin that answer... maybe there's a lot of debris in orbit from a war in the past that make GEO orbits a mess, and all current comm sats are in LEO. Count MEO in this category too for you Molniya fans, all that junk will smash those too. The debris and space junk in the lower orbit all fell back (takes 20 years or less for lower orbits due to atmospheric drag) but the higher altitude orbits are basically unusable. In that scenario the answer above works to isolate your desert colony.
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Geosynchronous satellites use high gain transmitting antennas. And their beams are typically focused to maximize the return on investment. It could be possible the explorers have wandered beyond the boundary of the signal footprint.
Many satellite ground stations use receiving dishes, and it is possible to mount the dish to a frame that is then ballasted with cinder block. You can look-up non penetrating roof mount, see one [here](https://www.grainger.com/product/18C881?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7923-vTr4wIVhp6fCh2rggRlEAQYBSABEgJ92vD_BwE&cm_mmc=PPC:%20Google%20PLA&ef_id=EAIaIQobChMI7923-vTr4wIVhp6fCh2rggRlEAQYBSABEgJ92vD_BwE:G:s&s_kwcid=AL!2966!3!281698275297!!!g!470278156059!).
The mount does not have to be on the roof, but on the ground where it would be easier to daily pick up, move, and emplace. The storm could be coming up, the workers get out of the storm before the ballast is fully installed and the wind gust blows over the dish and mount, bending it into crumpled ball. Or a gust higher than designed.
Generally the dish uses a very narrow angle to 'see' the satellite, both horizontal, or vertical. Some will include audible signal strength feedback to tell if the dish is on track or not. If the dish is not tightened down well, it is possible for wind to push the dish off beam. Or an inexperienced explorer misaligned the dish, and the next time they do better. You can think of a laser beam between the transmitter and receiver. Many things could occlude the beam, e.g. distant rain, a mountain, (the explorers descend into the Grand Canon,) or someone parks next to the dish in a motor home
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You've got the tech, but have you got the cash?
Some satellite based system such as satellite phones charge you by use. Your colonists may have ran out of data.
The catch-22 is that extra gigabytes or satellite time can only be bought online, so they won't be able to browse for a while.
They'll be good to go when their internet plan renews - as long as the satellite company is able to charge their credit card successfully.
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The dust and sand of your dry world could create powerful discharges of static electricity that would generate bursts of RF that effectively jam the satellites uplink or downlink or both
The interference would be similar to a spark gap transmitter.
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A nearby twin neutron stars solar system, gravity field and gravitational waves were not kept into account when computing GPS localization of satellites, and compensation systems for localization of satellitare and direct laser communication could not intercept satellites correctly and establish communication. This also prevent laser signals redshift in frequency to be compensated correctly
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## The satellites refuse to serve that area for some geopolitical reason
The satellites are being disabled while overflying that area owing to
* rebel activity in the area,
* due to a past war (and nobody bothered to turn it back on again because nobody cares about that region), or
* the sat network provides many civic services beneficial to governments and people *but not really billable for*, and the government of that area refuses to pay their fair share of the costs of the sat network. (compensation works that way in this economy). Perhaps they are billed based on their considerable land area, but have a tiny economy (likely because of the inhospitable conditions).
If this is a constellation of moving satellites, they are turning off services while transiting the area. If these are GEO satellites, *oh, they hear you*, but they have determined your position and are discarding your signal because of it.
## The planet can't have satellites
A natural or artificial [Kessler Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome) has rendered the planet incapable of having a functioning satellite system.
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Very simple suggestion:
Is their gear rated for use in that type of desert?
Ruggedized gear comes in several ratings for various environments.
The gear supplied could just not be suited for desert use, or use in a desert with a dust particles that small or that hot, and simply get clogged up or overheat and die in a very short space of time.
Like seconds after they get out of the vehicle due to all the dust it kicked up.
Environmental factors have always been an issue for gear life. Dust, cold, heat, water, etc... can all kill electronic devices very quickly when the device is operating outside it's ratings.
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Here's a simple solution. The satellite(s) covering this particular area are missing, damaged or both (if more than one satellite).
While not a problem for aircraft (assuming there ARE aircraft), since these can "observe" other satellites from higher up, for anyone on the ground in that area you're getting too few signals to get a reliable position.
The problem with this solution, however, is that smart enough engineers should have known about this beforehand, so it's unlikely to be a surprise to anyone, unless the satellites get blasted / damaged during your story or your characters find themselves in the troublesome area by accident. Otherwise they'd know they're walking into a "blind spot" or notice the signal getting weaker and weaker.
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The run down here is that there's this continent, and there is a lot of unclaimed land where countries haven't formed yet and a lot of tribes but there are some actual countries like kingdoms, (where kingdoms are at war).
Yes there's magic. (That's the main reason for the kingdom's war).
But I was planning to add this cyberpunk country, like it doesn't belong with these pre-industrial countries. Should I remove it? (I can always add it elsewhere).
Also if the answer is yes, would it make more sense if the said advanced nation was an island?
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While the Roman Empire had the technological knowledge to build aqueducts, roads and buildings like the Pantheon, in the same continent there were populations which were not far herding sheep in countryside. And this with no magic.
Also while the Egyptian were building the Pyramids the rest of the African population were at most tribal nations, hunting or pasturing.
So, yes, it is possible for one nation to be technologically more advanced than the others living on the same continent. Especially if trade routes (and the exchange of knowledge moving along them) are somehow not really efficient.
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# Remove it.
In fact, you should probably keep it away from the planet, unless there is a special reason to have it, and unless you are prepared to have technological differences hijack *any* plot.
Cyberpunk is usually about a harsh, uncaring society. So why should a street gang member *not* sell the contents of his flat, buy an assault rifle and a crate full of ammo, and hire out as a mercenary to one of the kingdoms? He'd get plenty of booze, plenty of sex, and what happens 30 years later when arthritis sets in is far in the future.
Similarly, people from the kingdoms would come to the cyberpunk society and look for jobs. Anything they can do without tech training -- unskilled labor at a contstruction site, gardening and cleanup, perhaps even a bouncer at a seedy bar. Saving just a little bit of their daily wage would let them return with a pack full of zippos, prescription-free painkillers, steel needles, etc. The corporations of a cyberpunk society would not really check ID cards, they look only at the bottom line.
Of course these individuals would be dwarfed by corporate activities. Ask the king to grow GM crops on his manors, spreading pesticide without safety concern and fear of class action lawsuits. The king is paid to handle that.
Preventing this "technology spill" will probably fail unless the cyberpunk society is more orderly than cyberpunk usually implies.
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I think you may be better served by deciding what you want from your world.
Does your narrative *require* a single technologically advanced nation in the midst of less developed ones?
Or did you just add it because it was a cool idea?
L.Dutch has rather neatly given an example around the Roman Empire and its existence in parallel with much much less sophisticated societies, so broadly the answer to your question would seem to be yes, you can have societies of vastly different sophistication alongside one another.
The question is how you want your nations to interact if at all.
If you don't want them to meet, physically separating the advanced nation will do the job for a while.
If you want conquerors, the roman empire covered europe and shaped modern civilisation as we know it with its sophisticated approaches to culture, industry and warfare.
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This sounds like a parody of a the United States.
If you understand how it happened in real life, you can adapt events to fit your needs:
The most important variable here is going to be cultural separation. At some point in their past, the whole continent needs to be divided up by a small number of adversarial and different cultures. In the case of North America, Britain was the last of Europe's major powers to lay a claim to the new world; so, New England is not exactly prime real estate for agriculture. Regardless, England's Protestant reformations meant they had the largest population of people wanting to colonize. So, they came to a place in large numbers with poorer living conditions. This meant that while French and Spanish colonials were confronted with way more farmland than they could ever use, the New England states invested their limited resources into industrializing leading to an urbanization boom.
But the English also claimed some territories farther South. The southern territories became massive providers of raw materials for the north to process. This meant that even though New England was specialized toward industry, it did not need the French or Spanish territories for anything giving the English colonies a full production cycle that mostly excluded the rest of America.
By the time the mid-late 1800s rolled around, the end of slavery put way more emphasis on industrialization to help balance the sudden shift in the American economy. With this came the growth of public education to meet the needs of an industrializing economy. Your cyberpunk civilization needs a similar event. Something that forces it to abandon "old way thinking" and pursue technology with a unified national determination.
By the early-mid 1900s the full cycle economy and growing reliance on industry made the US one of the most rapidly developing nations in the world driven by a culture of harsh capitalism, achievement, and wealth. Mean-time: the rest of America had two other general groups:
* The Spanish colonies (Central America) continued with their agriculturally focused societies and conservative values. While they technically had the population and resources to compete with the US, They chose to remain as 21 independent states instead of federalizing, this made building a full cycle economy more difficult for any one of them. They lived comfortably enough and did not care to change the status quo. They also were pretty resistant to adopting American technology due to so many cultural differences including language, religion, economics, and family values.
* The major French colonies were mostly absorbed by the USA in the French and Indian War and the Louisiana Purchase. Leaving only modern day Canada. While Canada has adopted more technologically from US advancement than Central America, they have such a smaller population than the other major groups that they don't do a lot of development on their own.
For purposes of your question, focus on recreating the Spanish timeline for your less advanced nations, but adding a Canada or two to represent the in-betweens may make your story more believable.
By the 1990s, the USA was the most economically and technologically advanced nation in the world. Almost all of the world's telecommunication, computer technology, and entertainment came from the USA while most of central america was still tilling soil just as their ancestors had done.
Even today, large portions of Central America remain pre-industrial. So the only question you need to answer for yourself is what's that last step needed to take a country like the USA to cyber-punk?
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**Separate the tech city with physical and cultural barriers.**
This is the "lost city archetype". Burroughs did it up with Opar, a lost Atlantean colony isolated from the outside world. There are older precedents (example, the giant lands in Jack and the Beanstalk) but with magic goodies instead of tech marvels.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uhgIa.jpg)
<http://pobrownbag.blogspot.com/2015/12/pobb-december-9-2015.html>
The thing with the Romans is that they had no hesitation about sharing tech, selling tech, capturing foreigners and bringing them home, etc. Now we are all Romans. To keep your rich city separate you need physical barriers to keep explorers / job seekers out and cultural barriers to prevent the inhabitants from sharing their secrets.
1. [Opar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opar_(fictional_city)) It is physically remote in central Africa, possibly further hidden down in an old crater. The people are paranoid, inbred and messed up.
2. Wakanda. Hidden with deflector shields, people are paranoid but somehow not inbred.
3. Atlantis. Hidden way underwater, nothing floats, people are paranoid, some look inbred.
4. Floating city (example [Tiphares](https://battleangel.fandom.com/wiki/Tiphares) in Alita, Battle Angel). Inaccessable in the air, people are paranoid or possibly all long dead.
5. Alien city. Inhabitants are sentient gorillas, aliens, faeries, giants etc. City is disguised by magic or tech. Citizens are paranoid or dismissive/contemptuous or might have forgotten about humans over time.
6. One I might have made up: the time traveler city. These people are refugees from this worlds future. They brought back tech from their time. They greatly limit
interactions with the outside for fear of altering their own timeline. Which maybe boils down to being paranoid, and eventually inbred, and then all dead.
7. One more: newly arrived colonists / refugees. Example: [District 9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_9). This city is separate mostly because it is really new. The inhabitants will mix with the natives, interbreed (or try), sell or trade their tech etc. The tech is not more widespread because they are very recent arrivals. This is how it worked with the European colonists in the New World. The result is a society very much in flux.
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>
> Yes there's magic. (That's the main reason for kingdom's war).
> But I was planning to add this cyberpunk country, like it doesn't belong with these pre-industrial countries. Should I remove it? (I can always add it elsewhere).
>
>
>
You have rediscovered the dwarves of Warhammer. Dwarves are a technologically-advanced nation in the midst of a bunch of low-tech people who have magic. Seriously though, the dwarves have helicopters and everybody else is still using chariots pulled by horses. Nonetheless, the dwarven tech isn't enough for them to dominate everybody else because #1 magic and #2 population. Dwarves live in a rather inhospitable environment (underground,) so they don't have the same population growth to throw bodies around like everybody else does.
So yes, definitely possible as long as you provide some reason as to why the technological advantage this country possesses is insufficient for them to dominate everybody.
>
> Also if the answer is yes, would it make more sense if the said advanced nation was an island?
>
>
>
Not necessarily an island, but some sort of separation or geographical barrier would be useful.
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Cyberpunk requires a very large supply chain - you need loads of mining, manufacturing, farming, ranching. You need lots and lots of infrastructure to be present - even the simple things take a lot of moving parts. Let's see - you want the internet to be present (or it's not really very "cyber").
That means that you need at a minimum, the ability to manufacture computers, routers, string wire across the country, generate electricity, and have enough excess food and water being generated that there's *reason* for people to work with those things, rather than having to be subsistence farmers.
Let's take one small part of that - stringing wire across the country requires the ability to make high quality copper wire, to manufacture high quality steel (for the towers to hold the wire) and interchangeable parts (nuts, bolts, etc), to manufacture plastic to insulate the wire, and to transport all of those raw materials.
Let's take a small part of that - high quality steel. So to make high quality steel, first you'll need a good source of iron and chromium (to make it stainless, so it doesn't rust through), and you'll need to have developed blast furnaces, which means you'll need a good source of coal for heat (you can use electricity instead, but that just means you need a good way of making lots and lots of electricity, and you can't make electricity without a good power plant, and you can't make a good power plant without steel - so coal *has* to come first).
So you've got an isolated country that manages to have enough iron, aluminum, chromium, copper, coal, gold, silver, rare earth minerals, etc. to sustain a cyberpunk economy, but remains in isolation?
In short - no. You can be more advanced than your surrounding neighbors to a degree, but you can't have a cyberpunk nation be that much more advanced because by necessity they will need to extend their economy worldwide. If the country is physically large enough to manage to produce all of the possible materials to sustain itself, then it will have to be British-Empire-like in size and scale, and possibly larger.
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You could make it a colony from a technological nation on a very distant continent. There was a large gap in technological development between Europe and Australia when the Europeans arrived. If there were fewer usable stopping points en route, a more dangerous ocean or a less developed sea-faring technology then discovery may have taken considerably longer.
It might even be that the technological civilisation didn't even know about the other continent until they developed satellites. I'd probably have the magic users still biologically related to the advanced civilisation, perhaps 'self-exiled' themselves to the distant land in pre-historic times after they discovered it by magical means.
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**Yes. And No.**
* **Yes:** We see many examples of a more technologically-developed nation or region dominating or coexisting with a less-developed nation or region.
+ The Romans were cited in another answer. However, it should be noted that the Romans were still within the same general level of Bronze-age technology as the peoples they dominated. I.e., they had swords, spears, etc., but those were within the overall capabilities of the surrounding peoples. The main advantages held by the Romans were their relative unity compared to the peoples around them (they could take them on one at a time with overwhelming force), their knowledge of engineering (i.e., the aqueducts, city-building), **and** the Legions, which were trained as an extremely effective fighting force.
+ Present-day: In the last two hundred years, there are many examples of nations with superior technologies dominating, or existing among, nations with lower technological levels for a time. For example, many European colonies in Africa and the Americas were examples of industrial economies (or their outposts, using, but not producing, technological products, such as guns) existing in close proximity to hunter-gatherers.
* **No:** Where there is too great a spread between the technology levels of the different sides, technology creep occurs. Look at the colonial experience in Africa, India, and North America. In all cases, technology (i.e., firearms) spread from the colonials to the colonized and leveled the playing field, to an extent.
+ In India, The First War for Independence (a.k.a., the Indian, or Sepoy Mutiny) was undertaken primarily by native troops armed by the *British*.
+ In the United States, as with Rome, the relative unity of the U.S. compared to the indigenous nations, allowed them to conquer one tribe at a time. Many of these tribes were armed with the same weapons as the U.S. Calvary that they were fighting, weapons that they had both legitimately purchased and which they had captured. Had there been a unified alliance among the indigenous nations in the Americas, there might have been a very different outcome.
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Historical examples:
* Hudson Bay company in North America,
* The Dutch East India company in India,
* the settlement of America,
* the Spanish presence in central and south America.
* the Phoenician trading empire.
* the Ottoman empire had different tech levels within the same political structure.
In some ways it exists even now in America -- not as nations, but as regions.
* Much of the rural parts of the Navaho indian reservation does not have electricity, or running water.
* Backwoods Appalachia and Ozarks can be like stepping back in time over a century.
In a small way this is getting worse:
* In the city for 30 dollars per month you can get 100 Mbit to gigabit internet connections. I pay 90 dollars per month for a 6 Mbit connection -- and had to erect a 70 foot tower. If you plot location vs latency the Earth is getting a very weird space metric.
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The cyberpunk civilization is alien. They don't really consider the natives to be worthy of notice. They don't trade with them, because why would you trade with alien wildlife? They have nothing of real value. The native magic makes them interesting to study sometimes. Some aliens collect magical artifacts like humans collect hunting trophies.
Others use native artifacts because they think it's hip. These hipsters practice cultural appropriation writ large. They attack and destroy local communities because they don't think they're people. They take their artifacts. Their cultural imitations are a crude mockery that rubs salt into the wounds they cause.
Natives of course can fight back with their magics, but their resistance is seen as just dangerous animals. This perspective does let natives roam somewhat freely in the alien cities. The nicer communities will of course employ the equivalent of dog catchers or trappers to keep natives off their streets, but the slums are infested with natives living off the refuse of this society. This lifestyle is obviously dangerous, but can be lucrative for those who export alien tech.
Alien tech doesn't make it far from their colonies. The natives don't understand it and can't replicate it. It's seen as unreliable compared to magic, which is well understood. Knowing that some things are possible has led to advancements in technology - crude aircraft powered by magic, for example - but they're not widespread due to magical limitations.
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Such a situation currently exists in our world: see [Wikipedia: Uncontacted Peoples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples). There are pre-industrial tribes in Brazil. Papua New Guinea has many uncontacted tribes as well. In both places, I think there are tribes that know about the modern civilization they are near, but choose to continue their way of life. Also, in both places travel is difficult due to dense rainforest/jungle, and in the case of New Guinea, steep mountains.
Even in the US there are the Amish, who choose forego the modern life, although they do interact with the rest of us more than the tribes.
I think this condition occurs with some combination of difficult communication and lack of desire to change. If the lack of desire is simply inertia or the human tendency to resist large change, then difficulty in communication will keep them happy in their traditional ways. It's not worth the effort for the moderns to take what they have, and it's not worth their effort to get what the moderns have. In other cases, the group has specifically rejected modernity (e.g. Amish). This group can exist as long as their is difficulty in communication, they do not have anything valuable, or they are embedded in a modern state which protects them as a side effect of protecting itself.
[Answer]
Technology requires lots of different materials and investment to work. This makes it very unlikely to have an *isolated* technological society in the middle of "primitive wasteland". It's not obvious at first glance, but even massive countries like the US or Russia are not self-sufficient. Destroy world trade, and they lose access to lots of materials and capital. This probably happened a few times already (the fall of the Bronze Age civilisations is likely this combined with climate change). You don't even really need advanced civilisations for that - even rather ancient cultures relied on trade of things like salt, leather, flint...
Of course, this doesn't mean it's impossible. It's just that the smaller the country is, and the more isolated, the slower the progress is going to be. And during all this progress, you need some very good reason why the *other* countries don't progress at the same time. It also means that it's rather unlikely that such a country is the remnant of a previous, more advanced age (another common sci-fi/fantasy trope) - at least at our technology level, more tech means more resources and more capital needed to sustain that technology. A small, isolated enclave of technology would quickly lose most of their industry and technology.
In the end, you don't even really have to think too much about the technical reasons, if you have trouble grappling with the massive scope of technological societies. The social reasons are quite enough to make this tricky. How do they remain so isolated that their neighbours remain primitive relative to them? What happens to people who try to leave (or enter)? How do you keep such total isolationism that prevents noticeable tech transfer (and foreign investment)?
If you want to keep this at least somewhat realistic, while still keeping the "high-tech among primitives" approach, I'd suggest:
* Make it an island. Sea borders are much more conductive to isolation (and defense) than land borders. They also offer unparalleled food security.
* Make them advanced in exploiting sea-based resources, or have access to other continents (that the other countries don't even know about). A big part of imperialism was gaining access to foreign capital and raw resources without having it be a two way street.
* The inhabitants pretty much have to be violent xenophobes, or at least extremely ignorant of the other countries.
The main problem with this is that it's hard to see how useful this would be for your narrative. Unless you want to build your story around this country (and something like e.g. the people there starting to get an interest in the "mainland"), these extreme isolationists are unlikely to have much impact on your story. At best, you can work with something like "this guy comes from that nation, but he's a very rare exception and will never go home again". An example would be something like Ultima's Lord British, who comes "from space", and becomes the king of a medieval-ish planet. Obviously, an entire planet makes for a great "island", especially with regards to medieval-level technology. Indeed, having the country be a colony of some advanced space-occupying civilisation solves most of the unrealistic aspects of this trope, especially if they want to minimise contaminating the local culture - some chance encounters are enough to sprinkle some mythology here and there in the local culture, while having minimal impact on the planet's development.
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[Question]
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I've created a monster with three weaknesses:
1. A soft spot in his belly that can be pierced through normally with objects, but the monster is so big and fast that hitting it is extremely hard and dangerous.
2. The monster has a severe allergy to some types of coffee, to the point where surrounding yourself with coffee grains can keep him away.
3. I'm having trouble finding an explanation for the third weakness: a specific type of wood that can pierce through his armor even though bullets can't. Can someone please help me with an explanation about how a piece of specific wood could pierce through armor even when other harder, stronger materials can't?
**Solution found!**
Thank you all for all the answers, ive selected the most upvoted one as the "solved" one but you all helped me greatly! Thanks All.
The way i solved it is mixing all the answers in one explanation: Basically the monster has a combination of a non newtonian type of blubber (putting together [Arcanist Lupus](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/44022/arcanist-lupus) and [Greig](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/59816/greig) answers) that usually is strong against bullet-like projectiles and other blunt force stuff and also has a specific type of coat that is fibrous like a doormat (as [chasly from UK](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk) pointed out) this way the monster gets pratically impervious to damage unless you use the right type of wood that generates the reaction [Arcanist Lupus](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/44022/arcanist-lupus) suggested. Also [Cyn's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/54137/cyn) response was extremely usefull for the purpose of getting the type of wood and helping in a way to mix wood with bullets.
Thank you all!
[Answer]
## The monster doesn't have armor - it has blubber.
Bullets don't bounce of the monster - instead they penetrate, but not deep enough to pass through the protective layer of blubber. The blubber isolates the bullets and then spits them out over time.
But the monster is allergic to this special wood. Instead of expelling the wood shards, the wounds close behind the shard, pushing it deeper until it reaches the vital organs inside, piercing and killing the monster.
[Answer]
**The bullets are made from Adina cordifolia.**
Adina cordifolia aka Haldina is a decideous tree that grows up to 20 meters (65 feet) high.
>
> Haldina cordifolia, syn. Adina cordifolia, is a flowering plant in
> the family Rubiaceae, the sole species in the genus Haldina. It is
> native to southern Asia, from India in the east to Yunnan and Vietnam
> and south to Peninsular Malaysia. It is known as Kadam or Kadamba in
> Hindi and Gáo trò in Vietnamese. ([ref](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldina))
>
>
>
It is used to [make furniture and flooring](https://www.woodworkerssource.com/online_show_wood.php?wood=Adina%2520cordifolia).
Haldina is part of the Rubiaceae botanical family. The [same family coffee is from](https://www.coffeecrossroads.com/coffee-101/introduction-to-coffee-plant).
**Why would this wood work when metal fails?**
For the same reason that silver bullets kill werwolves when lead bullets fail. Or why a small piece of crystal from their home planet will take away the powers of Supergirl and Superman when bullets, bombs, or being hit by a train does nothing.
In other words, it works because you say it works. Make it part of the allergy. Even brief proximity to anything related to coffee will weaken this monster.
The wooden bullet is strong enough to hurt a human...seriously, who wants to be hit by a small pointy stick going 950 miles per hour (427 meters per second, the speed of a slower bullet)? That would kill any human if it hit the right place.
Because the bullet is "made of coffee" (close enough for your purposes), it weakens the monster's body enough to allow the bullet to penetrate. The speed and force of the bullet does the rest.
EDIT: **Why not just use a wooden stake?**
A stake would work if you could get close enough without dying first. But this monster can sense the presence of coffee from a distance farther than its reach (since surrounding yourself with coffee grains works to keep yourself safe). It would know you were sneaking up on it with a stake and would move out of reach.
With a bullet, you can hit the monster from a distance. And with enough force to do some damage, even if you don't hit its soft spot.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rshbf.png)
[Answer]
**Only the locals know the secret**
The invaders with their huge elephant guns can blast away for as long as they like. What they don't know, and the local tribes long ago discovered, is that the armour is actually fibrous and the fibres lie at right angles to the monster's skin (rather like a coir doormat).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iK9ug.png)
These fibres easily mat together temporarily to block a bullet and then bounce back to shape, but if the monster is shot with a needle-sharp, wooden arrow or dart, it parts the fibres easily and penetrates right through. A simple poison tip then finishes the job.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6LR8C.png)
[Answer]
Why does a wooden stake through the heart or sunlight kill a vampire and bullets, knives, and other death dealing implements don't? It's part of the mystique of the monster.
Maybe the skin of the monster "senses" a metal bullet and turns into armor for the impact, then softens again. Sort of like oobleck, but better, since Mythbusters tried to stop a bullet with cornstarch and water and failed. The skin can't detect the wood, so doesn't harden and the wood is able to pierce the skin into the vital organs.
It all comes down to what **you** want to do. It's your book, you don't have to stick science. You already have the mythical creatures tag, so it, pretty much by definition, doesn't have to make sense.
[Answer]
>
> Can someone please help me with an explanation about how a piece of specific wood could pierce through armor even when other harder, stronger materials can't?
>
>
>
You're going to have to improve the armour before the question makes sense, because e.g. kevlar bullet-proof armour is famously not stab-proof. Kevlar stops fast relatively blunt objects, but not slow sharp blades, so being bulletproof does not inherently protect against metal blades.
Maybe you could come up with another reason why metal blades are no use (perhaps a dense acidic sweat which corrodes steel unreasonably fast, blunting the edge?) and make ironwood spears the weapon of choice against your foe.
[Answer]
Perhaps the armour is a bit like a non-newtonian fluid (ok, solid in this case) that doesn't only react to force but also reacts/hardens depending on the density of the thing hitting it.
My balsa wood arrow doesn't have the density or velocity required to make it react and slips right through, but your dense fast-moving bullets make it tougher than Kevlar. Unfortunately, balsa is too soft to make a good arrow, but over the years we've found that handwavium wood is low density and really strong across the grain and that's why we use it against these monsters.
[Answer]
Since it's natural armor, I imagine it's made of some kind of keratin. Maybe reinforced with fiber.
Without getting into the specifics of the wood or the keratin, let me suggest that some quality of the of the sap in the wood is like silver nitrate solution (AgNO3) and some quality of the keratin "glue" is like salt (NaCl).
The reaction moves very quickly ([see this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky0zq_GzwWU)) and [moves even more quickly in cold](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090601225048AAK8GhN) environments (like normal temperatures).
So again speculating with this hypothetical pair of reactive sap and keratin, lets say the output products are significantly weaker than the undamaged armor. Additionally, the chemicals that result from the reaction may cause a secondary reaction with the fibers reinforcing the armor, causing those polymers/fibers to curdle ([see video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1XCwSyTl8g)).
The compound effect is that a simple touch from the wood causes the natural armor to gap open, and this happens quickly enough that a slow-moving attempt to penetrate the armor (such as stabbing it with a stake or spear made of this wood) just seems to pass through with inexplicable ease.
[Answer]
I recommend [quebracho](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebracho_tree), a wood so hard that it supposedly breaks axes.
[Answer]
Your creature has a natural armor that is a non-Newtonian material (I won't say fluid because it's normally a soft solid.) When hit by a **supersonic** impact it's very hard and can bring a bullet to a stop before it penetrates deep enough to do a serious injury.
Your wooden arrow or bolt, however, is coming in subsonic and only faces a soft outer layer. It's long enough to penetrate deep and inflict a serious wound. (A subsonic bullet would likewise face only a soft layer but wouldn't get through it.) Your special wood is something that grows very slowly, makes a very hard, very straight branch. The rings aren't tightly bound to each other, though--when it hits the layer separate, the friction of trying to punch through slows the outer layers without doing much to the inner layers, hence allowing deeper penetration than you would otherwise get. It takes that to punch through the outer layer.
[Answer]
This creature has a pseudo magical outer shell of unknown molecular structure. This gives it strength... But a specific wood type also has a molecular structure that loves to chemically interact with the shell of this creature. This interaction quickly weakens the surrounding structure and allows you to pierce through.
[Answer]
The answer is even easier than you think.
Each wooden bullet would have to be made from the 'lodgepole' or core of the tree. As the tree grows layers develop at higher levels on this core. The bullet, looking at it end on, would have rings. When fired the bullet, conical in shape (7.62 NATO shape) would shed layers as it passed through armour. It would act like a depleted uranium round, heating up and hardening as it went through. Velocity becomes yur friend. Copper sleeve the round for stability, which would shed on the armour.
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[Question]
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In the world I am developing, a group called the Garotakor Kobark base their belief system on a fire that has burned consistently for hundreds of years. It has been contained within a step pyramid-like structure. How would this group continue to feed this fire without the general population being aware that it is being fed?
I'm not absolutely locked in on the idea of it being fed by people, so any way it could maintain itself naturally could also work. The main idea is it needs to be mysterious and impressive enough to convince a society of its "divine nature".
**Final Verdict:** The flame is from some sort of natural gas fire like the ones suggested. This fits the story well, and the secretive part will be more about how it is not from a divine source.
Some other problems brought up, such as the temple being invaded or going out due to natural events are actually a major part of the story. Thanks for the assistance!
[Answer]
>
> How would this group continue to feed this fire without the general population being aware that it is being fed?
>
>
>
Not all fires *need* to be fed. [Natural gas fires are very much a thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_flame#Naturally_fueled_flames), and some have been burning for a very long time indeed:
>
> At Yanartaş in the Olympos National Park in Turkey, natural gas burns from many vents on the side of the mountain. It is thought to be the location of ancient Mount Chimaera. This is the largest venting of possibly abiogenic methane on Earth's terrestrial surface, and has been burning for over 2500 years.
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P1V5n.png)
(image credit: [Jyri Leskinen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FiresChimera2.jpg))
Presumably though you *want* your eternal flame to be continuously fed by humans running a fake fire cult, and presumably you want the flame to continue burning without the average denizen of the area knowing that it has an entirely mundane source, rather than a supernatural one.
Well, imagine a natural gas "eternal" flame that one day just... went out. The gas reservoir below these places isn't infinite after all, and won't necessarily get replenished at a high enough rate or even at all.
What you can do though is mine into the rocks underneath where the sacred flame is, and construct a [wood gasifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator). You can imagine this as a sort of oven that uses wood (or charcoal) to "cook" more wood (or charcoal) generating a combustible gas. This gas can be ducted out through the fissures in the rock that fed the original "eternal" flame, which can then be relit.
The temple might consume an awful lot of wood or charcoal, and it might produce a lot of toxic tar, and a lot of people working there might die of carbon monoxide poisoning, but the business of burning can be done quite some way away from the flame, potentially far enough to remain deniable.
[Answer]
**They have other fires**
"Of course the pyramid gets a delivery of wood every day. We need something to feed the fires. No not the Sacred Fire, the other ones. The smaller ones for cooking and heating and that sort of thing. None of the wood goes on the Sacred Fire. No you cannot come in and see for yourself. We are too busy."
[Answer]
**Build your pyramid on a coal deposit**
There are actually quite a few fires in coal deposits that have been burning for a very long time without human assistance.
The Guiness record holder for longest burning fire is in [Mt. Wingen](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain) (a.k.a. Burning Mountain), Australia, and is believed to be 6000 years old.
[Brennender Berg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennender_Berg), Germany is called Burning Mountain by the locals, since its coal mine was ignited in the 1600's.
Another interesting case is the mine fire in [Centralia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire), Pennsylvania, USA, which has been going since the 1960's.
**Petrol pipeline**
If there is a source of petroleum nearby, you could run pipes underground into the pyramid. Inside concealed fixtures could feed it into the fire. You could even use valves to increase the flow in bursts, to give the appearance of signs from your deity when it is asked questions.
[Answer]
Use an oil-fed flame. The reservoir can be topped up by a buried pipe from another, larger, reservoir hidden in the High Priest's sacristy on the same level. Only (s)he and trusted Senior Priests know about this.
If they use oil lamps else where in the temple, then they should be able hide the amount of oil used for the Eternal Flame in the oil used elsewhere. Bonus points if they receive and give oil as alms for the poor - this makes it harder to track the amount of oil going through the temple.
[Answer]
Have a mechanism where wood piled up somewhere else is put on a conveyer (that the common folk cannot see), which slowly feeds the fire. A similar apparatus hauls the ashes away and dumps them in the river.
People who claim that the fire is not eternally burning get fed to the fire.
[Answer]
TL;DR: *“Of course it is God and God alone who keeps the flame alive. She imbues the high priest every Tuesday, when he refills the oil reservoir.”*
### Why you need this
The other answers suggested many mechanisms to secretly feed a flame – be it by natural or artificial means. While maintaining these on a daily basis is probably no big deal, on longer time scales, you need to consider exceptional events. Any given design can be immune to some of these, but I am pretty confident that it’s impossible to ward against all of the following:
* a war,
* the entire temple burns down, which is all the more likely for a fire-based religion,
* some terrorist or fanatic opposed to your religion sabotages the mechanism,
* natural disasters such as earth quakes, floods, plagues, etc.,
* whoever is responsible for maintaining the secretly mechanism is unexpectedly incapacitated, runs amok, or commits an error, e.g., due to the boredom arising from performing the same task over decades,
* the secret mechanism fails due to wear and tear, which is made more likely since every tiny problem can accumulate over centuries.
Also, consider the fire in the Roman temple of Vesta, where no miracle was pretended and thus some of the above causes were less likely or did not apply.
Still, there is evidence that [the fire went out several times](https://history.stackexchange.com/q/59117/5225).
Thus, forget about actually keeping the flame burning over centuries.
### Solutions
Even if the original intention was to keep the illusion of an eternal flame, sooner or later the religious elite will realise that they cannot uphold this illusion indefinitely and have to introduce contingency plans, adopt their theology, etc.
Mind that this does not mean that the elite loses belief, rather they create a version of their religion that is compatible with reality for them.
As a result, the religious elite will believe that whatever they do to maintain the flame is a divine act and the eternity of the flame is somewhat symbolical.
Now, I don’t see a problem with making all of this publicly known.
I am not aware of any popular religion that maintains a tangible (alleged) miracle to support its legitimacy.
People already believe in all kinds of things contrary to evidence.
In fact, humans keeping a flame alive over centuries is pretty impressive and can be sold as evidence of divine support.
At worst, such a miracle is a burden and risk due to the above problems.
Alternatively, you can make flame maintenance a secret ritual only accessible by elites, who get revealed the true mystic nature of reality. If you do so, layers may help, i.e., there is a gradual shift from the public believing in a miraculous eternal flame to the highest priests believing in some abstract concept of a symbolic flame. This way, people climbing the religious ladder will experience less cognitive dissonance.
Further protection mechanisms include:
* Strongly restrict access to the flame, either it is only accessible by priests or other religious elites or only on holy days.
* Make the flame transportable, so when your temple is raided by barbarian hordes, you can claim that some cautious priests hid it in the mountains.
### Afterthought: Do you really need this?
Religions don’t get started by some crafty person who found out a way to maintain the illusion of an eternal fire.
Some other crafty person would quickly dissect this before you even have enough followers to keep them from doing so.
Religions get started by people managing to rally people around them and their (somewhat practical) message.
Miracles, holy objects, etc. usually come later.
[Answer]
Well, if you have any kind of magic system going around, you could make it so that the people's faith in the religion is what fuels the fire.
[Answer]
Do people actually need to see the fire burning constantly? You could keep the flame contained within the structure, and restrict access to the flame chamber only to the highest ranking priests of the religion. The priests can uphold the myth of thet everlasting flame, while only really needing to keep it up for short periods of time, when the flame is exposed to the general public, e.g. during holidays.
[Answer]
Maybe you could exploit [Pepper's Ghost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost): the eternal flame isn't eternal, it isn't even there. You would need two sheets of glass, and two non-eternal flames, one of which is hidden behind a screen, so it can be replenished. Now you swap out the dark screen, and screen out the other flame, so you can replenish it.
There will always be the odd skeptic, of course, so, as others have suggested, they will need to be sacrificed from time to time.
[Answer]
Here's a proposed explanation, and some general thoughts as well, as basing a religion on a natural phenomena has it's share of difficulties since nature is always changing. Mechanisms of control within religious or occult groups go far beyond symbolic totems; it is ingrained in everything from the hierarchy to the rituals, to the teachings themselves. Truly, anything similar to your eternal divine flame in any religion would be auxiliary out of necessity to maintain control. Unless the flame *literally* speaks to the congregation or reveals images of God, it seems like the flame would be better off being "the gun" on the mantle in Act 1.
**Figurative vs. Literal:**
Even in the most traditional of religions, anything existing in "eternal perpetuity", like an ever-burning-flame is symbolic. It is generally about what the totem represents than about the actual totem itself.
Since you've established that there are more secrets behind this religious organization, it stands to reason that the congregation can't simply enter the church as they please and explore.
I think in this case, the easiest way to go about this without making the plot overly-convoluted by explaining this "divine flame" is simply that a priest or other religious figure moves the censer/torch into a back room after service, put's the flame out, and simply lights it again before the next service.
Humans have a very intuitive sense when something is figurative, especially in the context of a non-historical/currently-accessible divine totem in an organized religion.
**When it needs fuel:**
In cases where it has to be on display for quite some time, a fuel source could be used—hidden under a table or something similar. This would allow someone to go underneath to add more fuel, divert the flame, or do other "miraculous tricks". Some real 'Wizard of Oz' stuff.
**Alternative Source:**
I really like the idea @starfish-prime proposed for the naturally burning fire deposits, because this could even fool the religious elite. However the logistics are tough:
* Building a church with a natural methane/coal flame at it's centerpiece without disturbing the fragile ground that allows the flame to exist.
* These do not burn with 100% efficiency. If the area is enclosed, your religion isn't going to last very very long!
* It's impossible to tell (unless they have modern technology, in which case nobody would believe an eternally burning flame anyway) how long it could last. Sure, they could say it's been burning for 5,000 years, but it could be essentially tapped and the flame could extinguish during the next Sunday service.
**Closing Thoughts & Reactions to Deception:**
I would definitely give some consideration to the fact that there's really no religion in which everyone isn't aware that an "eternal flame" isn't literally eternal. I only say this because it seems like focusing on this will make the plot flat, especially if this flame is a major plot point.
Religions that catch have much deeper, unseen mysteries and traditions that go further back than what the people can see today. It seems like your divine flame is the crux of this story, and I would really recommend reconsidering.
**So they find out the flame isn't eternal, then what?**
Do the followers revolt? Why? Because they were lied to about something the benefactors of the religion could also claim they were just as surprised as.
The more likely scenario if the flame went out from the general population would probably be: "Oh yeah, it was figurative, but God still loves us!"
The religious elite/priests/those who are keeping the secret could easily explain a divine flame stopping by telling essentially the truth: "Fire, like a river, may look the same every day but it is constantly changing as the medium is burned. For this reason, any fire lit on this torch/at this sight is a continuation of the eternal flame."
They could also just get ahead of it by preaching sermons about the figurate nature of eternity to prepare the congregation for that contingency.
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[Question]
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Setting: Earth, 5 million years in the future (*see note 1*). Continents are still recognizable but sensibly altered by tectonic movements. Climate is drastically changed. Civilization does not exist anymore, having already risen and fallen many times (*see note 2*), but humans are still around. Humans have evolved into a plethora of species that, although partially capable of interbreeding, are on the verge of becoming different kinds of humanities. **Among them, however, one is morphologically identical to present-day humans: how is that possible?**
I know it’s improbable that a species may exist as a contiguous entity for many millions of years, so **WHAT SPECIAL CONDITIONS ARE TO BE MET TO MAKE HOMO SAPIENS A LIVING FOSSIL SPECIES?**
*Note 1: I'm willing to reduce this timespan to at least **2.5 million years** if I need to.*
*Note 2: In this setting human civilization on Earth rose to space travel levels and then fell to pre-industrial or even prehistoric levels at least a few times, so while no Homo species on Earth is technologically advanced there may be, somewhere, somehow, space humans which have retained varying degrees of techonological capability. They may have a part in the explanation, but **I would appreciate a justification as “natural” as possible.***
[Answer]
[Stephen Baxter](http://www.stephen-baxter.com/) wrote a story *The Children of Time* published in *Asimov's Science Fiction* magazine in 2005 (I saw it in the *Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: 30th Anniversary Anthology*) that poses exactly that question over approximately **400 million** years, and answers it in an interesting way.
He says:
>
> It had never been necessary for humans to evolve significantly, for they always adjusted their environment so they didn't have to - and in the process stifled evolutionary innovation.
>
>
>
He says this type of lack of evolution should always be a consequence of the evolution of intelligence, because intelligence is always able to figure out ways to prevent the need for further physical evolution.
[Answer]
# Humans live in the Matrix
Imagine that the Machines have taken over and keep humans as pets. After 5 million years, the humans rebel and overthrow the machines, re-taking their planet.
In the 5 million year interval, the only genetic selection on humans is artificially introduced by the Machines. For whatever reason, the Machines like us just the way we were when we invented them.
Therefore, 5 million years later, humans are genetically very similar to the present.
[Answer]
Genetic fluctuation in populations has been studied a lot. Two things can alter the genetic composition of a population: selective pressure and random drift.
We will assume no selective pressure on the genome which is a big assumption. I could imagine a *very* large population with heterogeneous selection pressures and lots of mixing of individuals. A selective pressure cannot keep up pressure because individuals move around so much and are likely to produce offspring with individuals from very different regions.
Random variations can happen. The larger the population, the less randomness (think of selection bias with a small sample) will be able to move the genome. This image shows a population with a 50/50 mix of alleles a and b. In the first generation of offspring, what is the mix of alleles?
from <https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetic-drift-and-effective-population-size-772523>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DmB6C.jpg)
Larger populations are less easily skewed by chance. Like two cellmates who are equally good at poker: a series of 10 games might show win loss for one of them to be 7:3 but over 10,000 games it will converge on 5000:5000 if the two are equally good.
Other aspects of the population which might artificially minimize it and cause random fluctuation to be more important. From same above linked source.
>
> An "ideal" population has the following characteristics, and most
> deviations will decrease the effective population size:
>
>
> * There are equal numbers of males and females, all of whom are able to > reproduce.
> * All individuals are equally likely to produce offspring, and the
> number of offspring that each produces varies no more than expected by
> chance.
> * Mating is random.
> * The number of breeding individuals is constant from one generation to > the next.
>
>
>
[Answer]
Since you mentioned space travel, don't forget time dilation!
In our near future, space travelers set off at substantial fractions of light speed to various destinations, then returned to earth. Due to time dilation, the travelers' societies have experienced the passage of only a few centuries or millennia, while millions of years have passed for the stay-at-home branch of humanity. If one of these expeditions has returned recently (say, within the last couple centuries), then you can have a human subspecies which is not only morphologically, but also genetically more-or-less identical to modern humans.
Add in cryosleep pods or a similar hibernation/stasis technology, and someone who is alive today could conceivably be returning home to earth 5 million years from now.
While high-speed deep-space journeys of this sort would imply a high level of technology to build the ships and mount the expeditions, the returning ships would not particularly affect the technological level of the world they returned to, as the industrial and technological base to reproduce them no longer exists. At most, the returning explorers would provide additional scientific knowledge, but it would be so localized and of so little practical value that it could easily be lost within a generation or two. (And they may not even provide that, depending on how automated their ships are vs. how much of the maintenance is provided manually.)
Also note that I said "various destinations" above. Different trips of different durations opens the possibility for periodic injections of small modern-human populations into your world, which would help to limit the divergence of the stay-at-homes from humanity as we know it today.
[Answer]
The big question is what do you mean by the "same". Humanity is quite diverse as it is. Do you want to preserve all races and ethnicities in present day proportions? Do you want them unmixed? What is the criteria?
Well you have to work around evolution. I can think of several angles to attack it in addition to what JBiggs mentioned.
* prevent environment selection pressure. For example, wise ancestors perfected climate control and fixed it at ideal settings for 21 century humans. Automatic systems survived more or less for 5 million years (unlikely)
* artificially select for stability of genome. After another rise of nazism there was another world war where genetic warfare was introduced. Artificial viruses or bacteria killed everyone too far from the "uber" race ideal genome. They became human symbionts and kept genome clear by killing fetuses with wrong mutations.
* fix genome on the go. Mad narcissistic scientist devises CRISPR-like mechanism that slowly turns everyone into her clones.
[Answer]
A couple things could make this plausible:
1, conditions where these humans live can be such that the current form of homo sapiens is ideal for life there, which reduces the natural pressure to adapt. Why would this be the case? Probably because of an environment at least partly man-made. Clearly in some earlier time, mankind built environments that were ideally comfortable and optimized for them, and their descendants now live in these (probably self-maintaining) habitations which are perfectly suited to their needs. One likely reason for this to go on so long is space colonization, which would force humans to live in completely synthetic environments or "terraformed" environments or giant dome areas which were specifically tailored and engineered for their comfort.
2, There could be a "baseline" genetic reference which keeps being reintroduced into the gene pool. This could also be the product of an earlier, more advanced phase of humanity. Shortly after perfecting genetic manipulation, humans may have preserved specific genetic "libraries" of human genes with what were considered desirable (probably profitable aka: "designer") traits. Sophisticated, automated systems can replicate this genetic stock which is still available for use, and probably includes some cool new or optional "features" which people might still find desirable, but to use the old stock, they must be close enough to "baseline".
2.5, Alternately, these "baseline" genes may be introduced from clones which are based on old-style genetic stock. There may have been a legal loophole which allowed clone "slavery" or servitude if the clone was created from scratch and grown entirely in a lab. Perhaps a "second class citizen" type system more like the highly educated Roman slaves who ran the empire's administrative apparatus. Over time, for legal/humanitarian/political reasons, the stock from which these clones could be produced was frozen to one basic "pool" and production continued for some considerable time. Inevitably, the descendants of the clones would mix with the non-clones, pulling the entire human gene pool back toward "baseline". Also, if there were cultural effects where non-clones were considered "superior" for some period of time, and there was a long term, low birthrate, the higher class strata may have faced a milder version of the inbreeding problem faced by European nobility during the Renaissance. This would make it necessary to integrate clones into the gene pool as well. After that kind of a long-duration imperial structure collapsed, humanity might be very close to baseline. Even farther out, perhaps the cloning facilities were kept active for religious reasons in some post-imperial religion where creating a clone based on "baseline" (ancient) genes was thought to bring back in some spiritual way the virtues of ancient humans from before the time of imperial decadence.
Basically, most of this would all boil down to some very sophisticated self-replicating and repairing machines which had been developed by humans at the height of their development, which continue to function.
Edit: since I answered, yet another plausible scenario came to mind which might even make a more interesting story. What if humanity (that is, 20th century humanity as we know it) has actually gone completely extinct and then been reintroduced? This could be either through a quasi-conservation program similar to current efforts to clone a woolly mammoth, or through some high tech "worst case scenario" fail-safe mechanism that was reactivated and began cloning modern humans again. Even if this event occurred far in the past in your future timeline, it would still put modern humanity far into the future.
[Answer]
There are answers I've seen here suggesting that this lack of change could be because advanced technology removes the pressures that would result in evolutionary change. Well, OP said that high technology on Earth doesn't currently exist in their world, and wasn't consistently present, as civilization rose and fell multiple times. Also, there's stuff such as genetic drift even in the absence of natural selection, and the only way to intentionally avoid it would, again, be advanced genetic engineering. The space humans with advanced technology have also been mentioned, but the OP said they would like a "natural" justification. It's also quite difficult to have technology, even advanced technology, operating without maintainance over literally millions of years. And why would space humans tinker with Earth humans over that time for so long, without detection (note that even if they have advanced cloaking technology, someone from their civilization could still decide to reveal what's going on, such as for ethical reasons)?
A solution I suggest is that it was chance, to some degree. Among the many descendants of humanity, it just so happened that one kind were similar to their ancestors. This may seem completely unbelievable, but it may not be. Some creatures, such as some shark species, have been around for millions of years with few changes. Humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand, but perhaps even without advanced technology, they could be adapted enough that some wouldn't change much. We aren't sure. Also, even if technology doesn't fully survive, parts of it perhaps could be used somehow in ways that would make some environments suitable and reduce evolutionary change (metal structures make building simple metal tools easier, for one). And perhaps the mutations, (which happen randomly, after all) , that would result in bigger changes didn't appear much in one population. Finally, the more change is allowed, the more plausible the desired result becomes. For instance, if "morphologically identical" means "outside looks the same, but internal organs, microscopic structures, and so on can be different," then that would be far more likely than "no genetic changes what so ever. "
[Answer]
Although I favor the artificial genetic reservoir idea myself (*Ergo Proxy* springs to mind), there is also the *Planet of the Apes* idea wherein time and/or space travellers return to earth and end up re-colonizing. I think there is more fun to be had by playing with conventional expectations of "human" -- for example, a "tall man" today is different from a tall man of just two hundred years ago -- so what sort of expectations would mean "human" to an observer?
[Answer]
Evolutionary change happens when unsuccessful models die before breeding and don't pass on genes that don't work to the next generation. This may occur by being eaten or having inferior gathering capability compared to a rival. Therefore the most successful models survive to breeding age and pass on the genes that have worked so far. Over multiple generations this filters to the best set of genes for a species at that time.
In modern society nothing kills off unsuccessful genes. Successful genes and unsuccessful genes reproduce at the same level. Provided technology hasn't progressed to a level where they can fix the genes this will cause a stagnation of evolutionary forces. There may be local changes due to diet and exercise etc. but the base model is still human as we know it.
[Answer]
Combine three things:
1) Genetic engineering removes old age as a cause of death. Full regeneration is enabled.
2) Medical technology can deal with most everything else that isn't covered by #1. Death is basically reduced to suicide (which will be rare as the mental health and medical reasons will be gone--suicides will be those who have grown tired of life) and major trauma beyond what can be put back together in time. (Or John Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline universe--memory recording/playback. Normal procedure is to get periodic recordings of your brain, if you die the recording is played back into a clone.)
3) Once this point has been reached genetic engineering becomes anathema--perhaps due to some event such as in the Trek universe where it almost lead to a final war.
Put this together and you don't have that many generations between now and then--and evolution is a combination of generations, pressure (the only major pressure now is for a desire for children) and gene pool size (very large, as we are becoming very globalized).
[Answer]
You don't understand evolution. Evolution is essentially the persistence of genes that help an individual live long enough to pass them on to the next generation.
There have been (and are) many species that have been genetically stable for quite some time. Search oldest animal species and you'll see that of the top 10, the YOUNGEST is 120 MILLION years old ([source](https://themysteriousworld.com/top-10-oldest-animal-species-on-earth/)).
And our survival mechanism is directly counter to evolutions usual means of change - we change our environment to suit us, making physical adaptations irrelevant.
Given your scenario, the question isn't why we would be unchanged in 5 million years, but why there are branches of our species that have evolved so far from the core. Rise and fall of civilizations don't really matter, unless they have gone back to **before** the stone age.
[Answer]
# Define "same"
Currently humanity has vast physical diversity, there are many different forms that you look at and automatically think "human" even though adults can have a 50% disparity in height, 400% disparity in mass and totally different surface colouration.
* If you keep all the humans in the same place, much of that disparity will be lost, humans will no longer be different, which also means they will no longer be the "same" as they are now.
* If you allow the humanity to spread among the stars then that diversity may well increase as the different groups spread off to different worlds and face fundamentally different forces.
However there's no reason why a strain of humans who remained on Earth or similar planets wouldn't remain fundamentally the same as a particular group of humans are now. Though from our own perspective they may appear to fit a "[generically foreign](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmbiguouslyBrown)" (tv)trope by appearance. You could potentially manage to maintain some regional variation in appearance but it's likely that time, and our increasing freedom of movement, will blur this to be minimal.
[Answer]
You would have to argue that the current morphology is a stable one. Evolution would have to reach a local maximum such that movement away from the current setup pushes us back towards where we are now.
This seems unlikely from our current viewpoint but is possible.
Note that this works best if science is also somewhat similar to what we have now. Or it would be hard to explain why we didn't adapt to the changing circumstances. The technology level doesn't have to be identical, but it needs to support the current morphology.
Look for places where we seem to be evolving and try to come up with technological or societal changes that would push us back. For example, our increasingly sedentary lifestyle would seem to lead to changes. So come up with a reason for us to be less sedentary. Perhaps environmentalism leads to less machinery and more human-powered activity. Or maybe it's a health thing.
[Answer]
Evolution working the way it does, there is no remotely believable way that it just went on holiday for a few million years. Humans have changed dramatically over the past one million years. Even if you assume that evolution slows down due to less selection pressure thanks to technology, the future humans would definitely not be **identical** to present-day humans.
If nature doesn't give you an answer, technology must. The only plausible way to create a total stop to evolution if it was intentionally engineered. One of the first high-tech civilizations in your history developed genetic engineering, and for whatever reason encoded an evolution stop into the human DNA in a widespread manner. Why they did and how it came that all non-arrested-development DNA died off is lost to history (or maybe not, if you want to make it a plot point).
This could also be a side-effect of immortality research. Improving the regeneration capabilities of DNA could cause mutations to not happen anymore, slowing evolution down to the possibilities already present in the DNA (i.e. recombinations of existing traits, but no changes in traits anymore).
[Answer]
Natural evolution is driven by environment and food supply. Creatures evolve to use a food supply that other creatures aren't using, or live in an area that other creatures don't inhabit due to environment variations.
Looking at a few 'living fossils', creatures that don't change, the vast majority are aquatic: gar, shark, lamprey, chambered nautilus, coelacanth, etc... where the environment tends to be more stable due to the insulating effect of liquid water.
Humans are stabilizing both environment and food supply, certainly in the economically advanced nations, so that may be removed as a cause of evolutionary change.
However, humans seek to improve themselves by evolution in their choice of a mate. We are innately attracted to a potential mate by qualities that would improve the species: taller, stronger, smarter, etc... ask yourself: why do you find that person attractive? It isn't the result of a logical thought process, you just like them. That's a desire that is preprogrammed into most humans. And it shows... the height of the average human in the 1500's was around five feet. It's getting closer to six feet today... in only 600 years, we've added about eight inches to our height.
So, in order for homo sapiens to become a static species, they would have to advance to the point where they had full control over environmental factors, yet have their ambition, curiosity, and even choice of a mate restrained, so they didn't seek to improve themselves. That would run contrary to how almost all life on earth lives, from the lowest to the highest forms. Almost all life makes an active effort to improve itself.
Could make for an interesting story, about how some humans try to stop evolutionary processes to make the species static, and end up being defeated in that effort by a bunch of teenagers who just want to get cozy with that hot guy or gal.
]
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[Question]
[
Specifically: **what are some biological structures that could help subvert the square-cube law's effects on animal overheating?**
Bob is a really, really big land-based ambush predator that's normally sedentary but that puts on massive bursts of speed in order to catch his prey.
The problem with this is, like with many such things, the [square-cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law). Specifically, big animals have issues dumping heat quickly, since they have more volume, and therefore, mass, relative to their surface area. Therefore, if Bob exerts himself for too long, Bob will overheat, and [it won't be pretty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_stroke).
When at rest, or going for a stroll, Bob doesn't produce enough heat to overheat himself. He might be warm to the touch, but he's doing fine in terms of body temperature. However, when Bob is running, fighting, or otherwise exerting himself, he can't dump heat quickly enough to stay alive. Sometimes, Bob has to do these things for a long, long time, because [his prey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human) has a tendency to run him down over the course of day-long periods if they believe he's responsible for any deaths in the area; **as such, limiting activity to brief bursts is not an option. As such, please do not answer with this.**
A common solution I've seen to this would be to make Bob less dense. However, Bob's prey is very good at fighting back with a wide variety of lethal weapons, and so Bob needs to be as dense as water, on average, in order to contain enough mass and therefore enough bodily structures to fight well and withstand damage long enough to heal. **As such, please do not answer with a decrease in Bob's density, because Bob would rather not die, thank you very much.**
Please note that **I am referring to biological structures, not behavioral adaptations** - "biological structures" in this sense include the brain, the blood cell, bones, and other such things, whereas "behavioral adaptations" are things such as "this animal is aggressive" or "this animal is nocturnal".
Additionally, **please note that I am not interested in determining what evolutionary pressures might lead to this.** Assume it's being built in a mad scientist's lab.
Good answers will will cite a biological structure/bodily feature/design adaptation/etc. capable of storing, rapidly dispersing, or otherwise mitigating heat that's also capable of existing under Earth-like conditions and that is compatible with Earthly biochemistry.
[Answer]
This builds off the answer by Lemming: Perhaps you could give Bob some gills, like fish, even though Bob is a land creature. The gills help aerate the internal organs with cool air (rapid moving air) on the inhale, and then expel heat from around the critical organs on the exhale. My thought behind this is that no matter how warm air is, when it is blowing across hot skin it has a cooling effect.
Perhaps the gills could be part of a secondary (involuntary) respiration system that kicks in on its own rather than being consciously performed (or even vice versa). The gills wouldn't lead to the lungs but rather a series of intercostal tubes that surround the organs expressly for the purpose of removing heat through rapid air movements. It provides the wicking effect of the rapid movement of air as well as the increased surface area presented by the other commenter.
<https://www.livescience.com/34062-breeze-feel-cool.html>
[Answer]
Biological methods to reduce internal body temperature:
* Increase surface area of skin, via cracks, and folds (mentioned elsewhere) like an elephant.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FMUP3.png)
* Use extrusions of the skin to increase surface area, and use them to pump blood through to cool blood. Elephants have this with their ears, but some elephants don't need this, so have smaller ears. Lets compare the african and asian elephants.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rdsWK.png)
* Use internal openings, wet from internal moisture, to cool off. Many, if not most mammals, use this method of "Wet" cooling off in dry weather with their tongues, and the inside of their mouths.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nilnk.png)
* Even plants attempt to cool off with this method, though it does appear like sweating, it is more so that holes inside leaves open, rather than water is excreted out.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nEx8q.png)
* Use externally wet methods of cooling off, ie sweat glands what humans do. Requires mostly exposed skin for this to work.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cJbFT.png)
* Light coloration can be used to reflect radiated energy instead of absorbing it and turning it into heat.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zWBDl.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/e4vWg.png)
* With mammals near the equator, usually this coloration applies to the fur, often what happens is this coloration is tied into the environment, so not completely white. The skin of the animal however is still very dark. The production of melanin is used to block UV radiation, preventing skin cancers. You'll find many animals with dark noses and even tongues because of this melanin issue, even in hot environments. It's common knowledge that this applies to humans, but it also applies to dogs like the Xolo breed dog of Mexico, which actually tan like we do. This isn't so much a heat adaptation, but an equatorial adaptation
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Rm5U.png)
* Lower metobolic rate, to decrease internally produced body temperature. The metobolic rate of elephants for example, is much lower than that of small animals like mice:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UQUbm.png)
* Use ectothermy, to derive your temperature *mostly* from the outside world. Reptiles do this, and have created some truly massive predators that weren't dinosaurs, but traditional basal reptiles and basal archosaurs (snakes, turtles, crocadilimoprhs) were able to achieve massive sizes. Ectothermy, cold-blooded ness, is where body temperature is mostly determined by the environment (though, even ectotherms, at very large sizes, will start having internal dynamics with increasing body temperature with out adaptation). During the period directly after the fall of the dinosaurs (paleocene), the largest animals on earth weren't birds, or mammals, they were reptiles, reptiles at sizes bigger than they had ever been even during the Mesozoic (reign of the dinosaurs). The temperature of the earth was very hot, hotter at some points than it was during the age of the dinosaurs, and certainly hotter than today. This, in combination with niches opening up, enabled massive reptiles to prosper, like [titanaboa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanoboa), [Carbonemys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonemys), and various extremely large crocodilians like [Euthecodon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthecodon).
* Use of Mesothermy. Mesothermy is basically anything in-between ecto and endothermy. One hypothesis for why [Sauropods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda) were able to get so big is their use of mesothermy. While many dinosaurs were likely endotherms, albeit with possibly lower metabolisms like the African Elephant, at the sizes Sauropods reached, they would have cooked themselves. However, despite being so large, Sauropod babies were extremely small comparatively, ["no larger than geese"](https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/sauropods-worlds-largest-dinosaurs/outside-mamenchisaurus/sauropod-dinosaur-babies#:%7E:text=But%20surprisingly%2C%20the%20babies%20that,11%20pounds%20(five%20kilograms).), their parents were "10000 times heavier" than they were. At those sizes, baby sauropods would likely not have had ectothermy, as they'd otherwise be relegated to the same niches as similar sized reptiles, though even more vulnerable. What's more, is that dinosaur babies grew extremely fast. They couldn't afford to be slow lumbering beasts, these babies had to eat a lot and eat fast. Hypothesis have been thrown out that the smaller babies had different metabolic characteristics than adults, and that adults metabolism wouldn't have matched either ectothermy or endothermy. The idea that traditionally ecto/endo/thermic animals could achieve something different than strict cold/warm bloodedness or transition has been seen in [naked mole rats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat), which have transitioned to a mostly ectothermic lifestyle, and [some monitor lizards](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0945-8) which have developed a somewhat ectothermic+ strategy.
### Added Thoughts
A few things I thought off the top of my head that I didn't exactly feel like would fit here, but I think are worth mentioning.
* While sort of behavioral, licking is used to cool off, particularly with mammals. Dogs, Cats, Kangaroos, they will lick themselves in order to cool off, though I think this may go against the spirit of the question, not only due to the behavioral nature, but also because this is a temporary measure against heat. It's not really something constant or passive, as the animal can't exactly hunt while this is happening.
* Op mentions density as a method by which you could produce less heat, but not an ideal answer. I'm not sure this mechanism would reduce heat in exactly. However lower density animals are a real thing, namely as a hypothesis in non avian dinosaurs (backed up by or modern avian dinosaurs and marks left on bones) and seen in avian dinosaurs, birds, even large birds. Birds have a series of airsacs inside them, which help support their body, and are hypothesized to have been at least one of the aspects that allowed some dinosaurs to get so large, though in the case of flying birds, this is accompanied by much less dense bones. This however, alone, isn't a measure to "reduce internal body temperature", in fact, since air is an insulator, one might hypothesize these airsacs would do more to insulate internal body-parts than cool things down. However, this lower density *can* reduce energy exerted, thus may indirectly reduce heat.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/E7gzt.png)
* Along the same lines, certain body plans are going to be better at certain actions than others, in terms of energy efficiency etc... Bipedalism is a much more efficient plan for certain types of movement, one of those being endurance running. Humans are currently the best ultra long distance animals on the planet in hot climates (longer than 30 miles), sled dogs may rival or beat them in cold climates, ostriches beat them in medium (they can run very fast for a surprisingly long time and distance, measured in miles, not feet, not like a cheetah). So perhaps this creature would benefit indirectly interims of heat with a bipedal stance, something similar to modern large birds, or theropod dinosaurs, the largest theropod dinosaurs were around the 5 -> 10 metric tonne range, many over 10 meters long. I'm not sure if that mass is big enough, they would be well above human size.
* It may also be worth pointing out, that while airconditioners aren't (yet ;) ) a biological adaptation, the way they work may be inspiration for a hypothetical biological adaptation. Modern airconditioners are usually two way, they cool things one direction, reverse the flow, they heat things up. This is because air conditioners work via a series of compression and heating of a special chemical inside the airconditioner by:
1. passing normal air over a liquid refrigerant (usually with a fan of some sort, which heats the refrigerant up, causing it to turn into a gas.
2. Compressing this gas, making it "hotter" and pushing this gas into a different location, normally outside.
3. Because the refrigerant gas is compressed, it is much hotter, even than outside ambient temperatures on hot days. This means it is still possible to cool this "heated" air.
4. Air from outside then condenses as it cools down outside, back into a liquid
5. this liquid is then pushed back inside, but now is depressurized, where it can be heated once again.
* Maybe the animal in question could some how produce a refrigerant that has the properties that make this possible and cool itself. It would however expend a tremendous amount of energy doing so (as air conditioning does today). It's unclear how realistically these concepts could be applied to an animal.
[Answer]
# Allen's Rule
Nobody seems to have mentioned the easy answer yet...
[Allen's Rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen%27s_rule) is the simple, natural subversion of the square-cube law in organisms. Where square-cube refers to objects which scale up *isometrically* (i.e. proportionally), Allen's Rule deals with *allometric* (i.e. non-proportional) scaling in organisms, specifically for the sake of heat rejection/retention. The rule states:
>
> ... animals adapted to cold climates have shorter limbs and bodily appendages than
> animals adapted to warm climates. More specifically, it states that the body
> [surface-area-to-volume ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-area-to-volume_ratio) for [homeothermic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeothermy) animals varies with the
> average temperature of the habitat to which they are adapted (i.e. the ratio is
> low in cold climates and high in hot climates).
>
>
>
Wikipedia further explanations:
>
> Allen's rule predicts that endothermic animals with the same body volume should have different surface areas that will either aid or impede their heat dissipation.
>
>
> ...
>
>
> Because animals with low surface area-to-volume ratios would overheat quickly, animals in warm climates should, according to the rule, have high surface area-to-volume ratios to maximize the surface area through which they dissipate heat.
>
>
>
Consider the following illustration using building blocks:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7gRvX.png)
You can readily see that the surface area increases as the shape becomes longer, and more slender, while maintaining the same mass. This is shown via the surface-area-to-volume ratio, as mentioned above; large numbers more readily dissipate heat. The cube has the lowest ratio of 3, and while the slab is an improvement at 3.5, the tower is a staggering 4.25 -- a whopping 42% more surface area than the cube!
It's a little hacky, but this one simple trick can make a major difference in surface available for rejecting heat. This can be combined with the methods mentioned by others, such as skin texture, to amplify the effectiveness of each individual approach.
Of course, this is a double-edged sword. A lanky body will provide entirely passive cooling; it will help stay cool during physical exertion, but it will also cool off at all other times, as well. Bob the gigantic animal will almost certainly need a method to actively control his heat loss while in a sedentary state. The right approach is probably to use Allen's rule to get most of your cooling, and the active physiology mentioned by others to regulate based on conditions.
[Answer]
Well now, this is an easy one.
Simply increase your surface area. This can easily be done, just look at [elephants and their ears](https://asknature.org/strategy/large-ears-aid-cooling/). Since I'm to assume this creature will not have come about through evolution and will be built in a mad scientist's lab, I can simply say that bob will either:
(1) Have huge ears. Design them in a way that won't be a detriment or will have him trip, aight?
(2) Have many large ears, all over his body. Great for detecting prey and pinpointing sounds!
(3) Have a large amount of flaps that are not ears, but have the express purpose of cooling down bob as he exerts himself and they flap all over the place. Passive air cooling for the win!
[Answer]
It's not necessary to prevent overheating of the body if you can keep the brain within tolerable limits. Canines use this fact to their advantage by having a structure known as a [rete mirabile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_mirabile) (Latin for "wonderful net.")
>
> A rete mirabile is a complex of arteries and veins lying very close to
> each other, found in some vertebrates, mainly warm-blooded ones. The
> rete mirabile utilizes countercurrent blood flow within the net to act
> as a countercurrent exchanger. (Wikipedia)
>
>
>
One predatory behavior of canines is to run down their prey until the prey succumbs to heat exhaustion and can run no further. The canine's body tends to become about as hot as the prey's body, but the rete mirabile in the canine's neck serves to keep the brain a few degrees cooler than the body.
Blood in a canine is cooled by air flow and evaporation in the nose, muzzle and tongue. When this blood returns toward the heart through veins, it enters the rete mirabile in the neck, where it is divided into many small veins and venules. Blood from the heart that is flowing toward the brain in arteries likewise enters the rete mirabile in the opposite direction, and likewise is divided into smaller arteries and arterioles. The close proximity of a tangle of veins and arteries with blood flowing in opposite directions forms an effective [countercurrent heat exchanger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countercurrent_exchange#Countercurrent_exchange_of_heat_in_organisms). The result is a canine brain several degrees cooler than the overheated body, sufficiently cool to continue the chase until the prey succumbs to overheating.
[Answer]
**Endothermic reaction**
Bob creates chemicals within itself on demand he mixes these chemicals in a unique organ, and circulates its blood around it to cool its blood. The reaction of these chemicals creates an [Endothermic reaction](https://www.thoughtco.com/endothermic-reaction-demonstration-604251) Cool bonus creates ammonia gas.
>
> Solid barium hydroxide reacted with solid ammonium thiocyanate
> produces barium thiocyanate, ammonia gas, and liquid water. This
> reaction gets down to -20°C or -30°C
>
>
>
If you don't like this particular endothermic recipe, others are easily discovered.
**Peltier Device**
Bob either has implanted or grows a Bio-Thermoelectric cooling organ to cool his blood. To cool the device before it overheats it's self the Peltier can be constructed as a tube. water can be expelled though the tube and exhausted as steam.
>
> Thermoelectric cooling uses the [Peltier effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Peltier_effect) to create a heat flux
> at the junction of two different types of materials. A Peltier cooler,
> heater, or thermoelectric heat pump is a solid-state active heat pump
> which transfers heat from one side of the device to the other, with
> consumption of electrical energy, depending on the direction of the
> current. Such an instrument is also called a Peltier device, Peltier
> heat pump, solid state refrigerator, or thermoelectric cooler (TEC)
> and occasionally a thermoelectric battery. It can be used either for
> heating or for cooling,[1](https://www.thoughtco.com/endothermic-reaction-demonstration-604251) although in practice the main application
> is cooling. It can also be used as a temperature controller that
> either heats or cools.
>
>
>
[Answer]
**Increase thermal mass.**
Early in the morning, before the sun comes up, Bob takes a long drink and fills up with a couple of cubic meters of water. Water has a high [specific heat capacity](https://gchem.cm.utexas.edu/data/section2.php?target=heat-capacities.php) and will absorb a lot of energy before increasing its temperature. Over his long day of shucking and jiving Bob heats up his onboard thermal mass, using the cool water to absorb his excess heat.
If the water in him gets hot then he needs new water. He dumps his hot water then stops and drinks a new load of water. It might not be as cool as it was in the early morning but it is still cooler than Bob; it will do.
The water is heavy. But Bob is strong and that is not an issue. Also, the added mass actually lets him hit harder than he would on an empty stomach.
[Answer]
## Built-in radiators
Bob's powerful muscles have a very rich blood supply to meet their massive energy needs. Fortunately for Bob, blood, being mostly water, is an excellent coolant, and, conveniently, when his muscles' heat generation is greatest, their energy needs - and, thus, their blood flow - are also at a peak. After oxygenating and feeding his muscles, the blood carries waste heat into a network of venous plexi under his skin, allowing it to be easily convected and radiated away. The blood then flows back to the heart and lungs and thence to the muscles again, cooled back down and ready to carry away more waste heat.
The dense networks of small vessels do increase venous resistance considerably, making it harder to get blood back to the heart; fortunately for Bob, he's evolved auxiliary hearts to force blood through the plexi when they're needed for cooling. When Bob is inactive, the sphincter muscles surrounding the small veins distributing blood throughout the plexi constrict, shunting blood into a few larger, low-resistance channels and reducing the load on Bob's hearts.
This could be easily combined with [@Willk's suggestion](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/219089/33651), by adding another set of venous cooling plexi in the walls of the gut to transfer heat from Bob's coolant blood into the tremendous thermal mass of cold water stored in the stomach.
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All the solutions offered thus far—and there are many good ones—focus on either thermal *dissipation* or thermal *avoidance* (dissipating thermal energy, or keeping it from building up in the first place).
But what about simply increasing Bob's thermal *tolerance*?
I.e., make Bob an extremophile, specifically a hyperthermophile. Alter Bob's proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and other biological molecules, as well as his organelles, cells, tissues, organs and organ systems, so that he can withstand extremely high internal temperatures.
Doing so will enable him to sustain longer periods of intense activity, since it will take longer to reach his maximum temperature limit. It will also allow the level of activity that Bob can sustain continuously to be much higher, since the hotter Bob gets, the faster he can dissipate thermal energy. I.e., in addition to allowing a longer period at max intensity, the intensity he can sustain at steady-state will be higher.
Essentially, you'd be scaling up the adaptations made by existing hyperthermophiles—like the single-celled methanogen *Methanopyrus kandleri*, which can grow at temperatures of up to $122 ^{\circ}C$—to the vastly more complicated scale of of tissues, organs, and organ systems.
One of the adaptations used by *Methanopyrus kandleri* is high concentrations of cyclic 2,3-diphosphoglycerate, which helps keep proteins from denaturing (think of cooked egg whites) at high temperatures. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanopyrus>
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## Can Bob change shape?
Maybe while fighting, Bob is kind of dense and compact. Afterwards, when Bob needs to cool down his body extends to become longer and skinnier (increasing surface area to volume).
Also, perhaps various protrusions emerge, helping shed heat. (The only example I can think of from the natural world is the way male genitalia in some species such as whales and horses are tucked inside mos of the time). A lot of emerging protuberances like this could help.
Also, you don't mention the terrain, but perhaps there are mud puddles or ponds that Bob can wallow in, similar to water buffaloes or hippos.
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Sweating is an effective way of dispersing excess heat. Horses sweat, human sweat, and both are optimized for running.
And if you ever got sick after standing still after a good sweat, you have proven on yourself how good sweat is at cooling.
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## Selective cooling
Although this example seems to be [recently rebutted](https://www.reddit.com/r/Awwducational/comments/2face8/mythbusting_2_we_used_to_tell_people_on_safari/) the idea of selective cooling might still be applicable: Oryx and similar antilopes adapted to hot and dry environments were thought to use a special network of capillaries in the nose to cool to the brain, in order to reduce sweating and therefore saving water.
Bob might be able to use any of the mentioned cooling mechanisms to selectively cool the brain and or other vital organs, in order to prevent the effects of a heat stroke. The rest of the body might be more robust against raised temperatures and function as a heat sink which would prolong the timeframe Bob would have available at max speed before the heat buildup starts to lead to exhaustion.
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Lots of people here have mentioned surface area. What about a heatsink and fins? Some people think that's what the stegosaurus plates were for. Some folks think that's a load of hoo-ha, but it's at least debated, and therefor plausible.
Suppose you grant Bob many thin, bladelike protrusions which are hard and reasonably thermally conductive? Maybe as he's running, he realizes much happiness and relief from the convection cooling of wind against his hyper-functional fully-weaponized heat fins? Maybe he thinks the journey is almost as important as the destination.
You do you, Bob! Live large! We love ya, big guy!
<https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/the-stegosaurus-plate-controversy/>
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Bob has weird lungs. When he's sedentary, he breathes like a normal animal - filling up his lungs, exchanging gas, and then emptying them. However, when he's running, his lungs act more like the air intake on a car.
He locks his mouth open cartoonishly wide, revealing a windpipe the size of a basketball. And he has a second huge windpipe on his back (or perhaps his back is just somewhat permeable to gas), creating a wind tunnel. He gallops along at 15 miles per hour, forcing hundreds of litres of air through his body *every second*. The hot blood in his lungs, pumped through heatsink-like structures, is cooled by the wind, and exchanges gasses with it as it blows past.
This does come with limitations of course - bob must run to cool down (unless it's windy), so he can't fight for too long in one place. He also can't run with too much of a tailwind - he might need to zigzag or tack to get the airflow he needs. But I think that's neat, so whatever.
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Subvert the square-qube law by not following it. Bob the giant animal may be a very long snake or centipede. When eating well, he may grow bigger still – but only by getting even longer. So surface area go up with volume, and cooling does not become harder.
An extremely long Bob may have problems, as a single mouth can't feed kilometers of body. If this becomes an issue, he grows more heads at regular intervals. This also solves the problem of breathing, the problem of controlling large amounts of body parts, and the problem of defending distant parts. The first head is biggest and do the thinking, the rest are just followers managing their segment of the body.
In cold weather, Bob looses heat through his large surface. But then he rolls up like ball of string, minimizing exposed surface.
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There is an [excellent answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/219073/42059) on pretty much every thing biological. There is a mention of [shape shifting](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/219155/42059). Let's go Sci-Fi! (And also full-retard.)
This is a brief version of a well-know sci-fi *"explanation"* of shape shifters. All the vampire, werewolf, or robot transformations can fit this scheme. I have read it in Russian fiction by someone, who calls them "Gray Zone", if it matters, but it seems to be older.
# Hammer space for a shape shifter
Bob has access to a personal space cavern. Also, Bob has two bodies. A "combat" body, large, heavy, prone to die from overheating. Bob uses this body only for the actual attack and other combat situations.
Everyday life of Bob happens in another body, much lighter, more capable to sustain heat.
Should a combat body be needed, Bob shape shifts. Basically, he switches his everyday body for combat body. The shift is immediate. The other body is waiting in hammer space, let's freeze or slow-down the time there.
So, Bob does not need to care for cooling his combat body, as long as it is not used for too long.
Bob has now a weakness, too. If there is an attack he does not anticipate, but it is strong to kill the everyday body immediately, Bob dies.
Well, at least it's somewhat original...
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What if Bob grew horns, like longhorns, hollow and full of spongy material that circulates blood. But what if those horns are made of iron or aluminum, like the shells of certain mollusks. This would give him a weapon and essentially a natural high-efficiency heat sink
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**A slow, majestic, giant octopus**
Think out of the box. An octopus shape may come in handy, to overcome square cube law, that is to increase Bob's surface.. Bob would swim, or crawl around, low energy creature don't produce much heat.. Say 24 feet tall, starfish shaped, about 250 feet wide ? span 750 meters ? I see no real issue with that. As long as it moves *slowly*..
**No agile predator**
The size contest would never be won by a land predator. Its agility and energy consumption requires a lot of heat to be transferred out, which is the root problem here.
So this is no real answer for predator Bob. But it's too big for a comment, so I leave it in
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Maybe increase Bob's locomotive efficiency so there isn't so much waste heat in the first place. This would also help him to maintain a quick pace over long periods of time.
Without resorting to wheels, his gait at speed would have to be a natural oscillation of his limbs, maintained by spring-like structures and requiring only minimal muscle input at constant speed. He would need to have evolved specialized springy ligaments that are connected across joints in parallel to the muscles.
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In a word, chemistry. You could have Bob extract from its food the necessary chemicals to produce an endothermic reaction, and then poop the exhaust.
In alternative, you could imagine a very efficient biological heat sink, such as metal spikes; some [molluscs](https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/1728/1/radula_synthesis.pdf) can incorporate high concentrations of iron into the points of their teeth.
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Why make it complicated, when Bob could just install a solar sail on his back to increase surface area and cool (or heat!) his body when required, just like the [Spinosaurus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinosaurus) in the back:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QbigE.jpg)
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Bob creates chemicals which when combined cause a strong endothermic reaction - ie it absorbs heat energy. Bob stores these in internal "tanks" for use when needed. The resultant compound(s) can then be reconverted with time.
Examples of endothermic reactions are the solution of any of ammonium chloride, ammonium nitrate, barium hydroxide in water.
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTzNkr06Ap8) is an example of two solids combining endothermically (Ammonium Chloride and Barium Hydroxide).
It happens that dissolving Ammonium Chloride in water appears to be a potentially very useful system. NH4CL is very soluble in water - a several molar solution can be made, but to go gentle on Bob's internals we may wish to limit ourselves to a 1 molar solution, or less. As shown below, it seems likely that 10 kg of water and NH4Cl would provide very adequate for a behemoth sized Bob to use occasionally.
NH4CL does not REACT with water, it just dissociates into NH4 and Cl ions in solution. Bob could conceivably have a liquid NH4Cl tank and a dry(ish) powder reservoir and use suitable internal processes to dehydrate the solution and save the solid product for later use.
Enthalpy of solution for NH4Cl is 14.78 kJ/mol
1 mol ~= 51 grams.
So about 295 kJ / kg
1 kWh = 3.6 MJ so 1 kWh of cooling requires about 3.4 kg of NH4Cl.
1 kWh = 3,600 kW-seconds, <- drag racer
or 360 kW for 10 seconds, <- small battle tank
or 36 kW for 100 seconds. <- car highway cruising
Even allowing for inefficiencies of heat distribution and other 'mere details' it looks like say 10 kg of ammonium chloride and water would serve Bob's needs in times of duress,
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**Related:**
Niven, Pournelle & Barnes in "[**Legacy of Heorot**](https://wiki2.org/en/The_Legacy_of_Heorot) " had "Grendell" - a creature with a super-oxygenated "speed" mode with similar cooling issues. To kill it you trigger it into speed mode while far from water. That doesn't help you cool Bob but a read may help you scope the problems.
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In a world naturally formed where some magic exists but is mainly used by sentient species, I'm trying to come up with a more or less scientific way to explain how this special, rare ore (going to be used for fine crafting) could be found in only one place on the continent ?
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Generally speaking, there is no way for any ore to be located in just one place on the planet. Ore comes from the center out, so to speak, therough plate tectonics or volcanic action. Consequently, through natural proceses, you will find it elsewhere. An example is diamond mining, which is fairly rare compared to other minerals, yet is mined in a [number of locations planetwide](http://geology.com/articles/gem-diamond-map/gem-diamond-map.gif). But, what if we stretch reality just enough that it's still believable?
You could go with the theory of meteor, but now you have a limited supply. All the mineral there is came with the meteor, and that might not suit your story. If it can run out, that would be the best solution. If it can't run out, but it's only very diffuclt to obtain, then maybe...
**Volcanic interior**
One solution is that the mineral is only obtainable from the inside of a volcanic cone. This would make the mineral plentiful, but quite rare to obtain as there are limits as to how you get at it (mining from the outside in might work...). Better still, push it to underground magma flows, which are so inaccessible that only one is known to exist. The mineral would only exist (without proper preparation) due to the heat or chemical surrounds of magma. Brought to the surface without preparation it quickly oxidizes into something useless.
**Old, Really Old**
Another solution would be to make it something that needed overwhelming pressure to create, and therefore was pushed up from a great depth very, very long ago. Now you're looking for very high, very old mountains. So high that it might be a problem to breathe just to get at the stuff. There are only a small handful of mountains in the world that would fit this bill. The higher you go, the more you can find... if you can hold your breath long enough.
**Underwater**
The material only comes to be when its raw form interacts with cold, pressurized salt water. That would make it accessible only in the deepest parts of the ocean. However, this might be so inaccessible that it renders it useless in your world.
**The Elements Came Together**
Finally, you could suggest that the raw components of the mineral happend to be pushed up near a magma stream such that they melt and combine creating your final product. While the raw materials are all over the earth, only in this one location did geology happen to reward us with the right combination of materials, heat, and access. Something along the lines of of the Earthblood in Stephen R. Donaldson's *The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever* series.
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There are several processes that are rare enough that only one place on Earth can offer its byproducts in viable quantities.
[Sodium hexafluoroaluminate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryolite), for a while the only flux capable of reliably separating aluminum from the oxidised form, could only be mined from the Ivigtut mine in Greenland; it is possibly the first mineral that has been *completely* mined out. No more remains (but we've learned to produce it synthetically).
[Trinitite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite) is also a very rare artificial "mineral" that was only to be found at Trinity Ground Zero, Alamogordo, New Mexico (or where a nuclear device has been detonated on the ground. Now that I think of it, *underground* nuclear explosions will also have yielded some other shocktites, and some of them might even re-emerge millennia from now). Not very good for anything except as a novelty, but who knows.
[Stishovite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stishovite) is a remarkably resistant silicon oxide that is impervious to fluoridric acid and even resists to [dioxigen difluoride](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride), possibly the most hideously aggressive substance known to man (rather than merely be able to burn cold water, it can deflagrate ice on contact). It can only be formed naturally when a meteor strikes the Earth *just so*.
There are several "shocktites" that are formed in shock metamorphism when the right kind rock is subject to the appropriate kind of meteorite strike and that possess weird properties (mainly unusual piezoelectricity or birefringence).
Fulgurites are more common (as they are produced by lightning discharging on sand). Same considerations apply as for trinitites.
Then there are compounds that are only found (naturally) in not-so-healthy places like the Oklo Gorge, where the geometry of a uranium ore vein allowed the formation of a [natural nuclear reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor).
Otherwise, there are could be all sorts of materials created by the not too judicious application of uncontrolled magic; I think I remember the *Cathedral knives* in Tad Williams' *War of the Flowers*, made from a magically poisoned glass.
Some magical experiment ran awry could have led to such a devastation that repeating the experiment is out of the question, *and yet* in the center of the wasteland the very rock could have been transmuted into something exceedingly valuable; and it would make no sense to let it lie there untapped, now would it? Sort of like what is said to have happened to all the valuable medical research that Nazi scientists ran in the death camps; seeing as the victims were already dead, let's at least not let them have died for nothing.
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## A real-world example
[Cryolite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryolite) ([sodium hexafluoroaluminate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hexafluoroaluminate)) is a rare mineral which is essential in the aluminium industry, because it is used as a solvent in the [Hall–Héroult process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_process) for the electrolysis of aluminium oxide. (See, the *magic* of making aluminium metal doesn't work without cryolite.)
Small quantities of cryolite have been found in the U.S.A., Canada, Russia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Namibia, Norway, and Ukraine; but there was only *one* large deposit on the entire Earth, at [Ivigtût](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivittuut) in Greenland; the Ivigtût mine was the only cryolite mine in the world.
We mined it all; there are no more commercially viable natural cryolite deposits: cryolite has the dubious distinction of being the only mineral resource mined to commercial extinction. Fortunately it is not hard to make from aluminium oxides, hydrofluoric acid, and sodium hydroxide; all the cryolite used in aluminium smelting nowadays is artificial.
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It came from somewhere else, a meteor/comet/ancient spaceship crash site.
Remnant of an older civilization or some historic origin; old industrial/nuclear waste site, the site of the old temple where dark magics were worked, fossilized unicorn bones!
Requires very specific and unlikely geological processes to form; ancient seashells compressed into stones, melted by volcanic fire, put under pressure and then frozen in ice.
Some magical geographical focus points; the ley lines of the world converge to this spot depositing magical energy deforming the natural geology, creating super minerals. The site of an ancient conjunction of the planets, eclipse, or other magical event.
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**Magical Organisms**
I'm going to go with the oil idea. Millions of years ago, you had an enormous magical forest, full of lightly magical ferns, trees, mosses, and earthworms. Over time, the forest is buried under itself, depositing magical carbon underground, where it is subject to intense heat and pressure. Due to the magical properties of the carbon, that heat and pressure is somewhat stored in the deposit, lending the coal important and impressive properties. When you make coke with this coal, it lends steel and other alloys powerful magic, or even just the ability to contain magic without the use of "Soul Gems" or something.
**Unintentional Magical Contamination**
On the other hand, perhaps you had a peat bog that was the site of a great and terrible magical battle that lit the skies for miles around, blinding those too close to the location. This baked strange and capricious magic into the peat bog, and any [iron harvested from the peat bog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron) can be use to make magical items with random effects.
**Divine Intervention**
Or some well regarded priest or hero of the great and eternal GenericGod (blessed be his name) asked nicely for this deposit of tin to be blessed. Now you can forge weapons and engines of war that smite the followers of the terrible BigBad (cursed be those who follow him).
**SciFi Handwaving**
A long, long time ago, right here on our home planet, a race of incredibly sophisticated beings were dropped off during their attempt to hitchhike the known galaxy. One of those beings had a bit of mud with some nanites in it stuck to their boot. These nanite stowaways jumped ship here, burrowing into the ground to find their favorite source of energy, (plutonium, tungsten, or copper). If they love the taste of radioactive plutonium, it would make the ore harder and much more dangerous to harvest. If they love tungsten, then it would take a much more advanced civilization to make use of the "magic", as tungsten has an extremely high melting point. If it was copper, then your civilization would have access to it very early on, as it has a low melting point, and might have a reason to keep using bronze as a primary material far beyond the intended bronze age. It would also give tools made with it a small drawback, as bronze and copper are fairly soft.
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Something to consider is that many minerals exist in very small quantities all over the place, but are only concentrated enough for practical extraction in a small number of places.
If the word's extraction and refining technology and/or magic is poor, the low-grade deposits may be completely impossible to exploit (and so one high-concentration mine could be the only source). But if the technology improves and the demand for the mineral is high enough, mining from the lower-grade deposits might become worthwhile.
Allowing a low level of unobtanium production from new mining operations might be a good way to drive conflict between the people in your world. The miners and their customers might need to fight (or flee from) the centralized power that controls the main high-concentration mine when the latter tries to maintain their monopoly. You could also build a whole network of smugglers and "ore launderers" who move and sell the illegally produced goods. Even if this sort of economic conflict isn't what you want your main plot to center on, it might make a good background for your setting.
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## Another real-world example
Yes, a geological process can be known to happen in one location only. Look up [natural nuclear reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor) - in a very *very* few places, uranium has formed a natural reactor. To be exact, ***only one is known,*** in an African site.
A natural reactor needed 5 things:
* early earth history (before the proportion of U235 dropped by radioactive decay from 3% to its current 0.7%),
* a uranium rich ore (for concentration),
* an appropriate level of groundwater flow (to moderate the reaction and replace boiled away water),
* open to the atmosphere which was more rich in oxygen than today's (uranium only dissolves in the presence of oxygen),
* remaining at the surface or undisturbed after 2 billion years (because that was the last time these circumstances coexisted on earth, and it it didn't remain at the surface it would never be discoverable or remain intact).
So that sets a precedent for "one or at most very few places" and some ideas for features as well. If your product needs specific features to come about, those might only have existed in one place together.
## How else could it happen?
Statistically, although any ore is distributed, the concentration will vary. So you can require a specific concentration range to have existed, and that affects rarity. The geological origin will also matter - did it need to have come from an ore that's had certain history, for example produced from sand that became compressed and then exposed to great heat or pressure? Now you need a location where sand was created at the surface and pulled down at a tectonic plate edge. Again, the specificity can make it rare.
An example: Suppose it needed calcium carbonate from sea animals, with a high proportion of something or other that evolved in a given species. Imagine a species in ancient times had a biology that metabolised and concentrated mercury, and arose in an isolated landlocked sea where it proliferated for a few hundred million years until the sea dried and all such animals became extinct. You now have a thick bed of calcium carbonate and some organic mercury compounds at high levels. Add a few billion years and some handwaved geological circumstances that transformed the newly formed rock to a new form over time, and you have an answer. If you also add heat + pressure, then even if this biology were in multiple locations, the resulting ore might have formed from the sediment deposits in one area only.
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**Yellowstone**
Make the place a nature wonder, a bizarre combination of super volcano, freezing snow, hyper heated water and inmortal bacteria create the posibility for this weird and insane organic crystal with magic properties to be created.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_National_Park>
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Is it really neccessary to have the source being singular?
In any way, there could be mundane explanations:
* The resource has other deposits, but they haven't been found yet (the existing one is a fluke, the others might be much deeper in the crust). For example: diamonds originally were only found in India in relevant amounts.
* There simply is only one major source on that continent (but the material is more common on another one - this can be useful story-wise).
* There is only one major source left on the continent. The other sources are not economically viable or depleted
* Certain materials really depend on the area's conditions and could not form anywhere else (like the different types of amber which depend on prehistoric forests and flooding)
* It could be caused by a meteorite impacting on another material (many minerals are only found in specific areas due to their creation in a single event). This will generally not work for metals, unless we are speaking of meteorite iron.
The existence of magic of course also allows a supernatural source, like a place where a deity once made a big dump ;-).
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An answer nobody came up with yet - there used to be lots of \_rare and\_valuable\_element\_ on this planet, so for millions of years people have stopped by and mined it. And now there's only place where there is any left.
Which previous visitors didn't find because their sensors were not as modern as mine. Or it's where they parked their spaceships. Or it was buried too deep for them to bother with.
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For an actual historical example that almost exactly fits the requirements, consider tin in the Bronze Age. Tin is an essential part of bronze, yet major minable deposits are located far from the Mediterranean center of civilization, in Portugal and Cornwall (which was literally at the edge of the known world).
This Wikipedia article on the tin trade has a link to a map showing one source of tin in both North and South America, none at all in Africa or Australia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_in_ancient_times> so it is not unrealistic to have only one source of an important ore on a continent.
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Perhaps the planet has a magnetic field (a dipole) and over time the ore is pulled to one spot?
Perhaps it is carried by a migrating species, or is bound up in a species that returns to it's home for some specific reason, like spawning.
The volcano idea is good. Perhaps there is a cluster of volcanoes, only in one spot on planet, that release the ore from deep in the planet.
Perhaps something to do with ocean currents and eddies.
I think in the end it is a transport question.
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With magic you have the possibility of portals and creatures from other realms.
What if this was the skeleton of an ultra-sized giant (humanoid) that came to the planet a very long time ago and they are actually grave robbing. Of course they don't realize this until they find the skull...
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Considering various celestial impacts, like meteors. If you are looking for more material than a singular meteor, maybe a small moon or satellite was for some reason pulled from orbit. That would definitely be catastrophic, but assuming it happened long ago, the remains of the moon could be geographically isolated to maybe a hemisphere, or wherever you want. Maybe the moon or satellite slipped away from a different planet - perhaps it had a very elliptical orbit around its original parent planet, and then at apogee different gravitational fields dominated (some super rare event for the system, maybe "the planets aligned"), pulling it from its stable orbit. That way you could have a large (or small) body of foreign material in a specific geographic region.
All of this would wreak havok on the system's orbits... maybe that could play into your story. What if the freak event of the moon leaving its original orbit and then getting snagged by the other planet, saved the planetoid from its own decaying orbit in the first place.
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Although you could have the ore generate in specific geographic conditions, or come from a meteorite, another solution would be to have the sentient species have limited means, knowledge, equipment, or accessibility to the ore. Depending on your plot and world, you can have the ore be just like any other rare material here on earth, except the people in your world have yet to discover more than one source. Or maybe they know there might be more around, but don't have the means to mine it, or get to the ore in the first place, and just got lucky with finding the one source they have, due to some geologic happenstance (like the ore only forms in pockets of the world's strongest material, and your species happened to find a pocket that was open).
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> I'm trying to come up with a more or less scientific way to explain how this special, rare ore (going to be used for fine crafting) could be found in only one place on the continent ?
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You could say that the rare magical ore came from meteorites, and to add complexity to the idea the meteors fell a long time ago when the planet passed through a meteorite belt. One which the planet only passes through every few thousand years.
Our own solar system has such a meteorite belt.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZRt2D.png)
Rather than say the ore can only be found in one place. You could explain that the meteorite is very difficult to find. It has no radiation or electrical interference and looks like a lot of other rocks. The majority of meteorites are small and can't be found on the ground even if you knew where to look.
There is an exception: In one part of the country it is very cold, and ice flows form. The meteorites impact the ice and travel downstream lodged in the ice. When the ice flows reach the bottom of a mountain they melt releasing the meteorite. This creates a river bed where the meteorites can be easily found.
This is kind of how meteorite hunters find stones in the Antarctica.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N8VjI.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite_hunter>
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Another option is to have the mineral be extruded from (directly or after some geologic processing) living organisms, that evolved in one area and can't spread due to surrounding conditions being unfavorable.
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Another approach to the "living things" approach...instead of a mineral, could it perhaps be a form of amber from the sap of a type of tree that only grew, in ancient times, in this one area?
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What about if this specific mineral is derived from the remains of a very, very old civilization, that underwent some chemical transformation due to pressure and the passage of the eons? I'm basically following the petroleum formation idea, where dead organic matter, through pressure and time, became a valuable oil.
To avoid the problem of it being available everywhere, it could be formed by a very specific combination of materials that were used on an old temple. For example, the specific ratio of iron, carbon, silicon, cobalt and europium (which is used for glow-in-the-dark stuff) could, after many millions of years and under extreme pressure, become a unique ore by itself.
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Exploring the idea of "living" matter, (possibly non-carbon based if necessary), decomposing by bacteria (or similar) into sugar.
In our world, sugars are held quite valuable by living systems, so this would be like throwing away fuel.
What kind of composition would these bacteria have to have chemically, and what kind of composition would their food have to have, for this to make sense in their (preferably not immediately dangerous to human) environment?
The organism should be able to excrete any form of sugar that is digestible to humans.
*(Note that this is "Science Based" but doesn't have to be exact like "Hard Science")*
[Answer]
**Aphids excrete sugar. Maybe your creatures can do the same.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qdb6f.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid>
Aphids secrete "honeydew": sugar rich secretions that fall onto your car and make a sticky mess. This is good stuff with caloric value for humans and ants and other things too.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeydew_(secretion)>
Why would the aphids forgo energy? It is energy for them as well. It is because there is so much. The aphids need to process a lot of the protein-poor sap to get enough protein for themselves. With that sap is more sugar than they can use, which makes it waste to be excreted.
For your bacteria the issue needs to be carbon vs nitrogen. Carbon is energy and nitrogen is required for anabolic synthesis of tissues. If you have an excess of carbon you need to process it and get rid of it to obtain the associated nitrogen. Carbon-rich, nitrogen-poor environments are common on Earth and elsewhere. Outside of Earth, one circumstance where available nitrogen is bound up in a surfeit of carbon is [tholins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tholin):
>
> Tholins (after the Greek θολός (tholós) "hazy" or "muddy"; from the
> ancient Greek word meaning "sepia ink") are a wide variety of organic
> compounds formed by solar ultraviolet irradiation or cosmic rays from
> simple carbon-containing compounds such as carbon dioxide (CO2),
> methane (CH4) or ethane (C2H6), often in combination with nitrogen
> (N2). Tholins do not form naturally on modern-day Earth, but they
> are found in great abundance on the surface of icy bodies in the outer
> Solar System, and as reddish aerosols in the atmosphere of outer Solar
> System planets and moons.
>
>
>
Wave your hands now! Your tholin-dwelling bacteria extract their needed nitrogen from the excess of carbon by partly oxidizing the carbon, substituting oxygen for nitrogen. Freed from its carbon cage, the nitrogen is available to the bacteria for protein synthesis. The partly oxidized carbon is left as a nitrogenless but delicious waste product.
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*Aspergillus oryzae* also known as *koji* is a mold. It is capable of breaking starches and other polysaccarides into sugar. It does this for its own benefit, but actually produces more sugar than it can use itself.
Sugar however is a preservative and an antibiotic. If you can produce excess sugar, and you have evolved to tolerate elevated sugar levels you have an advantage over other organisms that might want to use a food source.
Koji will enter into a symbiotic relationship with yeast, the koji will produce sugar, the yeast will ferment the sugar into alcohol. Yeast and koji are tolerant of levels of sugar and alcohol that would be toxic for other microorganisms, so the koji and the yeast, united, can utilise food sources that they could not exploit alone.
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## Ants and aphids
[Aphids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid) "are small sap-sucking insects and members of the superfamily Aphidoidea" (Wikipedia). They live on plants and feed passively by tapping the elaborated sap, which is basically a solution of sugars in water, flowing trough the plant host. They don't use all the sap they take, and excrete the excess in the form of [honeydew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeydew_(secretion)), which is a concentrated solution of sugar.
[Some species of ants farm aphids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism); the ants take care of the aphids and protect them, and feed on the "honeydew the aphids release from the terminations of their alimentary canals" (Wikipedia).
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ant_guards_its_Aphids.jpg) [](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ant_feeding_on_honeydew.JPG)
*Left: an ant guards it aphids; photograph by Agrinberg, available on Wikimedia under the CC BY-2.0 license. Right: an ant extracting honeydew from an aphid; photograph by Jmalik, available on Wikimedia under the CC BY-SA-3.0 license.*
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There is a massive difference between a creature that consumes sugar and discards what it cannot process vs a creature that releases sugar as a waste material. If that difference is irrelevant to you, then aphids!
From an energy perspective, sugar is a poor material to excrete as a waste material because it is high energy density. It is a good energy store.
You would have to hypothesize a biochemisty that uses a chemical that has a higher energy density than sugar, but then breaks down into sugar as the energy is extracted and excreted as waste. This would likely include an environment so rich in high-energy density material that excreting sugar as waste would have been evolutionary viable.
Maybe Gasoline could be a naturally occurring and highly abundant material. This would require a chemist to verify if its realistic.
Perhaps the single-celled organisms that evolved to become multi-celled beings managed to harness nuclear radiation and therefore organic chemicals just gunk up their 'digestive' system. Basically they consume food for the amino acids and maybe lipids, but the carbohydrates are just excreted as waste. Good luck explaining how the cells would be protected from the radiation though, that would be an entirely different WB question.
[Answer]
***Aspergillus oryzae* (koji)**
Look up *Aspergillus oryzae*. It is a member of a very abundant group of molds *Aspergillus* and this microorganism actually creates simple sugars from complex carbohydrates. So I think it works well with what you are looking for. It is not a bacteria, but I guess the gene clusters could be transferred from these fungal organisms to bacteria, if needed. As far as "non carbon based" goes, however, I think it is not compatible with the very nature of what sugars are! (basically carbon chains).
I don't know if they "discard" the sugars, per se, but they clearly don't use them. Indeed, in the process of making saké, there are two "fermentation steps". The first "fermentation" is done with koji, which is a starter culture of *Aspergillus oryzae*. I use quotations for "fermentation" as it is in fact a saccharification process. And the koji molds don't use the fermentable sugars, because the actual fermentation is done in a separate step (meaning the sugars have accumulated in the culture medium, before the actual fermentation).
The actual fermentation is done, of course, with a strain of the classical wine yeast *saccharomyces* that use those sugars and converts them to alcohol. Yeast can not use complex sugars to produce alcohol, which means that *Aspergillus oryzae* produce true simple sugars.
Considering that saké are usually very high in alcohol (commonly 12-15% abv) and that fermentation is not sustainable above 15% abv (for most yeast), it means that they have access to large amounts of fermentable sugars generated during the koji "fermentation".
So these *Aspergillus* guys use complex carbohydrates as source of food (like starch of cellulose) and output simple sugars. They are also used for the preparation of certain foods.
[Answer]
Many bacteria do excrete sugars in the form of [exopolysaccharides in biofilms](https://www.intechopen.com/books/the-complex-world-of-polysaccharides/exopolysaccharides-of-the-biofilm-matrix-a-complex-biophysical-world), so bacteria do excrete sugar molecues in the wild. Maybe combining this with the raffinose comment above, you could imagine a world where bacteria can manufacture both [D and L glucose](https://www.quora.com/What-is-difference-between-d-glucose-and-l-glucose) but organisms can't digest D glucose, so that bacterial biofilms on this world contain a lot of D glucose (or a polysaccharide the easily breaks down into D glucose).
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Edit: [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/111953/809) answer is actually better, but I believe mine still provides usable solution.
# There is no sense to discard sugar
Not with biology and biochemistry as we know it. Sugar is readily available energy source. metabolic pathways to extract that energy, with or without use oxygen, are really old and relatively short.
Discarding energy makes no evolutionary sense. Evolution generally minimizes energy spent. Gathering energy just to throw it away gives no benefit, using it for growth and procreation will always be preferred.
# How it might evolve?
The only reason do "discard" sugar that makes sense, is to store it for future use. Bees do exactly this. Carrots and potatoes do similar thing (store internally). There is no reason for bacteria / yeast / algae biofilms and other colonies not to evolve this trait, if food is available for them for some time, and hunger is regular. If conditions change and food will always be plentiful, they will store it, and store, and store, and never use it.
**This will not be stable**. Evolution will get rid of this trait, probably rather soon. But in the narrow window between environmental change and evolution catch-up, you can have your microorganisms *appear* to work as you want them to.
# Composition of microorganisms and their food
Actually, it will be really similar to composition of microorganisms now, and their food. Metabolic pathways to create glucose exists. There just need to be a reason for them to be used in this specific way.
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**Why not photsynthetic *algae* or plankton?**
Algae and plankton use UV radiation while capturing CO2 from the atmosphere to bind and create sugar and some more complex variants of it to use as food. If in your world there has been a recent raise in CO2 concentration(would also rise water acidity) or a rise on radiation levels, these organisms could be on a superreproductive/high activity phase.
This would mean that they would be constantly producing more of those sugars than they need while also multiplicating rapidly. The high concentration of sugar inside them would mean that a part of it would end up filtering out into the environment (these beings usually live in water, so you would end up with sugary water). If it is not released at enough speed, some of these beings would/could end up dying with sugar intoxication. After death, the membrane of these beings usually ruptures, releasing the sugar and other chemicals.
This would even allow you to have people carrying containers of water mixed with these organisms to have them produce sustenance when needed by exposing them to the air and sun.
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[Question]
[
FOOF or Dioxygen Difluoride is an extremely dangerous chemical. It is not in itself flammable but makes the substances around it combust.
**How could a biological organism (say a dragon) use this as a breath weapon without itself dying in the process?**
I am not exactly concerned with the synthesis of the chemical, but how it could use the chemical (breath weapon sprayed from mouth) without bursting into flames and exploding itself.
[Answer]
The Dragon does not store FOOF in its body. It stores Fluorine and oxygen separately in PTFE organs. It has “standard” dragon fire breath capability allowing it to preheat an internal chamber with an opening at one end to 700 degrees C. It then squirts a stream of oxygen gas around the walls of the chamber and a stream of fluorine through the centre.
Some of the oxygen and fluorine react inside the chamber to form FOOF which is then immediately vented to the outside on to the intended victim. The chamber itself is protected by the oxygen stream that passes along the walls of the chamber.
So the FOOF is created on the hoof so to speak and does not come into contact with the dragons body.
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If you search about [FOOF](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride) you will find:
>
> you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. “Oh, no you don’t,” is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal, “. . .not unless I’m at least a mile away, two miles if I’m downwind.” This, folks, is the bracingly direct route to preparing dioxygen difluoride, often referred to in the literature by its evocative formula of FOOF.
>
>
> FOOF is only stable at low temperatures; you’ll never get close to RT with the stuff without it tearing itself to pieces. I’ve seen one reference to storing it as a solid at 90 Kelvin for later use, but that paper, a 1962 effort from A. G. Streng of Temple University, is deeply alarming in several ways.
>
>
> “Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid O2F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred.”
>
>
> And he’s just getting warmed up, if that’s the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that’s -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng’s reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on.
>
>
> [Derek Lowe, Things I Won't Work With, In the Pipeline, ScienceMag.org](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride)
>
>
>
Darwinism would take care of any organism which would attempt using FOOF for any practical use, by reducing its DNA and all its body to a cloud of gases.
Unless this dragon has a magnetic AND cryogenic confinement unit in its guts, allowing it to keep FOOF cooled down and away from any substance until it is sprayed out.
[Answer]
**Terminally fluorinated stuff.**
FOOF will add its fluorine to anything which can accommodate fluorine addition. That includes some things, like water, which are already terminally oxidized and so impervious to oxygen radicals. As I understand it the fluorine displaces the oxygen to form hydrofluoric acid.
One would therefore contain FOOF in a terminally fluorinated compound. In this related question I proposed fluorspar, or calcium fluoride.
[How can Bronze Age people make hazmat gear for chlorine trifluoride?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80155/how-can-bronze-age-people-make-hazmat-gear-for-chlorine-trifluoride/80190#80190)
Fluorospar is fine for a fantasy; it is crystalline and beautiful. It should be impervious to oxidation by either fluorine or oxygen radicals.
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# Short Answer: Magic
The only way that FOOF can be stored is at cryogenic temperatures - it even decomposes to fluorine and oxygen at those elements' liquefaction temperatures. Unless your dragon has no metabolism to speak of, there's no way it radiates enough heat away to biologically chill something to less than a hundred degrees Kelvin.
So, `reality-check` notwithstanding, the way you store it is by having a magical refrigeration unit inside the dragon. A chamber whose very walls are imbued with magic that drain the heat out of anything inside them. (This, incidentally, would be very valuable for dragon-hunters. Imagine a perpetual icebox in a fantasy setting.)
Outside of this magical *Frigidaire*, there's no way. Notwithstanding synthesis of the chemical, it's so ridiculously unstable that even if you had an unreactive biological structure in which to store it (you don't, there isn't any carbon- or silicon-based biology that wouldn't burn in contact with the material), it would break down on its own.
---
On the plus side, you then have a quadruply-awful breath weapon. First, the dragon spews out something so cold it freezes everything it touches, which then *rapidly oxidizes*, setting *fire* to everything in its path, which results in some free elemental fluorine, *poisoning* everything it touches, and if there's any water around, you also get [hydrofluoric acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fluoride). So cold, fire, poison, and corrosion, otherwise known as the Elemental Sampler.
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[Question]
[
I want to know whether there is a way to make coins that are "swimmable" in the fashion of [Scrooge McDuck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrooge_McDuck).
My inquiry is based off this [Family Guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Guy) meme from [Pinterest](https://id.pinterest.com/pin/109141990943314984/?lp=true)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8oluK.jpg)
The coins don't necessarily have elaborate images or designs on them, they can just be plain tiny round disks.
I considered metals that melt when heated to body temperature (like gallium) but since that would not return to a coin shape after melting, it isn't an acceptable solution. I want the material to maintain the coin shape or at least reform back naturally when something passes through, this include not merging/sticking together with other coins.
Paper is also out of the question; I want it to be coinage, so substituted measures of value like salt, chocolate, etc. don't qualify, unless they can be turn into coins. They have to hold their shape when not being swum through, so jelly or similar materials are also out.
rubber, sponge, or similar materials are also out.
I also don't want the ability to swim through coins to be intrinsic to the swimmer or their clothing (some sort of field that makes coins permeable on contact or a similar device).
Is there a material or method to achieve what I describe?
[Answer]
Possibly. Push water or high-pressure air in from the bottom of the container. Essentially what you're doing is making artifical quicksand\*. See also fluidized beds: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidized_bed> I've no idea whether it would actually work with coins, though, given their shape.
\*If you happen to walk into quicksand, the recommended action is to lay down and swim out.
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**Aerate the aggregate**
Forcing air (or water, or both) up through a container of sand makes quick sand. Each sand grain is suspended in fluid, and free to flow. I propose this same approach could work for any aggregate material, including metal coins.
Problems:
* A mechanism to move that much air
* Noise from air and clanking coins
* Drowning
I'm imagining machinery similar to indoor skydiving simulators, with a large fan below the bottom grate. You know you have enough air when your coins just barely float. You can adjust air flow and coin material. Lighter coins will float more easily but if the average density of the solution is lower than the swimmer, then they will just sink.
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I find the answers that suggest to mix the coins with another fluid (air or water) unsatisfactory.
Swimming works for 2x reasons:
* the thing swimming is neutrally bouyant in the medium
* the medium behaves like a fluid
So to swim in coins you need to approximate those 2x conditions.
assuming a human swimmer
1) reduce the density of the coins to that of water
2a) decrease the size of the coins until the swimmers movement can make them flow.
2b) reduce the friction between the coins (apply a silicone coating?)
Most likely by the time (1) has been achieved (eg, with a hollow core) most coins will be sufficient small to bear paddling against (or at least some kind of freestyle stroke where the limb is out of the fluid for part of the stroke)
The low friction aspect of the coins would be to ensure they 'flow' at least a bit like water.
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# Use LEGO coins and water:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eMZNu.png)
They're plastic, so they'll float in water, it's just a matter of determining the ideal ratio of coins to water. It's better than using normal currency-sized coins because the smaller coins will impede your movement far less. Might be a bit pricey to get enough of these to fill a swimming pool to the appropriate density, but hey, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the same volume of actual gold coins, and you could potentially swim in them.
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No. Very unlikely. With heavy objects like coins a person would just lie on the surface and thrash about with a few coins being thrown around. Should the coins be made lighter and smaller the situation would perhaps approach what happens in grain silos which are very dangerous. Dozens of [people fall into grain silos](https://www.farmprogress.com/corn/grain-bin-danger-just-20-seconds-entrapment) every year and a lot of those are engulfed and die. It is not possible to swim in such conditions even for very strong men they just get trapped.
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Possibly... when sand is stimulated with sonic vibrations, it behaves a lot like a liquid. I'm not sure if coins are small enough to experience this phenomenon, but if they were, they may become swimmable.
[edit] This effect is significantly amplified and paired with blasting air up through it which I did not include in my original answer since the OP originally said floating it in another medium was against the rules.
<https://interestingengineering.com/video/this-mind-blowing-experiment-makes-sand-behave-just-like-a-liquid>
[Answer]
The goal is, as others have said, to reduce the friction between coins... or rather, to allow them to slide past each other smoothly: that coins don't do this is not completely because of friction.
But we want to do this by the intrinsic properties of the coins, not through adding a gas or liquid.
**Orientation**
Normally, coins poured into a container will tend to align with the floor of that container. So in a swimming pool the coins will all lie flat, making them very strong in compression. If the coins can be randomly arranged instead, this would definitely help.
**Shape**
The shape of the coins is probably the major issue here, but also probably one of the things that OP is least able to change.
If you push two stacks of coins together, they will remain separate: they do not "smoosh together". It would help if the edges were rounded rather than square, so that if you pushed two stacks of coins together, they would smoothly interleave.
Similarly, if you press down on the top of a stack, it is extremely strong and stable: a stack of dozens of coins will not collapse in compression, even if the coins are imperfectly stacked. So it would help further if the flat surfaces of the coins were also slightly domed, akin to flattened M&Ms or Skittles. That way, imperfect stacks become compressible.
Consider the difference between pushing your hand into a box of M&Ms, and a box of stacked sugar cubes: the skittles let your hand slide in freely, the sugar cubes will resist you.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W27bU.jpg)
**Mass**
Lighter coins will have less friction, and also less mass to resist the swimmer/diver. They need to be as dense as water (so the swimmer floats), but not much more than that. Actually, to be more precise: the volume occupied by the coins and the air between them needs that average density. Aluminum is probably close to as good as you can get.
**Coating**
Teflon-coating coins wouldn't allow diving, since they would still basically be a solid in compression. They *might* allow one to swim through them.
**Monopoles**
Personally, I suspect even the above wouldn't be enough to make them swimmable. Simple solids are probably unlikely to accomplish divabilty, no matter how slick they are.
Coins that are made of (or laced with) magnetic monopoles would be one way: they would repel, and thus be slicker than teflon, as well as spaced out, the topmost ones even hovering a little.
This would allow for both compression and buoyancy, both important for absorbing the impact when you dive in! You'd also get splashes, waves and ripples.
**Superconductors**
If monopoles are too handwavey, another possibility, though I haven't checked it out, might be magnets embedded into coins such that the south face of each magnet faces out... and the coins being made of superconducting materials. Superconductors are repelled by magnets, but I'm unsure what he behavior of a superconducting object with an embedded magnet would be. Intuitively, it *feels* as if such coins should act kinda like monopoles, but nothing at all works as I would intuitively expect around superconductors, so I'm probably wrong.
Of course, even if this works, it means making coins out of room-temperature, 1-atm-pressure superconductors, which have not yet been discovered.
**Gravity**
If the person swimming is very very light because of low gravity, then so can the coins be. This significantly reduces friction, and also compaction due to gravity: a swimming motion would churn the coins up farm more, and they would fall back in place far more slowly.
**Conclusion**
I'm not sure any *one* of these will be a solution, but some *combination* should be feasible, particularly if combined with other answers here (changing or forcing the separating material, vibrating, etc).
[Answer]
Make them highly ionized.
For example, if each coin has a very high negative charge, they will repulse each other and act like a gas.
Then you need to wear an highly ionized swimsuit that will cover all part of your body.
The swimsuit should have 3 substrates:
1) external substrate with same charge of coins, it will repulse them and allow you to swim.
2) medium should be dielectric, it should prevent the current to pass through and electrocute your body.
3) internal, a conductive material connected to a power generator that keeps the system balanced continuely charging the external substrate.
The big problem of this system is how to keep coins charged safely, a big amount of energy is necessary.
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## A zero-gee pool of coins.
Create a weightless volume (e.g., in orbit) packed with coins, with some room to breathe. With a continuous source of agitation (light breezes/jets of air) the coins will move chaotically around the room, acting like a fluid of particles which you can push against to propel yourself (swim).
The coins can be made out of anything and can be packed fairly dense (just don't breathe any in). I imagine this would be a wildly claustrophobic experience.
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Here is a video of someone experimenting swimming in shade balls that they use on a reservoir.
It will give a similar answer to your coin question. The resistance of the coins would impede progress as it will be higher than the propulsion and resistance your arms and legs would have swimming, you would have to make some kind of fins for your feet and a cupped oar like device for your arms, but even that may not be enough.
The coins would have to be plastic or foam. There would still be the problem of buoyancy as you would sink. Maybe try attaching a large helium balloon with a harness.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZbChKzedEk>
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Hollow coins could work. If you want to swim through them, they would have to be floating on water, like piled on a rich person's pool. As to what swimming through them would look like, I offer this demonstration by Veritasium: <https://youtu.be/BZbChKzedEk>
As you can see it's surprisingly difficult, yet doable.
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You'd need to create coins that have a density equal to the density of water at or below the bottom of the pool, either by using hollow coins or by using a particularly non-dense allow (maybe a metallic aerogel?). Effectively, your coins would be floating right at the bottom of the pool, so any disturbance could easily displace them upward and outward. It might also help to make the coins as slick and frictionless as possible to eliminate any friction as coins move past each other.
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The shade ball video (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZbChKzedEk>) posted by A. Sach illustrates the problem well.
Fluidization is necessary to reduce friction, and the coins have to be non-stackable.
The shade ball example shows that uniform size is a problem -- you get large patches of local order that increases resistance.
I suspect that the fluidization has to be strong enough that the gap is large compared to irregularities in the coins.
To swim in coins, the average density has to be approximately the same as humans. Consider what it would be like swimming in a pool of mercury.
One example of a dangerous solid that has some of these characteristics: Wheat. Every year there are farmers and farm kids that drown in wheat silos. A person is denser than the wheat+spaces, and the grains are slippery enough that you slowly slide down.
So if you had a coin shaped like a bean, with a density of about 1.3 so that with the air spaces it was just over 1.0 you could swim.
Over the years lots of things have been used for money. One of the more interesting ones was seashells.
So your new currency are clear plastic beads containing holograms to make them uncounterfeitable. They are cheap to make, don't bog down your pockets.
Or you make hollow quartz balls. Or for much longer lasting currency, hollow sapphire balls. You then can also have the fun of adding dopants to make them in brilliant colours. (Synthetic sapphire can be clear, blue, red, pink -- the natural colours of sapphire, or in a huge variety of other colours.
If you make hollow balls, you could line them with a real charge electret (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electret>) if you can put enough charge on them, you wouldn't need fluidization to keep them apart.
For that matter, they don't have to be spheres, but could be regular or semi-regular solids. By adjusting the charge to mass ratio, they would self sort.
This could bring a whole new meaning to the flow of money.
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I don't think you can do this without fluidizing, in a way that keeps the coins levitated and separated relative to each other in ways that are 'self-restoring' when the diver compresses them. The dive builds up a fair amount of gravitationally-induced kinetic energy and the coin system must absorb and dissipate this while having enough 'density' that the diver floats to the surface instead of sinking -- he would not drown, but would have no fun, and when he interrupts the fluidizing flow the coins around him will tend to coalesce to a jacket wherever he tries to go...
First major issue to be overcome is that disk-shaped objects don't fluidize well: when they start aligning in 'fields' air preferentially escapes past them and that section of the bed will progressively collapse. So you need something with comparatively low velocity to do the fluidizing with flat-shaped coins ... arguing for use of some kind of 'carrier fluid' perhaps with density lower than water. That is not part of the original question scope, but it remains a potential for 'fallback'.
These likely won't be precious-metal coins, even if 'hollow', and I think it is likely that you will have some light, strong shell *just* stiff and strong enough to absorb shocks like diving without permanent distortion (ie. exceeding the yield point anywhere in the structure). To me this suggests either aerogel/nanofoam or some kind of honeycomb, with the faces and perhaps edge ring bonded on, perhaps with positive pressure inside to contribute to effective stiffness and distortion resistance.
Making light coins 'a store of value' becomes an issue for Scrooge McDuck, and probably for you all, too, if the coins are basis for a legal tender. There's a pretty good analysis in a different context in a couple of the George O Smith Venus Equilateral stories, where he tries to design currency that can't be matter-duplicated. We don't have quite that problem, but we do have to try ensuring (1) a distinctive structure that can't cost-effectively be faked; (2) testable structure that is distinctive and can't cost-effectively be faked; (3) 'tamper-evident' construction that identifies when coinage has been adulterated or is 'in need of professional testing' -- there are other concerns. If the coin is made of honeycomb brazed or adhered to face sheets, for example, microstructure or added trace elements can give a certain inherent set of qualities. As with Microsoft's holograms (in principle) spreading even large setup and coding costs over a large number of instances can pay where 'counterfeiting' even at fairly large nominal face value (as for Bitcoin or other virtual currency when markets don't close) would not.
Making the coins lenticular with an airfoil cross-section might work, but these wouldn't feel like coins in the hand. So I would wonder about making the face designs in heavier relief, using aerodynamic dimpling a la golf ball, or doing specialized shaping to make the coins suitable for the above clean levitation characteristics.
I do wonder what would happen if you could develop a structure so stiff yet light that it could be processed to hold its shape in vacuo (where you want it to be for many types of fabrication anyway) and have near-neutral buoyancy in air. I don't think offhand that pressurizing the ambient environment changes the working displacement density of air radically enough to help with the levitation and relative effective 'inertia' of such coins ... but someone should 'gin up some physics to test.
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After posting this i saw a similar post but:
If you hired the zero G plane (vomit comet) you could pack a large container with both yourself and coins, when it went into zero G you could then swim through them.
There would have to be just enough coins so as you swim they compacted against the rear wall of the container giving you resistance to get propulsion forward. As you swim you would push the coins in front behind you keeping the resistance going. You may need some kind of cupped paddle on you hands to assist.
Too many coins and you would have too much resistance in front of you.
Depending on if you want actual coins or just something of value you could swim in smart water that they use for tracking criminals. The Smartwater security system sprays digitally encoded information onto attackers. If it could be coded like a Crypto Currency then it would have value stored in it and that would be like swimming in water.
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L.Dutch made a worthwhile observation in [an answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/77764/29 "L.Dutch answer to Could a cyborg catch a bullet?") to a different question:
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> Moreover for close range shots there is almost no time to react and move the limb: for a shot fired at 20 m, with a speed of 200 m/s, you have only 0.1 s to have the limb in place to protect you (if you see the gun pointed at you) or even less if you have to react to the sound of the shot being fired (which reaches you at about 300 m/s).
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Suppose our intrepid cyborg is not visually aware of the shot being fired. (Basically, it's "looking in another direction", whatever "looking" means for it.) Its first indication of the possible danger is when the leading edge of the shock wave from the bullet being fired reaches it at the speed of sound, approximately 300 m/s. If the shot is aimed at the cyborg and the bullet is either subsonic [or supersonic](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/77776/29 "EngelOfChipolata's answer"), the shock wave is closely followed by the bullet itself, which is of course a problem; however, if the bullet is going in some other direction, then the cyborg will be able to detect the fact that a shot has been fired and remain operational.
For an alternative scenario, since lots of people have argued that the speed of the bullet is too low, you may freely choose to consider the following scenario instead: A person stands next to our intrepid cyborg, with both facing the same direction. The person fires the weapon along their mutual line of sight, such that the trajectory of the bullet takes it away from both of them. The cyborg does not visually observe the shot being fired.
Here, we aren't interested in actually *dodging* the bullet or really doing much of anything with the information, but rather only the processing that goes into determining the fact *that a shot has been fired at all* with a reasonable false positive rate (no claiming "shots fired!" when someone slams a door shut). To put this in software acceptance criteria terms, the cyborg only needs to set a single bit in a fixed memory location somewhere once a shot fired condition is detected; the time to do this particular write to memory can safely be approximated as instantaneous.
**How long would the cyborg *at a minimum* need to, based on auditory cues alone and with a reasonable false positive rate, determine that a shot has been fired in its vicinity?**
You may assume that the cyborg is able to fully process all audio input in real time, with no lag.
I have a feeling that [Nyquist and Shannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem) are working against us here, but I don't know to what extent.
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Disclosure: we (Sound Intelligence) sell this exact product.
The problem is *not* detecting a loud noise. That's actually quite easy. But the vast majority of loud noises aren't gunshots. Is your android going to duck every time a door is closed?
Another answer quoted 120 dB. That's at the standard measurement distance of 1 meter. Guess what? At that distance, you're dead anyway. We can safely ignore it.
So we're dealing with a gunshot 'sound that's not only attenuated by distance, but also we have reflections from the ground and walls. This will smear out the peak and make it a bit longer. It's still a pretty unique signature, especially if you are in a stationary environment. You can see how the sound decays, and compare it to the normal environment.
Other noises may be not as loud as a gunshot, but by being closer they end up at the same dB level at the microphone. Looking at the whole signature including reflections and decay, recognition becomes a lot easier.
So the practical answer is that we may need the full sound including several hundred milliseconds after the initial peak to distinguish it from perfectly normal sounds.
How much margin does that give us? Well, the bullet is traveling at about Mach 0.9, so the sounds leads by about 10%. Let's assume a shot fired from 100 meters away. That means the bullet arrives exactly 100 ms after the sounds - just enough to have a somewhat reliable detection, but not to react.
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I think signal [convolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution) between the sound and a prerecorded shot sound should suffice to determinate that is actually a shot (a trained human can easily separate shot from other sounds), and we admit that this computation is instantaneous. Thus, only the sound travel time must be taken into consideration.
The speed of sound at sea level and in ISA conditions (25°C, 1013.25 hPa, ...) is 340.29 m / s, thus the time to reach the cyborg "ear" is $$t = \frac{distance}{speed} = \frac{20}{340.29} = 0.058 s = 58ms$$
The main problem is that sentence
> The shock wave, of course, is closely followed by the actual bullet itself.
is actually false. This is the problem when something has passed the sound barrier, the sound is behind the object. Thus, if your cyborg is shot, the bullet would reach them before any sound does. (In fact the shockwave created just on the tip of the bullet is ahead of the bullet and if you want to hear it you have to listen to the bullet tip... and you don't want to put your ear there).
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Let's assume the shot is fired at t=0.
The sound travel at about 340 m/s, therefore we have to rule out supersonic bullets, as they will hit the cyborg before it hears the shot.
For a subsonic shot, assuming the emitted sound spectrum is comparable with this one ([source](http://www.aidic.it/cet/12/26/085.pdf))
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0NYjY.png)
we have a peak frequency of 1 kHz, meaning that to have a complete oscillation of the pressure wave in the listening device of the cyborg we need at least 0.5 ms.
After this millisecond the cyborg has to locate the point from where the bullet is approaching. Proper triangulation would require 3 "ears" in different locations, if instead the cyborg has only 2 it will be able only to identify the line along which the bullet is travelling.
After having found the point of fire, the cyborg has to determine if the bullet is really approaching to hit, or if it was fired to another target.
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To react to a sound compatible with a gunshot and *assuming that it really is a shot and you're the target* you can probably reckon on the dramatic increase in sound pressure being enough, but we could call it half a period of a 1 kHz wave, or 0.5 ms plus the distance divided by the speed of sound (propagation time) after the shot. The question is, *is that enough to do anything*, given that the bullet isn't far behind. Using metres and seconds from now on.
For a distance `x` and bullet speed `v` (assumed constant) we have a time `t=0.0005 + x/340 - x/v`in which to detect the sound and move out of the way.
If you imagine dropping all the way to the ground to dodge a bullet, with a cyborg that can essentially fold itself up instantaneously, you can consider that as a very first approximation to be falling half the cyborg's height -- lets say 1 metre -- based on the centre of mass. From the basic [equations of motion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equations_in_classical_mechanics#Equations_of_motion_.28constant_acceleration.29) we can find that it takes `1/sqrt(5)` or 0.45 s to fall 1 metre. That would mean the reaction time is miniscule compared to the distance and difference in speeds and we can simplify, getting `340/v =1-(340*0.45)/x`. For a 200m/s bullet that means a distance of around 220 m.
If your enemy always goes for headshots and you know you only need to duck the movement required drops to say `1/3 m` and the time to around 0.25 s -- a distance of `120 m` for your 200 m/s bullet
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A couple of things to add...
1. By definition, a supersonic bullet exceeds the speed of sound. If you are close enough, you will not hear it before it reaches your location, if it is fired in your direction. If it matters, most handgun ammunition is subsonic, while most rifle ammunition is supersonic.
Of course, a bullet will not remain supersonic at any distance, it will slow down over time. However, a bullet meant for long-distance shooting may not slow below supersonic for 1000 meters or so. (Technically, the bullet is the projectile, and the cartridge and charge of powder are important in how fast the bullet can be pushed, but I'm blurring those distinctions.)
2. There are two sounds associated with supersonic bullets: 1) the firing of the gun -- i.e. the powder "exploding" in the cartridge to propel the bullet down the barrel -- and 2) the shockwave from being supersonic. The shockwave follows closely behind the bullet, while the sound of the gun firing may be left farther behind. (It would not be unusual for a rifle bullet to be 2-3x the speed of sound.)
Quick Answer: *Here's a [really good paper](http://www.montana.edu/rmaher/publications/maher_ieeesafe_0407_109-113.pdf) on the subject.* One graph in the paper indicates about 30 milliseconds for most of the audio -- muzzle blast through echoes -- to be received 9 meters from a rifle. Onto that, you'd add processing time, which I would guess would also be measured in the low milliseconds. The processing time should be fairly constant, and you could run multiple detectors -- optimized for different distances and directions of fire. The dominant times would be: a) how much of the 30 or so milliseconds your detector needs to see to make the call, and b) the distance of the gun from the cyborg -- depending on the direction of the fire.
My musings:
So it depends on the relationship of the cyborg to the bullet's path as to what it will hear. If the bullet is fired at or near the cyborg, and if the bullet it supersonic, the cyborg might first hear an impact -- though that would be hard to distinguish from other sounds -- followed by the shockwave from the bullet, followed by the "bang" of the gun, then echoes and reflections of the shockwave and the "bang".
If the bullet is subsonic, there will be no sonic crack, but if the bullet goes beyond the cyborg there may still be a fairly unique "zing" of a fast object flying by.
If the bullet is fired away from the cyborg, it will hear the "bang" first, then some of the sonic boom. And then a fair amount of reflections and echoes.
Loudness-wise, an unsurpressed rifle can be 160 dB very close by. (This is why suppressors or hearing protection are a big deal: percussive sounds like this will damage your hearing if greater than 140 dB. Remember that the dB scale is logarithmic.) Sound intensity falls off with the square of the distance, though if you're close there are probably not a lot of sounds in your city that are as loud as an unsuppressed gun, if only because of lawsuits for hearing damage.
Msalters' answer is fascinating. I imagine their product uses multiple sensors, spread out over city blocks, to triangulate the position of the shot. (Not an easy task due to reflections/echoes, etc.)
So, all that said, if you only intend for your cyborg to determine that a shot has been fired somewhere nearby, the time to detection would vary depending on whether the shot was fired towards or away from the cyborg (with supersonic bullets, at least). At an absolute minimum, if a supersonic bullet was fired at the cyborg, the shockwave would reach the cyborg in as little as 1/3 the time it would take the "bang" to propagate to the cyborg. At a maximum, the shot would be fired away from the cyborg and we'd have to wait for the "bang" at the speed of sound.
If you want to locate the shot, you would have to wait until multiple cyborgs hear the shot, and coordinate between themselves. (Or perhaps one cyborg that has a pretty long distance between its "ears", but echoes/reflections will still make it difficult.)
Actual recognition time is dominated by how much sound you need to hear to capture enough of a picture of the sound wave to try to identify it, followed by processing time. Considering you have cyborgs, I assume there is a lot of computing power, so that would add something on the order of a few milliseconds.
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`t` of the sound of the shot (speed assumed as 300 m/s). It is the same as the shockwave.
To 'realize' the shot, there is a lag from when the sound is received by the sound sensor (or ear) to the processor (or brain), and the processing time deciphering and figuring out that the sound is indeed a gunshot. Both are ignored.
So, by assuming the distance is 20 m, then:
```
t1 = 20 / 300 = 0.067 s
```
That is the required time for the sound to reach the cyborg, if both input time and processing time is ignored.
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Speaking about the question in bold, namely "how long a cyborg needs to spend to determine if the sound it receives is a gunshot" - this highly depends on whether that cyborg has microphones capable of receiving frequencies beyond human hearing range, whether it can process signals at the rate at least twice faster than maximum frequency that its microphones can register, and whether the exact spectra of all the guns are foreknown by it. The first parameter here is measurable, a short search returned that there are microphones that can register frequencies up to 500 kHz, the second is assumed to be "ideal" that is, all channels are captured somewhere without lag, and the third is assumed to be ideal without quotes, that is, as soon as the cyborg receives audio that's matched at least some high-frequency part of any gunshot sample, it says "Gunshot detected".
First, such a cyborg would be limited by DSP rate, even if there would be a ready-made FPGA to perform a FFT/FPT (there's a research that says gunshots are good candidates to run FPT together with FFT, [this one](https://www.scirp.org/html/5-1610037_22604.htm) ) that would do a moving FFT/FPT over enough samples to discern frequencies from 500 kHz down to another adjustable factor (named FL), FPGAs still do not return result values fast enough to say "almost instant", this kind of an FPGA would have to work on at least 1 MHz operating over no less than 256\*500/FL samples of a microphone, the output delay can get big enough due to sheer path travelled by all the signals within the FPGA and all the time to shift triggers within it, etc etc, thus 1 MHz might even not be reached if FL is low enough, based on the current technology. Lowering the FL would allow for less false positives if a certain combination of high-frequency sounds would actually happen to appear without a gunshot being fired to trigger the recognizing circuit, raising it might hit a situation where in a certain gunshot pattern there will be 1 to 0 distinct high frequencies upon which to react, either invalidating the detection completely or triggering it by a single frequency peak. Also, I am not aware of gunshot patterns containing frequencies this high, but I assume they do because a gunshot is essentially a single impulse with diminishing Fourier spectre towards infinity. Assuming that 1 MHz DSP rate is actually reached, and FL set to low enough to avoid most false positives, the FPGA alone would produce a pattern matching a gunshot in 256M/FL microseconds. Say if FL is 125kHz, top frequency is 500kHz, and all the patterns contain enough data to detect a gunshot in this frequency interval, the FFT/FPT data of a heard gunshot will be ready in 1024 microseconds, or a little more than a millisecond.
(PS: this 256 is an arbitrary number that is also a subject to change, it can be changed to a power of 2, and depends on the incoming signal patterns, whether they align to FFT frequency values for a given sampling freq. I don't have any of these, especially for high-frequency region which would provide the earliest info about the gunshot which is sought here, so wherever 256 is read above, a lesser value could also fit, reducing resultant data flow downstream as well as reaction time, but increasing false positive rate. Afterwards I assume that 256 is the lowest value that, together with selected FL, provides acceptable false positive rate.)
Second, the signal has to be processed to match stored patterns. This can also be done with FPGAs, although they first have to operate over the same amount of data, and they have to do that fast enough so the data won't change while processing is performed. This requires a buffer of some kind in the cyborg's circuitry between the sampler/FFT/FPT and the matchers. This adds to latency, which mostly depends on how the buffer is organized, whether it can serve all the pattern matching FPGAs per cycle with the entire set of data (which for FFT is 4 bytes per frequency bin, and with a sample size of 1024 per above paragraph takes considerable amount of time to both be collected from FFT FPGA and get loaded into a receiving circuit over whatever data bus there would be) and should there be too many of those patterns per receiver, whether the matching circuit that wiuld prodice a detection would receive a sample fast enough. But, since the incoming data flow is constant at a rate of 1 matching sample per microsecond, and the lowest amount of matchers that a sample would be fed into is one, the resultant delay can be no more than 2+1\*number of samples, in mincroseconds, where 2 contains 1 as the time to transfer data to the buffer, and another 1 for the matcher FPGA to produce a yes signal. The signal can actually share an analogue bus line (a wire) to send a logical 1 via diode to a single collector like a processor pin dedicated to an interrupt.
So, assuming current tech and some data about unavailable cyborg architecture and gunshot patterns with high frequency range, the minimum delay at which a cyborg could detect a *known* gunshot sound is no greater than 1026+samples, in microseconds, starting from the moment the gunshot's front sound wave reaches the cyborg's microphone(s). This value can be reduced by selecting less samples in FFT+FPT block, lowering the intermittent data size, optimizing data bus to make more matches per sampling cycle or probably advancing to better technology in making cyborgs.
The thing highly differs if a cyborg is required to detect an *unknown* gunshot, like one from a freshly made weapon, the solution would likely involve a trained neural network translated into a FPGA, if there could be an FPGA to contain the NN, and reaction times would most likely severely increase.
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Not only medium conditions but also type of firearm has to be taken into consideration: different firearmes produce different output spectrum at shot.
That being said the cyborg database could be filled with all the spectrum profiles of all the firearms in the world (way) OVERsampled to get for each weapon the most common one.
That being said, to identify a shot, a match should be done on the entire (as far as samplers can sample) spectrum width and not just one freq.
Now, still agreeing that we are looking for frequencies here, hence p variations and not levels, I anyway think that slightly more than a quarter period may suffice (for sure not less), that is the point where a full period, thus freq, evaluation can be made: if you know in how much time you reach the peek, you know how much the period is, 4x.
This means we are looking for the lowest freq in the sampled spectrum, because its quarter period would the longest.
Of course this would require constant air pression monitoring to know where the 0 crossing is, to identify the first peek.
All this being said, because of the many variables involved, and the MANY more not mentioned (variation of base pressure before the first ramp, noise, and so forth...) I strongly doubt this would ever be possible with an impressive degree of correctness. Thus, if sometimes the cyborg would be positively identifing a shot and being able to somewhat react, the rest of the time the poor guy would just walk like a freak trying to avoid invisible bullets XD
AND all of this, in the kingdom of approximations of course
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Everything starts somewhere ... and intention of gods (from my fantasy world) to teach people to not ask them for help should start somewhere too. Something, some kind of accident or event, should bring them to thought of teaching humans not to ask them for help.
My current ideas are:
* Disappointment from behavior of people living to the west of the Cloudy mountains. These people ask the gods for help with even in the most stupid, unnecessary, and simplest things. Meanwhile, the people living inside the Cloudy mountains and to the east of the Cloudy mountains are fully self-dependent.
* Consternation from the existence of a church using the name of one of gods and false or very stupid teachings. For example, the clerics of this church could be teaching people to sacrifice animals to buy forgiveness of sins.
**What events could convince the gods to teach people to not ask them for help?**
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Because they want humans to grow up?
Gods see humans as their children. First gods will directly guide humans. Then they will be present and intervene as needed. Then they will take distance and trust humans will remember what they have learned, make their own mistakes and their own choices.
Humans with gods constantly guiding them are little more than puppets or pets. That is not how most people want their children to grow up. Reasonably then some gods would see humans less benevolently and be just fine keeping them dependent forever. Similarly some people seem to prefer having gods bear all responsibility and indeed think that atheism would lead to some emptiness of morality or values. So there would be a wide spectrum of opinion among both gods and humans, I think. Just like their are many kinds of relationships between parents and children.
Because gods want humans to make a choice of their own free will?
The choice could be something as simple as choosing themselves which god to follow. In any case direct interference by gods would leave mortals dependent on their superior power and human choices would be reduced to side effects of divine action. This would make free will problematic and any concept gods judging humans a no go. If gods are directly intervening in human lives any human sin would essentially be reduced to gods having failed in their guidance. So if human free will and responsibility is desired gods need to give some space for it.
So the actual event would be more along the lines of gods recognizing the signs and realizing it is the time to move to the next stage of human development. Humans no longer being content to be gods puppets and rebelling in some fairly childish and silly form. Humans showing signs of being stifled by gods will and failing to use their own judgement. There are lots of possible signs and it would be a combination of several minor things happening, not one big event. You can use event humans have then becoming independent from their parents as models with some adjustment.
I doubt gods would make the change all at once, either. And there probably would be some prophets or such preaching the end of times coming near or the time of prophecy or time of miracles coming to a close. A major change in the relationship between gods and humans would probably cause lots of religious upheaval. New religions rising. Religious persecution. Religious dogma being codified. Sacred texts being collected and canonized. All that stuff.
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**The gods agreed not to fight among themselves.
Intervening with their side would mean the opposing god had a right to do so too, escalating things back to how they were.**
It sounds like there are several gods in your story, perhaps even different religions. I propose that the gods were, at one point, fighting among themselves but the power involved could destroy everything but, upon realising this, a truce was called. The gods now compete through the number of followers and there are rules against direct intervention (else things could escalate once again).
This means that the two sides must have no physical intervention and the gods can only advise their people through laws, traditions and philosophies.
Because of this competition each god wants his people to be better than the other god's people - a competition they can't directly intervene with. Because of this the god that loses out would be the one whose people aren't self-reliant and progress on their own.
As such we end up with both gods being in a position where they want their people to do as much for themselves as they can.
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## Why would gods want people to rely on them?
Say that you're playing a video game where you're building a world. To the simulated people in that game, you're effectively a god.
When you leave for work, do you want text alerts on your cell phone with the personal drama of each simulated being in that video game, demanding action of you every second of the day?
Your exact reasons for creating this little pocket universe that views you as a god are your own; maybe it's fun for you, or maybe you're doing research on how it evolves, or something else. But whatever the case, it seems unlikely that you, or any other god, would create a world just to be a slave to its inhabitants.
***tl;dr*-** Most gods would would their wards to be self-sufficient. It's kinda hard to imagine a god that'd create people for the sole purpose of having to deal with their drama.
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Events that could cause "teach people to not ask them for help"? Well, there were many in TV/books like:
Because of free will / curiosity
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> Stargate ("Because, there is a chance they will be worshipped like the Ori when interfering, and they already saw what happens when that happens (i.e. the Ori and how they got corrupted even though they started with the best of intentions). And the Ancients believe in not interfering partially out of belief in free will, but also because they were more in line with science so perhaps they observe what happens")
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Because they are "lazy" to lead every step of humanity
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> Foundation series - Asimov (Book: Second Foundation - Part II - when second foundation "sacrificed" themself, so they stop "rotting in place" for many years. First group instead of progress - focused on search for "gods" = second group.)
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Because god stopped to be interested
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> Supernatural (U.S. TV series) - (God focused on writing his own book about world)
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Because God is not god at all
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> * any story where is superior civilization with some backward civilization like Superman or Thor story. But in the end he realized something about "they don't deserve me" "they don't want me" "I'm dangerous" or something like that.
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Or simply - there was no God, only good reasons
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> Nightfall - Asimov (who really believed in god - survived, only thanks to "faith"), and some Outer limits (TV series) stories
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People decide: "You are no god for us!"
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> Batman vs Superman, Foundation (first book)
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**The gods are dying**
The gods aren't truly immortal, just extremely long-lived. Now they can tell they're in the latter parts of their life and are trying to prepare the people for when they're no longer around. Maybe they used to have a way to increase their lifespan or propagate but something happened to prevent it, or maybe this is just how things were always eventually going to be. Either way, they know there will be a time when they won't be around for humanity anymore and want humans to be ready for that.
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**The gods want to do something else.**
They are sick and tired of this Earth. Maybe they think that we broke it beyond their abilities to fix, between nuclear bombs, global warming, and Donald Trump (or something else if it isn't the modern Earth), and are now trying again to try to create a species that does not destroy its homeworld beyond repair.
Therefore, they decided to abandon humanity to fail on its own and are now directing their efforts towards making a new species that would do a better job at maintaining its world.
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Maybe your gods feel like overworked parents...
"I just cleaned this mess up! No I'm not going to do it for you. I don't care how much you whine, you are handling it yourself this time."
Gods can get frustrated too.
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A more selfish reason: the Gods have limited reserves of power. Affecting the material world drains them of a little bit of their power. Perhaps this power takes a long to regenerate, or perhaps they have a total amount for their existence and they die when it runs out. So they teach humans not to rely on them so that they either have power when they need it, or so they can extend their own lives.
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Both of your ideas sound good I would recommend a combination of the two.
Some ideas of my own.
1. The gods realize that if they stop helping Humanity they have grown so dependent on them if they would die within a month since you don't even know how to find food on their own without the help of the gods. This causes to slowly wean Humanity off of their dependency on them.
2. Dispute between gods spill over into Humanity causing Wars that almost lead to Humanities Extinction. This causes the gods to pass rules designed to separate humans from gods including forbidding gods from helping humans and instead encouraging humans to help themselves.
3. Maybe the humans start to complain that with the gods constantly helping everyone there's no way for people to shine and stand out from Humanity because of their skill dedication or Talent. This causes the gods to rethink their treatment of humanity.
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**The Gods need to rely on the Humans**
There could be something that the Gods are lacking knowledge of (maybe they're dying or they themselves don't understand how their existence came to be and they can't figure out why or how).
Not unlike a Neural Network can find patterns that the human who coded it cannot see, the Gods are relying on the humans to solve questions that are seemingly unsolvable to the Gods. If the Gods were to intervene with the humans' learning too much, the humans would have a biased knowledge and possibility come up with nothing as the Gods have. Thus, the Gods have taught the humans how to survive and how to communicate, but beyond that they want to intervene as little as possible.
It could lead to some big moment of "Now it is your turn to teach us...". That's probably cliche, but everyone likes when characters have purposes larger than themselves, right?
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For shits'n giggles?
"Oh oh oh, Zeus! I got this awesome idea! Let's just do nothing at all and see the look on their faces! It'll be sooooo funny!"
"Yo, that idea's whack! Let's do this, bro!"
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Perhaps god had a long day at work, and really just needs a drink.
Personally, I like my gods having shallow, petty reasons for acting the way they do. It's really so much more fun than ineffable wisdom of the ages.
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A god that limits his creation to what he could create, in the end limits itself. The exact intent of creating something intelligent/evolving can be to transcend the limits of the creator.
Even an almighty being could lack the power that only comes from subtraction: The difference between a big block of marble and a statue is the LACK of marble in places where it makes the whole thing rather un-statue-like....
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In many stories, the gods' power is in some respects linked to the worship of their followers. The more followers a god has, the stronger (or at least the more able to influence the world, perhaps through those followers) that god is. It is common in such stories for Man to outgrow the need for gods, and so the gods, deprived of their worship, can no longer act in the world.
Petty gods might have an attitude of "well, fine then, if they won't worship me I'll take my ball and go home." But assuming truly benevolent gods who want the best for the world, if people—maybe because of increased reliance on technology, or in cynical response to all the times their gods didn't help them out—fall away from worshipping, those well-meaning gods might realize that their time of influence is coming to an end. In such a scenario, they would best serve their loyal following by teaching humanity how to get along without them, as they know their power is fading and soon they'll be unable to help even their most devout worshippers.
In the face of waning faith and reliance on the gods, benevolent gods would not want to cling to the last remnants of the faithful, dooming those followers to continue relying on them and worshipping them in vain. Those gods might instead help their followers learn how to be self-reliant, to ensure an orderly transition to life without the gods' guardianship. And, perhaps, the gods might then use their last powers to bestow powers or gifts upon their most devout adherents.
Those gods could then fade from the human sphere of influence knowing they'd left behind people who could make it on their own, and who would not remember the gods for having abandoned them, but would instead remember them fondly as the teachers and guides who led them beyond themselves and showed them how to stand on their own.
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What is a god?
This question needs to be central to this discussion.
If a god can be an ascended mortal, there may be some unwillingness to having taken the role.
The goal may be to protect mortals from other gods' influence by sacrificing their own.
Good example from fiction: Guthix (Runescape). He did exactly this.
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Well, gentlemen this sounds interesting so I'm going to explain you through a very basic example.
There is nothing in this world in this universe which God haven't given us from strength in our body to a sharp mind. From air to water, from food to alcohol from bed to pillow. Well whatever is around us is given by God and there is nothing left in this world which is not a gift of God so even after giving so many things to us he wants us to evolve so that we should become a better person.
We shall not be dependent on anyone because if we strive by ourselves without any help or without any dependency, a true adorable human with a great personality will rise who will change the world.
He has already given us all the things which are vital for a living. Still if you're dependent on him then we don't deserve to be here on this earth.
Because a diamond never gets its shine until and unless it has been through a rigourous shaping. Also, a rolling stone gathers no moss.
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Everybody wants to win the lottery:
Suppose you are a god and each time there is an event in which luck or "god's favor" is involved you will get a ton of request to win and each of those is incompatible with the rest...
Edit:
Even if you are a god you just can't please everybody because there will be many times where helping someone implies prejudice others, for example in business what do you do when two companies are competing an both ask for divine help to overrun the other,both are good (insert cult name) so you just don't help or do you?. In the end anything you do or don't will annoy someone so the only options you have are:
A:not more request rule.
B:any request that may prejudice another of my followers will be unheard.
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In many mythologies, special humans(prophets) are necessary instruments for gods to perform miracles through, but more importantly that the gods can/are able to initiate conversation with them, as opposed to the rest of the population.
This could be for example because the gods live in a separate dimension, and most humans are simply too weak to be sensed by them(except for the prophets), unless they actively pray. However, an evil god/gods/outsider is able to intercept these communications and twist the message into something that they know will lead to corruption of the human, and destruction to the world.
In order to limit the destruction to the mortal plane, the gods decide to withdraw from their worshippers. They instruct them to stay silent and never pray again. Soon, the only ones left praying are your typical cultists who want to bring about the apocalypse.
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**The gods are hiding**
The gods are powerful, but they have powerful enemies, including other gods. The gods are immortal, which means that know that they won't die peacefully asleep amongst their loved ones. Even the gods of murder and mayhem are terrified of their *own* demise.
The only reason they gods would put themselves at any real risk would be to put a permanent end to their enemies. For thousands of years, the gods have been watching each others actions, finding hints as to how to find and kill their enemies before their enemies do the same.
For this reason the gods almost never intercede in this doings of humans. If the need of their worshippers are great enough, they *might* help very indirectly, by showing their worshippers how to solve their problems for themselves. Any more direct show of divine power might be traced back to their realm and allow their enemies to assassinate them in a time of weakness.
This might be seen as cowardly. However, gods' lives are very important. If say you are god of Hope, you could directly solve many of your followers problems. However, you have promised your followers that one day you will put an end to the god of Suffering once and for all. Even if you never actually do anything, just the knowledge that you are still out there, gives hope to your followers, and ensures that the god of Suffering will not be too bold in his depredations. Of course, the actual god of Cowardice is still round somewhere, but praying isn't much use.
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Truly omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Deities, would need to have a far higher level of consciousness than that of a human. We wrongly see the Gods as made in our image, thinking they think like us. The Gods do not decide anything, they just created a Universe with established rules. Even us humans, must live by them.
**It is in fact us, who teach ourselves**, by exploring these rules. Those who get closest, will bathe in enlightenment and those who stray, will linger in the darkness. We learn these rules, in the same way we learn everything, by trial and error.
We live in strange times, where "not relying upon the Gods" is, what more and more believe to be the best religion. Humans have been very superstitious and have always adored some deity since the dawn of their age; we need a religion. Luckily we now have football players, pop stars and other wild things as substitutes for our lost faiths... And those who do not rely upon Gods, do rely on these things.
Religion is for us a framework that can be filled with anything and it cannot be void (the Gods forbid it). We fill it with something consciously or unconsciously and we then must rely on whatever we filled it with. For is relying on something greater than ourselves, were it just for spiritual comfort, not the essence of religion? How much we must consciously rely on it, is determined, either by the personal experience of trials and errors, or by the rules of an organised religion.
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# There are too many people for the gods to micro-manage
The gods are powerful, but they are few, and humanity are many. They don’t have the resources to micro-manage all of humanity (at least not without harming themselves in the process). So they want humanity to be able to take care of themselves. After all, they didn’t create an entire planet from nothing – they just created a species of sapient life to live on it.
# The gods don’t know the answer
When they created humanity on the pre-existing world, they did not have full knowledge of what they were creating. They never imagined that humans would grow to be as powerful and as technologically advanced as they have today. In fact, modern technology is so advanced that the gods (who are not engineers or scientists) don’t really understand how it works. The gods are genuinely stumped by some of the questions that are being asked of them. So they need humans to answer the questions themselves.
# The gods need humanity to be strong
The gods are not all of the deities out there. There are other such beings. Evil ones. The gods need humanity to be strong, so they can fight even when their divine commanders are not directly present.
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I think Ville Niemi's answer is perfect, but I wanted to add a specific case of "the gods want us to grow up" which has very different ramifications: what if the gods want us to grow up to be gods? What if the line between a god and a person is more muddled than we've been lead to believe. What if the only thing separating us from them is simply maturity and experience?
The gods may stop helping us because the only way for us to ascend, ourselves, is to find our own voice. Once we can sing under our own power, then the gods may teach us how to sing in the upper register, as masters of our realm.
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A quick glance at real world anti-missile systems seems to show that they do work, but imperfectly. The problem naturally gets harder when the incoming missile is extremely high-velocity.
If your strategic calculation was "if one nuke hits us, we will be forced to retaliate in kind, and that ends badly for everyone, so let's do everything that we can to prevent the incoming strike, that way we can retaliate with sub-nuclear options" -- would nuking the nuke work?
The idea here is that a near miss wouldn't matter since the fireball would be so huge.
Assume the blast happens over uninhabited land, that nukes are not scarce, that the poltics etc isn't important here...
...is it practical?
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You have described 1950 era ABM's, so the short answer is "Yes, of course"
The pulse of hard radiation from the nuclear explosion could potentially fry the electronics of the incoming warhead, so the detonator does not work. The sheet of neutrons from the explosion could actually affect the nuclear material inside the incoming warhead, and of course the thermal pulse will ablate part of the incoming warhead and act like a rocket motor throwing it off course. If the explosion is close enough, the enemy warhead is simply consumed inside the fireball.
The US "Sprint" ABM deployed briefly in the 1970's, and was armed with an enhanced radiation thermonuclear warhead. Older systems like Nike or air to air missiles like Genie also used nuclear warheads (although the primary purpose was to destroy the bombers carrying the nuclear warheads, the effects of the explosion on the Russian bombs outside the immediate blast radius would be quite similar).
The downside is you are using nuclear weapons in the atmosphere in the airspace over or near your own homeland, and the enemy warheads are either disintegrating in the atmosphere (showering you with Plutonium dust), or are plunging randomly into the ground, leaving you with the task of recovering "hot" items full of nuclear warhead fuel. While much preferable than dealing with the aftereffects of a nuclear explosion vaporizing a city, it is still not an ideal solution, hence President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative; meant to shoot down ICBM's in the boost and mid flight stages rather than stopping warheads in the final seconds before impact.
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Keyword: One.
In practice you will have a big problem when you try this--interceptor #1 engages inbound nuke #1 and destroys it. Fine.
30 seconds later inbound nuke #2 sails through the area of ionization and isn't intercepted because the interception radar can't see through the ionized area.
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> would nuking the nuke work?
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Yes. This is basically the same idea as what Mythbusters tried with [guns and grenades](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLHeLAtHco). Assuming there is nothing you want to keep within the (potentially combined) blast radius, using a nuclear weapon to destroy a nuclear weapon would work. However...
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No. It's kind of the difference between using a bullet to stop a grenade and a grenade to stop a grenade. Why would you spend between 2.00 and 200.00 USD [on a grenade](http://www.inetres.com/gp/military/infantry/grenade/hand.html) when you could spend between 0.21 and 0.32 USD [on a bullet](http://www.ecomass.com/wp-content/uploads/How-Much-Does-a-Bullet-Cost.pdf) that does the same job just as well? You don't need an explosive to destroy a nuke. A [kinetic kill vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle) is all you need, which is, coincidentally, exactly [how the US handles missile defense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Midcourse_Defense).
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**It's not practical, because you would fry your satellites.**
While nuking a nuke would certainly work, so far as destroying the other nuke is concerned, you would almost definitely destroy some of your satellites in doing so. ICBMs don't travel close to the Earth, instead taking high arcing ballistic paths hundreds of miles above the ground. Your best option for hitting a nuke with another nuke would be to hit it at a high altitude, where the detonation of your nuke wouldn't harm the target of the enemy nuke. Of course, detonating a nuclear bomb at a high enough altitude over your country that it won't damage ground installations puts another important asset at risk: satellites.
[High altitude nuclear tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosion) have been done, in fact, back in the 60s before we agreed to [ban the detonation of nukes in space.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty) Even at that point in time, the tests that were done inadvertently damaged several US satellites. We now have far more satellites in space, and have become significantly more reliant on them than we were in the 1960s. Knocking out a few of these satellites with an anti-missile would make anti missile nukes, while possible, extremely impractical.
*Note: this is not suggesting that nuclear interceptors are worse than getting nuked, just that they're worse than conventional interceptors.*
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Anti ICBM's exist already. The [SM-3](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3) Anti-ballistic missile. I knew someone who worked on it. It is a non-explosive missile that uses optical guiding to hit incoming nukes with insane accuracy. The payload is essentially a lump of metal that hits the nuke, disabling it, and not activating the explosion.
We used a modified SM-3 to knock that failing satellite down safely a few years back:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-193>
I know this doesn't directly answer your question about an anti-nuke-nuke, but it is a viable means to prevent a nuke from making landfall, and thus could be important to your worldbuilding.
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Yes, easily. We can actually take out most ICBMs using conventional explosives. I would be willing to bet we have a quick nuke drop warhead as a fallback if the conventional ones fail.
The trick is what kind of nuke to use and what altitude.
The nuke to use is an "enhanced" a.k.a "neutron bomb." The "enhanced" is a bit of misdirection. All fusion devices emit 99%+ of their energy as neutrons. To convert the neutrons into blast and heat and in general make a big explosion, you have to wrap them in a dense, neutron absorbing material like lead, polypropylene etc.
It's a myth that fusion nukes are highly destructive in space. With no atmosphere or ground to convert neutrons to heat and blast, you just get a rather large quick flashbulb for radiant effect. Space itself, even near earth space has so much volume that you have to be within something like 30km for a 1 megaton device to generate a killing pulse. (Intensity falls with the square of distance, remember.) On the surface, a 30km radius is massive, in space its a blip.
Neutrons don't kill other nukes by primarily heat, blast or frying the electronics. Instead, they transmute the isotopes within the enemy device, altering the critical ratios of those isotopes such that the device can never go critical. (Although, if close enough, the neutrons will cause heating in isotopes and blow it apart right there and some electronics can be fried by neutrons.)
So, the best point of intercept is above the atmosphere i.e. 90miles/140km or higher. The really important satellites are in geosynchronous orbit at 25,000miles/40,000km, so they're safe from any interception blast.
Intercepting above the atmosphere also prevents the blinding effects of ionized atmosphere noted by others. Even that may not matter as the enemy will be tracked by multiple sensors deployed on the ground, airborne and from high satellites, all of which will be transmitted to the interceptor which can otherwise fly blind. The ecological and other ground effects are minimal. With little blast or heat, there is little plasma and thus little EMP.
The real utility of an interceptor system is that it introduces immense uncertainty in calculating the success for an attack. Nobody really knows how all the factors in a nuclear attack will combine to produce what output. The interceptor system might substantially fail in a real attack or it might wipe out the attack completely. In the latter case, you've done nothing but p\*ss off the targeted polity.
That uncertainty was a big part of the Reagan's Star Wars mojo back in the 80s that helped bring the Soviets down. The Soviets had long planned on being able to launch a devastating first strike and then absorb a much smaller counter-strike. The maybe-it-will-work,-maybe-it-won't Star Wars talk, threw that out the window.
Active defense is the new hotness at all levels. The Israels' are knocking individual artillery rounds out of the sky and pre-detonating RPGs. Interceptors in one form or another, and at all levels are here to stay.
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I take no credit for the image below. [All artwork and information belongs to Blue-Hearts on DeviantArt](http://www.deviantart.com/blue-hearts/art/Winged-People-Anatomy-Muscles-495419088):
(click on image for a higher resolution)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/E4ZwQ.jpg)
I'm personally very impressed at her level of detail and how she managed to make a (feathered) winged human/ angel build seem at least believable. Then again, I'm not a biologist.
edit: this is only muscle structure, she has posted a bone structure one on her DeviantArt as well (as well as a few more, maybe).
edit 2: (sorry I keep editing!) let's say the bones are hollow, as user Shadowzee mentioned in a comment, otherwise they'd be too heavy to fly.
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**Probably not**
I agree that the work is incredible, but ultimately the problem with the design is always going to be the downstroke of the wing.
Birds have massively well developed pectoral muscles. In chickens, this is what we mean when we describe the breast meat. It's the largest single muscle group on a chicken and most other birds because of the sheer force required to pull the wing down and lift the bird up via the air underneath that wing.
The design in the picture has two critical faults; the first is that on a bird, the wing is in fact an evolved arm and therefore is connected directly to the pectoral muscle. These wings are behind the arms, with no clear muscle group in play for pulling them down.
The second is that the pectorals are nowhere near as well developed as they would need to be in order to support the body of the human in flight.
Even if we connect the pectoral muscles directly to the wings on the back, more or less rendering the arms useless, you would need pectoral muscles of a much larger size to generate the power needed to flap those wings. Remember, that humans are much larger creatures to most birds and therefore suffer the setbacks of the square cube law, which basically says that volume increases exponentially to length, surface area, etc. meaning that you need much larger wings and much larger muscles to drive them by proportion to a smaller bird.
If you're in doubt about that, check out the size of a hang glider. That gives you some idea of what size a wingspan a human may need to get controlled flight.
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Someone else used this exact picture and asked the same question. The picture is detailed but misses several important elements.
<https://images.app.goo.gl/k3oPSuLqVxpikx967>
This is a bird's anatomy, if you look at the bird you can see a massive pectoralis major (chest muscle).
<https://images.app.goo.gl/v6QYooyoSV5SNguJ7>
Looking at the skeleton that pectoralis major needs a massive potruding chestbone to attach itself too, and it needs to extend far out so that the forces the muscle creates are more aimed in a downwards direction. The picture above misses this because it would lose the human aestetic.
Besides the small pectoralis major the humerus of the wing is simply attached to the scapula (shoulderblade). The normal humerus is attached to the most complex kinematic chain in the body consisting out of the scapula, clavicula, costa (ribs), sternum (chestbone) and a long range of muscles. This humerus is just attached to the scapula, meaning it has the Range Of Motion (ROM) of the scapula as well. This means that most of the power generation for downwards movement has to happen with the protraction of the scapula, especially since the wings themselves have a small amount of muscle attachments (mostly the wing-triceps) that are able to pull it downwards. Unfortunately much of the power generation of the triceps is lost somewhere else as the triceps take up surface area where the supraspinatus normally attaches, which partially helps with protraction, elevation and upwards rotation. The placement of the triceps, which is almost on top of the win, also limits the downwards ROM as the muscle simply cant contract that far. For an easier reference of the ROM this woulf give, try moving your humerus (upper arm) forwards with your biceps (funnily enough the biceps are better at representing this than the triceps due to the construction of the wing-humerus). You'll notice it mostly does your lower arm and when you move your upper arm the biceps do little, but your pectoralis major+minor and serratus anterior do most of the work. But aside from the triceps theres barely any muscles that directly help the wings move downwards, so almost all flight movement has to happen with the scapula protraction on a very tiny ROM with relatively speaking very tiny muscles.
Just how big do these muscles need to be? Meet the Illiopsoas, two muscles often referred as a single muscle and while it might not look it in the picture they are the most massive and powerful muscle in your body:
<https://images.app.goo.gl/9r34Y7kjyypBbKmDA>
These muscles lift either your legs, or your entire upper body. They allow you to lean backwards and look up without falling over and when doing belly crunches they are secretly doing 95% of all the movement of lifting the torso&legs rather than your abdominus muscles. And this is the absolute minimum size that you would need to glide, not fly, glide. Just imagine having to jump, and the floor moves up for you to jump again faster. That is basically what flying would be like, one continuous jump with very little time inbetween. Try it now, jump as high as you can for half an hour and realize that you would somehow need to jump EVEN FASTER to "fly".
TL: Dr: no you wont be able to fly with the setup in the picture, although it is a very well done picture.
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In addition to the problems already mentioned, the wings are too high on the body. You need equal weight infront of and behind the wings. Having the wings attach on the shoulders, the legs would fall. It's not balanced.
Gliding animals, such as the pterodactyl, may have gotten aloft by running very very fast due to powerful legs, and as a result, needed smaller wings. The wing size could work if the body was sufficiently strong and sufficiently light and if the flight was primarily gliding not powered and extended flying.
But the wings would need to be attached on the sides down at least to the hips or top of the legs, not just attacked on the back down to the ribs. That extra extension would create balance for possible gliding - that is, if humans could run 45 or 50 mph to take off.
<http://dinosaurpictures.org/Pterodactyl-pictures>
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This is a very nicely detailed piece of anatomical speculation. However, at normal human scale, such a being would be unable to fly on Earth unless their muscles had a much higher force to volume ratio. A human sized winged being would require prohibitively large wings, and the volume of their muscles would contribute to them looking rather alien to us.
However, there are two circumstances under which having this anatomy could result in a being capable of powered, independent flight: The first is by reducing the scale of the winged humanoid, the second is by reducing the gravity of the environment in which they might fly.
By reducing the being in size to around that of a sparrow, this being may be able to fly on Earth. Of course, at that size, the being would not possess enough neurons in their brains to have anything near human-level intelligence.
On the other hand, reducing gravity would allow a human-sized flier. At approximately 0.1g and normal Earth sea-level atmospheric pressure, flight may become possible. Such an environment is most likely to be something like a large orbital habitat, where gravity is a function of speed of rotation rather than mass.
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A being with a non-birdlike (such as the winged humans shown) anatomy can fly, if the planet in question is more forgiving. Specifically, if gravity is less, and air is denser, less lift is necessary to fly with equivalent mass. Credit goes to Randall Munroe for the idea: <https://xkcd.com/620/>. See <https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/620:_Wings> for a discussion of the math.
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Everyone is talking about the biology involved.
Let me approach this by the engineering angle. Humans already fly with wings. It's called gliding and these people do it:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2UiPt.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/y4y8Y.jpg)
[And here is a video of a group of airbenders using wingsuits to glide pretty close to the ground, because some people are that crazy.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuiEycHzDNI)
People in flying squirrel costumes can only glide down, generally speaking. People in hang gliders can gain altitude if they pass over an upwards stream.
The point here is that the lift you can get - from speed, from wing beats, or from streams - is proportional to the area of the wings.
If your angel creatures can hold their wings open, they will at the very least be able to glide somewhat - they seem to have more wing area than the people in wingsuits.
But in order to lift themselves... That's a no.
Look at the blue critter at the bottom right corner of the image below:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tUjUT.png)
[Conservative estimates have its weight at around 75kg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus#Size), which is about the average adult human male. It was much more aerodynamic than your angels, and seems like it had much more wing area.
Even if your angels weight, say, only 40 or 50 kg due to lighter bones, their shape still makes flying awkward. Their center of lift is not aligned with their center of mass, for example. That could be fixed with a bird-like tail, but I don't see that in the DeviantArt image.
So in all likehood your angels would be pretty good at base jumping. But they would have to land on water in order to not break any bones. To land on land they will need a parachute.
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I don't think that's going to work: in our body the pectorals are good at moving our arms because of their location and the interaction with the shoulder articulation.
In this design the pectorals still look better suited for providing strength to the arms, not to the wings: even with tendons transmitting the needed force, having them go around the torso to reach up the wing seems rather ineffective.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2wOBV.png)
It would probably work better to have the wings as in normal birds, and some sort of tentacles on the back for manipulatory purposes.
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There needs to be a connection through to the sternum via very large pectoral muscles to the chest/front of ribcage. Large means like a pigeon's vs the size of it's body, with a protruding sternum. A human skeleton would be torn apart by such muscles, the bones that make up our skeletons are wrong also. The wings would have to be very large vs body size. The scheme would probably need to go towards large bat rather than large reptile. Reptiles have a single attachment point for each wing whereas mammals have a long web of skin all the way along the side of their body.
Maximum size of a flying animal is limited by % atmospheric oxygen, earths' gravity, strength of materials that cells can build.
The biggest mammalian scheme viable at the moment are bats like the big fruit bats in Australia
Back in pre history.... late Cretaceous, Carboniferous..... larger flying animals would have been viable, when higher CO2 levels would have supported thicker forests + marine algae to produce higher Oxygen levels, then it would be possible to get away with smaller wings and larger body size by flapping more rapidly, which needs a higher metabolic rate.
High CO2 allows the plants and algae to grow faster, so long as there aren't too many humans around.
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The center of gravity is off. Solid torso bone, pneumatic circulatory system instead of blood, have the blood be a thick viscous fluid for nutrients and not oxygen transport. Limpet teeth bones. 7 times the strength of mammal bones and bird bones.
If the connection point is at the bottom of the torso bone just above the flank then in a horizontal glide the wings will be balanced between chest and butt. Outstretched arms counteract legs.
Hydrostatic muscles are exceptional. Have the wings be hydrostatically pumped. For male form have a barrel chest for female form have a pair of heart type things in each breast.
Absolute maximum wing loading for birds is 25 kilograms per square meter. If intelligently designed by scientists then it won't have to deal with evolutionary baggage. No trade off between the power of fast twitch muscles and the stamina of slow twitch. Current electroactive polymer artificial muscles are very strong. Genuinely organic cell based muscles would be even stronger.
Ionic wind, organic photovoltaics, electrocytes. In gliding mode have the feathers produce ionic wind for a gentle continuous thrust. Have the wings act as solar panels. It won't be as efficient as the best of the best laboratory engineered panels but it'll still help. Electrocytes are cells that are good at producing high voltage for the ionic wind.
Digitigrade feet will help with running jumping and landing.
For the wings. They connect at bottom of torso bone with a short but strong and thick bone going towards the head before bending back down towards the butt for the 3 long bones per wing. Have a final short but slender bone at the end the same length as the base connector. The final slender one assists with finding thermals to ride.
A pneumatic circulatory system with the chest lungs being a pump and supporting organs is very light and an effective coolant system. The skin being a highly thermally insulating hydrophobic membrane will help prevent hypothermia when flying as well as water loss from not sweating. That's important since the above angelic humanoid has very little moisture relative to most animals. I define animal as a living thing that isn't a plant fungi or microscopic.
Having less moisture due to the pneumatic circulatory system and thick slow blood helps with low weight.
Perhaps the wings are inflatable. Feathers or not, still use a membrane and have the feathers attached. The membrane can inflate with air to increase surface area while flying and deflate to easily fold up behind.
Also for penis inclined individuals, have a pneumatic erection.
I thought this over when thinking about winged Khajiit from elder scrolls, potentially from a previous kalpa.
Hope this helps.
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An artificial endocrine gland is cultured in the lab and is to be inserted in a person. This gland functions by secreting special substances in the blood stream.
It needs to be placed in a position where it can be well vascularized, protected, and stable (close to a bone?). It must be an anatomically free position where it does not interfere with other organs. As a bonus, it should be easy to access to make the implantation not very invasive.
This organ is spherical, no larger than a pebble.
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# Art Imitates Life
Lucky for you, the implantation (or rather reimplantation) of endocrine glands is already a thing. During parathyroidectomy, it is common practice to perform [autotransplantation](http://endocrinediseases.org/parathyroid/surgery_autotransplantation.shtml) of a portion of the hyperactive tissue. This is usually done in the muscle tissue of the neck or forearm.
This is a whopping big parathyroid, much larger than the 3 to 5 mm "pebble" you're likely imagining (**Moderator warning: Images contain blood and may be off-putting to some users**):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sRPqX.jpg)
Reimplantation is a simple matter of securing it to the muscle:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dbNkR.png)
And Bob's your bloody uncle:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fifyg.jpg)
Muscle is already vascular and the new gland will rapidly grow its own vascular network. This location will not interfere with any other organs and the procedure is minimally invasive. The new gland will be protected by muscle and subcutaneous tissues and the reason why autotransplantation is done in the forearm is precisely for reasons of easy access. Any future access to your endocrine gland can be made under local anaesthesia.
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Use it to replace [the appendix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_(anatomy))?
Lots of blood flow, fairly central to the body, reasonably well protected, and doctors have lots of practice accessing that part of the body. By removing the appendix at the same time, you can be sure that you have space to put it in there without interfering with any *other* organs..
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I would go somewhere between the liver and the stomach.
* Stomach has an hollow shape, so it can accommodate for some volume demand from the artificial gland
* Liver is the body chemical reactor, and is well connected to the blood stream
* Abdominal cavity is easily accessible
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Why make it permanent? Put it in an external pack and have temporary connections. Then you can brag about it. Also, you can get the latest version whenever you want. Or adjust the settings as you like.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LMDJB.gif)
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> This organ is spherical, no larger than a pebble.
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You could put it almost anywhere in the abdomen. People's bodies can end up with masses that big and more from all kinds of sources... tumours, fibromas (and other kinds of fibrous gunk), foreign bodies, inadvisably large quantities of food, lipomas... the list goes on. You can have these things for years and never know. People can have grossly enlarged bladders and livers and still survive OK. There's lots of room in there, and most things are stretchy and squishy and moveable to some degree. I'd see about sticking it near the spleen... you might even be able to tuck it under the floating ribs to give it a bit of protection.
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We already put endocrine glands into people.
A nice example is the birth-control-implant. It isn't a sphere but a small stick usually inserted into the biceps.
Having a stick implant is also probably a better idea if you plan to put it into a muscle, as it would sit along the muscle fibers nicely.
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Plug it into the liver. There a nice place between gallbladder and duodenum. People don't notice swelling of liver, fatty liver so something small like a pebble would not be noticeable.
And the implanting can be done with a needle.
[Answer]
The size of a pebble means it can be practically anywhere - growths like cysts or benign tumors much larger happen in various places of the body without causing trouble. The rest is pretty easy too. Trying to make implantation non-invasive seems like the tightest constraint. Paranasal sinuses are a "free real estate" accessible through the nasal cavity, plenty of blood flow, good connection with the immune system, close to brain, protected well within the skull, a bit exposed to infections and poorly thermoregulated (cold air in winter). Another decent candidate is vicinity of one of submandibular salivary glands, a small incision under the jaw to access, the jaw bone protecting it, extra bonus - the secretions could be mixed with saliva e.g. for external use. Yet another option is impantation in lungs - again, the procedure of implantation would be similar to bronchoscopy, under general anesthesia but through mouth and trachea.
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[Question]
[
The story centers around a group of people that get lost during in the woods and -for no apparent reason- suddenly find themselves in 13th century Europe (the Netherlands, to be precise). They don't know how they got there and there doesn't seem to be much they can do about it, so they stay in a small town for at least year till they figure out what has happened to them. In the meantime they try and make a living for themselves. Some of them find work, some use their skills and knowledge from the future to make a living.
One of them is a woman who has a dark skin.
**My questions are:**
* How would people in the middle ages react to a dark-skinned person? There is no harbor in town and it's quite small, so chances are they've never seen someone with a dark skin. However, they might know of their existence because of the crusades: the story is placed at the start of the 13th century in the middle of the 5th crusade (not that the protagonists were involved, but a lot of dutch people participated in it so it must have been a thing at the time).
* What would be a good occupation for my character? The original idea was to have her take on some medicinal activities, maybe even in disguise, but this was also at the time of witch burnings and such and I'm not sure how well people would've reacted to that.
Any recommendations for research literature are also welcome!
[Answer]
**She can be an Ethiopian Christian Pilgrim.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IyedZ.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Florence>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Ethiopia>
>
> In 1441 some Ethiopian monks travelled from Jerusalem to attend the
> Council in Florence which discussed possible union between the Roman
> Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. The arrival of
> the Christian monks caused something of a sensation. It began two
> centuries of contact in which there were hopes to bring the Ethiopians
> into the Catholic fold...
>
>
>
Would a small town in the Netherlands be aware that there might be a distant foreign Christian kingdom? Yes they would!
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prester_John>
>
> Prester John (Latin: Presbyter Johannes) was a legendary Christian
> patriarch, presbyter (elder) and king who was popular in European
> chronicles and tradition from the 12th through the 17th centuries. He
> was said to rule over a Nestorian (Church of the East) Christian
> nation lost amid the Muslims and pagans of the Orient, in which the
> Patriarch of the Saint Thomas Christians resided.
>
>
>
Your traveler can say she is on a pilgrimage to visit some Christian site and get a blessing to take back to her ill husband. The people will be interested in her because of her exotic provenance but more comfortable because she is christian and also interested in the local holy site. She can make her living telling stories of distant lands and peoples. Probably no-one will pay her gold for stories, but they will put her up and feed her.
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People of color were rare but not unheard of in those days. Gypsies in the East and Moors in the west were known to be slightly darker skinned. The most venerated [Polish painting of Madonna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Madonna_of_Cz%C4%99stochowa) depicts Her as dark skinned woman. The people knew that faraway lands had different races, you only need some reason to be in Europe.
In medieval Europe your **religion** and **social class** were more important than skin colour. An independent woman was more suspicious than a dark skinned person. Most women had three choices - marriage, monastery or prostitution.
Tell them you are a noble woman from the realm of [Priest John](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prester_John). You were captured and enslaved by the Mohammedans and later rescued by your current friends. This gives you some sympathy from the very religious folk you meet. Explain that you can't go home because your country is separated from Christian Europe by the enemies.
As a bonus, being a captive from faraway lands you can explain some of your knowledge. People can be bit more forgiving of the exotic wisdom. Medicine is a good idea, but don't push it too far. Being a Moorish witch is not much better than local witch.
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It's important to note 2 things about the [Spanish Moors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors) that are germane to your question;
1) There was at least one major win of the 'Re-conquest' of the Moors in Spain that occurred in the 13th Century (under Alphonse VIII)
2) It was the sacking of the Moors that led to many of the developments in mathematics and science within the Christian worlds from that time through a couple of centuries because the Moors had been spending considerably more effort in enlightening themselves than the Christians of the time.
As an educated guess, your dark skinned time refugee would struggle socially, but the people of the Netherlands would express little concern or surprise at the technological or mathematical expertise of your traveler, assuming that she was a Moor. This would actually be a benefit to her because it's a convenient excuse as to why her language, customs, and occasional gaffes (like using Okay instead of All Right) may be forgiven.
To be blunt, in that era she's going to get more resistance from being a woman than she is being black but if she knows what she's doing she could easily set herself up in midwifery. That wouldn't be seen as that big a leap for women at the time, she'd already know more than the women of the day in many respects, and perhaps most importantly, if she saves mother and child from some awkward situations a couple of times over, all thoughts of witchcraft will probably go away on the grounds that there's no deodorant quite like success in this field.
Personally, I'd keep her away from technical or engineering fields - don't let her be a blacksmith or design buildings or do accounts for the local businesses. Their math was very different to modern mathematics for a start, and standing out in such fields, especially as a woman, is an ideal way to attract said unwanted attention of witch hunters.
As per comments, several other important notes about this answer; First is that serious witch hunting progroms weren't in force in the 13th century, although some historical texts do point out that witchcraft was still something seen as suspicious in that time.
Muslim learning was already being introduced into Europe during that time, although perhaps not as widely spread as it was to become during the reconquest of Spain. The comments below do provide such additional insights.
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The association between skin color and slavery is a pretty modern one.
By the 1800s, Europeans had mostly stopped enslaving other Europeans, and Native Americans were no longer selling other Native Americans as slaves either. That meant that most slaves in existence happened to be from equatorial Africa, and thus they had black skin.
Of course, there were also Europeans enslaved *to* Africans, but that was mostly in north Africa.
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There are dark skinned persons, and dark skinned persons.
In 13th century Europe there were two groups of people who were strongly discriminated against: Jews (who were not "dark skinned") and Gypsies (who were "dark skinned"). People of North African or Arab descent (who are "dark skinned" Europoids) were not discriminated against because of their appearance, but rather because of their religion. People of sub-saharan African descent would have been perceived as exotic, and not discriminated against any more than any other stranger.
Remember that in the Middle Ages anybody from a village more than a few miles away was a stranger, and people were generally strongly xenophobic.
By and large, people of sub-saharan African descent were known to exist, and there were a few of them living in Europe, at least towards the end of the Middle Ages. Portugal had a few thousand, England and France a few hundred, and there is a record of a black soldier in Gustav Vasa's (reigned 1523–1560) Swedish army. (Fun factoid: the black Swedish soldier was called Antinous Blåman, "Blue Man"; the Swedes perceived him as blue, not black. He married and had children, and for all we know his descendants still live in Sweden.)
Ah, and witch burning is a modern phenomenon, not a medieval one. As long as the "dark skinned person" does not behave like a Gypsy, and has a convincing story how come they are Christian (of the correct variety of Christianism for the locale), all is fine.
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Be a leper.
Good excuse to cover up. Nobody will touch you and in fact will give you stuff to leave. If the woman has the assistance of the group, she should be able to survive without too much hassle
Another other option is a pilgrim. The group can speak for her and with extensive robes remain hidden.
Final option is to be blatant and open by being a travelling merchant from a far away land.
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[Question]
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A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun. The result is a giant shadow that sweeps across the Earth's surface.
This world has the opposite phenomenon. Instead of a giant shadow, this world has a giant deadly "spotlight" sweep across its surface.
Must achieve these effects:
1. Must produce enough thermal power to kill humans (who are not native) and some (or all) non-native animals efficiently enough that full exposure to the light is (near?) certain doom.
2. Should have easily-observed warning signs allowing vulnerable creatures roughly one minute to find shelter. None of the lifeforms on the planet have developed its meteorology well enough to predict them except by visual/thermal observation.
3. Must be natural/meteorological/astronomical in nature. (Nothing like a giant orbiting laser).
4. Most or all plants, fungi, etc (non-animals) should be able to survive.
These would be a plus:
1. The starlight should normally be white, but the spotlight should be red (best case), blue (next best) or orange (third best). Otherwise, just brighter.
2. Should occur a few times per week in at least one area on the planet.
3. Should not be precisely periodic. If two occurrences are 36 hours apart, the next one might be 34 hours after, or 50 hours after. There may be a complex pattern, but it shouldn't be plausible to figure out over the course of a couple of weeks.
A "spotlight" that covers part of the planet is preferred, but if being larger than the planet is easier, that may be acceptable.
Here are a few ideas I was toying with, but I'm not sure how realistic they are:
1. There are multiple small (or distant) stars in the system, each white in color, and multiple red moons surrounding the planet. The stars are clustered around the center of the system so there is still a day/night cycle (is this possible?) with a roughly Earthlike luminosity. The red moons reflect light on the surface more or less constantly but the intensity is relatively small compared to the normal light from the stars... Until enough moons reflect light from enough stars to the same spot on the planet's surface! I don't know if they can really reflect enough light for this to work though.
2. Because of chaotic atmospheric conditions, atmospheric refraction causes the (single) star's rays to focus on a small area. I don't know if the color objective can be accomplished this way though.
3. There is very thick cloud cover, but sometimes a hole opens that allows the full light of the star through onto part of the surface. Also not sure if the color objective can be accomplished.
[Answer]
A wobbling [pulsar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar) will do the trick.
Pulsars emit a lot of energy in narrow beams that come from their poles. The slowest ones flash every few seconds; make its tilt wobble so that it is not pointing at the planet all the time. In addition, wobbling causes the pulsar to shoot at different points of the planet's orbit through time. The planet is hit when the pulsar's beams' path just happens to be passing by the planet.
If the pulsar is flashing every few milliseconds (as is normal for them), it will seem like a continuous beam for observers.
Finally, to make the beam small enough that it doesn't cover the entire planet and more, justify it with lensing from nearby nebulas, the planet's atmosphere, and maybe a black hole between the pulsar and the planet.
[Answer]
# The remains of an ancient Dyson swarm
Not quite natural, but mostly non-technological. If a prior civilization had constructed a [Dyson swarm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm) around the system's star, the light coming from the star might be heavily occluded. Assume the sun is >10X hotter than ours (or the planet is much closer in), and there are enough collector bodies in the swarm to block some 90% of the sun's light at any time. If they are close enough in toward the sun, there will be enough diffraction around each collector that they wouldn't cast visible shadows, and could only be observed by direct observation of the sun, which requires a minimum level of technology to avoid blinding yourself.
The spotlight effect would occur when resonances in the orbital periods of the different bodies in the swarm cause gaps in coverage. The creating civilization could have arranged this purposefully to provide sunlight to further flung planets/stations, or be coincidental. The apparent brightness would grow gradually as more pieces of the swarm leave the "hole" in the field, so the warning sign would just be a rapid but gradual increase in brightness.
The spotlight color would probably be the same as the normal sunlight. However, if the star is very hot, heading toward blue spectrum, the swarm might occlude the blue/UV portion of the spectrum more and let redder light through (imagine if each collector is a giant solar array panel with no backing, e.g. microns of silicon). At the very least they would radiate heat in the infrared. If natives to the planet are used to these conditions, that might be their normal "white" light.
[Answer]
Any sort of passive light-focusing (with lenses, mirrors, etc) scheme is unlikely do more than to make slightly warm spots. The fundamental reason has to do with the conservation of etendue, and you can read more about it at [Would a Moon made of water pose a threat to Earth during eclipses?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/131247/737)
As such, if you want the spotlight to come from a moon, the moon would either need some kind of power source (which starts to sound like "giant lasers") or would need some natural mechanism to eject jets of energy or matter. As far as I know, all kinds of [astrophysical jets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet) would require something much more massive than a moon, so this seems like a dead-end.
I think the most feasible explanation is a planet which is ordinarily protected by its atmosphere and/or magnetosphere, but on occasion the weather aligns such that the protection is lost in an area. We to experience this to a small extent on earth: both the sun and earth have magnetic fields that vary over time. One trouble is if the earth's magnetosphere were periodically penetrated by the solar wind, the atmosphere would be stripped away. Though it could take a very long time -- perhaps it is interesting for your story to have a "dying planet".
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Not entirely sure about the feasibility of this, but it's an idea I had when I read your question. I wonder if something like this would be possible through Gravitational Lensing. Essentially, this is when black holes (with enormous gravitational pulls) bend light around them, causing telescopic effects. I've linked the Wikipedia page for gravitational lensing as well as an article from Space.com below which you could read up on to give you a better idea of how it all works.
My idea though is that what if, just outside the edge of what can be seen from the planet, there's a system of black holes which pull light in such a manner that it's focussed into a thin beam, which cuts across the galaxy and occasionally burns its way across your planet? This would explain the huge intensity of the light as well as allowing a 'natural' explanation for how it's focussed so tightly.
Having it at such a distance would also mean that the appearance of the beam of light can't be predicted, as the people on the planet don't have the technology to either see that far into space, or understand what they're seeing. Besides, at such a distance that the black holes don't mess with the solar system's structure, the light would take very long to reach the planet. So when the beam lines up, its effects are only seen on the planet later (how much later depends on the distance. Centuries, or even millennia maybe).
As for the colour of the beam, we can assume the source of light is moving away from the black holes and the planet, which would cause Redshift. This would make a white light source look red to the observer. Frequency wise, we could assume that other objects in space (planets, dust clouds etc) often block the light from hitting our planet, but occasionally it slips through the gaps (like when you see the sun for a couple of seconds through a clearing in the clouds before it gets blocked again).
For non-animals to survive, perhaps they've evolved to feed on the huge light intensity and maybe even need it every few days to live? Or (depending on the history of the 'humans' on your planet) maybe everything else is evolved to survive the intense light to an extent, while humans aren't. Perhaps this is similar to how we have to wear clothes - we can't handle Earth's natural climates without external help. Maybe those caught outside of their radiation booths are killed rapidly, while those who stay inside are fine?
There's a lot of ways you can go with this idea and I think the rest is up to you. I've included a few links at the bottom you might be interested in.
**Further Reading:**
*Gravitational lensing:*
<https://www.space.com/39999-how-gravitational-lenses-work.html>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens>
*Red and blue shift:*
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift>
<https://www.space.com/25732-redshift-blueshift.html>
[Answer]
Let's have some cosmic fun.
Say that your planet orbits *inside* of an expanding red giant star.
Yep.
Now, say that someone or something decided to construct a shell around your world, perhaps before it had been engulfed by your host star as it evolved from the main sequence. This shell may be layers upon layers of [orbital rings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring).
Now, say that this shell--made of some impossible material, probably--has some degree of translucency to it and the ability to change this translucency. You can have one hemisphere of the shell totally opaque to simulate night, with perhaps little points of translucency to simulate stars, and the other hemisphere translucent to simulate daylight (much less a simulation this point, because actual starlight would be entering).
Finally, let this shell have some circular region of total transparency which sweeps the planet, perhaps moving across the shell faster than the day-night cycle to give the folks on all sides, day or night, some of the action. You can think of the shell as being comprised of a bunch of little windows if you'd like, like pixels on a screen, that can be tinted and whatnot and can be made to filter out the unnecessary or harmful radiation of the star it is orbiting *inside*. The transparent portion would not filter these things, allowing death to beam down onto everything below. Heck, perhaps it even has little perforations or 'openings of the windows' that allow actual, high-energy particles to enter as well.
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Ozone holes (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion>) already cause real world health problems.
I think you could combine ozone holes and the loss of other atmospheric protection with the a coinciding local [weakening of the magnetosphere](https://sciencing.com/earths-magnetosphere-protects-suns-solar-wind-1955.html). In the presence of a very energetic "sun", the results might be "deadly".
"Deadly" as in it might be immediately painful and certainly cancerous over time. Not deadly in the [Vin Diesel kind of way](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGOvH1T-dsA) you might be looking for though.
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**Constant lightning.**
Consider a Rocheworld.
[Can an atmosphere englobe a planetary ring?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1274/can-an-atmosphere-englobe-a-planetary-ring/1280#1280)
>
> Two tidally locked planets just outside the Roche Limit can orbit each
> other and share a combined atmosphere. You would be able to fly from
> one to the other without ever leaving the atmosphere and objects
> placed at the lagrange points would be able to remain there.
>
>
>
These binary planets circle around each other. At one point in their orbit, their atmospheres touch (or you could have a moon graze the atmosphere of its planet). The friction of the two atmospheres against each other produces colossal amounts of electrical charge. When the two are close enough that the atmosphere can provide a path, charge can equilibrate across.
This takes the form of constant tremendous bolts of lightning that follow the path of the point where the two partners are closest to one another.
[Answer]
I haven't seen this directly addressed, so I'll pose it as an answer:
TL;DR: Large moon with atmosphere refracts to a "point" on your planet. See below for etendue/thermodynamics, refraction, periodicity, and "warning signs".
A companion (moon, twin planet, or even planet as primary with your story set on a comfortable moon of a gas giant) large enough to hold a substantial atmosphere can perhaps be tuned to get the result you need.
Devise an atmosphere for the companion body with a powerful thermal inversion somewhere that reduces some of the spreading due to typical refraction of a density-stratified lens.
So we effectively have a ring-shaped lens, fairly narrow (edge view of the companion's atmosphere) but of very wide diameter (the companion itself), tuned to refract fairly well to a "point". The source of the light is the sun, and we will not get hotter than that. We do not need perfect point focus, but will gladly accept a central line of foci for various degrees of refraction, which generate -- you guessed it -- different colors of spotlight at different orbital distance of the large body from your planet's surface. Blue when it's close, red when it's far -- *if* it behaves like a proper lens-shaped lens. This would also result in color change as the effect sweeps from the edge of the home planet (farther) to the center (a bit closer). Warning signs would be similar to normal eclipses (the effect would only be observable from the very height of the eclipse). Finally, a combination of rotational and orbital planes for the three bodies involved can do wonders for making a simple periodic set of processes appear miserably non-periodic, particularly for observers located at different points on the surface of the home body.
I'll create a graphic. But I think this thing is doable with a lot *less* machinery than has been proposed so far, and without violating physics to the point of ridicule.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jd4XO.png)
Obviously, we see spreading -- not focusing -- in the highly idealized illustration above. But this only illustrates the radiation passing through (say) 000 degrees and 001 degrees of circumference on the companion body (left), as viewed from the planet (right). Do this 359 more times, and I say it's *possible* that there *could* be a net increase of insolation at the area (not a point, no!) of maximum effect. I am not trying to get down to the math that describes the increase, just to rule out that Etend--Entru -- whatever it is -- makes it impossible. After all, we are only refracting sunlight here, not reflecting moonlight.
I am indebted to Mark for his patience with this thread.
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The moon discussion referenced by @Phil Frost suggests part of the answer. A moon is too small so the lens-like body or phenomenon has to be big enough to cover all or most of the sky from the point of view of the target planet (which may itself be just a moon in a bigger system).
The problem is coming up with a celestial lens. If you can solve that, the rest is just a question of placing the target planet and the radiation source at a suitable scale and proximity.
A lens spotlight redirects light from a large area outside the "spot" so the first warning of the death ray's proximity would be a significant darkening, similar to a solar eclipse. In the distance you might see reflections from dust or clouds within the cone of concentrated light, so you can see if it's coming closer.
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The system could be a binary system with a neutron star or black hole orbiting close to the main star but in an eccentric orbit that lasts a few days. When it draws close to the primary it pulls off huge masses of coronal gasses and causes massive incredibly intense solar flares. If these incidents happen at the same time as the planet is in the wrong part of the sky then you can expect some serious pyrotechnics to hit the day side of the planet for a few hours.
The black hole/neutron star would most likely have been captured rather than be an original part of the system, explaining the eccentric orbit and any unusual spin needed etc.
It doesn't take a big stretch to somehow say that the gravity and magnetic fields of the neutron star focuses the ejections into beams somehow. So every X hours you get massive beams of solar energy being fired in random directions. You can then get the variance by saying whether those beams hit your planet or not.
[Answer]
A small moon-like object in the planet+star's [L1 Lagrange point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L1_point) (i.e., the point where the star's and planet's gravity exactly cancel out) would do the trick. Thanks to the wave nature of light, the moon will generate an [Arago spot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arago_spot) (bright spot) on the surface of your planet. Pick a small and bright star, perhaps a young white dwarf or neutron star, or a black hole with a violent accretion disc. Bright enough that the spot is deadly (this can also be achieved by moving the moon/planet system closer by), and small enough that the star can be considered a point source.
To have a moving spot, the moon would need to move about a bit. You can think of an orbit around the L1 point. This should not be too hard.
Much more difficult is the fact that the L1 point is an unstable equilibrium point. Objects do not remain in orbit around the L1 point looking only at gravitational forces. Here, some handwaving is necessary. Perhaps the pressure from stellar winds from the central star have some stabilising influence. Perhaps heating of parts of the planets not obscured by the moon will cause massive out-gassing of the oceans into space, providing a stabilising pressure.
Regardless, it's definitely not a *predictable* situation, which should make it ideal for your story.
[Answer]
the remains of a largs, but planar lens body (probably a solar power station) located on the L3 and L4 spot of the planet-moon system.
it is comprised of large, reflective panels that is stablized through geometry or leftover, still functional propellantless stationkeeping methods within a halo orbit around the L3 and L4 lagrange points.
since the largest possible Halo orbits around a lagrange point within the earth-moon system is much larger than that of the moon, the resulting lens can have an apparent size much larger than that of the star on the planet's sky. If the star is a very small, very bright star like a neutron star of white dwarf, then the lagrange point swarm's apparent size could be several order of magnetudes larger than that of the star.
since the swarm's original purpose was generating and delivering power to the planet, it could have been originally designed to focus starlight on the surface of the planet (an increase of the apparent diameter of the star three times on the planet increases the insolation from this virtual point of view by nine times.) and if some and only SOME of this stationkeeping ability have been damaged after the swarm have become derelict, the resulting lens would behave erratically: sometimes deadly, sometimes harmless.
if the moon is close to the planet, and the swarm is large enough so the apparent diameter of that swarm is 10 times that of the star; the resulting focal point would be at most 100 times brighter than anywhere else on the planet, while not violating conservation of etendue (the lens in this scenario is visually much larger than the disc of the star from the planet's point of view, as the moon here can be much larger and closer to the planet than THE moon is to THE earth.) or thermodynamics in any way.
If the panels themselves are tinted, the reflected beam of starlight would be colored: gallium arsenide gives a red tint, gold gives a green tint and silicon nitride on silicon gives a blue tint, completing your argument.
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A transparent sphere works as a burning glass so a moon of (impossible) clear material should do the trick by concentrating the rays from the sun if it orbited at the right distance.
Trouble is that absorbtion would eat most of the light if the diameter was more than a kilometer. A thin ice-shell might work, but good luck with explaining the origin (and stability!!) of that ;-)
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[Question]
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I'm the new superhero on the block. I've got the classic powerset - super-strength and super-durability. I don't have to worry one bit about your average thug hurting me.
On the contrary, I'm really worried about me hurting the average thug.
See, I've got my cape and mask ready, and I want to go bust up some drug dens, but I don't want to give anyone anything worse than a bruise, and I'm kinda new to my strength.
So, how do I knock someone out without any serious risk of injury?
* I could just punch them in the face, but I know that One Punch Can Kill even without super-strength to worry about
* The police use Tazers, but those cause people to fall, and falling is inherently dangerous.
* I could forget knocking them out and just force them into handcuffs, but I'm scared I might break someone's arm by accident
Anyone have any better ideas?
[Answer]
As has been noted, you *cannot* safely render someone unconscious. Even disabling techniques such as [tasers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taser_safety_issues) carry a risk of killing. There's a reason that most people refer to such weapons as "Less than Lethal" weapons, not 'Non-lethal.'
So...
# Frame Challenge: You don't need to knock them out
In fact, you shouldn't. You have super strength. Even for a normal-strength person, any physically-based means of rendering someone unconscious carries a risk of damage or death. You are strong enough to (potentially) tie steel girders into pretzels. The difference between 'hard enough to knock out' and 'hard enough to kill' is pretty minor by your standard.
So, you do what the police do.
You learn how to restrain, not knock out. You put someone into a position where their mobility is extremely limited, and then you lock them in that position. This is why the police carry handcuffs and zip ties. All of these things are available for sale on the open market, go buy a bunch. Then practice, practice, practice. Handcuffs and double-loop zip tie cuffs are *extremely* fast to apply if you have used them enough. Heck, just look at how fast a cowboy at a rodeo can hogtie a steer.
The advantage you have with your super strength and durability is that you can easily hold a criminal nice and still so you can apply the restraints quickly and easily, and all of their flailing about isn't going to hurt you.
So...when you go into a situation full of 'random thugs' it should look less like your standard superhero going in punching and flailing. You should just move from criminal to criminal, breaking their weapons, setting them face-down on the ground, then positioning their arms and legs behind them and tying all four appendages together.
Someone who is that thoroughly restrained is not likely to be any more of a threat than someone who is unconscious. If their weapon is in pieces and they can't move...they are subdued. No need for the risky proposition of rending them unconscious.
(Note: This is sort of like how Spiderman handles crooks. He doesn't have to knock them out...he just hits them enough to daze/disarm them, then webs them to a solid object til the police arrive)
In short, it should look more like a hogtying competition at a rodeo than a proper fight.
Heck, as a Super, you could probably even get a company to 'endorse' you and manufacture 4-strand heavy-duty zip tie cuffs designed specifically for that purpose.
[Answer]
>
> I don't have to worry one bit about your average thug hurting me.
>
>
>
So you don't need to knock people out.
Note that ordinary superheroes (the police) don't knock people out (and a taser does not do this ). In particular policing in my country (Ireland) is essentially unarmed and the police normally tackle and subdue criminals (violent ones) without extreme force. It's a given that you use minimal force under all circumstances.
>
> On the contrary, I'm really worried about me hurting the average thug.
>
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Worry about assault charges and becoming a murderer yourself.
In the UK and Ireland hitting someone in the head is considered a major step up in the severity of an assault. It can be considered attempted murder in some circumstances. If someone dies you can be charged with murder and would probably be charged with manslaughter.
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> See, I've got my cape and mask ready, and I want to go bust up some drug dens, but I don't want to give anyone anything worse than a bruise, and I'm kinda new to my strength.
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Ring the police - they know how to do this and you don't. Better yet, enlist in the police force and learn the law and how to do the job properly.
It's something of a mystery to me why superheros don't enlist in the police if they really want to help people.
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You don't.
It's *always* a significant risk of killing someone.
TV and film tends to give the impression you can repeatedly hit someone as hard as you like in the head and they'll keep moving. In real life they could die and it's a major no-no for police to do this as there is no safe way.
One hit to the head can cause a concussion. This can kill you if not diagnosed and properly handled. Never hit someone in the head unless your life is in immediate danger.
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Karate student of 30 years - you cant. Knocking someone out requires striking the skull with sufficient force to bruise the brain. Brains have limited healing capacity.
The brain is two hemispheres of fatty tissue connected by a short but thick segment of the same kind of tissue. The two hemispheres float independently in the cerebrospinal fluid, so blows from many angles will cause a shearing effect on the connecting tissue. Even injuries that have no immediate symptoms (i.e. no knockout) can express decades later because the injuries can be deep in the brain. Memory impairment, loss of self control, inability to process emotional and social cues are some of the long term symptoms.
Edit: Causing unconsciousness by choking requires depriving the brain of oxygen sufficiently long for a critical percentage of the organ to shut down. The line between unconsciousness and death is very fine, and is the reason that police using "sleeper" holds usually end up in court.
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I would say that you can "knock" the criminals out of business, without actually hitting them. Just pick them up and take them to the police station.
To facilitate this, your character could invest in a prison bus, and park that outside the drug den (or whatever). Then, a couple at a time, carry the criminals out kicking and screaming. They can't harm you, so why not? Then they are locked in a bus and you can go back for more.
Now, you then run into the issue of criminals running away as you are depositing another criminal in your bus. I would agree with StephenG about calling the police. In a symbiotic relationship, the police would cordon off and contain the drug den, and you would leisurely procure the criminals.
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You could use a [choke hold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokehold).
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> A chokehold, A.K.A. Donkinator, stranglehold or, in Judo, shime-waza (Japanese: 絞技; English: constriction technique) is a general term for a grappling hold that critically reduces or prevents either air (choking) or blood (strangling) from passing through the neck of an opponent.
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This is more controlled and less damaging than simply bonking someone on the head.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/m7KPm.jpg)
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There are people who do this professionally. It is a discipline that requires a lot of expertise and four to ten years of training, and even once they have a medical degree they consider it dangerous and requires continual monitoring.
These people are called [anaesthesiologists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthesiologist), and it is probably worth reading about their training to see what's involved in knocking people out safely.
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As others have noted, using physical force to suspend another person's consciousness is risky at best.
Look deeper into your set of super powers.
Maybe you have...
* the ability to exhale ether or some other mild anesthetic.
* the ability to mentally trigger instant intense narcolepsy.
* a form of telekinesis which only effects the blood/brain barrier, making it momentarily impermeable.
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Assuming we are limited to physical activities involving strength (no chemicals, electrical energy, psychic powers etc.) then we need an effective way to utilize the strength without damaging other people.
The new superhero should consider using a net or bola as a means to tangle the target(s). Using the unusual strength he can project the net or bola farther than an unaided human (the target might be lulled by believing they are out of range), and even has the possibility of trapping multiple targets should circumstances be right.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gKjxI.jpg)
*Using a bolo from horseback*
As a secondary weapon, consider a bag of beanbag rounds. normally fired from a 12 gage shotgun to knock down a suspect. This can also be used to penetrate barriers (depending on how fast it is thrown). With practice the superhero can adjust the speed of the throw to match the circumstances, and obviously practice hitting the target in the centre of visible mass.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fcPVY.jpg)
*Beanbag rounds. Leave the shotgun and cartridges at home*
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Using a chemical agent like sevoflurane the modern equivalent to ether or chloroform. I know this is boring knock out drug, but it works.
Either hold some over their face, or maybe even inject it. Your impervious so it doesn't matter how long it takes.
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Your hero could be an [aikido](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aikido) practitioner, which is designed to do just that.
An additional superpower like super-sense of touch could also do the trick. You could then monitor the henchmen's health as you strangle them.
There is an added fun in that, as your hero could be so sensible (s)he needs to wear gloves, or has to use drugs to dampen his(her) senses from time to time to avoid a nervous breakdown, leaving him(her) unable to control his(her) grabs for several hours.
(S)He could also be a medical student / paramedic / nurse / anyone used to sedate dangerous patients.
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You could accelerate the subject to cause G-force induced loss of consciousness (G-LOC).
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> Under increasing positive g-force, blood in the body will tend to move from the head toward the feet. For higher intensity or longer duration, this can manifest progressively as:
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> * Greyout - a loss of color vision
> * vision Tunnel vision - loss of peripheral, retaining only the center vision
> * Blackout - a complete loss of vision but retaining consciousness.
> * G-LOC - where consciousness is lost.
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[Wikipedia - G-LOC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-LOC)
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One technological solution might be a variant on the Electro-Sleep machine.
No need to force the person to sleep, finangle their brain into doing it for you.
Tricky bit is that as-is, the technology requires electrodes attached to the person's head and takes some time.
I admit to knowing very little about the technology, but a determined subject could quite possibly stay alert with the machine attached. Its main purpose is to help insomniacs who *want* to go to sleep.
If you were willing to do a little bit of Super-Technology though, it'd be a good real-world starting point for a Sleep-Ray that acts like a science-fiction stun-gun (see Star Wars's stun blasts for comparable technology)
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I hope this isn't too broad, but the idea is to apply this into a manageable game system - however, I want it to be believable. This is superseding the idea of "belief" makes magic, magic is a physical thing in the universe that exists regardless of belief and cares not of intention or morality. Theoretically, one could accidentally stumble upon new magic.
The overall setting would be that of a high-fantasy world, with ancient technology mixed in (like our modern) that comes from an unknown period. While it would be easy to say "this does x magic because that's what they're trained in", but I find myself thinking *what makes magic manifest, and then hard to master?*
My thought process is somewhere along the idea that, starting out simple, a single rune would be drawn with a finger. upon further mastery, a user could combine all sorts of magical arts, from spoken Words of Power, to channeling their "energy" into runes/weapons/objects.
But specifically:
**What makes spoken magic difficult? It couldn't be hard to just repeat a simple phrase, so how could it become a skill to master?**
### Related questions
I split the original question into a series of specific questions. Please also see:
* [What makes Air-Drawn magic difficult to master?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89921/specifics-of-magical-symbols-and-casting-what-makes-air-drawn-magic-difficult-t)
* [What makes mastering the concept of physically manipulating magic difficult?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89934/specifics-of-magical-symbols-and-casting-what-makes-mastering-the-concept-of-ph)
* [How would new spells be created in a world that inherently makes magic through generations of tradition?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89949/specifics-of-magical-symbols-and-casting-how-to-purposefully-quickly-create-ne)
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## What makes spoken magic difficult?
**The length.**
A spell requires a specific incantation. More complex spell has more complex magical phrases. That's why summoning a meteor requires a full 30 minute speech. Anyone can do it, if they can remember the exact phrases on a full 10 pages.
**Timing.**
You need to say the phrase in under x seconds. For a very complex spell, you may need to say it on exact x seconds. That's why Musica kingdom handles difficult spells better than other kingdom.
**Pronunciation.**
It's hard to learn only from literature, as the language contains many homographs.
**Tonal Language.**
The magic language might be a [Tonal Language](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_language). Same words in different tone has different meaning.
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Well, youngling, to explain why that is, is easy, yeh, but to understand is hard. To master it, impossible for you, so listen closely, yeh, because I will not repeat it.
Magic works on the Ether Plane, which permeates everything. Yeh, everything. No, stop looking, it's not visible, dummy. There's always magic, everywhere, yeh, and everything we do influences it, and is influenced by it, but to make it visibly and palpably manifest in the Sullied Plane, yeh, the Ether has to be manipulated into Interference.
Everything has to add up in the right way. Sometimes the Ether will do that on its own, and nobody knows why. Yes, yes, maybe it's the gods. But listen now. The Enlightened have *learned* through the eons, yeh, how to influence the Ether into Interference. The Masters of the Enlightened are extremely powerful, because the Interference they may achieve is perfect. All the laymen and the novices think there's tricks, but there isn't, yeh, because the less perfect you construct the Interference, the more it resembles just the regular noise and chaos in the Ether, yielding nothing on the Sullied Plane, or child's plays' tricks at best.
The easiest way would be to draw ancient runes with pigment made from the shells of a million, yeh, Whisper Bugs. Wait, it's not *simple* to draw runes, but of all the ways to reach Interference, the runes are the easiest to get right, because it's about getting the geometry right, with the strokes applied in the correct order and on the right timing, pushing the Ether, caressing it with the pigment, to yield to the idea of Interference. There's books that you can study in detail, and their parchment is very patient, yeh, very, so you get the most stoic of all teachers in them, and unlimited tries -- if you can afford the pigment.
Yeh.
Then there's the Spoken Word. Like I said, yeh, the Ether influences everything, and everything influences the Ether. For most words uttered on the Sullied Plane, the Ether just moves away from it, yeh, disgusted. But sometimes, it seems to get curious, and lets itself push to Interference, when the right formulas are recited in just the right way, yeh, with perfect timing. Get the tones wrong, the ordering, yeh, or speak to loud or to weak, and all you get is noise and chaos in both Planes. Now you don't need Whisper Bugs to try this, yeh, but to get the incantations right, a Master would have to teach you. Again. And again, yeh. And if you lack the talent, they'll quickly, yeh, grow frustrated to speak magic before you again and again. The Masters have learned ages ago that only one Sullied, yeh, in each generation develops the talent to truly replicate the utterings or -even rarer- find new things to say, so they'll not even bother to begin teaching most of them who seek their wisdom. Least of which would be you, yeh.
So now you know, but you don't know. Run, look for your mother. She's taking way too long with the wine, yeh.
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You can answer all questions about magic once you realize that magic is just plain programming.
Now, magic incantations are your REPL. They can be easy or difficult, they can be written, told or drawn (gestures in the air). It all depends on the programs you have access to!
So you will spend nights preparing spells (programs, hopefully powerful and smart programs), and make them easy to invoke with a simple command language (using various modality, so that you can invoke them as conspicuously or inconspicuously as the situations require).
And the difficulty lies in there: as a good programmer^W magician, you are able to write new programs^W spells on the spot. But you can make typoes, or small mistake, overlooking some detail (programming on the spot, under pressure, is not the same as programming and debugging nightfuls).
The only thing we're missing to implement full magic with our current technology, is some nanobots to be able to manipulate the matter around us quickly and inconspicuously. And of course, our iOS or Android devices are not programmable by the user (they're not magicians!), so they cannot use them as their own magic sticks, but have to use the canned magic we provide them.
You could think that a good NLP system hooked with some AI would solve all those UI problems. Well, try to use Siri or its competitor some time! ah! <https://youtu.be/KeBYsOlwWwk?t=92>
And seriously, you can take all the occurence of magic in traditional tales and analyse them as programming and computing technology (plus nanobots which unfortunately are still vaporware for the moment, but most magic doesn't even rely on nanobots).
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You could base the spells on an ancient language that has many variations and depending on
how you make up your sentences, the result would be very different. The variations might
be located in the pronunciation, context (words applying differently depending on the
environment for instance), a large vocabulary (that would require time to master) and
maybe simply having the good phrasing.
To explain myself, take a look at Latin : I'm sure it takes time to learn it,
even more to master it and know all the subtleties.
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> Air-Drawn magic to call upon elements. Would it be something that could be combined like a written language - would there be cursive or other variations in writing ?
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Eventually, rune construction could be based on that too. They could draw a first symbol
and then add up stuff, building up the spell as they draw. For instance to make a Fireball
it could be possible to draw the symbol of a flame (which could be anything in that old
language),then a circle around it and cross it to throw it out / Or you could start with a
ball, lighting it on fire and then throw it - then it's up to you to decide if a method is
more powerful/ Time saving / Energy saving / etc.
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Well I've been a bit premature on the last question but it would be possible that
since the magician is casting the symbols it is also linked in some way with his spirit.
Hope I'm helping you out a little.
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**Flex your brain muscles**
Humans have brains that evolved to do some thing well, [like pattern recognition](http://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/humans-are-the-worlds-best-pattern-recognition-machines-but-for-how-long) , and other things not so well, [like risk assessment](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-inertia-trap/201303/why-are-people-bad-evaluating-risks).
Make your magic system use a piece of the brain that it just isn't good at, making your user devote greater amounts of resources to continue the practice.
This is your system so you can hand wave an area your humans are poor at understanding and claim your magic requires that they do it. This also gives you the opportunity to explain why another race or species would be good at your magic.
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It is quite difficult for native english speakers to pronounce the german 'ch', like in 'ich'; same for french speakers to pronounce the english 'h', like in 'hear'; or the spanish 'r' like in 'roto'.
Just collect a dozen of those, and it takes weeks to months of training to pronounce even a short sentence so it sounds correct (=indistinguishable from native speakers) - some people never master it in their whole life.
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Magic is intoxicating. This is why so many people want to do it and so many people are so bad at it.
Each syllable of a spell has an additive, and (most importantly) *immediate* effect. The longer the spell, the drunker you get, and the more likely you are to slur or otherwise fumble later syllables of the spell. Usually when this happens, the spell just fizzles, although the hangovers are *very* bad. Sometimes however, *something* happens, but not what the spell caster intended. Some people have even blown themselves up.
Note that the effect only happens when the spells are voiced. Saying them in your head to memorize them has no effect. So most people know several spells perfectly well, but can't manage to pull them off.
Like practiced drunks, practiced magicians can overcome the effect, but even they struggle with very long spells.
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**Understanding the Science behind**
For example you wish to make a little rock:
* You need to understand from what material and how this behave and form at atomic level
* What keeps them together, if it needs a special temperature or some impurity to hold together
* If it needs extra presion, or the amount of time it would require to take a specific form naturally.
All that information could be learned, but with more complicated actions or things, it would become incredible harder, near to imposible for normal people.
Sorry for some IT example but it would be like bringing a new Virtual Machine to your environment. Making it interact with everything around it like has always being there take real experience and knowledge, just like magic. :)
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There are a number of ways to make magic difficult to perform.
1. For spoken magic CageyCat has already covered having a very complex language that is required. I'd suggest a second or alternative method is that used by Ursula Le Guin in the Earthsea books, which is that all objects (and people) have a secret name that you need to know to be able to work magic on them or with them. These words would need to be learned through a variety of means and passed down (jealously) from master to apprentice. This could mean that all but the most basic actions require words not yet learnt to perform, limiting magic to a set of actions.
2. Another limiting factor could be willpower. You speak the right words but you still need to be able to provide the power for the spell yourself. This requires training and practise, so any novice who picks up the spell for destroying a city can read it, but not imbue it with the power required to cast it.
3. Make failing a spell costly. As in do it right or you risk killing yourself (and maybe everyone around you), many magic systems do this (Warhammer Fantasy comes to mind, where miscasts can summon demons to kill you) and it means while mages and wizards are very powerful they are also walking a fine line between wielding that power correctly and death.
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You may have something similar to what I proposed for air-signs (uniformity is a good thing!): uttered magic is a specific phrase in an arcane and not easy to master language.
You *can* learn the sounds by heart, but it will sound false as when someone tries to read a phrase in a language he does not really understand.
In that case spell might still work (barring major pronunciation mistakes), but it wouldn't have the power of the same phrase read aloud by a professional actor (magician) mother tongue in the "true speech" (or whatever you want to call it).
Between two extremes there are all variation in fluidity, accent rhythm, cadence, accent, etc.
You can have has many variations and as many difficulty levels as you need/please.
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# It is much more dangerous
One slip of the tounge and if your pronunciation isn't perfect, the spell doesn't work the way you want it. You could accidentally use the wrong parameters, the wrong spell, or even the wrong target. Your firebolt could end up hitting you instead. You could teleport yourself into a wall. You could accidentally use an unknown spell on yourself with no known cure, or a spell with no or difficult cure.
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I'm not sure if I got the question, but I'll try give a good answer anyway.
Sorry about my bad english, I an trying to do my best here.
# Quantum Field
Magic is usually defined as a way to manipulate the laws of the universe(or smartly use them) as far as I know, this is not so different from science.
So you can use the Quantum field theory to build a some “Magic Field” theory.
And make things predictable for the player for he feels like is mastering magic.
In short the quantum Field theory tells that every point on space has some special properties, separated by fields(you can think in this as layers for simplicity), each field is the home of some type of elementary particle which like properties, can have a numeric “particleness” of its kind such as the electron particle field where an electron is just a location with a high value of “electoness”.
Is there a way more fields, each one can interact with other and give complex behaviors.
You can find out more on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory).
# Adaptation to magic
So if we change some stuff like give new fancy names it can give us a great magic system
Since the ***electron*** is already related to electricity, we can name it as ***lightning element.***
The ***magnetic*** field(where is home of the photon) is tightly related to the electron field, and makes sense for the player because lightnings makes bright light, but the reverse may still works so ***light element*** can make ***lightning element***, it will make even more easy for the player discover that relation(but not to master).
And even is all other particle fields to play like quarks that are elementary like the electron but can join together to form other types of particles like ***protons*** and ***neutrons***.
***Protons*** and ***neutrons*** are hardron types which has much mass that come not from its quarks but by all the enormous energy needed to hold these particles together, so we can call then ***the heavy element***.
Joining ***the heavy element*** with the ***lightning element*** we get ***atoms***(usual matter!), and the player can break the matter to get these with some kind of tool, spending knowledge points, this make some kind of reverse alchemy game.
Of course, you can make many other elements, it is just imagination
# Make it hard: spelling system
Now the easy stuff is done, we need to make it difficult, if the game will be based on hand drawn spelling system, we make symbols!
First step is to divide the screen in a grid and assign an element maybe two to each cell.[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/X4G8I.png)
Then add overlapping areas for connecting the regions.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bieKT.png)
As the player draws on the screen, passing between regions, it generates patterns that can be translated to a spelling.[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gm4Z7.png)
You can also add as many levels of symbols you want, making even more complex to the player, because only the order of the areas matter you can design complex symbols just by order of elements, with diferent meanings.
The player may many times pass the finger over an different area and conjugates a completely different spelling or fail. It can be fun.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gwGHq.png)
At least that's my idea.
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I get it you want something solid, to weave your fantasy into. I'll start with a deep seated belief of my own. That is; when someone communicates it isn't just logical stuffs that are passed along but also the emotional state in which they were created. To understand what someone is communicating requires assuming their frame of mind. Words then induct a state of being. This is similar to "the medium is the message", while that is true, the first medium is the person who is disseminating.
Since we are talking about *magic* then we can super charge this idea into enchantment type magic: beguiling words, induce laughter so hard it becomes a weapon, inspire awe, and create illusions.
While words, language, really any form of expression can create a change in others they can also create a change in yourself. Keeping a diary clarifies thoughts, also prayer does the same; expressing your thoughts in words or writing crystallises them a bit better than if they are not spoken. So this *reinforcement* can be used to release your inner potential, if we want to go far fetched you can tap into all the electrical energy in your body like an electric eel and increase the voltage to the point you can fire it off your person, or become super strong, whatever.
A fun thing to do then is realise the following, not everyone learns the same, people can bring on a state of being though dance (being more tactile learners), some are auditory, some are visual. This would mean different schools of magic could be centred around not just "powers" but how people learn them, a certain school might be known for it's fire magic, but that is because a tactile learner mastered that and they can't share, or adapt it to another style. The people in that school know what was passed on and developed by their masters and they could share with similar schools but find it hard to work with people who do things very differently.
I like this system for a few reasons: 1) because anything goes, schools can do whatever you want based on the ability to induct a state of being that harmonies with the magical field. If you went with some four elements system (or any mix and match system), then you get headaches about what makes sense and it might become a restriction in your story telling. This way any school can do anything you want them to. 2) Explaining it this way mixes magic with a bit of psionic/mentalist feel (dune, foundation series) and would synergize well with your possible inclusion of advanced science.
If magic *is* created though a sort of mental resonance brought on be altering ones state of being (possibly though a succession of such changes) then it would be a very difficult thing to communicate, this brings up personality types (Myers Brigs); another belief of mine is that the greater the difference in personality types the greater the difficulty in communication. This is straight forward; as the personality types (as least in the Myers-Briggs) are about preference, the test uses a bunch of vocabulary (discriminators) that tend to put you on one side or the other for four different scales; that really isn't important the important part is that people who identify strongly on one side of the scales has a harder time trying to understand someone on the other side the more polar the difference the more difficult. The more difference in these dimensions the harder it is for people to see eye to eye. As put above, regarding communication only really being understandable if you assume the state of the person communicating; it is very difficult for these people to assume the view point of the other, and because of ideals (people who are more polar tend it idealise things that draw them more towards that pole [Extroversion vs Introversion is one pole] then they reject the others view.
So simply, types of magical induction can be defined using human learning styles, but then broken down again based on personality types making for very narrow schools where even if you really wanted to learn, not just anyone could wrap their heads around their way of doing things.
One final note. It isn't what you asked for, but I like "belief being magic". After all computers are so cool, they take tiny electrical impulses and we can move giant robot arms... it's all about leverage. Magic is the ultimate leverage, it's generally taking the thoughts in our minds and breathing them into reality, we are already getting to the point where computers can do this reading brain waves. We have moved from punch cards (physical input), to keyboards (still no screen!), monitors, now voice recognition on our phones, and imagine thought based operating systems, 3D modelling software will be so easy to use!
The next step, if you really want a physical basis... combining all the above... air born nanites born of an advanced ancient civilisation; which form an invisible but omnipresent quantum computing net and are capable of reforming reality are responsible as the underlying driver making everything have a *physical basis*. They monitor for subtle changes in the EM field brought on by controlling thought and state of being.
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I always thought of the "Verbal" part of spell-casting to be like a template. The spell itself is a manipulation of energy by some innate ability of the spell-caster, and the "shape" of that spell would be determined by the mind itself. The verbal part of the spell would simply be a way to focus your mind into the specific pattern required to shape the "mana" or "spell energy" into the desired effect.
Since many spells can be very complex in their abstract concepts (such as to say, heal a broken bone), it would require a very complex language that helps guide your mind to create the proper effect. Runes might also be much more complex than a standard writing system because they would need many subtle variations designed to codify the words and patterns of the "template" of the spell.
So although the language would be very complex, it's not necessarily just that the words are hard to say or pronounce over and over correctly, it's also a function of how well you can use that phrase to form the template in your mind, which might take considerable practice.
This could also be used to explain spell-casting systems where advanced practitioners no longer need magic words, phrases or incantations. The pattern can be seen so clearly in their mind, they no longer need words to express that pattern and create the spell effect.
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Since you liked the "Magic Programming" concept, the explanation can also be in the support.
When the spell is written, it can expect for some element to be present to "start". Be it the parchment it is written on, or something more complex (parchment + precious pearl + blood of a virgin...).
Thoses materials are then used by the spell, to take the fireball example, the spell morph the parchment into a fireball, that start to propel itself and burn once thrown.
However, in verbal spell, you have to adapt your spell on the fly to your environment, or combine multiples spells to recreate the environment neccessary. So to create a fireball, the spell would look almost nothing like the runes on the parchment, because you would be casting a spell to create the support in your hand, the spell to transform this support into the fireball, and the spell to "activate" the fireball altogether.
If you want to make peoples flee verbal magic even more, you could make mistakes in the spell dangerous, so for example, the spell to create the fireball support is really easy to mess up, and create a explosion, or a venomous snake, instead.
To compare with real programming, it would be like using known command in known environment, or making all your project directly into the interpreter, without possibility to come back, and no debugging help.
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I think that you should start with basic mechanics of the magic in your world. By defining the mechanisms behind the magic and the rules that govern it you will be able to adjust difficulty levels and create suitable obstacles in achieving a status of an Archmage.
I think these are the questions worth asking:
## 1. What is magic? (form)
This is a fundamental question. Is it akin to matter? Or rather a force like gravity or electromagnetic force? Does one need a physical contact or a physical manipulation (besides vocalising) to be able to use magic?
So, if magic is a type of matter, you can simply limit its quantity. Those who can collect more magic (mana :) ) are capable of greater spells. If magic is a force then you can think of a type of force and different problems associated with their practical use.
These, of course, are not the only possibilities. Just some examples.
## 2. The source of magic
Basically, it is where the magic comes from. Does it have a particular source? For example, magic is generated by a mage. Then, the more magic a mage can generate the more powerful they are. Magic output can depend on food, meditation, DNA, and so on.
Maybe the source of magic is established by some higher beings, i.e. divine magic. In this case, the limitations can be associated with either the establishers themselves (a mage has to have a good relationship with the higher power in order to perform spells) or the access to the Source (higher beings have used a complicated language and the Source responds only to it; the Source can be accessed only in a particular mind state; etc.).
Your world might not have a single source of magic, which then will be somehow dispersed. However, this dispersion can be uniform (and here we have a problem of concentrating the magic to drive a spell) or not (something like the places of concentration of power, power lines, etc.; hence the problem would revolve around a distance from those places or lines of power).
## 3. Nature vs nurture
Who is capable of learning and performing magic? Does one have to have some innate ability or blood and sweat can get them there?
If you resort to nature, you can easily control the number of mages by manipulating a distribution of right genes in your population. You can also limit magic abilities to certain blood lines or birth conditions.
If you decide that everyone willing to learn can become a mage, you can adjust the learning curve to make it easier or harder to obtain power. You can also play with the availability of this knowledge. Some families can have heavily guarded spellbooks that only the older sons or daughters can access. Your heroes can be on a quest for some lost books.
## 4. The usage mechanics
How exactly the spell works?
Does a mage channel the magic through their body (stamina, physical endurance, pain tolerance, etc. can come into play) or their mind (important factors here would be willpower, attention spans, logical abilities, intelligence, self-control, mental stability, etc.)? In this case, a mage functions as a conduit. They can be damaged by tapping into too much magic. They can burn out. They might risk their physical and emotional integrity every time they perform a spell.
Another possibility is a mage as a catalyst. It can be an interesting scenario since it allows for some fun limitations. For example, aptitude for magic can function as catalyst quantity — the higher the aptitude the faster and stronger spells can be performed. Since catalysts only speed up and facilitate natural reactions the spells can be limited to natural for your universe processes and changes. E.g. magic can cure cancer (because it is a natural process) but it cannot regenerate amputated arm (because humans do not regenerate limbs).
The next approach is to use a spell (or a ritual associated with it) to focus magic. In this case, you can play with the difficulty of rituals and levels of precision required for a spell to produce a desired effect.
A spell can also be an activation mechanism, i.e. all the magic needed is already there, but one needs a correct trigger to start a chain reaction. A mage would have to know what triggers what, what is the critical point, and how to contain the spell. The idea of the chain reaction opens enormous plot possibilities. Things can easily go off the rails. There is always a chance of unexpected consequences due to mutations during the chain reaction.
## 5. Rituals
What is the true significance of the rituals?
For example, in case of incantation-based magic do the words truly matter? Can it be that the spells consisting of words are just a vehicle for creating a certain melody or a certain consequence of sounds? How important is understanding of a language used for spells? Can someone just learn by heart the pronunciation of a spell without understanding the meaning?
Are the rituals set in stone or they are more flexible. It makes for a very different dynamics if a mage can improvise on a spot.
## 6. Spell "aftermath"
What happens to magic after a spell? Does it dissipate? Can it be infused into a material object? Does the law of conservation of energy apply to magic?
What if magic charges an object of a spell? Then depending on magic mechanics, future spells can be easier or harder to perform. Mages can keep those objects due to advantages they have. Alternatively, mages have to be very selective about magic applications because they might not be able to affect an object again.
If an object can be given magical qualities what kind of qualities those are? And who can take advantage of that object? Can mages mage items for non-mages? Or all magic is limited only to people with corresponding abilities?
This is not a straightforward answer to your question, but I still hope it is helpful.
[Answer]
Spoken magic might require speaking words composed of individual sounds, but there is no guarantee that the composition of these sounds will follow general composition rules of any human language.
So, while everyone can pronounce a basic 4-letter spell word like:
>
> amal
>
>
>
not everyone can effortlessly1 pronounce an advanced 20-letter spell word like:
>
> mhklmnprtptpmnbcgtrh
>
>
>
And saying that reliably and quickly, while a somewhat miffed fellow with a zweihander is charging at you, would take some practice and hard memorisation.
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1 Or at all - at least judging by reactions of my acquintances whenever I read consonant clusters like this one.
[Answer]
How about the required level of precision?
When drawing runes, you can use tools to assist. Potentially you can undo and redraw mistakes. Potentially you can draw them larger so that the variance caused by that little tremor in your hand is just background noise.
When speaking them however, you have no way to correct any mistakes you make, and while you can maybe slow down and take longer, time is the only dimension in which you can stretch things. So you'd better get it right the first time.
And that's more difficult than one might think. How many vocalists can hit specific notes precisely and consistently without resorting to autotune? Regular, sloppy human speech doesn't require a lot of precision, but a vocal magician needs voice control that would be the envy of any opera singer.
[Answer]
# It's like a phone tree ... in an alien language.
The creators of the MagicTree are as different from humans as humans from a crow... squirrel... triggerfish... octopus hybrid. To speak their language with the right intonation would be quite a feat! And their MagicTree system is asking you to select 1 for healing, 2 for incineration, 3 for the technical service department. It would be hopeless except, the same way as the barking of your dog might direct the bank phone tree to convert all your assets to Bitcoin and send them to the last wallet that spammed your cell phone, the MagicTree system occasionally gets ... confused. It's customer service, after all.
So you know some combination of whistles, gargles and howls that can get certain spells done, usually. Problem is, the system might misread you, and it keeps track of customers having trouble navigating the system. It's designed to *help*. So after two rounds of saying "I had some trouble understanding that last response", there you are on 24-hour hold, waiting for the next available customer representative. Who is currently writhing on a firespike at the bottom of an alien sea in a black hole a trillion years from nearest hope of assistance. You might get through to an unemployment office faster.
Luckily, the system has a glitch (full mailbox, upload failed) and resets every 24 hours. Yay, more spell points!
Just whatever you do, oblige two crucial practices. (1) No matter what, do not agree to read the Terms and Conditions - you'll end up as one of those suddenly white-haired things tearing their eyes out while muttering incomprehensibly of nameless horrors that await us. And (2) Never, EVER, but *never* cast the spell that lets you hear the Muzak.
[Answer]
While belief is a popular source of magic, probably more common is mental focus - the ability to concentrate on the outcome of the magic.
Two mages say the words for a fireball spell perfectly, and yet one fizzles and flops on the floor 3 feet away while the second is the size of a basketball and soars across the field. The difference? The focus/concentration on the outcome... the ability to force what is visualized in the mind to become real in our world.
There are many example worlds with which phrases and glyphs are there to help the mage but they are not actually required (much like a recipe to provide stability and consistency)... but its really the concentration that is the fuel source for magic.
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[Question]
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I'm ESL, hope I can deliver the questions clearly.
Consider a regular and sharp longsword.
1. Would it be possible to stab someone by handling it close to the tip or maybe in the middle of the blade? (I never had one in my hands, I have no idea if you have enough stability to stab).
2. How much damage would it do to the hand?
[Answer]
The answer is Yes, of course, a warrior can grasp his own sword by the blade, and the old fighting manuals show this technique clearly (half-sword technique).
There are also instances where it is recommended to grasp the opponent's sword.
[*Here*](https://thehemaists.com/2015/05/18/what-are-we-really-seeing-with-the-half-sword-images-of-talhoffer/) is good treatise on the topic of half-sword technique, when it's used & why.
From *Medieval Combat* (a translation & description of Talhoffer's *Fechbuch*), we read: "The half=sword techniques were originally devised for fighting armoured opponents. The sword is gripped on the blade with the left hand and used like a short spear or bayonet to slice or stab into the armpits, groin, face, throat and joints."
Even though the technique was devised for armoured fighting, it could certainly be used for fighting without armour. Apropos to the question of injury to the swordsman's hand, note that medieval guantlets did *not* fully encase the hand and fingers:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZkME7.jpg)
The swordsman still had to wear a (thin) leathern glove underneath. This does not invalidate the answer, because the leather itself is relatively thin and offers little protection from stabs and slices. Thin leather = less bunching & greater range of motion; thick leather = bunching & less range of motion. You still need to take care in order not to slice your hand through the glove!
[Zweihander Techniques Demonstration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbNL_At0IVw)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B5iS5.jpg)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RocQ5.jpg)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hh0lj.gif)
[Answer]
Yes, it's possible to stab someone by holding the middle of the blade.
As a weapon, the long sword was often used with half-swording techniques; so often, the other hand would be holding the blade.
**Half Swording** was a thing back in the day, where people would grab the middle of their blade with their hands while using the sword. The sharpest part of a sword is often closer to the tip, so this was relatively safe as long as you were wearing some sort of hand protection (eg: Plate gauntlet/ Thick leather gloves/ etc.). Even without the hand protection, it is theoretically possible to grip the blade such that your palm and fingers would not be sliced open.
This actually allowed the sword to be "shortened" for **more powerful** thrusts, or have more leverage when in close quarters.
Also often done was the flipping around of the sword to use the handle side as a mace/war hammer type implement.
[Answer]
With a sharp-edged longsword (no [ricasso](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricasso) , no gauntlets and no cheating by holding sword's hilt with the other hand), not so much damage.
Skin will be punctured, and an eye can be lost, but there can be no deep penetration, because the attacker's hand's grip will slip over the sharp edge. That hand can be cut to the bone, if attacker is trying hard.
* Attacker can practice a grip over blade sides only, avoiding sharp edges. This way, apparently, more damage can be done, but this grip would require a lot of practice and still remain much weaker than a normal hilt grip.
* Another way or dealing substantial damage is using sufficient space when thrusting the sword to let the sword gain momentum. This way it is not much the grip, but the sword's own weight that would deal the damage.
Two techniques above would be sufficient to kill an unarmored opponent, but still not likely to be effective even against a light (like leather) armor.
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wi0Ug.png)
I've actually had this problem in real life before.
Couldn't explain it well without drawing it.
I pushed the butt of my hands together along the face of the blade while locking fingers over the blunt end of the blade.
Of course this method won't work with 2-sided blades
I used this method as I had snapped the hilt of my sword off
[Answer]
The other answers discuss the technique quite well, so I wanted to toss this in.
According to <http://www.darksword-armory.com/how-sharp-were-medieval-swords/>, The relative sharpness of the longsword varied across time. If the blade was destined to attack an unarmored or leather clad warrior, it's edge would have been sharper (also more brittle). In this era, we would assume half-sword techniques without any sort of hand protection to be potentially catastrophic to the hand.
However, with the advent of chain mail and plate armor, razor sharp edges became less desirable. Less razor-like equals less damage to the bare hand.
Depending on your time period (and ultimate sword design), your character could lose a finger or two from the trauma. On the other hand, the sword may not even be sharpened up to a point, if it's intended target is plate-clad. Minimal/no damage could be possible.
[Answer]
Yes it is possible, it's called half-swording and it's quite common in a good amount of longsword manuals.
With a proper way of gripping the sword you can half-sword safely even without a pair of gloves and sustain no damage to your hands. Skallagrim has a video in which he does exactly [that](https://youtu.be/vwuQPfvSSlo?t=2m18s), half-swording with his bare hands then Mordhau-ing a rubber tire, although he admits that wearing gloves give a psychological advantage to half-swording.
[Answer]
You could do it with one hand on the blade and the other on the hilt (aka Half-swording), but doing with with both hands on the blade would not work. You would not have enough grip to hold the blade firmly and it would just slip off your hands. That's why cross-guards were made, so you can have a point of contact when you thrust. That part gives superior grip and prevents the hand from slipping on the blade.
Even if you had a good grip, the damage would be superficial, you would only "scratch" your opponent, no serious injury. In fact, you might hurt yourself more than you hurt your opponent if you lack hand protection.
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[Question]
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The year is gazillion and five and humanity has spread out across the galaxy. As we expanded, empires were formed, then toppled, federations coalesced, then unraveled, feudal kingdoms cropped up and were swallowed up. In short, history has been lively.
The current situation, which has held semi-stably for a few centuries now, is one of relative peace imposed by military detente, with five huge interstellar nations dominating the economic and diplomatic arenas. Of the ever-dwindling number of still-independent worlds, most are too low-value to be noticed, but a few, conveniently located along borders between the major nations, are crafty enough (or gullible enough) to play the nations against each other to maintain their independence.
True sentient AI continues to elude researchers despite millennia of continuous research. For that reason, even though everything that can possibly be automated has been automated, but humanity at large still needs to work. People still have jobs and salaries. Scarcity and unemployment are still a thing in many places, although in most cases, things are prosperous enough to ensure that everyone has access to basic dignity and opportunities.
That said, economic and white-collar crime is rampant, and economically-motivated violent crime is as common as it has ever been. On the other hand, genocide, xenophobia and even racism are not exactly extinct, but they happen to be at an all-time low. Slavery, of course, is illegal everywhere.
Except this one planet. Here, a large percentage of the work force is involved in one particular industry as actual slaves, forced to perform their life-threatening duties under threat of whippings and beatings or outright executions. Accidents abound and are often crippling our outright fatal, but this is just a cost of doing business. The slave population is replenished by forced breeding and the occasional importation of criminal (and some times not so criminal) prisoners.
This situation has persisted for just under two centuries. Over the years, many people have looked into doing away with this situation. The problem is that, for very strong specific reasons, even with the deplorable safety record, maintaining a slave work force is the only way this planet can maintain any viability as an inhabited world. Granting freedom to the slaves would result in a critical work force shortage and subsequent shutting down of this particular industry, quickly followed by the unstoppable collapse of the planet's economy. The end result: exodus for those with the means to leave, mass starvation for the rest.
The majority of the free folk on the planet is actually unaware of the situation. (Or maybe, they are just purposely keeping themselves in the dark, or actively lying to themselves.) The full truth is known only to the slave owners and overseers, to the highest ranks of planetary government, and to a very select few top officials off-world. And to the slaves themselves, of course.
**The question**: Why does this one planet still have slaves? What do the slaves do that justifies their existence?
Aside: I prefer the issues to be local to the planet, but if this can't be realistically achieved, I could make this about the only way for the galaxy to obtain some critical resource instead.
[Answer]
Your slaves aren't legally defined as slaves to the outside universe.
Several centuries ago the initial settlers were selected as a control group of otherwise "unhealthy" or doomed citizens who were promised a scientific application of a new prolonging treatment that involved habitation in a controlled environment absent of the toxicities found in the common industrialized planets. They were relocated in mass and settled into their communities, which were effectively the same as small villages from history so far back people don't even remember what it was like to have a house made of something other than metal and concrete.
To them, this is a haven. They are given a prepared (a-la terraforming) unindustrialized planet and governed only by a subset of rules enforced by the relative inhospitality of the planet itself. A natural prison. Their work consists of crop management for food sources that require tons of land, produce enormous emissions, and are considered relatively unappealing to a lifestyle where everything is manufactured and prepared. In other words, people have forgotten how to butcher livestock.
Without getting too technical, in a future where corporations, conglomerates, and all such have grown to sizes too big to fathom, the concept of whole or natural has been lost in the feasibility of distribution and preservation to a large, interstellar network. Food has to be processed to endure any duration of shipment. But not here.
Here we have fresh food and vegetation of all varieties, grown in mass where the population, even if gorged beyond ambulation, could not possibly consume the product or even threaten its output. The citizens know they are in a controlled study and the only way to ensure their care is to fill the planet with crops, harvest, deposit in the shipment tubes, and keep on going. They are told their treatment requires huge amounts of product to extract the serum they need to live, which is a common multi-vitamin but they don't know that. Their offspring will thrive, so long as they too consume the serum. And out of fear you maintain a world of slaves.
Why is this allowed? Because business has some crooked roots. A while back some huge pharmaceutical company purchased this planet in its useless state and dropped some automated terraforming machines onto it. It took centuries to become viable, but eventually it was declared legally habitable as a class X settlement - which basically means study only. Thanks to the never ending loop holes that plague all legal systems, this planet is now wholly owned by the pharma company, who can and will use it for "study." And since it is class X, nobody really cares to dispute this. It is unfit for industrialization or settlement at this time in a universe with so many options.
As for the subjects, the first round volunteered. They were duped, so to say. Pushing notions of an illness whose only cure appears to be an environment in a low pollution atmosphere, plenty of sun, or however they chose to sell it, the people were offered some guarantee of service, plus an incentive to their living families. Ultimately a cheap expense for the company, but to the families of the sick, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. No matter how good society gets, some will always want more. And they found them.
The sister planet is close enough for travel and is a special class designated to the ultra wealthy, or people who can afford such vacations. Contracted exclusively to the company, who owns planet X, for consumable resources. The people of the slave planet only know there is a sister planet, but don't know anything about it. In reality, the supplies harvested from the legal slave colony in abundance are sold as a premium to sister planet. A taste of real food for those who can afford it. A planet close enough where the product does not require preservation or alteration. One of the few places left in the industrialized universe where you can taste anything like it. Because of this, people tend to look away when they realize the food is a product of legal slavery. They see them as happy volunteers offered a lifestyle only read about in history. They see it from above where they don't know the truth about what happens on the surface. Plus, they can't because it's private property.
Essentially, they are slaves by definition only. Legally, they are patients of a medical study. All signed and legal, including offspring.
The company has an exclusive right to this planet for the designated contract of 70,000 earth years. Or basically forever. They made sure to lock that one down knowing the last true treasure is the simplest of things - a good hot meal that doesn't come out of a bag.
Win win.
[Answer]
>
> The problem is that, for very strong specific reasons, even with the deplorable safety record, maintaining a slave work force is the only way this planet can maintain any viability as an inhabited world. Granting freedom to the slaves would result in a critical work force shortage and subsequent shutting down of this particular industry, quickly followed by the unstoppable collapse of the planet's economy. The end result: exodus for those with the means to leave, mass starvation for the rest.
>
>
>
You are describing nowadays China, modified to be a whole planet rather than a country. Have a look at this related question:
[Could a Megacity be a Penal Colony?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/108412/21222)
Now, some people may say that chinese factory workers are free to leave whenever they want. I have read about this situation in other countries, and seen it happening on my own. Here industry owners will hire the poor and uneducated to work on their farms, providing not only a salary but also food and shelter. But the food and shelter must be paid for, usually the rent of the tools used for the work as well. The wages are not enough to pay for it all, and the workers must stay and work harder, or else. By the way, we don't want to admit that such inhumane practices are still a thing in the 21st century, so the local law here calls such cases "situations analogue to slavery", but not slavery proper because that has been abolished.
A prison planet might work just the same. As long as the costs/benefits to shelter and feed slaves are more favorable than the cost/benefits of using machines or free labor for the same job, there will be slave planets. And the excuse will be a centuries-old one:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I1Nmd.png)
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Alternatively, the population is made of the most dangerous criminals of the universe. For one reason or another they cannot be dealt with any other way, so planetary governments are paying someone to keep them locked in a planet. Since a working inmate is more profitable than a non-working one...
[Answer]
This planet has variable magnetic field (or its star is prone to storms), which means using properly shielded electronics is prohibitively expensive in many areas.
The slaves would perform manual labor in open areas, like agriculture, mining and construction, because traditional electronics-based machinery can not operate there.
[Answer]
You appear to be asking two questions:
1. How can I justify slavery on this planet when it is illegal in the rest of the galaxy?
2. Can the slaves do anything about their condition?
**[Occam's Razor:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor) All things being equal, it's impossible to maintain slavery**
In the beginning was tyranny. It's relatively easy to maintain slavery under a tyranny. Those who dislike what the tyrant says are eliminated. Those who provide for the tyrant's needs (no matter how they do it) are supported.
As time goes on philosophers, statesmen, rebels, sympathizers, do-gooders, etc. come and go. A few wars are fought, and over time laws are passed that slowly begin to give The People greater political power. It gets harder to treat people "unfairly" (and that's in quotes because "unfair" is perhaps the most subjective word in the known universe, see the cartoon in Renan's answer for a good example).
Eventually you end up with a representative government where even an individual (with enough organization and effort) can be heard loud and clear. An no matter how valuable or necessary slavery may seem, that one person can start a wave of sympathy that, combined with a representative government, eventually leads to the eradication of slavery.
In other words, all things being equal, it's impossible for slavery to be sustained. In fact, as government becomes more representative, the shorter the period of sustainable slavery becomes.1
**So, all things aren't equal. Something's upsetting the balance.**
Frankly, a valuable or critical resource is not enough to justify slavery. During the U.S. civil war cotton was a valuable and critical resource. So much so that the South refused to ship whole docks full of it to pressure England and Europe to enter the fight on the side of the South. It almost worked.
However, it's difficult to imagine a resource so critical that it could work. To make things worse, the more critical the resource, the more it works in the slaves' favor. Go on strike, everybody dies, but the whole honking universe knows what happened because everyone was inconvenienced, enter the sympathizers, laws mandating change suddenly occur because, above all else, *it can't happen again.* We need something much more unequal (call it *unfair*) than this.
Worse, yours is a galactic empire with technology out the wazoo. You need a reason to justify *no robots.* You don't need full AI to dig minerals or cut down trees. In fact, a case could be made that half the jobs out there require no imagination at all. They're completely procedural and don't have automation today simply because the flexibility of legs, arms, and fingers have yet to be mastered by the tech. So we need something *unfair* and *unautomatable.*
Finally, slaves only make economic sense when it's cheaper to use people than anything else. Building pyramids with slaves today would never be economical because one very well paid crane operator is worth thousands of untrained people and the cost to maintain them (costs to maintain slaves can be mitigated by inexpensive replacement, but only to a degree). On the other hand, we still use low-pay workers to pick fruit, berries, and other food stuffs that machinery simply can't do yet. Long story short, we need something *unfair,* *unautomatable,* and *economically viable.*
1. Any unobtainium will do, but it needs to be unique to this planet. On a galactic empire scale, that would suggest a very large world so that a great deal of material can be collected at once. This makes it economically viable but hard on people (heavy gravity).
2. It can't be mining. Mines run out (it's difficult to imagine, but you can deplete a planet). That means a renewable something. A *biological* substance that is unique to the planet. The chemistry of the ground and atmosphere could be duplicated... so what would be hard to duplicate?
***A nearby pulsar, with a whomping strong magnetic pulse that regularly sweeps the planet.***
And that strong magnetic field in combination with the unusual chemistry of the planet produces... oh, say a tree sap that happens to be the only life-extending/fully-rejuvantive analgesic known to humanity.2 Better still:
* No automation. The rotational period of the pulsar is frequent enough and the magnetic pulse strong enough that you'd be constantly repairing or replacing anything that had electricity-bearing wires. The cost of automated operation would be enormous if it was possible at all. I'm assuming the average magnetic pulse from a pulsar would be impossible (if only economically) to shield.
* Difficult synthesis. Do-gooders can't simply say, "let's set up a factory that duplicates those conditions over on Tatooine!" because even if you could create the delicate combination of chemistry and magnetism that creates our biological unobtainium, the cost would be worse than just repairing and replacing the automation. Remember, *pulsar,* and little Johnny's "cosmic science kit" really can't duplicate that level of strength. So... no can do.
* That leaves people. And a lot of people, because you have an entire *galaxy* to supply and you're the one and only location that can do it. The environment may require environmental suits, but you can't have anything electrically driven on them or the magnetics will destroy them. You can't have a lot of metal at all or you'll kill the human via inductive coupling. That means an environment that needs no more than hazmat or scuba suits to harvest the unobtainium.
*And since profitability is always an issue, you're either paying them next to nothing (keeping them in indentured servitude like the company towns of the U.S. early 1900s), or it's flat out slavery where pain avoidance is the primary motivator for work.*
**Can the slaves do anything about this?**
As I mentioned in the beginning, no society with any form of representative government will tolerate slavery for long because there will always be somebody who sympathizes with the plight of the enslaved.3
* Therefore, there will be a constant propaganda war going on to keep the galactic populace distracted about the real conditions on our slave planet. This will be a large, complicated, and sometimes illicit effort that will be a great sub-plot in the story.
* There will always be someone on the planet itself, one of the not-enslaved, who sympathizes with the slaves. These are dangerous people, because they will be planning (a) whistle blowing events, (b) armed rebellion, (c) aid societies and all kinds of solutions to try to help the enslaved. Don't underestimate these folks. Grassroots anti-slavery movements were a huge contributor to the U.S. civil war.
* Finally, there's the slaves. Slavery works because the enslaved are (a) emotionally drained (institutionalized), (b) physically drained (you only want them strong enough to work, not strong enough to fight, (c) disenfranchised (no one anywhere near them likes them, no "nearby" support), (d) unempowered (everything is provided for them, an entire welfare state, the threat of leaving that condition is frightening), (e) and controlled (regular oversight by armed and authorized agents).
Overcoming slavery in your condition would likely begin with an underground railroad that smuggled out both slaves and evidence of the slavery to encourage sympathy amongst the politically powerful outside the world. But whether or not they're successful will depend on whether or not your society is truly free — free to develop abolition societies or allowed to have religious beliefs that preach the equality of all souls before diety. It's a complex mix — but that's what makes a good story.
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1 *So long as small groups of people can hide in the political shadows, and so long as there's an illicit desire that people are willing to pay bookoo bucks to fulfil, there will always be some slavery. Sex trafficing and the drug trade in our world today are a good examples. However, I'm assuming that organizations this small are outside the scope of your question.*
2 *Nothing drives humans to spend money like the fear of death. With the possible exception of professional sports.*
3 *You could always declare your galacitc empire to be a monarchy that doesn't tolerate free speech, but that's a very hard thing to do without a lot of sycophants. It took full engagement in a popular war-of-revenge for Hitler to convince the people to give him full power. After a while, that power could only be held by fear. And even that was beginning to erode by the end of the war. Generally speaking, people will always want a voice, and the cost of suppression probably goes up exponentially with the number of people you need to suppress.*
[Answer]
The industry will have to be agriculture, some very basic mining or harvesting operation.
Slavery makes sense only for **extremely basic and unskilled jobs**.
Examples of slavery in reasonably modern times are cotton picking in the US, or canals and road building in Stalin's Soviet Union (using hand tools).
If job requires skill, slaves will pretend to be too dumb to do it.
If job requires any kind of machines or tools, slaves will break them, or rather make it look like they broke on their own.
More over, job should have very simple and obvious measure of productivity: amount of stuff harvested, the length of a ditch dug in the ground. Any kind of ambiguity about results (like quality of stuff picked) will let slaves produce lowest quality.
So your basic industry will be picking stuff, and maybe digging it out.
Either **picking fruit of spice plants** (with paid workers doing the planting).
Or **picking nuggets of unobtanium** out of raw material mined out with pickaxes, or loosened by machine (driven by paid workers).
Picking up and sorting objects is a task that is notoriously **difficult for machines**: objects have different shapes and sizes, so they require very dextrous fingers, and farm produce requires gentle touch too. Sorting unobtanium from similarly-looking but useless minerals requires keen eyesight, and attention to detail.
Machines that can do that exist even today, but they are expensive, they break down easily, and as others suggested, you can have radiation environment shutting down with electronics, or abrasive dust getting into moving parts.
As for **political/social reasons** for continued slavery.
**Planetside**, both rulers and free citizens are OK with it, b/c that's how they have always done it, and b/c slaves are "unevolved savages", and will starve to death without "civilized supervision", or might even resort to robbing and killing "cultured citizens".
**Galactic superpowers** do not interfere b/c they do not care enough (just like we do not care about Chinese assembly workers, or Latin American farmers). And because the slave planet is the only source of spice/unobtanium, any action of any major power to "free the slaves" will be interpreted by other powers as an attempt to grab the resource for themselves.
If you read history of US Civil War, "free the slaves" movement has been going on for like 50 years before it. But it did not receive much support in Congress until it became the only way to avoid a defeat in the Civil War.
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**Only the natives of this planet can do the work, and they will not do it willingly.**
One narrative about why African slaves were brought over to work in the New World is that they made better slaves than the Amerinds, and so were worth the expense to obtain. There are holes in that story but it is a plausible one and you can adapt it to your scenario.
Your world is a hostile place, but the descendants of the original colonists have adaptions that make them able to survive the surface conditions. In a job which requires human labor, only these natives will be able to carry it out. Slavemasters and overseers must wear protective gear and cannot stay out for long.
These natives are disinclined to do much if left to their own devices. Or perhaps the masters are not interested in paying them what it would cost, which might be a lot. So they are compelled to work as slaves. This is justified by pointing out that their living conditions as slaves are better in many ways than what they were in the native state and so slavery is an improvement for them.
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3 Ideas that popped into my head
1. Manual labor, the planet has few natural resources and relies heavily on manual labor to accomplish construction and agriculture.
2. Genetic engineering, there's a market for figuring out how to manipulate the genome, and what better Guiana Pigs than actual people. This would explain the required breeding population mentioned earlier.
3. Resource gathering, in a dangerous area of the planet (that conveniently makes electronic communication difficult, if not outright impossible) there is a highly valuable resource let's call them X-Crystals (just as a placeholder). Theses X-Crystals are not only valuable on the planet, but also off world as well, due to some innate quality they have.
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The planet is rich of some kind of very rare resource, like *oil*... no, I mean unobtanium, and bases its entire economy on it.
Mining is an expensive business. Raw unobtanium geodes are brittle, and must be dug up with the utmost care, or they'll break into a low-quality dust.
Of course, the five interstellar nations of your galaxy have developed high-tech machines able to automatize extraction, but they are expensive... your planet doesn't have the means to produce the same technology on its own, or maybe just doesn't care.
When the mines were first discovered, whoever was in charge at the time just started shoving convicts in, and it became a local custom until "convicts" became an equivalent of "lesser caste", "untouchable" and "slave".
Thanks to those unnamed sacrifices, your planet can now trade and bribe its way in diplomatic relationships with the galaxy at large: the other nations are always in need of some extra unobtanium, after all, and they are much more happy to buy it for some third-grade neutral planet rather than from their interstellar rivals.
Of course, it doesn't have to be unobtanium and it doesn't have to be mining, but something that produces value and, for a reason or another, it benefits from free mass labor.
If the whole mining-operation thing seems too much cliché, I think you could justify slavery as some form of cultural - religious heritage; you would have an harder time explaining how it started and how it became so prevalent in your two centuries limit, but that's nowhere near impossible. The roman empire, as many others, was built on the back of slaves after all.
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A totalitarian religion should do the trick. The 'dirty' jobs can only be done by the 'unclean'. The 'unclean' cannot be part of the religion, leaving the religion is punishable by slavery or death. Does not take much for people to go along with this plan. Plenty of examples of countries that treated different sub-populations as less well than their animals. You don't need to work hard to find a religion that can be extended for use in this scenario.
For more inspiration look no further than the [Gulag Archipelago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago).
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In the described scenario the reason(s) almost have to be cultural or the practice would be more widespread; slavery tends to be economically expensive to societies that use high levels of slave labour when compared to the same society using a willing workforce. In the past purely cultural reasons for slavery have included their role as a status symbol for the owner and the role of slavery as a penance with the goal of the enslaved paying off a social dept of some kind to regain their lost honour. As to the role of slaves within a culture that uses them, this tends to be work that no-one else wants to do, either because it's dangerous or its excessively hard or considered "unclean". Possibly you could make mass slavery pay but the goods or services that the slaves were producing would have to [unobtanium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium) level expensive.
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The solar system in which this planet exists carries out an annual lottery, in which 99.9% of the entrants are winners of life-long wealth, but the losing .1% are assigned to the slave planet (to mine the resources that fund the lottery). Thus they are slaves by "choice" (obviously not having read the fine print about the beatings) on a planet whose rare resources (think Spice) can only be obtained by manual labor, due to the double ferromagnetic moons.
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**A Deal With the Devil**
This question sounds a lot like a utilitarian thought experiment. Perhaps there isn't anything really special about the planet itself, it is just that the entire civilization is built around a few suffering to benefit the many. There are various reasons it could arise.
*Just sign here...* Perhaps a literal deal with the devil. Perhaps a pact with some pandimensional entity with Orange and Blue morality allows the remainder of the galactic civilization to be a utopia, all for the low price of letting one tiny blue planet be the hell on Earth.
*Bread and Circuses* Humans really like reality TV. The entire galaxy enjoys the real life drama shows. Without them the great democratic civilization would collapse. RealTV Limited only needs one planet. Everyone agrees that it is worth a few criminals and wannabe stars suffering. Well everyone except people on one particular planet. Technically they can still vote, but one planet isn't enough to get even on seat of the senate.
*Unobtiani-sufferanium*. Perhaps the civilization is powered by emotion. Perhaps the suffering is packaged up and shipped out. Perhaps a single planet suffering punches a whole in the warp and creates an objective anchor that can be used to break the law of relativity allowing telekinetic psions to push ships faster than light. In any case the suffering itself is the resource that allows the rest of the civilization to be the utopia it is.
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The planet's a giant sexual fetish resort, and everyone there, master or slave, is there willingly. The slaves come because they find the idea of being chained up and dressed in scanty leather-and-metal outfits arousing, and the masters are there because they find the sight of half-naked slave men toiling away in the sun while similarly half-naked slavegirls lounge at their feet and hand-feed them grapes enjoyable as well.
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Slavery doesn't have to be in your face it can be much more subtle like not providing adequate funding for education and making prisons, policing, healthcare private businesses.
Or that there be an external threat (real or conjoured) so that people are less likely to challenge authority.
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For one of my projects, I'm developing an inhabited Earth-like world, with the key visual difference being that much of the land is purple, instead of the brownish colour it is on Earth. My question is: **how would this be possible?**
Constraints:
* The soil must be fertile, and capable of supporting both animal and plant life. I don't mind if it's toxic to *humans*, as long as it's feasible that life could evolve to be immune to it.
* It has to actually *be* purple. It can't just *look* purple (i.e. be covered in something that's purple, or speckled with purple rocks).
* It has to be purple on a permanent basis.
* It has to be purple to a depth of at least several metres.
* The soil needs to plausibly cover a significant proportion of the planet's surface (i.e. the bits not covered by deserts, ice caps, and oceans). So if there's a compound that would result in purple soil, but it would be extremely unlikely to find massive quantities of it on a planet, then that's a no.
* My preference is for a deep, Cadbury's-chocolate-wrapper purple, but if that's not doable, then any shade will do as long as it's visibly purple. Pink does not count.
I am aware of [this similar question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94273/blue-soil-aka-dirt-in-an-earth-like-planet), and borrowed a few of my constraints from it, but I don't believe it's a duplicate because none of the answers mention purple soil, and blue is not the same as purple.
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[Amethyst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amethyst) is quartz turned violet with radiation.
Sand in most places is just broken down quartz. If your quartz is purple to start with then so is your sand. I figured there must be someplace where the sand was made of amethyst. Pfeiffer beach is such a place. <https://californiathroughmylens.com/2011/08/pfeiffer-state-beach-in-big-sur/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zZYw6.jpg)
<https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4f/fb/55/4ffb55b6ee9e813464a26821ee85d3f2.jpg>
Nothing to invent here: amethyst is not crazy rare, nor is sand.
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[According to the wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple):
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> Purple is a color intermediate between blue and red. It is similar to violet, but unlike violet, which is a spectral color with its own wavelength on the visible spectrum of light, purple is a composite color made by combining red and blue.
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So if you just have many small, blue particles and many small, red particles in the soil, that should do the trick. Someone analyzing it up close may be able to see the differently colored particles. Some small patches of land may be either blue or red, or other shades of their mix (such as pink), depending on the concentration of the particles. But the more homogeneous the mix is, the closer to purple the ground would look. Even for someone standing right on top of it.
So how do you get red and blue particles?
Start with the answer for [the question you link about how to have blue soil](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/94648/21222). **Edit:** Will has called to attention in the comments that Vanadium may be a more favorable choice than copper. You may have to consider the toxicity of Vanadium vs that of Copper.
Then add loads of iron to the soil, to make it red as well. Iron tends to redden things.
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## Can I interest you in some algae?
There are compounds that already produce shades of purple in algae- [anthrocyanins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthocyanin) and [retinal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal).
Anthrocyanins are found in many plants and algae, either as an antenna pigment or as an antioxidant. They're mostly studied in higher plants like *Arabidopsis* but there's no reason that soil algae wouldn't produce them as well. If you'd like a little more justification, try having a "hotter" or bluer sun- that'll encourage the formation of purple antenna pigments in cyanobacteria and other algae that live in the soil.
On the other hand, we have retinal. This compound actually provides the basis for the [Purple Earth hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Earth_hypothesis), as it's light-sensitive and can be used to convert light energy into chemical energy. If you take this route, the hotter sun will help justify it as well, and the algae in the soil will proliferate wildly.
Sometimes it's hard to get algae to grow densely across an entire planet. In that case, try pairing your favorite cyanobacteria with a fungus to produce a lichen, which is much more stable and can be found in many more places such as deserts. The coloration still comes through quite nicely.
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I think you should solve this problem from the opposite angle.
What makes Earth's soil seem brown?
Not all dirt, even on earth, is brown. As mentioned in some other answers iron can add a reddish tint and other minerals can cause colorations running the entire spectrum, but the vast majority is brown-ish, or has a brown overtone.
This link gives a simple explaination:
<https://www.livescience.com/4045-ground-brown.htm>
Basically brown is caused by decaying plant life releasing carbon into the soils. So, what I would do is ask: what do the plants and animals of my world release when they decay? How would that decaying matter impact soil color? If lots of red and blue colored minerals are part of that decay cycle, then the soils could (quite plausibly) be mostly purplish, no matter where you are.
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Ever visit Death Valley? In particular the Artists Pallet?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fCSn0.jpg)
The purple here is due to the manganese inside what's known as purple shale.
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> Excellent outcrops of deep purple, wine red, red, blue, turquoise, and green argillites of the Belt Supergroup can be seen in Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana and in Wolf Creek Canyon along US Interstate 15 in west-central Montana. – [Argillite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argillite)
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There are actually quite a few purple shales as quite a few compositions will create a wide variety of purples from light ones to relatively dark purples.
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> The presence of hematite and limonite (hydrated ferric oxide) gives rise to reddish and purple colouring – [britannica.com](https://www.britannica.com/science/shale)
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No point reinventing the wheel, purples exist quite naturally.
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Purple is not really a color in the way we think of it, it is an artifact of how our eyes are put together, primates are probably the only organisms that see purple. As Renan pointed out it is created by activating red cones and blue cones without activating green cones, which actually requires two separate wavelengths at the same time, thus the best way to produce it consistently is have two strong color sources.
**Red Rocks and Blue Plants**
An early oxygen atmosphere (that is to say an atmosphere that has just recently risen in oxygen content) like the permian and triassic makes red rock and soils extremely common, see [red beds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_beds). So make your plants and soil bacteria blue instead of green and you will end up with a lot pf purples on land but really blue seas.
**red rocks and blue rocks**
Alternatively in the same type of atmosphere as above soils that a very rich in both iron and copper would give a variety of purple colors. The hard part is having enough copper, iron is fairly common but copper is not, especially on a galactic sense.
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For [purple soil](http://munsell.com/color-blog/soil-color-montpelier-forest//) you'll need a lot of [pyrolusite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolusite).
It doesn't seem toxic, but I'm not sure how well plants will grow in it since it is a crystal. Maybe if it's well mixed it would still be purple yet fertile.
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Purple is the combination of blue and red, right? So, one way to get blue and red into the soil would be to have large amounts of something red (such as iron oxide - rust) as well as large amounts of something blue - cobalt or something of that nature. (Cobalt is pretty toxic to people, so that could be problematic, but that's neither here nor there).
Additionally, you could look at this [link](http://www.tcichemicals.com/en/us/support-download/chemistry-clip/161-02_ChemistryChat.html) on colors and how they're derived chemically and find something that fits your needs.
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There are purple rocks on Mars, as seen by Curiosity in [this article](https://www.seeker.com/nasa-mars-curiosity-red-purple-rocks-planet-minerals-habitability-2177262325.html).
Geological processes can break rocks down into soil.
As far as fertility goes, you could just have different microbes on your world, ones that thrive in this soil.
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[Lepidolite](https://www.britannica.com/science/lepidolite) can definitely be purple, but as mentioned previously - dirt is primarily the decomposition of plants and animals.
In order to meet your requirement of:
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> The soil must be fertile, and capable of supporting both animal and
> plant life
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You would need to make the local lifeforms Lepidolite based (instead of carbon based).
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In some beaches of Crete in Greece the sand is pink to purple.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bAx8K.jpg)
'Pink sand is a result of tiny red organisms that grow on the dead coral reefs and pieces of shells which fall to the ocean floor and is washed onto shore. It is also made of natural formulation of calcium carbonate from very small marine invertebrates that mixed to corals and shells and other marine things which has Foraminifera, microscopic amoeba that has a red or bright pink body shell. All of these are what causes the sand to have a pink hue.' source: <http://www.chaniapost.eu/2015/06/24/the-pink-sand-beaches-of-elafonissi-and-balos-a-brief-explanation/>
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How about this: The local equivalent of chlorophyll is purple, or a first stage breakdown product is purple. Further, unlike chlorophyll, it is a very stable molecule and takes a long time to break down. This compound then would accumulate in the soil. If it's soluble it would leach into the water, dyeing lakes and oceans purple too.
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The simplest answer: pretend that you've created a purple soil which contains all the qualities you want it to have. Bam, you're done! And it fits quite nicely with the scenario you've created.
Or, if you want to be 'real world' about it, give your world a different history and elemental make-up so the main components of the rocks and soils have red and blue in them, which would mean a world with different chemistry and hence a different origin and geologic history, maybe resulting in a different atmosphere and geologic make-up, and different plant and animal life! So, you get Prince's Purple World, but maybe we humans are not in it.
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I've recently been looking into post-apocalyptic settings for a possible novel. I like the feel of people trying to survive off of the land with nothing but the clothes on their back, or banding together for survival in makeshift shelters, but there's always one problem: given enough time and resources, people will inevitably start to return to the lifestyle they had before the apocalypse. Cities will eventually be rebuilt, power restored, and so forth.
In order to keep the post-apocalyptic feel, I want to prevent that. An obvious way to do that is to have something in place actively keeping people from advancing, like zombies or a deadly virus, but even those can be defeated by a good enough wall, cold temperatures, or a cure.
Also, **and this is very important**, I don't want to change the world by introducing undead or the killer flu. I want the world to be as natural as reasonably possible. What I mean by that is if you were to walk outside in this post-apocalyptic world, you would ideally have to worry about nothing you wouldn't have to worry about if you went for a walk in the woods today. This also includes visual differences, like new animals or a changed atmosphere.
So here is my challenge: I want a post-apocalyptic world, permanently, with as little change to the natural world as possible. What the apocalypse was doesn't matter, as long as the following is achieved on a permanent basis:
* Daily struggle for survival, simply because people aren't used to living off the land.
* People limited to solitary, family based, or <200 people in a group. No big cities.
* Inability to maintain power, save for more archaic methods, like water and wind power. No nuclear. Batteries and the like are fine, but should be limited.
* Technology halted. No technological development, as everyone is trying to stay alive.
* No governing body, other than what individual groups appoint over themselves.
Obviously *something* is going to need to change in the world. My goal is to keep it as 'unpresent' as possible. Ideally, there would be a big apocalypse which would happen and then leave, but have permanent effects, without changing the natural world. Assume the world is present day Earth.
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If you limit population everything else follows; specialists, and the technology they create and maintain, require the support of high density populations. There are several things going for you already:
* a post-apocalypse population crash, and there will be one, will effectively end the oil industry, more or less permanently, this sharply limits the yield of an acre of farmland to something closer to 1900s levels or less.
* the post crash population is also likely to be scattered as small random bands that will struggle to survive let alone grow beyond one generation if they cannot link together into larger groups with broader genetics.
* there are a number of ways to cause long term damage to the fertility of land, we've already degraded much of the best farmland in the world one way and another; as long as farm yields stay low population growth is restricted.
* there are also a number of ways to permanently damage the fertility of a population so that their growth rate is severely restricted, some of these are cultural, involving active infanticide, while others are due to genetic damage from exposure to chemical or biological agents.
* given a human generation or two large land predators could potentially breed back to the point where mankind finds itself on the menu in a way not seen for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. This is partly because the post apocalypse population will lack certain skills and knowledge that were once common in humans, in particular how to hunt and survive outside of the village environment.
Any or a combination of the above could be used to realistically keep population flat across a wide area preventing a return to high density settlements and the technical advances that they make possible.
Do note that this can get a little hairy, the initial survivors have access to large reserves of pre-processed materials, refined metals, tools, bulk food reserves, synthetic cloth etc... that can carry them through beyond their actual population's ability to maintain and survive, when those resources run out they could be faced with a second lose of population as equipment that was "keeping their heads above water" breaks down.
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Honestly, as long as the populations of the world is brought down to a small, SMALL percentage (even something as large as 1% could be fine), you should be okay. (I chose 1% because I believe that is the largest percent of a group that could survive for a true apocalypse, but that's just my personal view. I'll operate under this idea. You can modify it as you see fit.) We're at 7.6 billion. 1% of that would be 76 million people. Sounds like a lot, yeah? Well China's population would be about 13,860,000 or so of that. India's would be another 13,390,000 or so of that. That's already over a third of the remaining population in EXTREMELY large countries.
If we were being generous, that leaves the rest of the world with about 50 million people. Let's just assume all 50 million people SOMEHOW lived in the United States. (Not even Canada and Mexico, just the US.) That's 15% of the current US population. Mind you, this means the only places in the world with surviving human populations are USA, China, and India. Nowhere else in the world is there another survivor. Seems pretty unlikely that the population distribution would be so densely focused. So, let's spread this out a LITTLE more.
If we were to include Canada and Mexico, this means North America's population just dropped to 10 percent of what it was. The last time the US Population was at [50 Million was in 1880](https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html) when the US was in the process of growing at an extremely fast rate. If we assume all other humans exist in only China, India, Mexico, and Canada (the latter two would likely try and move towards the US or the people of these nations would attempt to work together with the US to some extent), then that means there's not going to be an influx of immigrants. What the US has is what they have. If we assume the growth rate of the new America mirrors that of the world today (a 1.09% yearly population increase), then it would take about 175 years for the population to mirror that of the US today. It would take a little over 200 years for the population of the new America to mirror that of the combined US, Canada, and Mexico today. This is also assuming that America somehow managed to be practically unfazed by the apocalypse in comparison to the entire world, even compared to the only two other surviving regions.
In reality, assuming a 99% decrease in population, the US's population would drop to around 3,257,000. That's significantly less than the population of Los Angeles and less than half the population of New York City. Canada would drop to around 367,100. Mexico would drop to around 1,292,000.
What this means is if you go out to a mall or a crowded area, of the people that you would see now, only a handful of them at best would still be around. Odds are, everyone you know and trust will have died and you now have to survive on your own or with the help of strangers. Seems fine, right?
Well, as seen [in the answer here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41587/how-long-can-a-power-plant-continue-to-generate-electricity-without-maintenance), power would stop within a few months if you're lucky. In reality, it'd probably shut off in a few hours without someone manning the controls and keeping things regulated and even. As for the water, according to [*Life After People*](https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/life-after-people/), a fictional apocalypse documentary, water would last maybe a few months. If you have a well and your own alternative source of power, you could get that to last longer, but that'd be rare exceptions for someone prepared for this. It would not be the norm. Internet would go out pretty quickly as it would not be a priority. Radio would last a long time due to a lot of stations having backup generators, but even then it'd go out sooner or later.
On the upside, you'd have your pick of housing. With 1% of the world's population left alive, this means, if we assume EVERY house had a mother, father, son, and daughter, then only 1 out of 25 houses would still have a singular resident. You really could take your pick of new abode. If we assume the deaths/disappearance/etc. of people was truly random, not taking into account age, health, and so forth, this also means that there is a good chance that the house you want could be someone too old, too young, too weak, or too sick to be able to defend the house. Odds are this wouldn't be how it actually worked out, but if we were going with raw probability of survivor, it works for the sake of thought.
Without the internet, most people wouldn't know what to do. There are three main things to consider when initially trying to survive and those are Food (and, by extension, Water), Clothing, and Shelter. Well, housing is readily available, so that won't be an issue. You can always raid the closets of the houses around you for clothing if you didn't have enough of your own. All that's left is food (and water). If you act fast, you could raid water jugs and bottles from stores, run them under the tap, and fill up enough water to last you a long time. A half gallon (really 64 ounces) of water is your daily recommended intake. You could probably get away with half of that (32 fl.oz. or a quarter of a gallon) if you want to conserve resources or a quarter of that (16 fl.oz. or about an eighth of a gallon) if you are relatively inactive and sedentary, maybe. [Mayo Clinic actually recommends nearly double the usual 8 cups of 8 ounces a day](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/water/art-20044256), meaning while you may be able to get away with less, [you probably shouldn't](http://rehydrate.org/dehydration/). [Especially not if you're not eating appropriately](https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/wonders-of-water#1). As the WebMD source says and the earlier Mayo Clinic confirms, about 20% of our fluid intake actually comes from other sources, namely food. This is the simple part. I'm pretty sure everyone knows to raid the pantries of nearby homes to gather food and drink. That's the easy part...
Then comes the hard part. Most people who lack experience in agriculture or military backgrounds will likely be unsure of how to start and maintain a thriving garden to live off of, let alone a farm. In fact, most people will likely see their storehouses of water and think they're fine where they are. Unless these people live near a source of clean freshwater, they shouldn't settle where they are already at. Even if they do live near a freshwater source, [there's a chance it may not be clean enough to risk](https://helpsavenature.com/top-ten-most-polluted-rivers-of-world) ([especially in countries lacking in the same dumping regulations as the US.](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/pollution/)) This means anybody who isn't constantly moving towards cleaner sources of water is actively put at risk of dying from dehydration once their water runs out, sickness from the contaminated water, or dehydration caused by becoming sick thanks to the contaminated water. Once they get there, if there aren't people used to farming, fishing, or agriculture, they will quickly run out of food and you'll get raiders who are hungry and desperate stealing and killing for food. You may even wind up with worse atrocities like (essentially) slavery and other things depending on the morality of the survivors and how desperate they are for the things they want. You *may* get tribes of survivors starting to form together, but even then, it'd be a challenge. I honestly see dying out as a more likely scenario, at least in the US and Canada, either due to in-fighting, starvation, or lack of people to procreate with. In more rural countries, a new civilization COULD occur, if they can find other people, but again, they'd have to find people who are willing to cooperate and work together, sharing their skills and resources with others.
No matter what, within 10 years, you can expect petroleum products like gas to run out or be unusable, so don't expect people to fight over it... It won't matter. Honestly, it'd just be a day to day grind where humans inevitably die.
If animals and plants are affected by this too, then this will speed up the process for humans to die off. Insects and small animals will be able to resurge thanks to how fast plantlife regrows, but most larger animals will struggle as they fight over food. Wolf packs will have been disbanded and erased. Flocks of birds would be down to a couple members. Only patches of grass will survive. Most trees will have fallen. The world would regrow, but it would take a long time for animal life to make a comeback and humans will struggle to hunt and forage in this new world. You could expect this world to still be livable, but it's a matter of if humans will succeed. Once humans do manage to lay down roots again, though, expect there to be a resurgence in that respect too.
I'd say, post-apocalypse, 1% of the world (76,000,000) will remain. If I were to make a wild assumption, 1% of the survivors (760,000) will ultimately survive the post-apocalypse. Assuming a 1.09% growth rate (the current growth rate of the world population), humans would reach 1 billion in 663 years, the same approximate population of the world in 1800. Odds are, by this point humanity would be back to a similar way of life as in those days. Without regularly inducing apocalypse now-ish, you can't really expect the world the *stay* post-apocalyptic, especially if you don't want permanent environmental changes, which would happen no matter what form of apocalypse were to occur.
Basically, you're looking at turning the clock back on civilization by about a thousand years. It gets the job done once, but that doesn't assure it will work the second, third, or fourth times. With each event, humans will become more resilient and prepared, with bunkers already prepped and stocked for the next time and a larger emphasis on physical record-keeping which is likely what kept the humans from the first apocalypse alive: those who were smart enough to hit the library.
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They would be very hard pressed to advance if all the best resources were gone.
Maybe a lot of people evacuated the planet (or tried to) before the apocalypse, taking with them huge colony ships full of a lot of the best that the planet had to offer. All the gold in the vaults is gone. All the processed steel is either gone or what's left is all collected together in one spot that the survivors don't realize. They took with them as much food, medicine, and everything else that they could. Some people got left behind in the now-resource-less world.
Or maybe the planet is just not rich in good resources to begin with. No iron. Copper is even more rare than it is here. The planet has no areas of rich and abundant life; only enough to survive.
If they cannot make durable tools, they get no rest. Stone tools need to be replaced often. And if there are not a lot of trees, and if the land cannot support a lot of trees, then they need to be conservative in their wood usage as well. About the only thing they are likely to have a lot of are rocks. That would force a hard life.
What scarce little they could get which is better would be very highly prized. If someone did manage to make an iron tool, it would be a priceless heirloom, an artifact carefully guarded. Even just a nice steel knife or an ax would be worth fighting tribe-scale battles over just because of how much better it would make your life.
[Answer]
**A maternalistic AI has taken over, and is convinced that technology and cities are bad for us**
I know it's a bit farfetched, but if Skynet rained fiery death down from satellite weapons on any communities that were too large or advanced, that would maintain your desired conditions.
Textbooks and books in general are currently super common, and there's enough general technical knowledge diffused over most modern countries for a return to the dark ages to be as sustainable as humanity's previous forays in that direction, unless you have an active agent discouraging the success of would-be rebuilders. Sorry.
Maybe, given a few more generations, print books will be sufficiently rare, and electronics sufficiently complicated, that we couldn't just revert to nineteenth century tech and work back up, given some sort of collapse. I'm not persuaded that we're there yet.
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You can't stop civilization without a persistent attack that permeates the natural world. In other words, your ideal of "if you were to walk outside ... you wouldn't have to worry about [anything different than] if you went for a walk in the woods today" is fundamentally impossible. Our civilization today, though radically different than that only 200 years ago, wasn't born of a vacuum. It came from a civilized history going back at least 5 millennia. They had no technology as we think of the term today, yet managed to build cities, trade routes, and complex economies, and they lived in virtually exactly the same world we have today. Therefore, your world necessarily must include something different that is currently not there. Disease, zombies, robots, aliens, etc are all easy plot devices, so I can see your reluctance to use them.
You can change humans instead. Consider *Planet of the Apes*. In that story, humanity is radically altered such that they become too simple to build a civilization. A remnant of unaltered humans would be the focus of the story. This is like zombies in some way, and you're also left with the question on what to do with these new humans (make them violent, slaves, etc.). Again, the threat has to be persistent to keep civilization down, so writers revert to the disease and zombie tropes.
Since you want to specifically avoid those tropes if possible, consider [an American TV series called *Revolution*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)) that handled this very well, though you might view it as breaking your "natural as possible" rule. In this post-apocalyptic world, electricity generation and transmission suddenly becomes impossible. Literally, moving a conductor through a magnetic field no longer generates electricity; it does nothing except waste your time. There's an early scene of a character explaining how it's as if the laws of physics suddenly changed. It's later strongly hinted that it's actively caused by some kind of runaway nanite technology, so there is no need to convince readers of a change in fundamental physical laws.
Something like this should work nicely. You could handwave some other mechanism like a solar flare or space radiation wave so you appear more original. You could even use this exactly, because though the show was critically acclaimed, it did not have a high viewership, so your story likely won't be seen as a ripoff.
The major caveat is that your story can now no longer use boons from the pre-apocalypse that depend on this physical law. Technology, as modernly understood to be electrical devices, would not only halt but be virtually non-existent. Any meaningful advances would be strictly in the mechanical sense, which given decades, centuries, or millennia, can leave you with a very creative outlet. And see we're back to the same problem. This is a persistent change, unnoticeable on a walk in the woods, but it's not believable that civilization could not rebuild to 19 century levels in one hundred years or less.
I've tried to offer something conceptually different, but bear in mind that ultimately civilization cannot be stopped without changing the world or humans in a fundamental way.
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## The Iron Wind
Borrowed from Numenera, the Iron Wind is a "storm" of nanotechnology that wanders the world, wiping out most everything in its path.
To work for you (and to avoid a direct copy-pasta), it would likely need some tweaking. Maybe it is attracted to certain forms of EM radiation, preferentially destroying those communities that try to establish wireless communication. This serves to keep civilization nomadic (in order to avoid the storm when it wanders by by chance) and communication between groups sporadic (due to having no means of communication faster than the fastest vehicle, complicated by non-stationary communities), limiting the amount of cooperation possible and thus stunting technological advance. Perhaps there are dozens or hundreds of smaller swarms, making them a less overwhelming, but correspondingly more common, threat. Perhaps they are some other technological boogeyman gone awry - killer robots, satellite based lasers, some bio-engineered virus - whatever.
When the "storm" is not present, the world is largely as one would expect - rotting infrastructure and largely primitive humans eking out an existence among them. By tweaking how the menace behaves, you can block other specific technologies if desired. In the presented scenario, there is nothing stopping a group from developing any level of technology desired so long as they avoid certain forms of EM radiation. If you don't want that to happen, have the threat be attracted by other signs of civilization as well.
## Where did it come from?
It doesn't matter, really. A weapon gone out of control, some alien punishment ("A Wind Named Amnesia" anyone?), or the wrath of God. It can play a major part of your world or just be a Deus Ex Machina.
## Plan B
**Radiation**. It's been a staple of post-apoc literature for decades for a reason.
A global nuclear disaster irradiated much of the planet. Side effects of radiation - acid rain, irradiated oceans, etc, make life difficult in the rest of the world. A decent breeze can move irradiated particles hundreds of miles, making no place permanently safe. And so people are nomadic (again), and acquisition of resources id severely limited because all the good stuff is surrounded by kilometers of radiation (because it just so happens that people tend to live around the resource richest areas, and population centers are a preferred target for those with nuclear weapons).
And because much of this radiation has a long half-life, it won't decay to safe levels for thousands of years, and so this problem doesn't go away any time soon, probably outliving humanity, considering its sad state of affairs.
[Answer]
To reframe your question a bit: **What is the fundamental prerequisite condition for civilization as we know it?**
There's at least a couple good candidates for answers here, but the one I think will be most immediately useful to your purposes is:
**There must be a surplus of food such that some people can do something significant with their lives other than just trying to keep themselves fed.**
The inversion that solves your problem: There must be something preventing that.
You've got a wide variety of choices here. Points of failure include nitrogen fixation, pollinators, salinity, acidity, too hot, too cold -- and that's just on the supply side. To break the demand side, speed up everyone's metabolisms or cripple their digestive systems or something like that.
I think this is enough to get you pointed in the right direction.
[Answer]
Other humans.
You could simply state, that whenever a certain amount of ressources was accumulated (which is necessary for building a city / civilisation) raiders showed up, killed most of the people and stole their stuff. For that reason people at some time stopped trying to reach that goal. It may have become part of their mythology that too much wealth attracts monsters (the raiders) and for that reason the tribes would be too afraid to take any action in that direction.
It might even go so far, that whenever a certain level of population is reached, some members get expelled in order to not attract the evil beasts attention.
Or the apocalypse was caused by some new technology and therefore science itself is viewed as some terrible evil that is to be persecuted. A Mythology like that would keep a society at a very basic level for an unlimited period of time.
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I don't think you have to do anything here. You have a world in which all extraction industries are basically gone. It's a world of trying to subsist on salvage and recycling--and it's basically doomed to run down, not rebuild. Your problem isn't recovery, it's keeping it from running down.
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For some reason, for example a virus that becomes more lethal the more nerve connections you have (ie the smarter you are), all the smart people are gone. This virus could also have changed the surviving worldwide human DNA so that long-term planning is hampered.
Possibly viruses were created for warfare purposes that are designed to infect people and only activate to murder status when a minimum amount of nearby people is reached. This means that communities that rise above a certain size immediately get killed off. Anyone who witnessed the ghosttown would likely believe it an act of God punishing those people for their practices, and people will keep smaller communities and avoid specialized and sinful tasks that appear inside larger communities.
Otherwise religious practices could heavily hamper research as has been done in the past. Gods plan is to be followed, not messed with by trying to change things with medicine or technology the gods hadnt offered.
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1. **Permanent:** Nothing is permanent which is a bit of a problem but not insurmountable. We can go with "long enough".
2. **Post apocalyptic:** Itself theoretically a temporary situation. The principle being that you're living day to day on the salvage of the pre-apocalyptic civiliation. There's a point where the salvage runs out (or is no longer accessible to your primitive groups) and your post-apocalyptic scenario becomes merely a primitive hunter-gather scenario. We have to somehow maintain a steady supply of salvage. We also need to keep these people on the move and prevent them from becoming a settled farming community or migratory herders. This is actually the hardest part.
We have a problem here. Consider Chernobyl. The nuclear fallout made the area uninhabitable to humans for decades. This in turn allowed a surge in wildlife populations and diversity. It turns out that the presence of humans in an area is far worse for nature than the fallout from a nuclear reactor going pop. Nuclear war isn't going to cut it for this one.
A far better bet is an ice age. Highly unlikely in the current scheme of global warming based climate change, but it has effects long enough to be permanent on human scales and would utterly devastate current civilisation. Glaciers would put out a steady stream of salvage during a summer melt, regulating the rate at which it resources could be recovered and allowing a prolonged culture of living on the salvage of the old world. You wouldn't be able to hang around the edges of the glaciers for long though, so it's only a summer trip up for salvage and then a return to warmer climes for winter.
This migration along with the fact that an ice age also [causes much of the world to dry up](https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_09/), limiting the effectiveness of a static farming lifestyle keeps what little population can now be supported fairly mobile. Hunting, gathering and salvaging.
Much of technological growth is population density dependent. With a very low population capable of living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle its unlikely you'll have any noticeable technological recovery or development for several generations after any massive crash.
However this approach will tend to leave a slightly environment to a modern person, being much drier, coastlines will be unfamiliar due to the aforementioned drying (sea levels were 120m lower during the last ice age) and different vegetation will exist in previously familiar climes.
**The tickboxes**
* Daily struggle for survival, simply because people aren't used to living off the land.
This can only last a decade or so, at most a generation, because after that people will once again be used to living off the land. The daily struggle to survive after that is your day to day struggle to survive. Can we eat? It is safe to sleep here?
* People limited to solitary, family based, or <200 people in a group. No big cities.
Hunter-gather society is fundamentally limited to small groups, nothing to worry about here
* Inability to maintain power, save for more archaic methods, like water and wind power. No nuclear. Batteries and the like are fine, but should be limited.
Since there's minimal need, there's minimal drive to develop these things until people are trying to settle down. Expect crude waterwheels at best.
* Technology halted. No technological development, as everyone is trying to stay alive.
Again, this is a function of population density outside isolated cases. With small groups there's going to be minimal transmission of ideas and no drive to industrialise.
* No governing body, other than what individual groups appoint over themselves.
Population density again. If you kill off enough of the population there's no room for governments.
[Answer]
**The world has no metal.**
This world's crust is very poor in easily worked structural metals -- iron and copper, at least. Some metal artefacts may remain, having been imported before the collapse, but it's in little bits. This doesn't prevent cities -- IIRC the Inca and Mayan civilizations had no metal except gold jewelry -- but it limits the tech considerably.
Also, people don't know how to do basic tech because they're so used to high tech. Knowing how to make things with 3D printers doesn't help much when you have to make them with sticks, stones, and leather. This could also eliminate agriculture, large buildings, and maybe even wheels.
The condition "people aren't used to living off the land" doesn't work. No matter what conditions are, people will get used to them, and probably in a few years.
[Answer]
You change the laws of nature so that electricity and internal combustion engines simply don't work any more. See S.M. Stirling's "Emberverse" series.
Your "Daily struggle for survival, simply because people aren't used to living off the land" isn't really a factor, because those who don't know how to live off the land (or force others to do the work for them), or have land nearby to live off (urbanites, IOW), die off in quite short order.
[Answer]
Extreme cold. Efforts required to survive in -50 Celsius would be nearly prohibitive for agriculture, mining, etc. Especially on large scale. "Ice age" world would be challenging even in regards to basic necessities like water. Limited availability of fresh water have a great potential to cripple civilisation as we know it.
Highest/Average temperature can be tuned for desirable effect.
Lower temperatures would reduce habitable zones - a little research might be needed to guess/adjust the tunables...
Depleted fossil fuels would be another option...
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The earth takes a glancing blow from a large object, not enough for total extinction but enough to knock us back to the stone age.
The impact also throws the earth's orbit out into a more elliptical shape, causing large seasonal fluctuations.
Just as people are adapting to that it turns out that the object is still out there having shattered into fragments after the impact, and the earth passes through the cloud every X years causing meteors to rain from the sky shattering any civilization that has started to rebuild.
A single event but with long term and recurring consequences where you can tweak the numbers enough to keep some people alive but make it very hard to build any sort of lasting civilization.
Eventually we'd either die out or rebuild but it would take a long time under those sort of circumstances.
[Answer]
**Armageddon, Jehovah's Witness style.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mFp6p.jpg)
This image of Paradise Earth from Watchtower 1975 is interesting for many reasons.
<https://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/earth-forever.php>
The Jehovahs Witnesses have very specific ideas about what will happen with Armageddon. As I understand it, 144,000 individuals will be chosen to inhabit Earth, remade as a paradise. These 144,000 will return from the dead.
<https://www.jw.org/en/publications/books/bible-teach/what-is-gods-kingdom/>
>
> Who are those 144,000? John
> himself tells us: “These are the ones who keep following the Lamb no
> matter where he goes. These were bought from among mankind as
> firstfruits to God and to the Lamb.” (Revelation 14:1, 4) Yes, they
> are faithful followers of Jesus Christ specially chosen to rule in
> heaven with him. After being raised out of death to heavenly life,
> “they are to rule as kings over the earth” along with Jesus.
>
>
>
As opposed to leaving the Earth and going to a different plane, the Earth itself is remade as a paradisial home for these 144,000.
>
> 21 After Armageddon, mankind will be under just one government, God’s
> Kingdom. That Kingdom will do God’s will and bring wonderful
> blessings. For example, it will remove Satan and his demons.
> (Revelation 20:1-3) The power of Jesus’ sacrifice will be applied so
> that faithful humans will no longer get sick and die. Instead, under
> Kingdom rule they will be able to live forever. (Read Revelation
> 22:1-3.) The earth will be made into a paradise. Thus the Kingdom will
> cause God’s will to be done on earth and will sanctify God’s name.
> What does this mean? It means that eventually under God’s Kingdom
> everyone alive will honor Jehovah’s name.
>
>
>
Thinking about waking up in this world:
* There are not many humans for an entire planet.
* By the racial diversity, it looks like the 144,000 are gathered together from different places in the earth - this is a recurring theme in the images I saw. Also, if these people have been dead, some might have been dead for a long time. They might have lived and died a long time ago. The 144,000 might struggle to communicate with each other.
* It is Earth, renovated. It can be as close to the original as you think it is appropriate, but there will be differences. You will note the lion, recognizably a lion with its carnivore canines, preparing to eat a handful of grass. Things like that suggest this remake of Creation was done in a hurry, or possibly by entities that were caught by surprise with the task, or who did not really comprehend the complexity of the original and how the remade whole might function going forward.
* People will live forever. I am not sure, though, this means that they are invulnerable to harm. These individuals died once. Maybe they can die but they come back?
---
Overall, this vision of a post-apocalyptic paradisial Earth is super interesting and one can find lots of detail about it from the Witness point of view. I like the idea of Earth stripped of almost everyone and intentionally made as nice as possible for the deathless humans set to inhabit it. But it is not so nice that everyone lives in mansions - in the image there is a man, wearing a shirt from a factory, drinking from a stream with a saucepan. I like the idea that this remake is carried out by well-intentioned entities that don't really understand what biological things (including humans) do on a day to day basis to survive. There may be other gaps in their understanding which will become evident as time passes.
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A state-developed nano-tech research program is nearing completion when a cold war starts escalating between several highly developed nations. One of the researchers finds out that upon completion the nanomachines will be networked with the existing spy satellite network and turned loose as a first strike weapon to bring the entire world under the control of the government. Horrified about the dystopian future this would bring about, the researcher, who is a bit of an anarchist and an environmental activist, hacks together a software patch and changes the directives of the nanomachines in an attempt to forever eliminate the threat of government tyranny and prevent mankind from destroying the environment.
When the government released the nanomachines the hijacked directives were something along the lines of:
1. Any community with more than say 200 people would get a daily warning to reduce its size to under 200 or have 1% of its population randomly dissolved.
2. Any communication or network device developed to link communities would be immediately dissolved.
3. The leaders of any community regardless of size that didn't employ a 1 vote per person democracy would be dissolved.
4. Any machine that uses petroleum as a fuel would be rendered inoperable.
5. Any nuclear-powered device or weapon would be dissolved.
This, of course, would destroy any government, police force, or army on the planet, resulting in a mass exodus of all major cities, rioting looting, starvation, and general apocalypse.
Once the human population on the planet had balkanized into ragtag isolated clans there would be essentially no evidence of the nanobots as they would be too small to see and would no longer be performing visible actions. Of course, if any of the groups combined or grew larger than 200, or started developing communications equipment or petroleum-fueled machines the nano-machines would again take action.
If after a couple of decades the controlling satellite network were to fail or the population of the nano-machines was to fall below a critical level it would no longer matter as it will have long been taboo to ever have a clan with over 200 people or to tinker with advancing technology.
[Answer]
Monsters.
The earth is covered by a huge number vicious beasts. They are normally territorial and can generally be avoided, but they are strongly attracted to noise - so any sort of industrialisation, or even the clamor of a large number of people living together, will attract beasts from all over to attack them.
You said you wanted it to appear to be the same, no new animals - well, this is impossible; in a post-apocalyptic setting, without humans to hunt them, there will be a massive resurgence of wild animals. So it's going to be different regardless, the only question is how different.
You can still make it largely appear the same, though, if the monsters are hard to find and ignore individuals not making too much noise. Maybe they hibernate underground, so you can walk through the woods and it will appear not different from the woods today, but as soon as you turn on your car engine: Bam! They burst out of the ground and eat you!
This has the bonus of allowing the new monsters to eat the wild animals. Currently, wandering wolf packs are rare encounters because humans killed them all. In this world, they are rare encounters because the monsters eat them. Thus the world *looks* the same, just... postapocalyptic.
As a result, humans can only form small communities. Only surface Mining is possible - oil drilling is certainly right out. Shelters will have to be makeshift - too much hammering might attract the monsters. The focus of humanity will shift to a heavy emphasis on hunters/warriors, to protect the villages. Technological advancement will be impossible, with life a daily struggle for survival.
[Answer]
For a good example see S. M. Sterling's series that started with "Dies the Fire"
See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emberverse_series> In it electricity stops working, as well as anything using more than about 100 psi.
People are more efficient in larger groups. 200 is a bad size. Hunter gatherers are extended families -- 20-30 people maybe. As soon as you have any form of agriculture, towns of a thousand are quite possible. Examples are in the Iroquois Federation, the Cherokee, and the Mississippi mound builders in north America. The Aztec and Maya in central America, and the Inca and the raft of smaller nations they conquered in South America.
One way to keep the tech down is to not have agriculture. Make a climate that is more variable. (We may be doing this already) If agriculture fails, then famine takes out 90% of the people, and the remaining ones don't have the ability to restore the technology.
Comment asked 'how variable?'
* India had massive crop failures when the monsoon failed one year.
* The first 3 colonies in California died of thirst and starvation.
* Lot of the mass migrations in history have been due to short term climate shifts that made the previous system of agriculture unworkable.
* Agriculture right now is very technologically dependent in many regions.
Right now we are getting some extremes due to arctic warming. This lowers the temperature differential between pole and equator, which in turn makes the jet streams weaker. They wander more, and move much more slowly. A standing Rossby Wave last winter causes western North America to be much warmer than normal, while eastern North America shivered.
Right now California seems to be running several years of drought followed by lots of rain. Without dams, pumps etc how much of the San Joaquin valley would support a farmer.
Coming up with a plausible change that makes ALL agriculture impossible is hard. But getting it to fail in 90% of the world I bet only requires tripling the standard deviation of the rainfall per year.
You would have pockets -- Oregon's Willamette Valley, say, or the Skagit Valley north of Seattle -- where ag might still be possible. But the pockets would b small, wouldn't connect, and would devolve to 1700's technology. Best you could hope for would be wood fired steam + sailboats.
If you want a more extreme case, have aliens move the moon to half the distance from the earth, and incline it's orbit more. This would speed up orbital precession by a bunch, increase tides by a factor of 8, make them much harder to predict, trigger a whole bunch of earthquakes and volcanoes.
[Answer]
**Humans as cockroaches**
Most existing answers that suggest a population drop or resource depletion suffer from the same flaw: With time, humans will adapt. With stone age technology, they were able to populate the entire planet, including scorching deserts and frozen tundras. That was with a primitive understanding of physics and no technological force multipliers. It's almost impossible to roll humanity back to stone age, and even if it were, it'd simply be a matter of a few hundred years for humans to rebound (recall that previously domesticated animals and food crops have been spread across the globe and will not have to be "redone")
The only way to prevent humans from rebouding is by **kicking them from the top of the food chain**, so to speak. Imagine AIs rule the Earth. It's not like they're going out of their way to exterminate all humans, they simply don't care whether we live or die, anymore than we care about trees, grass or ants when going around doing our business. Most of the Earth will be taken up by their infrastructure, and humans will be able to survive only on the fringes or as thieves and parasites, a pest to be occasionally managed. Some AIs might have security measures to keep humans out of vital bits of infrastructure. Humans are quite smart so they'll probably find a way to eke out a living somehow. Just not in the billions, and not with huge settled cities, but as nests and bands.
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Imagine its not quite present day earth, but the near future and nearly every piece of technology we use is digital. For example, +95% of cars, boats, airplanes, etc are now self-driving. All police and military have fingerprint locks on their firearms. All schools have transitioned textbooks to digital media. Then it happens a super solar flare wipes out all electrical infrastructure and devices on the planet.
With no vehicles transporting food and no water pumping to houses, the major cities would quickly fall into anarchy. Without access to their weapons, the military, police, and government officials that actually stuck around in major cities and tried to govern would be overrun by the mob. After the initial die off the survivors would have to learn how to live off the land from scratch and would largely fail. Only a handful of isolated survivors would live to create the next generation and most personal knowledge on how any advanced technology works would be lost.
Basically, the technology would be too advanced for people to look at and figure out, all records on how things work would be gone. Heck, there wouldn't even be an oral tradition passing on basic skills. In two generations the vast majority of the planet would probably not even be able to read. The tech level would be set in some ways lower than it was in the dark ages... at least they knew how to farm and create simple tools and shelters then.
Strangers would be largely unwelcome as different groups would take to raiding other groups to survive so it would take probably generations before people started banding together again. Even large raiding groups wouldn't work as there would only be so many nearby groups to prey upon and they would eventually turn on each other.
In short, it could take several decades before cities start to rebuild and even when they do it would probably look closer to a medieval serfdom than a modern city.
]
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[Question]
[
I want my world to contain a fruit that electrically shocks you to the point where it's painful, whenever you bite into it. Now, there are many organisms in nature that produce sensations similar to electricity (jellyfish, electric daisy, etc.) but I want my fruit to *actually* shock you. What would have to happen for this to be possible, and what might be different in a world where such a fruit exists? Some ideas:
* The fruit could have evolved electrocution as a defense mechanism, similar to how cacti are prickly or peppers are spicy.
* Could this fruit be used culinarily? Maybe you can make a dish with this fruit in small quantities to have a tingly effect.
* If this fruit is essentially a natural battery, you could produce fires much easier than by rubbing sticks together. How might this impact society? Could this fruit start fires spontaneously?
* Would this fruit have lead to earlier development of electricity and related technologies?
[Answer]
How it would produce electricity? Most likely, the same way [electrical eels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_organ_(biology)) do, I suppose - a mesh of long cells, that get electric potential due to work of [ion channels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_channel). They would be activated by some activator being released in fruit when it is damaged, the same way damage of the endothelium causes [coagulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coagulation#Regulators).
About evolution of such plant - it could start from plant signalling to insects via electric field(many insects react to them) and later signalling cells would change the purpose the same way nerves of electrical eel became weapon(it kills its victims with thought :) ). Another interesting way of using electricity - electrolysis of hydrogen for flying seeds(though hydrogen can be more efficiently generated via usual organic reactions).
// fruit is simply a means of attracting animals to disperse those seeds. having vectors chased off by electric shocks is not a positive evolutionary trait.
One animal may eat the plum, swallows the seed, and excrete it far away later, surrounded in fertilizer. Another one may eat the juicy part and spit out the seed nearby. Obviously, plant would prefer the first one. So if fruit is swallowed and slowly digested it would not produce electric shock, if it is eaten by parts, it would shock the animal.
[Answer]
Building off of ash, which is a nice idea, the charge is what draws the 'animals' to the fruit. They have a corresponding organ to harvest that energy. They use the charge, just as we use the sugar in our fruits.
[Answer]
"Electrocution" means "electrifying something until it dies".
So, why would a plant do this? Because it's a carnivorous plant that feeds on them. The fruit are just a lure. As for how, well, I think you hit on it when you mentioned the electrical eel.
[Answer]
Fruit is designed to *attract* not repel predation, as such an electric charge is generally counterproductive.
There may however be a reasonable explanation for an electric "fruit" of sorts; consider that the "fruit" is not a sweet fruit that we would tend to think of when we hear the word but rather a body containing seeds like a pine cone that is sealed against the elements until such time as the weather is right to disperse the seeds and have them germinate. Such cones often rely on fire in the modern world but an electric charge could serve a similar purpose or could in fact be an ignition source for a fire dependent species. Cones could build up a friction charge from the wind and/or the rubbing of cones against each other, you would not want to touch a charged cone. This is not a "fruit" that would not be used for food nor, at least in my opinion, would another example of biological electricity advance the development of the science any. I in fact would expect that this would have little overall impact on the world we know since such trees would live within existing burn dependent forest ecosystems.
[Answer]
Here is how the fruit could do it:
A charge is gradually accumulated on the inside (via ion channels in the usual method). An insulating layer of avocado-like fat wraps this inner pulp. The thin outside layer accumulates the opposite charge.
On biting into this fruit, the biting apparatus of the eater completes the circuit. The outer and inner layers equilibrate, with charge coursing along the mandible or mouthparts of the fruigvore.
One fruit could deliver one shock. That might be enough to kill an insect or small animal. After the frugivore ceases its effort (and falls off). the fruit might be able to heal and regenerate charge, just as a fruit which is pecked or otherwise cut while still on the tree can sometimes repair the damage given time.
Fruits dissuade frugivores all the time. Especially to be dissuaded are insect frugivores, who spoil the fruit and are too small to disperse seeds. If the fruit is eaten before the seed is ready then the whole seed dispersal scheme is kaput. Unripe fruits are bitter tasting to us or unpalatably sour, and contain proteases and other enzymes intended to disrupt the digestion of fruigvores intended to eat them before they are ripe. These substances are why one must cook green tomatoes. Fruits also want to dissuade the wrong types of frugivores - hot peppers being a prime example. Peppers do want to be eaten, but by birds, not mice. Mice will chew up the seeds but birds will pass them.
A fruit like this will maintain a charge only while on the tree. Just as a ripe fruit will turn off proteases and other antifrugivore mechanisms, when it wants to be eaten this electric fruit will cease to maintain its charge. Once off the plant, the energy source (from the leaves) used to maintain the charge differential is gone, and the charge difference will slowly wane. An electric fruit might use a shock like this to make sure it is eaten only after falling on the ground (by something like a coati who will disperse the seeds).
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I'm seeing a lot of people saying that the point of a fruit is to attract animals to eat it... but, all the plant really needs is for at least **one** animal to be able to eat it. Take a look at the manchineel tree. It's one of the deadliest plants alive, with sap that can damage the paint on cars. Standing under it during a rain will cause your skin to blister, and burning the tree causes smoke that can burn your eyes... so, needless to say, ingesting its apples is a pretty bad idea.
Unless you're a black-spined iguana, which eats the apples *and* lives in the boughs.
It's a tenuous relationship, of course--if anything happens to the iguana, the tree is done for--but as long as it holds, the machineel tree is nearly invincible to attack from herbivores and parasites, and the iguana has a reliable food source with no competition and a safe place to live.
All you need is at least one animal with a mouth that conducts electricity poorly (or perhaps is smart enough to coat its mouth in something that is first), and voila, you've got your seed dispersal!
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It wouldn't be an edible fruit, so it would use another form of seed dispersal. I am thinking a fruit that when it pops either because it matured or because something bit it shoots a multitude of small seeds at significant force. The seeds will when be carried by the wind. So I am guessing the normal trigger would be wind making the plant and the fruit sway.
How is this related to electricity?
[Triboelectric effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect) creates voltage on separating surfaces. When the seeds are shot from the fruit they are obviously separating from it. If the connecting surfaces of the seeds and the fruit are in the opposite ends of the triboelectric series, both will acquire electric charge. On the fruit this would likely be irrelevant, but on the seeds the acquired charge would force the seeds apart from each other and spread the long fibers on their surface for maximal surface area. Both of which the plant wants.
I doubt this is exactly what you want, but eating a fruit like this **would** hurt and if the seeds have high ratio of surface area to mass, as they reasonably would, much of the pain **would** be from electric shock inside your moist and sensitive mouth.
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You could easily have a scenario where the plant and some animal evolved together such that only this particular animal can safely consume the fruit. This facilitates dispersal of the seeds by a specific animal. The term is coevolution, and is fairly common in nature. In terms of a mechanism by which the electricity is generated, you could look to something like an electric eel, but I would consider instead [lemon batteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery "lemon batteries") for inspiration, where there's a chemical reaction between the juice of the fruit and electrodes. In your case, you could have some compound in the juice of your fruit that reacts with something commonly found in mouths of most species species. Perhaps a compound in saliva. Then, the animal that coevolved with the plant can have something different about it's saliva that inhibits the reaction, keeping it from getting shocked.
In terms of culinary uses, the intensity of the shock can be based on how much you dilute the juice you extract from the fruit. Dilute the juice enough, you just get a tingly sensation.
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Re: the first part of Ash's answer (that I can't reply to) "Fruit is designed to attract not repel predation, as such an electric charge is generally counterproductive."
Capsaicin-containing fruits are an adaptation that repels mammals, who feel its effects and are less capable of spreading seeds after consumption, but not birds, who don't feel its effects and are more capable of properly spreading the seeds ([wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin#Natural_function)). If your world also features a species or taxon that is both better adapted to spreading your fruit's seeds and also somehow less vulnerable to being electrocuted while eating it, that would make evolutionary sense.
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Many have pointed out that evolving electrocution powers on a fruit is counterproductive. So instead, what if...
# The delicious but dangerous growth isn't a fruit
From its formation, this world has had terrible weather conditions. Sunlight is very limited in large parts of the world, and as such, the few lifeforms that have managed to evolve have done so by inventing methods for dealing with the lack of sunlight. Some did so by storing energy gained from the sun, perhaps by raising load-bearing branches on the uncommon clear day and lowering them to release that energy for survival the rest of the time, or by storing the energy mechanically or chemically.
This organism's solution was different.
[Some plants are rich in zinc](https://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/foods-high-in-zinc/), and [some plants are rich in copper](https://draxe.com/top-10-copper-rich-foods/). These are provided by the soil, which is in turn fertilized by dead organic matter. Your plant in question gathers both and applies them to an electrolyte-rich growth, [just like a lemon battery.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery)
This electrolyte-rich growth differs from a fruit in that it does not contain seeds. The growth is divided into chambers by organically-produced wax, which serves as an insulator and allows the chambers to be combined in series to produce a greater voltage. Biting into the growth provides a conductive connection between two chambers at differing potentials, resulting in electric current passing through the victim's body. Probably not enough to be fatal to any but the weakest of species, but likely enough to cause noticeable discomfort.
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I can think of why the tree would do this, consider the chili pepper, the capsasin discourages large mammals that can digest their seeds so only birds (who are not affected) will eat them and spread their seeds.
Now imagine your tree produces a strong charge in its fruit, birds would be unaffected but and large animal standing on the ground that tried to eat the fruit would get a shock because it completes a circuit with the ground. Now we have a reason your plant has such weird fruit it wants birds to eat it but not large animals becasue they can break down their seeds and birds can't.
As for how it does this this is not too hard [cell membranes can make good capacitors](http://stg.rutgers.edu/ourpubs/Golowasch_Nadim_2015_Encyc_Comp_Neuro.pdf), your plant just needs to stack an incredible amount of cell membranes together and build up a charge potential across them. Also consider that teeth are very electrosensitive (it has to do with how teeth first evolved), so this will work doubly well on most mammals, it may not even need that strong of a charge.
this also means that once the fruit has discharged it will take time to build up a charge again, so a clever human could figure out how to harvest them safely.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cayb0.jpg)
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With some citrus fruits, such as a lemon, one can build a battery by inserting metal strips. The citric acid in the lemon causes corrosion of the metals, generating an electric current.
It is possible that a plant could extract the appropriate minerals from the soil, and transport them to the fruit, where they could be contained in some form of neutral fluid, until some creature bites into the fruit, bringing the acid into contact with the minerals, and electricity is generated.
With numerous containers of minerals, the fruit should be capable of producing several charges for multiple bites. It wouldn't take a lot of electricity to do the job - most animals have sensitive mouths, where even a mild electric charge will be extremely unpleasant.
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**It's not just the fruit itself, it's also the seed!**
As the fruit decays, juice vesicles (like those in a citrus fruit) gradually release chemicals that produce a very mild chemo-electric current which triggers and supports the germination of the seed. When the fruit first falls, the impact with the ground releases a larger jolt needed to penetrate the somewhat-insulated seed coat. When the seed receives this jolt, not only does it start germinating, but it also releases *it's own* jolt to help break down the insulating seed coat, which also helps the fruit to produce more chemo-electricity, in a positive feedback loop.
**Chomp**
When an animal comes and takes an abrupt, huge bit out of the fruit (particularly if it's fresh fruit from a tree, which isn't yet triggered by a ground impact), it not only produces an abnormally large fruit-shock, but also triggers a similarly large response shock from the seed (which triggers more from the fruit, which triggers more from the seed, etc. etc. etc.). This results in the seed itself popping (like a cross between a popcorn kernel and a Galaxy Note 7's battery) and the crispification of a would-be frugivore.
**FOOD**
However, if the seed is *carefully* removed, the fruit itself can be used for rather stimulating cuisine! Electric fruit salads, "Jolt Juice", and many other novel dishes can be made. The intensity of a fresh fruit's current might be unappealing, but you can let it ripen a bit and lose some of its potential. Cultures that regularly eat it tend to have special baskets for carrying and storing them so they can be handled safely, and people with children or pets must be careful to keep the fruits out of reach.
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Lots of people have addressed the thoughts on why a plant would want to do this. Lets look at a possibility of How it could be a bug zapper.
Design the Fruit to have some layers, much like a [Leyden Jar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_jar). A Leyden Jar is essentially a primitive capacitor. Some of them can hold a respectable charge (I remember a high school physics teacher swear loudly and involuntarily drop one when it discharged into his hand)
A conductive outer skin, a layer of non-conductive pith and a conductive inner material and stem. Static would build up from the environment builds in the fruit. The undesirable bird or bug gets too close, landing on or near the stem. He provides a ground for the fruit to discharge into and zap, no more bug or bird.
The fruit will ground and discharge when the fall out of the trees, and then bears or whatever eat the fruit and spread the seeds around.
A totally organic bug zapper, I like it. I hate bugs
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A good explanation is not FRUIT that electrocutes you, but some other part of the plant (stems?) that would. Their purpose is to keep the yummy fruit from being eaten before it was mature enough to propagate.
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Well, in an imaginary world that you would like a "fruit" that electrify whoever bites it (whether you wanna use it as a bait for later eating or just some random ideas), would be fun to "model it" as:
* A plant that **absorbs** the electricity in the atmosphere and put it in its fruits to act as a bomb (**electricity bomb**) to stun their prey before eating it or w/e you want to do. You could check [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_electricity) or Google Search in order to get more detailed data related to the behaviour or the "Electricity in the Air".
If you also say that the stun of the fruit, just like the spice, could be something that people will be looking for in order to get **feel better** or add different tastes to their foods, that could reinforce the argument.
Is interesting to remind you, guys, **that when you eat spicy food**, you are actually burning your tongue/mouth so the body produces endorphin to make you feel better. I quote [this article](http://www.medicaldaily.com/pass-spicy-food-4-ways-get-high-without-any-drugs-whatsoever-323588), that backup that argument:
>
> Chili peppers in particular contain high levels of the substance
> capsaicin, which causes the burning sensation in spicy food. The
> chemical has been proven before to work as a topical painkiller for
> arthritis, and also forces the brain to release endorphins. “The
> endorphins work to block the heat,” Paul Bosland, cofounder and
> director of New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute, told
> ABC News in 2012. “The body produces them in response to the heat,
> which it senses as pain.”
>
>
>
So, based on that, you could also say that eating this fruit would have the same effect in human/animal body.
I dont think that I need to reinforce the idea of the plant need to survive and that why it shouldn't hurt the human/animal just because there are so many carnivorous plants in the world that, one plant that actually can stun you before **eating you** doesn't look **that scary** or crazy.
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One of my side characters is a scientist, and he is zombie immune. This lets him get close enough to study the zombies. However, I feel like just saying he is a "biologist" might be too broad. A lot professional scientists are specialized in something, right? Perhaps some sort of human anatomy or disease specialist would be ideal to make him the best guy for the job? Or is just "biologist" good enough?.
I'm aware the absolute best option might vary slightly depending on the specific traits of the zombies, but for stereotypical zombies surely there is a short list of specialties, probably mostly in the field of biology, that would make a person uniquely qualified for trying to study them?
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I think the comment of @Daron is crucial here - decide the discipline of the scientist based on the discovery that he will make in your story. Just a "biologist" might be too broad indeed because there are many sub-disciplines in biology which will have little to contribute to zombie research.
A few interesting options might be:
* Figuring out that the "zombie disease" is caused by a virus; here I have a sample by the way, don't touch it, because it's still active, and I'm going to analyse it in my lab to see whether we can somehow deactivate it after an infection, or maybe develop a vaccine: a **virologist**.
* I found there are quite some changes in brain structure when people become zombies, and by the way, did you know that we can paralyze them by flashing them with an SOS signal in morse code? A **neuroscientist**.
* So zombies can really only eat raw meat, but we can trick them into eating meat alternatives instead and they will die after a few days! A **nutritional scientist** or **physiologist**.
It can be helpful to check Wikipedia's [list of scientific disciplines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines) for more options.
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**Kelly Weinersmith**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vq7Lh.png)
[I study how host behavior influences risk of infection with parasites, and how parasites subsequently change host behavior and correlations between host phenotypic traits.](http://www.weinersmith.com/)
Someone who studies behaviour-influencing parasites is a good bet. I don't believe there is a specific name for these people other than Parasitologists.
Bonus points for this being a small field. Since it is a small field it is more likely the researchers have a wide range of skills. There is no such thing as an "ecological behavioural parasitologist" or a "laboratory parasitologist". There are too few to specialise like that. Everyone can do everything.
The classic example is the zombie fungus. . .
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UZGDO.jpg)
. . . which tells the ant host to climb high. But there are probably only two or three people on the planet who specialise on that particular fungus. Seems unlikely one of them would be in town unless you want to play it for laughs.
If you want to play it for laughs, I suggest the infected are at first called "zombie fungus people". This is later shortened to "zombies".
Rather than a fungus that infects an ant, Kelly is interested in a worm that infects a fish. The parasite changes the fish behaviour so it swims to the surface and gets eaten by birds. The bird becomes the new host, and poos out worm eggs over a large area. This is how the parasite spreads.
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## Virologist
>
> Virologists are medical doctors that oversee the diagnosis, management and prevention of infection. They’re also scientists, who may drive research on various aspects of viruses. A virologist may be both a scientist and a physician. [(source)](https://www.rcpath.org/discover-pathology/careers-in-pathology/careers-in-medicine/become-a-virologist.html)
>
>
>
## Epidemiologist
>
> Epidemiologists study outbreaks of diseases, the causes, locations, and how various communities are affected, utilizing relative information to aid in the prevention of future outbreaks. Epidemiologists help to keep the public informed of methods to maintain and improve public health. [(source)](https://www.healthcare-management-degree.net/faq/what-is-epidemiology-and-what-does-an-epidemiologist-do/)
>
>
>
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**Toxicologist/immunologist**
A toxicologist or immunologist would be best equipped to handle zombies, since there must be some toxin, or biological disease, that "zombified" the zombies. The toxicologist would have knowledge of various toxins, as well as toxins in general, giving them a good chance of solving the zombie problem. If it is caused by biological causes, then an immunologist will likely be your best bet, as the immune system must have fought the disease well enough to keep the body alive but mentally damaged(and still contagious), or itself became the perpetrator of the disease. It is likely a good idea to have one of each.
Having a doctor, or physician around doesn't make much sense as they tend to only be good when there is preexisting knowledge about the disease, as they must work on many different diseases, diagnosing them to known ones, for many different people.
A general biologist, of course, likely spends very little time with cures of people or healing, but rather instead *biology in general*, not even necessarily immunology, or even human biology.
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**[Cryptozoologist.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptozoology)**
If you're telling a story that involves the unknown, the various rumours and legends surrounding the mythology of zombies and where it's cropped-up in the world, what brought it about, what their behaviour is, their drives, their weaknesses - and whom they serve - then your best bet is to get on board someone who's spent hours scouring online sites and ancient library books studying zombie lore. A smattering of college biology wouldn't go amiss in attempting to explain how they work too.
Of course you'll be able to tie-in legends from Voodoo, shamanism and the Manitou of the native Americas, Chinese zombie stories and folk-lore and strange tales from the Ancients of Egypt and Celtic peoples to reveal the truth behind the myth.
A crypto-zeek would also be able to tell apart the superstition of a frightened people, the misinformation, the mixed-signals from other supernatural stories that haunt people's psyches, to disentangle all these you need someone who's obsessed about this creature for much of their life. This of course lends itself to a back-story for the character of an experience in their childhood/youth that sparked the obsession.
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**Mathematician**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8MgIk.png)
<https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/28517>
Specifically an expert in stochastic calculus.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_calculus>
>
> The best-known stochastic process to which stochastic calculus is
> applied is the Wiener process (named in honor of Norbert Wiener),
> which is used for modeling Brownian motion as described by Louis
> Bachelier in 1900 and by Albert Einstein in 1905 and other physical
> diffusion processes in space of particles subject to random forces.
> Since the 1970s, the Wiener process has been widely applied in
> financial mathematics and economics to model the evolution in time of
> stock prices and bond interest rates
>
>
>
Your mathematician is not interested in zombie teeth or how they became zombies or zombie society. The zombies are treated as particles and your mathematician derives rules governing their movements. Horde agglomeration is the most dangerous to humans and also a pattern which might be manipulated for human benefit, but your scientist (who was different to begin with, and has become more different through isolation as well as the process that made him immune) is interested in horde formation for its own sake. It is interesting.
Your mathematician is studying horde behavior via math because it is an objective and comfortable lens through which he can study himself. And understand what he has become. Because of course, he is a zombie.
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## A thanatologist
These guys are to science what necromancers are to magic; death obsessed experimenters of dubious repute.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatology>
Any specialist of the types mentioned in other answers who had a morbid interest in death might start to call himself a thanatologist; or alternatively, you might have a genuine interdisciplinary generalist who just really, really, really knows a lot about many aspects of death.
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## Zombiologist, experts on education and hygiene will follow
The zombies started popping up. For some reason, resurrection became statistically far more frequent than people previously believed (in).
At first, zombie folks just escaped their graves and started to roam around eating people. This habit was shortcut a few years later, when soylent green got distributed in their neighborhoods and the zombies kept calm.
But the smell is not gone. And the zombies are of no use.
Now, we're setting up this expedition. It has a few experts on board, who may find a way to civilize the zombies. What education they need (if any) and if there would be means of communication. Also, cleaning experts and cosmetics firms have shown interest to take part.
Ms X will prepare the expedition. She has the advantage of being zombie-resistent, and an expert in the field. Zombiologist, specialization behavioral sciences.. she lived with zombie family all her life.
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# A cell biologist
This is just one possibility among many already mentioned, but if your zombies are literal walking dead - moving around despite the heart not beating - then a cell biologist would be the perfect specialisation.
Somehow the zombies' muscle cells have enough energy to move despite the lack of freshly oxygenated blood. This is an astounding scientific mystery, and if we can solve it it might shed some light on how the infection can be stopped. So you need someone with an insight into the inner workings of the cell, in particular someone who specialises in the cell's energy systems.
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There is no short list, it all boils down on which aspect of zombies you want to study.
Throw for a moment the zombies out of the question, and think of humans: which scientist is better for studying humans?
* for understanding how their bodies work, a biologist or an anatomist might be the better choice
* for understanding their health issues, a medical doctors is the way to go
* for understanding their interaction in groups, an ethologist or social scientist is better suited, maybe paired with a jurist
* etc. etc.
The same can apply to zombies. And don't forget that many fields of study have overlapping between them.
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## Pathologist
A doctor who specializes in all the ways the human body can break down. (One might believe that all doctors does that, but it is not so)
Now, there are a lot of subcategories to choose from. I was thinking of the guy down at the morgue who performs autopsies on all the "died from unknown causes" bodies.
Typically seen in TV series while eating lunch next to an cut open corpse while cheerfully discussing some macabre subject with the detective.
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# Morticians and medical doctors
Zombies cannot exist without [magic](/questions/tagged/magic "show questions tagged 'magic'"), so all a scientist of any kind is going to be able to say about how they work is "yeah, it is dead but still moving".
Morticians, along with many physicians as well, know just about everything that there is to know about corpses - things that you can't even imagine and which you don't know that you don't know. A mortician or a medical doctor would be able to analyze how the zombies decay and what their weak points are.
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Zombies being a new phenomenon would almost certainly warrant their own field of research. And it would grow out of the medical field, since it the phenomenon would be mistaken for a disease at first.
I introduce you to necrology and the necrologist.
Though the first ones would have trained as medical doctors, within a span of a decade or so and recognizing that this has nothing to do with biology they would be trained in physics, with perhaps a side of occult/demonology.
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Probably not what you're going for but just to throw out the idea: **computer science, mechanical engineer, materials scientist and/or mechatronics.**
Traditional D&D style zombies are fundamentally magic. There is nothing scientific going on there; they are animated by magic. You could go with something like "28 Days Later" where there's a biological explanation (namely, they aren't dead at all) but maybe as an alternative, suppose the zombies were caused by self-replicating nanotech that has gone out of control.
Scientists invented nanotech robots that were supposed to go through your body and fix cellular damage, self-replicating and even mimicking muscle tissue and sinew where needed. They can even form rudimentary neurons to attempt to correct minor brain damage.
Welp, turns out, they end up killing the patient, "helpfully" taking over the dying functions (including the brain) and keeping the corpse going in a horrifying mimicry of life. If they bite you, there's a good chance of nanobots crossing into your body and repeating the process.
You get the idea. In this case, what you might need is a variety of specialists in nanotechnology and programming.
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## ***Kinemortology***.
Derived from word for the irrational fear of zombies (*kinemortophobia*), "*kine*" is the Greek word for motion, and "*morto*" is the Greek word for dead or death; together they make the word *kinemorto*, which literally means *walking/moving dead*, or the more familiar term, *zombie*. "*-ology*" is, of course, the Greek word for a branch of study or science. *Kinemortology*, in essence, is the "branch of science studying the walking dead".
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## Reanimatologist
As zombies are created through the reanimation of a corpse, *reanimatology* can be considered as an all-encompassing field for the study of zombies and other revenants. It can be a twist also as a reanimatologist could be someone who creates the zombies and thus, knows them well.
>
> a branch of medicine that studies the main patterns of the cessation and restoration of human functions. The pathophysiology of the death agony, of clinical death, and of the restoration of lost or altered vital functions constitutes the theoretical basis of reanimatology. The term “reanimation” refers to the complex of methods used for revival.
>
> https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Reanimatology
>
>
>
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[
If you have a physically fit individual who can see up to 5 seconds in the future, is it possible for them to not get hit by bullets by moving away?
(Precognition being defined here as the ability to sense hundreds of futures based on the likelihood that they will occur by doing given actions, plus the processing power to process this information. Precognition is primarily sight and pain.)
Practically speaking, in most ranges, by the time the bullet is in motion it's too late for the individual to change whether or not they get hit, but what about moving before the trigger is pulled, or feinting, or something like that?
If so, what ranges would this be feasible at, and what kinds of guns would be possible to dodge? Pistols? Sniper rifles?
I imagine sustained fire would be almost impossible to dodge without cover.
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# It's complicated:
First of all, kudos for limiting it to five seconds. More than that starts getting strange. Second, I strongly suspect you're going to start hitting a problem with precognition, which is that prediction alters reality which alters precognition. When your precognitive dodges the bullet, they're still visible and light travels REALLY fast. So naturally, the person alters their trajectory to compensate for where the bullet is going. This creates a nasty feedback where the character now has to dodge the NEW trajectory of the bullet, and all the reasonably probable trajectories of the bullet. Then there's dodging the second and third bullet, all of which may be in the next five seconds. While your character may avoid a lot of bullets at reasonably close range (especially with good reaction time against clumsy/slow opponents) I'd say **NO** to a short-ranged gunfight.
You **MAY** still be unbeatable in a gunfight, however. Rather than dodging bullets, you can anticipate where your opponents will be in the future and shoot them first. THEY have no ability to anticipate the bullets, so 9mm of prevention is worth 45 calibers of cure. Also, invest in a bulletproof shield, since they can't anticipate as well where THAT will be. Even a small one might be enough, and these would be useless in a normal gunfight but great for your character. You still get shot, but it won't be nearly as harmful (although anyone who's ever taken a bullet in a vest will tell you it's still a LOT of energy to dissipate).
Long range sniper fire, your character is golden (hard **YES**). Anything where the bullet already left the barrel by the time the character reacts, nothing the shooter can do will change the trajectory (unless it's a gyrojet smart projectile that tracks targets).
Ambush? The character will know it's coming and can take cover, jump behind people, or just drop suddenly. This greatly reduces the opportunity for a shooter to hit the character. This is especially true if the character isn't the intended target. So a hard **YES** to dodging stray bullets, if the character is in a position to maneuver. This also means the character would be the ultimate secret service agent—they could deliberately interpose themselves easily between an intended target and a shooter. Invest in good body armor.
Your ability to dodge spraying bullets will depend on the perception of the character. If they can see bullets (and I certainly can't, so just knowing bullets are fired doesn't guarantee you know where they will be) then they would be able to chart a course that misses many bullets. Human reaction isn't perfect, so they might misjudge, or slip, and not realize it until it's too late to change it. So **MAYBE** on random sprayed bullets.
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**Single shot weapons.**
There is a game called Super Hot that presents a similar situation. Rather than precognizing where the bullets will land you can slow time to see where the bullets are. Note this also slows down the player so you can never move super fast. Might be worth a play to get a feel for what's possible!
The main thing you cannot dodge is a machinegun firing down a corridor. I know the corridor will be full of lead in the next 5 seconds. That's no use if I can't get out of the corridor before then.
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### Yes, your character is basically unstoppable\*
First, I'm going to assume that there is some sort of engine (extradimensional supercomputer, deity, alien, whater) which grants the powered individual this capability and interfaces directly with their brain (or soul depending on setting).
Secondly, I'm going to assume that whatever this Precognition Engine does isn't *true* precognition but rather *simulated* precognition. This means there's no actual time travel or future-observation going on, instead, the precognition engine is hooked up to some sort of panoptical system which is capable of viewing the users' entire (or even just local) reality at a particulate level (smaller or bigger adjust prediction accuracies). To "see" the future, the Engine performs simulations. This prevents nasty causality issues and the other weirdness that accompanies time travel.
Finally, I'm going to assume that the Engine is capable of precogging the power's user's brain, effectively granting meta-precognition. Otherwise, the user would only ever see one, rapidly shifiting future, since the Engine is capable of perfectly prediciting the future (in the short term).
Also, if your User has a gun, then they would be absolutely unstoppable.\*\*
**A simulated gunfight, from the precognative side:**
The person who's connected to the Precognative Engine (the User) is of the opinion that they do not want to get shot. The Engine "knows" this (although it's not necessarily sentient).
Now, a gunman is approaching the user, and the Engine calculates that in five seconds, the gunman will have aimed, fired, and hit the User. Next, the Engine simulates what the User would choose to do when presented with this information, and the simulated User decides to, lets say, take a step to the left a second before the gun is fired. Simulating this course of action, the Engine discovers that the gunman is good enough to partially adjust their aim and the User get's winged on the arm instead. This data, is once again fed to the Engine's simulation of the User, which again "decides" to avoid this fate and chooses a different simulated action.
This simulate-query-resimulate loop continues onwards until the simulated User is presented with a satisfactory action, and this process works onwards continously.
The User, unaware of what's going on "behind the curtain" simply sees all the possible futures of the choices that simulated-User made and eventually settles on the same choice that simulated-User eventually made (free will is dead, but whatever). Then, they perform the exact set of actions that allow them to avoid getting shot.
**The same gunfight, but from the gunman's perspective:**
The gunman is a professional. They sight the User with their gun, line up a shot, and are about to press the trigger, when suddenly the User steps to the side a bit. The gunman readjusts their aim, but again, just before they're about to pull the trigger, the User is coincidentally not lined up properly anymore. Frustrated, they continue trying to get a bead on the User, but always just before they're about to fire the perfect shot, the User does something that makes them feel like they'd miss if they pulled the trigger. Eventually, the gunman can't take this anymore and losens their tolerances on what's an accepatable shot and starts shooting, even if they don't have a hit lined up. It dosen't help though, the User seemingly dances or limbos across the field of fire without getting hit once.
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\*There are scenarios where the User *can* get hit. Notably, they can get hit by area-affect weapons like bombs or grenades where they can't get out of the danger zone within five seconds (unless they can disable the bomb or grenade before it goes off, for example by shooting it or getting someone else to shoot it) or they can get hit by enough massed-fire, although it would take a serious amount of bullets to make it that there's no possible dodging window and the User would be stupid to put themselves in a situation like that. The most effective way to kill the User is to unknowingly poison them and then make sure they aren't in an enviroment where they can precognatively find the antidote or how to make an antidote in under 5 seconds.
\*\*If the User has a gun, they basically become unstoppable. Then, they can do fancy things like:
* shoot opponents just right so they twitch and shoot their neighbors just right
* shoot bullets which ricochet just right and jams weapons
* shoot enemy vehicles just right so they get disabled instantly
* shoot bullets, grenades, etc out of the air with multiple ricochets
* etc
To highlight how ridiculously bullshit this power could be, imagine the user is in an empty field, with a gun, facing 12 professional soldiers. It's a standoff. Then, the User simply finds the future where shooting one of the soldiers *just right* makes them twitch their gun to the side and shoot 11 perfect, friendly-fire, headshots on their fellow squadmates before dying themselves. To see an example of what it could look like to watch a precognative fight, take a look at [this clip](https://youtu.be/qHFORem2Bj8?t=60) where Bart disables all her opponents, even when starting from extreme disadvantage (although the power Bart has is slightly different) or take a look at Contessa in Wildbow's *Worm* (although her power is also slightly different).
[Answer]
If your only enhanced skill is the 5 seconds of precognition, and you remain normal in every other way (no super fast reflexes etc.) then there are a few things you can do to lessen your chances of being shot. I'm assuming perfect precognition of all possible outcomes, along with an ability to perfectly adjust yourself in response to the precognition outcomes.
1. If there is cover really close by, you are golden. Just go there. Now they can't hit you.
2. No time to get to cover before the first shots are fired? You can feint. Move in such a way that will allow you to dodge (or if nothing else get shot in the least serious spot). An example would be shifting slightly so the bullet passes just past your body in the gap beneath your arm. Unfortunately, since the shooter can react to anything you do (I assume), any larger more obvious attempts to dodge (which would have to be begun sooner as well, giving them more chance to notice) may result in them altering their aim, resulting in a situation where you're committed to a movement and their adjustment results in you getting hit anyway. But since you can see all outcomes, you already know to avoid any motion where this will happen. Likely in 90% of cases, the most favorable outcome you find will be one where you only move slightly, at the latest possible moment, "tricking" the shooter into missing.
3. Captain America's shield or Wonder Woman's gauntlets. If you have something like this, you can dramatically reduce your risk of getting fatally shot. Simply move whatever it is in between you and the bullet. The smaller it is the better (Wonder Woman beats Cap, again I am assuming you are capable of making perfect movements in response to the precognition. If you can't be precise, then Cap beats Wonder Woman) since a smaller "shield" has less risk the enemy will realize you are blocking and change aim. HOWEVER unless said material is something super cool magic/sci fi tech that absorbs impact, this may still result in a lot of pain and or damage to you. All that energy from the bullet striking has to go somewhere, after all. Still better than the alternative of the bullet entering your body, though. The same principle goes for body armor. If you are wearing a bullet proof vest and your precognition tells you you can't dodge said bullet, just move so it hits you dead center of the vest and at least you won't die. Wearing body armor gives you more "options" for what you can do to result in a non-fatal or less serious injury outcome (at least in situations where your body armor is strong enough to stop whatever you are being shot with from that given range).
That said, depending on distances, cover, type of gun, etc., you are not always going to be able to escape. While you can use the tricks above to have an advantage and be far less likely to die than some other person in the same situation, there ARE going to be situations when you get shot anyway, because no matter WHAT you do it will happen regardless, in which case your precognition doesn't help you much.
[Answer]
**No**
Guns shoot bullets *fast*. A quick search on handguns shows a it ranges from 2000k/h to more than double. Let's get that in perspective.
Imagine someone throwing a tennis ball as hard as they can at you from two to five meters away. It's difficult to dodge or feint. You might succeed sometimes and not at all with others.
Now imagine the same, only you are going in slow motion and the ball is not. Suddenly it's nearly impossible to dodge the ball.
With precognition you'll see a lot of outcomes where you'll be shot. Luckily there are probably outcomes where you won't get shot. With only five seconds to work with, you can only know definitely how to move to shake of their aim in those five seconds, making them miss or not shoot yet. The problem is that in the few possibilities you have to survive, some might lead to a dead end after the five seconds. Even with continuous precognition you might go and run into a hallway as it's your only way out, but find out quickly that when they turn the corner they'll shoot you.
In some situations you'll have some chance to evade fire, but I think even with the perfect precognition you describe you'll likely be shot if there's no cover available.
Unless talking is allowed. With seeing all the possibilities, you can also see what words will get you out of it. This can get them rich, or be a pressure point of their psychology or whatever. Many things might make them hesitant or not want to shoot you. I mean most people will want to capture him to check the stock exchange or bitcoin prices for example.
[Answer]
# Does the shooter know you're a precog?
Because if he/she does, you're hosed. All I'd need to do is hold the gun on you and then start clogging up your precognition with false starts. Am I going to shoot or not? Now? NOW? ***How about now?*** Of all those hundreds of possible futures that could happen in the next five seconds, every tenth of a second represents the possibility of an actual shot because I know you're a precog and I'm jumping random numbers through my head about when to pull the trigger.
If I'm good enough at it, you're vapor-locked because so many of the possible futures cause you're death, you don't know which one to react to — and all I need you to do is blink at the wrong moment once. *(Hah hah! picked the wrong tenth of a second suckah!)*
The movie *[Next](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(2007_film))* makes the idea of precognition look almost godlike. But that's only true if the people you're reacting to don't know what you can do. When that's the case, they act very predictably.
When they know you. You're hosed.
*Bear in mind you can always create a boring godlike character. "The precog always knows the truth! The precog knows which moment will be the actual trigger pull and which are just fakes to try and clog the vision!" But your character needs limits to be relatable and believable. The twist to the movie* Next *was that in seeing any distance into time involving Jessica Biel (a middlin' actress... but well worth looking any distance into time...) the movie could create the ending surprise twist (also known as the TV show Dallas' "it was all a dream!" trope). But that ability was meant to bring about a specific plot condition. You must do the same. So, the reality is that your precog must have a weakness — and I think that weakness is that when people know they're facing a precog, they can jam the vision with a lot of false positives, which confuses the precog (what I'm calling vapor-lock).*
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That depends on your understanding of the nature of time, predestination, and the ability to alter the timeflow. That is, **it is your call (as the writer or game designer).** It comes down to a variant of the grandfather paradox.
* Under most conditions, five seconds are plenty to move the body so that no body part is where any other body part used to be.
* When a shooter fires an aimed shot, he or see will notice that the target has started to move and try to lead it.
So how will actions by the precog who has seen the future and wants to alter it affect other actors? Say the precog is sitting on a bench in a bar. The shot *is going to* go through his heart and then through the back rest. The precog stands up because of that warning. Does the future which *has been revealed* disappear, or does it have to happen? It was the most likely variant a couple of moments ago.
Those "strands" of yours, do they include the precog's own action? In 75% of the probabilities, I stand up, so let's not stand up and the shooter is confused?
If the shooter can react normally, I guess precognition isn't enough to escape.
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Here's an aid for the imagination.
First imagine that the gunman is instead holding a long thin rod, representing the trajectory of the bullet. As he waves it around, can you dodge above or below it and avoid being touched by the rod? If you are standing close enough and are suitably agile and acrobatic, possibly. For a short time, anyway. You may have seen people dodging a long sword like this, for example. The further away you are, the faster the rod moves and the easier it is to change its direction of swing, and so the harder it is to dodge.
Now imagine that the rod has a flag attached, that traces out the path of the rod for the last 5 seconds. The trailing edge of the flag represents where the gun was pointing 5 seconds ago. Can you dodge the trailing edge?
From the point of view of the precognitive, it is as if they can see the flag being waved 5 seconds into the future, so 'now' appears 5 seconds ago, and they only have to dodge the trailing edge of the flag. With 5 seconds warning, you have much more time to get out of the way of it. You can either duck under or jump over a moving line quite easily given 5 seconds notice. You should therefore be able to avoid it at a greater range.
But then, you can also see that one sweep at waist height to get you to duck low followed by a low sweep back to catch you before you can jump again may be much harder to avoid. It's a way to think about tactics.
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> is it possible for them to not get hit by bullet**s** by moving away?
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DWKraus's answer gives a very detailed explanation of what it would take to dodge or evade a bullet. That's all fine and good, but you asked about bullets *plural*, and that one extra 's' changes the situation significantly.
If you knew where a bullet was coming, how would you evade it? You'd drop to the ground, dive out of the way, leap to the side, etc. All of these actions give your body a lot of momentum (most likely in a direction that you wouldn't normally be moving) and place you in a posture/position quite different than where you started. When your attacker adjusts and takes their second shot, they're going to see you moving and aim based on your new trajectory. You don't just have to predict the bullet and react, you have to first cancel your current momentum and throw your body in a completely different direction. If you're in the process of diving to the ground, all the precognition in the world can't stop your midair free-fall, stand you back on your feet, and prime your muscles for another evasive maneuver. The amount of time it takes your body to complete the first dodge and recover effectively eats away at your precognition buffer (it's future that you can "see" but can't do anything to change). You'll likely have half the reaction time for the second shot. By the time they fire their third shot, the benefits of precognition are more or less nullified.
This calculus obviously changes if the attacker is using a weapon that can't immediately be fired again (like a black powder rifle, or they used the last round in the magazine). The time required to reload, re-arm, and re-aim the weapon all work in your favor. If you can pick yourself up and start moving again before they can fire the next shot, then you should be okay. Against most modern weapons, though, you'll want to make sure that your initial evasive maneuver takes you behind cover or into an otherwise protected position. You can't afford to give them a second chance.
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**You can dodge the bullets. You can do more than that.**
In the movie Next, Nick Cage's character can see 3 minutes into the future. This clip is towards the end of the movie. He sees all possible futures and evades the ones where he gets shot.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC5ZiK6o7uQ>
I feel like you might not know about this movie, Piomicron and so I hesitate to share the clip because it is a very cool movie and this is one of the coolest scenes. If you dig stuff like this, stop the video right after the bullet scene because otherwise it will spoil the end. Rent it! Next is a fine film; one of Cage's best and I have never seen a Julianne Moore movie I did not enjoy. Also: Jessica Biel!
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It depends on the battle situation. If you have good cover available and aren't too badly outnumbered you can avoid their fire. You know when and where it will be safe to expose yourself for a moment to shoot at them and you know exactly where to place that shot.
However, this will not protect you if there's no cover within 5 seconds, or if you are outnumbered to the point there is no safe spot to pop up for a shot. You jump behind the block of concrete, there are guns aimed all around the concrete, there's nothing you can do while they walk up and toss a grenade.
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As others have pointed out, knowing that the room you're in is going to be riddled with bullets in 5 seconds might not be enough for you to run to safety.
In addition, keep in mind that anyone you're fighting can also see the future, to a lesser degree - because you can see the future, and they can see you. If you suddenly jump to the right, they won't bother shooting to the right and will shoot left instead. While your head is in the rapidly changing timelines five seconds from now, they are in the present and have much less to think about. (Read the Mistborn trilogy to see this done in proper epic fashion).
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# Bullets are surprisingly "slow".
Next time you're out in the desert shooting your handgun at rocks a few dozen feet away, **put in some tracer rounds**.
(They "light up" like in a video game and you can see them going along.)
Humans have incredibly fast acuity time. (Witness video games like Splatoon, where one frame, about 1/50th of a second, is a completely normal operating time for players.)
Amazingly the first time you do this, you'll actually "see" the bullet going from your gun to the rocks over there. (You'd probably guess before trying this, that it's "too fast to see", that you wouldn't actually "see it travel", but you do.)
The simple answer to your question is that for Really Long Sniper Shots (Like Riggs In Lethal Weapon) **it takes bullets a full second or two to get there**.
(Definitely not as long as "five seconds" - but a couple seconds.)
# The bottom line is, "sniper shots" are 1-2 seconds.
Really, based on that info, you would formulate what happens in your story. Good luck!
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It depends on how fast your brain can process all those future possibilities.
If your brain can process all those possibilities, then choose the most probable outcome, and finally decide a response to the enemy's action in less than a second, then your ability would really be useful.
But since, like other answers, future would change because of our action, the actually useful precognition would be shorter than 5 seconds. This is because our action, and how the enemy responds to our action, would result in a new set of future outcome.
In this form, the ability would look similar to the ZERO system in Gundam Wing and the the Geass of the Knight of One in Code Geass. The ones using this power must have a strong will to stare into future, not fooled by the precognition, yet not consumed by paranoia.
If you know you are going into a gunfight, then you could put a bullet through the other guy before his hand even start moving to his gun because you know when he is going to draw. He can't unleash his infinite-bullet minigun if he is dead before he could fire it. Even if he is behind cover, you know when he is going to pop out and open fire an instant before he shoot.
Even if you don't know you are going into a fight (like a sniping), you can dodge or get away, because the bullet takes time to gravel, the assassin needs time to get into position, etc.
Of course, all of these depends on you know how to respond to these situation, have the tools to protect yourself, and are in a condition to act on self-preserving. If you are tied to a pole facing a fire squad, then the best you can do is yell something incomparably cool So you can die with dignity and awesomeness and won popularity among fans. Who knows, if you got enough popularity, the studio would revive you in the next season.
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[Question]
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I'm working on writing a story wherein there is a revolver inspired by Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy's samaritan. My question is; can such a gun, as described below, work? Or would it be a bone breaker like Hellboy's Samaritan?
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> *Hellboy's Samaritan*; 22mm four shot revolver which supposedly would
> break a man's arm. Further details largely unknown.
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> *VD Revolver(VDR)*(from my story); 19.25mm, 6 shot revolver. Cylinder
> between 3 and 3.5 inches wide with a 12" barrel, the last two inches
> of that a muzzle break venting straight back. Miscellaneous details;
> fires from the bottom of the cylinder for the lowest possible bore
> axis, swing out cylinder, single action only, ten pound weight.
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A little back story on it, and my story's world. Robotic augmentation is common, this gun first made by a man with robotic arms just because he could. The government then, to commemorate Victory Day (VD), modified it only slightly and issued it to exemplary officer's as a type of recognition of valor. The original was based largely on old world doctrines of stopping revolvers, the government version kept the same doctrine. One shot enough to kill anything no matter how augmented. Of course since only augmented individuals could fire a compromise was later made when a human wanted to fire one. For whatever reason a few made it onto the civilian market and from there tweaked. The original cartridge; 3000 grain bullet weight at 1250 feet per second, was then down loaded to a 1500 grain bullet weight at 800 feet per second. Still monstrous but only actually four thirds the calculated recoil of our largest handgun round. The S&W 500 with a 700 grain hardcast. The VDR similar in size to the Magnum Research BFR. Now of course it is impractical, and maybe absurd, but the character using them ain't in it for reason. The reason they choose these specifically is that they simply want to. They just like them, they get aroused by them. Physical limb replacement is out but the character might have nano-tech augmentations, it'd be a long shot though.
So to recap the actual question is; can such a gun, as described, work? Or would it be a bone breaker like Hellboy's Samaritan? The only real requirements to be considered working; that it fires, hits things reasonably accurately within forty yards, that it not tear itself apart, that it doesn't kill or maim operator.
Commenter points;
The character in question does have smaller handguns, just prefers these if possible.
Massive and unwieldy? Yes but we, in this universe, have the BFR and the VDR weight of ten pounds is loaded. Unloaded its 7.5 pounds which is two pounds heavier than the BFR. I can see this problem being dealt with by augmentation or training.
Chamber being about 4 inches long should keep most fingers safe.
[Answer]
You might be surprised to learn that even the full power version of this gun could be fired by an experienced shooter without physical augmentation.
It's all about gun design.
First, there's porting. This is a pair or symmetrical set of openings in the top of the barrel, near the muzzle (typically to either side of the front sight). Propellant gas, still under high pressure, exits from these openings just before and as the bullet exits the muzzle, and the resulting rocket thrust greatly reduces muzzle flip, which is a very large part of the equation in terms of controlling recoil in a hard-kicking handgun.
Second, there's mass. A big gun like this will be heavy anyway, but if no effort is made to lighten it (to ease carrying), or mass intentionally added (tungsten inserts in the frame, extra long, extra heavy barrel), every ounce left in the gun is soaking up recoil momentum and lowering the recoil velocity.
Third, there's grip design. Look a the grips on a BFR (designed for rounds as powerful as .45-70 Government). They're classic single action grip shape, a design that puts most of the recoil into raising the muzzle (opposed by the porting and mass of the gun), so the gun goes *up* when fired, instead of back into the shooter's face (as has been a demonstrated problem with .500 S&W in a double action revolver - sometimes even causing double firing when gun movement operates the trigger a second time).
Combine all three, and you wind up with an oversize BFR style single-action revolver that anyone who knows what to expect and is in good condition (with adult male upper body strength, at least) can fire safely. If they don't develop a horrible flinch the first few shots, there's no reason it couldn't be accurate, either, within its limits.
[Answer]
Yes
28mm revolvers exist they are just not practical weapons (~14lbs).
a 22mm would be almost identical to a 8guage shotgun shell, except it will have more powder.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/x4wdp.jpg)
**Hellboy's gun has relatively low power you don't want to copy it.**
The length of the cartridge also matters as much as the diameter, a wide short cartridge is not going to pack much punch. Hellboy's cartridges are wide but very short, I would not expect more punch than a large pistol or mid range shotgun.
**Your homebrewed cartridges are a bit better**, almost identical to a 8 gauge shotgun shell (21.21mm). Homemade 12gauge shotgun revolvers exist and weight around 11lbs, you can drop some weight by using better materials. note your real problem is you have a lot of wasted metal making a cylinder big enough for 6 large diameter rounds, the cylinder needs to be wide enough to fit them all at equal distance which makes for a very large diameter cylinder. That is a lot of wasted metal in the center of the cylinder, and that adds a lot of weight. That is why the largest handguns often only hold 5 rounds, it has a huge impact on weight.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KXfHP.jpg)
**But you could make your bullets a lot better**.
So how do you really take advantage of augmentation, use a necked round, you can drastically improve the power for similar recoil. What extreme can you get wit that. well the largest common rifle round is the .50bmg, is 12.7 X 99mm and packs significantly more punch than a an 8 gauge shotgun will.
A .50 bmg handgun also exists (see image) .50 bmg is necked rifle round and produces 65,000 psi (450,000 kPa) and 2-3000 foot pounds of force so a measly 1200 is no problem. Even hand made .50bmg revolvers exist but are comically heavy. A fireable single shot .50 bmg production handgun also exists, THUNDER 50 BMG, it weights 12lbs empty although a significant amount of its mass is recoil absorption.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/USady.jpg)
So in the end you are looking at something in the 10-13 lb range. could a normal human fire it without aid, no, not in any way reliable or combat useful. But an augmented human likely could you just need something to absorb recoil and carry the weight.
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# You Betcha
If we temporarily ignore the capacity of the wielder to carry the monster, you could weld a hand grip and stock to a Howitzer. Maybe only the Hulk could use it. But it would work just dandy.
So, having proven the premise is possible, let's focus on plausible. I give you:
***[Recoilless rifles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoilless_rifle)***
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> A recoilless rifle, recoilless launcher or recoilless gun, sometimes abbreviated "RR" or "RCL" (for ReCoilLess) is a type of lightweight artillery system or man-portable launcher that is designed to eject some form of countermass such as propellant gas from the rear of the weapon at the moment of firing, creating forward thrust that counteracts most of the weapon's recoil.
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Now, I know what you're thinking. "These are usually shoulder-mounted critters like anti-tank rockets because, well, the back-blast might cause mild skin irritation on the user's face." And you'd be completely correct. But I'm thinking that all we need is some kind of shield, right? Let's think *Logan's Run.*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2V1kQ.jpg)
*copyright MGM*
Having done it's work, the back-blast is directed harmlessly out of the user's way. Just because it has the potential to start forest fires shouldn't detract from the natural beauty and form of the weapon. Besides, who doesn't like a picture of Jenny Agutter?
*I'm going to leave the ability of the user to hold the weight of the weapon up to the OP. Frankly, I'd hate to hold it on some Evil Genius who's decided to start monologing. No matter how strong you are, that much weight would become uncomfortable mighty quickly. Isometrics, anyone?*
**Edit:** Daniel B brings up a good point. There's an out-of-manufacture class of weapons that could solve most if not all of your problems: the [Gyrojet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet).
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> The Gyrojet is a family of unique firearms developed in the 1960s named for the method of gyroscopically stabilizing its projectiles. Rather than inert bullets, Gyrojets fire small rockets called Microjets which have little recoil and do not require a heavy barrel or chamber to resist the pressure of the combustion gases. Velocity on leaving the tube was very low, but increased to around 1,250 feet per second (380 m/s) at 30 feet (9.1 m). The result is a very lightweight weapon.
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The Gyrojet is the realization of considerable sci-fi fodder, most notably from the *Buck Rogers* series of comics (1933) and books where the "rocket pistol" was a staple. I'm especially fond of my copy of Philip Francis Nowlan's *Amargeddon 2419 A.D.: The Seminal "Buck Rogers" Novel,*1 (1978) which has a parallel universe, disintergrator rays, and repulsar beams — *and doesn't waste one darn minute trying to explain any of them.* Oh, yeah....
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1 *Rendered nearly worthless to anyone but me due to the number of times I've read the book. Yes, I understand there's value in mint condition books — but the true value of a book is discovered by how worn the cover and pages are. Who cares about a book that's never read?*
[Answer]
I've crunched the numbers a bit, and I have to admit that both variants of the weapon are possible, although very unwieldy. What I don't like here is a narrative part - I just can't imagine someone developing such a revolver as a battlefield weapon.
So I've thought about some corrections. Say, we have an increase in human augmentation, robotics, etc. So there are targets that is very hard to take down. I can imagine a government agency developing a ".758 BMG" necked up wildcat of .50 BMG to deal with heavily armored augmented threats in urban environment. The main weapon it used in is a Barret-type rifle, bullpup, suppressed. The round is subsonic and, perhaps, frangible. It has a muzzle energy of about 14000 joules and delivers most of them to the target without overpenetration. It can be fired by non-augmented human operator as an antimateriel rifle, and by a non-augmented operator standing up. .758 BMG rifle is absolutely valid and can be a normal item in your world.
.758 revolver is an experimental crazy offshoot of this technology. It was envisioned as a sidearm for augmented operators, firing the same round. I'm not sure this weapon was ever accepted and mass-produced. It's just too crazy and unwieldy, with too short a barrel for the round it fires. But there can be a number of prototype examples.
For unaugmented human to use it, it needs severely underpowered rounds. And, to be honest, it sucks. Something like .50 Beowulf carbine would give you about the same power (<3000 joules) in much more comfortable and ergonomic package. And all those carbines are of themselves a compromise in trying to fit a big caliber bullet in short action. So it is very much a novelty gimmick and should be treated as such.
Another part that I don't like is that too underload this cartridge you need to leave A LOT of space in it empty. I'm not sure it is safe. My proposed solution was to make the original .758 cartridge caseless. Without brass it would be shorter - maybe around 3.5 inches as opposed to .50 BMG 5 inches. Then the character would be able to manufacture his own weaker cartridges with lighter bullets from cut down .50 BMG brass.
UPD: I kinda forgot your full-power round was supersonic, but IMO, when you go as heavy as 3000 grains, you can just make it subsonic. I envisioned ".758 Barret rifle" as a high-powered analogue to Russian 9x39 rifles, with heavy rounds, subsonic and suppressed, for urban usage.
[Answer]
I can think of 3 ways to solve this problem:
The first approach is to treat it more like a low calabre RPG and less like an actual bullet. Instead of an instantaneous combustion from a cartridge, making the rounds rocket propelled means that the shot accelerates over time significantly reducing the recoil at the moment of launch. 10lb anti-tank rounds can be fired such as to obtain nearly your desired speed within about 30 feet without creating bone breaking recoil. In contrast, a 19.25mm slug will be about 0.1-0.2lb so making a manageable projectile that can reach 800 ft/sec within inches of leaving your barrel should be pretty doable.
A second approach is to treat it like heavy artillery by using hydraulic recoil compensation. By mounting the barrel and firing assembly to a hydraulic track, you can distribute the recoil over time as the barrel and firing assembly moves backwards on the track.
A third approach is to make the slug an explosive round. Explosives are much less dense than lead; so, a 19.25mm explosive round would weight the same as a much smaller solid round; so, you would need a much smaller cartridge to get your shot up to speed.
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Absolutely. The trick is, **the bullet is a bomb, not a slug**. The bullet is a miniature artillery shell with its own destructive mechanism - [HEAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_anti-tank_warhead), bursting charge+shrapnel, etc.
**In fact, that's what *requires* the large bore** - shrinking an "active, fuzed\*" artillery shell down to 19mm is quite a challenge\*\*, and this is why modern fighter jets shoot 25 or 30mm rounds.
For Hellboy, this kind of destructive power makes sense given who he's fighting. It also makes it quite an achievement to make his own ammo - *the miniaturization*.
So the bullet itself is doing most of the heavy lifting - it would be deadly if you *handed it* to the enemy (presuming this delivery method allowed the fuze\* to operate normally).
What does that do for kickback? **The gun only needs to get the bullet to the destination**. The destruction doesn't depend on imparting a whole bunch of kinetic energy like a normal bullet. That means the launching charge can be smaller, meaning lower kickback. However the large caliber shell necessitates a rather large gun with a lot of mass, which would soak up kickback, making it not bad at all. Anyone who could lift the gun could shoot it.
When Hellboy says "it'll break your arm" he might be exaggerating, or might mean that he's *also* developed plain old kinetic-energy bullets with a lot of propellant. A bullet *that wide* would make no sense; surely it would be a [sabot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot).
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\* Do not edit. The mechanism which tells a bomb or shell when to detonate is called a fuZe. [Look it up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuze). A fuSe is something else.
\*\* Part of what makes fuzes a challenge is making them not detonate accidentally. For instance the 16" rounds from *Iowa* arm from a) 1000++ gees from firing, b) -8 gees from air resistance, ***and*** spin from the rifling. Only then, impact+time delay sets it off.
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In fact, such guns were actually made, for instance Colt's 10-gauge revolving shotgun: <https://www.forgottenweapons.com/colt-1855-10-gauge-revolving-shotgun-at-ria/>
(You may be confusing"revolver", which is a mechanism, with "pistol".)
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I'm current planning a story which includes a race of diminutive humanoid aliens, one of whom crash-lands on Earth. They're fully sentient, and have the same average intelligence level as humans. The other main difference from humans, besides their height, is that their lifespans are much shorter.
Using sols (Earth years) as a comparison: an average human reaches maturity around their mid-to-late teens, and has a life expectancy of 70-80 sols. An average member of the alien species reaches maturity at around 4 sols, and has a life expectancy of about 20. 30 is almost unheard of. The crash-landing alien is therefore *astonished* that the first human he runs into is 36 sols old.
This raises an interesting problem. 20 years isn't an awfully long time to do anything at all. If they spend the same number of sols in education as we do, they won't have much time to do anything *with* that education by the time they graduate. If they spend the same proportion of their lives in education as we do, that's about 3-4 sols, which is nowhere near enough time to actually learn a whole lot.
So I imagine, compared to humanity, these relative mayflies are going to find technological progress quite difficult. It won't be so much "standing on the shoulders of giants" as "balancing precariously at the top of a chain of fifty aliens, all standing on each others' shoulders". So I ask you: **could a species whose average livespan is only 20 years ever progress far enough to reach space?**
**You may assume the following:**
* By "reach space", I mean a program comparable to the Apollo missions - if they can get that far, I'll make the bold assumption that they will eventually reach interstellar travel.
* Their resources, planetary environment, and desire are all sufficient for space travel.
* Their discoveries are sufficiently documented to be remembered and built upon, as mankind's discoveries (generally) have been.
* The aliens do not have the means to artificially extend their lifespans (be it via DNA modification, cybernetic enhancement, or whatever).
* They do not have the assistance of other alien races who are trying to "uplift" them.
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I'm aware of [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59934/would-shortening-a-species-lifespan-increase-the-speed-of-technological-advances), but there, the "shorter lifespan" is that of humanity. I'm going 3-4 times shorter than that, and I want to know how *far* they could progress, not how fast.
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We waste a lot of time repeating things to children without the maturity to care. Most of school maths could be taught in a year by skipping all that repetition. Most of the rules of grammar are slightly pointlessly rigid. A slightly dystopian society would allow early testing of abilities to push people directly into a specialist career rather a more general education and freedom to choose.
A few upgrades on their ability to learn and consciously recall information without needing as much repetition then they could easily compress at least our basic first 18 years education into no more than 3. Meaning they'd be 5-6 years old on completing higher education. 10 years of working life and a low tolerance for bureaucracy would even leave them with some retirement time.
If we consider the rate of technological progress during WWII, a period when certain technologies got the full focus of certain governments. Replace the 4-5 year funding cycle with something that moved fast enough for the necessary pace of their society. They would feel like they truly were standing on the shoulders of the slightly taller members of the previous generation as they went into space.
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## Rapid evolution in a harsh climate and environment
They'd have to reach maturity quite early on, and assuming their cognitive abilities are similar to humans (same learning speed, same memory on average), most of those who can specialize in one domain will die long before they can sufficiently advance on that. Let's say maturity is reached at age 5 (equivalent to human age 20), they'd have ~15 years on average for that. For humans it takes up to a long lifetime in order to provide something innovative to society, and only the least of us are capable to even do so. If you reduce that number even more, the chances get even worse.
However, the speed of evolution for that species is strongly boosted, meaning the gene pool can adapt much faster than that of humans. The outcome could be that the average intelligence *can* increase a lot quicker along with other traits. Be reminded, genetic adaptation devoid of mere conditions of survival is mostly subject to reproduction - thus also a matter of societal circumstances. But, it's genetic adaptation, meaning intelligence and industriousness have to be evolutionarily preferable - or to be more precise: Females have to prefer to reproduce with males with high values in the metrics of such traits. Peacefulness (as of non-violent behavior) would be an advantage as well, given that "trust" is an extraordinarily important commodity in a society.
Naturally, environments significantly contribute to shape species' course of genes. Harsher conditions like having a wildly alternating yearly climate with a very cold season is a good requirement. Surviving such conditions requires thinking ahead in time, planning and the ability to defer gratification, all the while there are 2-3 seasons in which productivity can flourish. What could be helpful is that all the while they adapted to that environment, the climate would have to continue to become more and more harsh, which would raise the necessity for all the traits mentioned even more in order to pursue better technology to compensate. Predators, which require cooperation and modern weaponry may also be quite helpful in order to continually cull the "weak," but to also lay more emphasize to cooperation in general (you wouldn't want them to live too isolated).
At this point we are talking about a theoretical, evolutionary super-forge. But that would be necessary to counteract the disadvantages of short lifespans. The result *can* be that of a species way more advanced than humans themselves. However, they couldn't reach the mastery, experience and general education humans can achieve. So it's not *that* clear how both species would compare.
## The education system
For the education system itself - there is no time to waste. A method would establish which would educate children and students in a quite narrow domains intensively without providing more than a minimum of education in other areas. Ambitions, intelligence and talents of children would be measured quite rapidly - IQ tests would solve most of that, the rest is up to any combination of choice, randomness or continuing to work in the domain of one's parents.
How education works in particular is up to you. It would be certainly different from our education systems. If governments are involved too much, well... count that in as a factor of quality degradation. But I assume it wouldn't be a monoculture for the entire species, just as humans don't have either - neither through time or space.
## Conclusion
It's not easy, but if you shape the environment and culture in which they evolved over long periods of time correctly, it can become quite plausible that your species can advance technologically and reach space. I bet most of them would talk and think as fast as Ben Shapiro. But be reminded, their average IQ would *have* to be significantly higher than that of humans in order to compensate for their shorter lifespans, probably around 130 [compared with what we have today](https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country). That said, those participating in space exploration and travel are likely those with above their average intelligence, ranging among the best in their domains of work, who are also tested to have top mental and health conditions - just as we select our astronauts.
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There a few places where you can gain time to do stuff in a very short life :
* As you said, faster maturation. They are as aware at 4 than we are at twenty.
* No mind degeneration. They die to some organ failure but their minds are very sharp to the end (so you get a full 16 years of smartness).
* Better knowledge transmission. They could have a way (maybe biological) to transfer memory from an individual to another, or maybe they just have a better memory altogether. Memory is not intelligence, they could still make as much errors as anybody and be close minded to humans.
* Hive minds. Each individual control several bodies that can do simultaneous tasks. A normal individual could control four or five bodies at the same. A few to produce and the rest to study (your wandering alien just happened to have lost his other bodies, bad luck)
* They don't sleep. Their short lives are one third more productive than ours.
* They have no fun. They just work all day and don't really need to pause that much.
If you combine two or three of these propositions, I think you can get an interesting species that would be able to evolve very fast.
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By reaching maturity at 4 Sols this isn't actually too bad, they have 16 years of maturity per generation, which would be equivalent to all humans dying at 36.
Yes 36 isn't super-old, but it's old enough to have done significant amounts of work.
They would need to develop very efficient ways to teach and propagate knowledge from one generation to another and would most likely tend to specialize. Rather than knowing a little thing about everything they would tend to be experts in one field.
You may well see master-apprenticeship type structures form as well where ongoing work gets handed down from one scientist to another. For example a physicist may train up a number of students, then select one to be their apprentice. The two would then work together closely for ten years until the elder retired whereupon the new one would train up their own apprentice so you always have (at least) two people working on every important project.
They commonly say it takes a human ten years to master something, well that gives these aliens time to apply that mastery even if it takes them just as long as humans...
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I think this would be do-able - it might take them a bit longer (in terms of generations certainly!) but it would be do-able, partly because I'd anticipate such a society adapting to their limitations and partly you could do some relatively minor biological/neurological tweaks.
**Societal**
Awareness of mortality - A race that is aware of their average lifespan can plan for what happens after an individual died - humans already do this: finding ways to efficiently record information so that the next generation aren't beginning from scratch is a good example. Once they started getting into more and more complex areas of science and thought that were taking longer than the productive lifespan to deal with I imagine they would have prioritized this aspect heavily. They are also likely to have focused heavily on time-saving technologies, perhaps sooner than we did. There are things that we developed post-Apollo that would have sped the process up (advances in computing, knowledge-sharing etc), have those developed first and the job of getting to space is much less time intensive.
Procrastination - We humans procrastinate *alot*, think about your average undergraduate university course (~3 years), it's really **not** three years of full-time work. Were it not for the cultural expectation of there being a large amount of time spent having fun at university you could do a bachelors degree in two years *easily*. We just have no need - because we have the time and we know it.
**Biological**
Increased neural plasticity - while not binary on-or-off the human brain's ability to form new new neural pathways and learn things drops significantly relatively early in our lifespan (somewhere between 20-25 years old). Keep the alien brains highly elastic until they die and they will be able to get more learning and development done.
Increased maturation rate - you've already alluded to this but I think you missed one of the key benefits, if offspring are mature in just four years that means that the parents are going to have to spend significantly less time looking after them and raising them. Freeing them to return to a more complete focus on their "work" sooner.
Increased decline rate - make the same true at the other end of the scale as well, while humans may live to 79 years on average most start to experience noticeable health decline much sooner, limiting our effectiveness in the latter stages of life (and average retirement age is between 59-70 so at least 9 years of that aren't really counted for things like, say, Apollo programs). We've managed to extend human life expectancy significantly over the last few decades (the US male average was 66 when Apollo landed us on the moon!) but we haven't solved the general issue of decline in old age. If your Huminis can remain effective and efficient up untill say a few weeks or months before death that will help.
Reduced need for sleep - humans generally need 6-8 hours out of every 24 to be healthy, if your aliens can do the same on say 1-2 hours out of 24 then over a 20 year life span they have 36,500-43,800 extra hours in that 20 years than we do *that's another 4.2-5 years* they are effectively getting for "free"
Smaller size = smaller travel distances - humans like a lot of personal space for living in and so on. Even if the Huminis want proportionally the same the actual physical distances are going to be much shorter, but physics doesn't really *care* about that - if they make a car or train that goes at 50 mph but the distance they need to commute to work is say 20 miles *less* than an equivilant human they are going to get there sooner. Spending less time moving from place A - place B would free up a hell of a lot of time that can be better utilised for achieving things.
Smaller size = lower mass to lift to space - The nature of the rocket equation means that a massive barrier to human spaceflight has been that we need to lift massive amounts of mass up to space (the spacecraft needs to be big enough for say 3 humans and humans are bigger = more mass, the humans need more oxygen, food, etc = more mass) and the bigger the mass you need to lift the more complex the engineering challenge is in doing so. And a simpler engineering challenge can usually be resolved in less time.
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Lots of good answers here – just wanted to add something I think was missed.
**For most of human history, education didn't take 18 (or 22!) years.**
Up until the mid-20th century, most people learned to read *at best* and stopped there. The brightest were more or less able to start adding to human knowledge shortly after that. As a recovering mathematician, I can give you tons of examples of these types of folks: Gauss, Galois, Riemann, Ramanujan, Noether, Lovelace, Cauchy, Poincare... all of them made significant contributions to mathematics/physics before their 30th birthday (and some, like Gauss and Cauchy, were child geniuses). And there are tons of other examples.
So, maybe your civilization would require a longer time to get to the same point, since you might need more of those child geniuses and you'd miss out on late-life geniuses like Euler, but it could still certainly be done.
The only reason we have schooling for so long is that *so much has been discovered*. And this isn't even getting into all the critiques of our out-moded education system (which is based on a system that wanted to have interchangeable workers in a pre-computer society). If your civilization can avoid falling into that trap, they can get people making discoveries earlier.
Another aspect is how discoveries tended to get made 200 years ago vs. now. Something that annoyed me when learning math in school was how many different things were named after the same people, and, frankly, how simple they seemed. They had the advantage that there were *so many things to discover* and figuring out one kinda lead to the next.
The vast majority of the major advances can be made by people early in life; it's only once there's a ton to build on that you start having trouble. I suspect your civ will have a 'long tail' of small amounts of progress after a certain point.
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I think the solution would be for the aliens to be have knowledge genetically encoded and passed from parents to offspring. For example, the offspring of two mathematicians might be born hard-wired for maths.
The disadvantage of such an approach is that offspring are less capable of adapting to changes in their environment during their lifetimes, but here's the thing: if you live for a very short time, the degree of change in your environment is proportionally less.
Crash landing on an alien planet would probably be traumatic for such creatures, but hey, that can be part of the plot line.
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**Yes.**
One of course needs a way to maintain knowledge, written, mind sharing, or otherwise.
They need to have curiosity and a desire for space travel.
**Culture**
One big piece that limited our progress was cultures that rejected advances because they went against an established orthodoxy, religious, scientific, etc. This still happens even today.
Many scientists were shunned or didn't publish their work due to potential backlash by 'the establishment'. Newton for example, didn't publish his work on calculus right away fearing criticism. Galileo was persecuted for his research.
If our culture allowed a free exchange of ideas without egos or orthodoxy, scientific progress would have been much quicker on Earth.
As to the short age, we've had many progeny that contributed to our advancement before the age of 20. So even if humans only had a 20 year lifetime, we still would have eventually gotten to space. If your aliens mature sooner and can learn and maintain their base knowledge I do believe it would be inevitable for them to invent the technology required for space travel.
The government or institutions would have to make it a priority and steer their gifted individuals towards that end goal. That's another big if. They might have other priorities, improving life span for example.
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**What kind of 'Intelligence'**
The question specifies that the aliens have "the same average intelligence level as humans", but there are many aspects to the concept of "intelligence". I doubt there is a consensus in the scientific community regarding the full list of aspects that constitute "intelligence". And among humans, the distribution of those various aspects to individuals is wildly uneven.
Given the remarkable variation possible between one random "average human" and another, even assuming the overall "intelligence" is the same, two humans can have remarkably different aspects of intelligence. For example, one might be phenomenal at rote memorization, while the other is superb at performing mathematical calculations. All else being equal, those two individuals might be said to be of the same "average" intelligence, overall.
Now to take that concept, and transfer it to an alien species in a way that allows them to reach spacefaring technological levels without exceeding "average" intelligence, all you need to do is pick and choose which of those intelligence aspects are more common among those aliens, compared to humans.
Mathematics, engineering, logic, will be needed for the sheer ability to achieve space flight technology. Remarkably strong memory will make sure they retain any knowledge they get in their short lifespans. Creativity and imagination will need to be present, to inspire the desire to reach for the stars in the first place, but could be relatively surpressed compared to human levels, and even less artistic and abstract thinking traits to balance it out to "average".
So you have an "average" level of intelligence by improving some aspects, and reducing others. Improve the ones needed for the goals of the story, and keep them average by reducing whatever is left over.
The exact list of attributes can be decided by the needs of the story, as well as just how far imbalanced they really need to be.
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**We're not that slow**
Countless examples from e.g. music, (e-)sports, science and engineering show that a talented and motivated human child, in a suitable environment, is quite able to compete with adult professionals in a specific field, and even advance the field as a whole. This will, of course, not be possible for *every* child, but early exposure and a cycle of positive reinforcement can help development, and, perhaps more importantly, will allow you to identify the most gifted individuals and place them in a project that fits, and will benefit from, their abilities.
**Culture plays a big role**
Your education system should probably focus more on individual growth and practical experience than conformity and "one size fits all" packages. Learning *and practicing* a profession should go hand in hand with (and be tightly coupled to) "basics" like culture, language and math. Yes, that means that your active workers' skills will vary wildly, but it'll also lead to a higher average aptitude and a cultural know-how that will help mitigate this.
Your bus factor will, by necessity, be kept high. Being "that guy" who jumps ship and leaves behind an undocumented mess that necessitates a lengthy training period for their replacement might be a ciminal offense.
One thing that an individual of your species will lack, compared to humans, is breadth of experience. They will be very smart and intuitive about their chosen profession and whatever their society cares most about, but appear a bit clumsy and naive when it comes to things outside their area of expertise, roughly comparable to how people with Asperger's are often portrayed.
**Lifespan isn't everything**
While making progress at the speed we do today requires the relative luxury of having food readily available and the internet at our fingertips, a lot of humanity's advances have happened in a time where the average life expectancy was closer to 30 than to 80 (although, admittedly, mostly due to a higher child mortality rate), and mere survival was hard work. It is generally accepted that agriculture was instrumental in buying us the "leisure time" to develop into a specialist society.
You could make this easier for your aliens. In general, smaller species tend to be more calorie-efficient, so if they found an ecological niche that provides a suitable (for Earth biology: protein-rich) diet without them having to go toe to toe with larger predators, that might outweigh the lifespan disadvantage. Perhaps they are exceptionally nimble, or possess very acute senses, allowing them to traverse areas that are "off limits" to other species? Perhaps they're highly social and instinctively able to organize in much bigger groups than the small-ish tribes humans had? All of these traits also promote the development of intelligence.
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It depends on their culture.
(I'm assuming they've reached a society more or less like ours (without space programs, of course)).
**Guilds**
They are divided in guilds that put together aliens with the same area of interest, like guild of chemistry, guild of politics, guild of art, of history, etc.
**Another model of schooling**
They don't spend years studying everything as we do in school, but instead, they focus on how they are going to contribute to society.
We humans divide our society by making each individual specializing on a career. The difference between us and them is that we humans spend too much time in entertainment, while they focus on their choice (groups of scientists, historians, politicians, etc).
Let's say that, instead of learning math, english, science, art, history, etc, etc, etc. in school, they learn they the very basics (language?) and focus on what they need. Of course historians and politicians could lead them to disaster, but that's not the topic here.
**Practical examples**
* Alien borns;
* Spends a year learning basics (4 to 5?);
* Starts studying, let's say, chemistry (We could put 8~10 sols here);
* He/She joins a scientist group (Guild of Chemistry) focusing on a new project called Alienpollo Project;
* When he/she achieves an advanced age (16?), he/she retires and starts lecturing to young aliens.
**Friendship with humans?**
You didn't mention if they have anything with the humans (or any other species).
If this is a possibility, they can reach space.
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If putting your question into grotesque maximum, it sounds like "Have mosquitoes any chance to reach outer space". However, despite its provoking influence, actual answer is "it doesn't relate to a life length".
Ability to progress as a society is more about mental development speed, not about education amount. As an example, we can take us, human race: our traditional society reached outer space, invented StackOverflow and all that cellphones; however some aborigine tribes still stick with basic skills from stone age, not more. So, the faster is a particular specimen goes through it mental development, the more chances it could positively affect next generations, by both improved genetics and shared skills.
So, final answer is "yes".
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As an interesting aside, it's worth mentioning that, at certain points in history, humans have had a similar lifespan to what you're proposing.
For example, the average life expectancy from birth in classical Rome was just [25 years old](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time), and their society helped to shape the modern world, so I don't think a short life span precludes anything you're stating in your question.
Perhaps the life expectancy of your aliens will change over time, as the environmental factors they are exposed to change (such as being on a different planet).
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All our mammalian friends are replaced by domesticated giant insects! Man's best friend are now dog-sized [hissing cockroaches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_hissing_cockroach), [fireflies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly) are lighting our houses and [harvestmen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opiliones) are used for transport. Consider present day technology, no magic - but instead of our most common mammalian companions, I'm looking for giant sized insects to fill their roles. **Do not consider feasibility of this increase in size** - for all that matters insects just happen to grow as big as mammals.
Cattle is used for meat and milk production and as draught animals. Which species of insects, given a boost in size and several thousand years of domestication, could replace them? Would it be more than one? They don't have to produce real milk, but some other digestible fluid would be cool!
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I'm surprised that nobody has brought up [honeypot ants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_ant).
They are social (unlike most insects), which, given breeding and domestication can be used by humans similarly to the way we use domestic animals inherent socialization instincts (dogs-packs, horses-herds, etc) by substituting humans for the instinctual social group. Honeypot ants are literally walking food containers. I could see these becoming something similar to a milk-cow easily.
Another very obvious choice is bees! We already DO domesticate and use bees in agriculture. There is a very ancient tradition of animal husbandry with bees. Basically, giant bees being used to help humans is a natural choice (once again, notice how we usually co-opt instinctively *social* animals?) I have no idea how the difficulties of the Square Cube law would apply to a gigantic *flying* insect, but it is entirely possible that if super sized bees were too weak to fly, they could get to food sources efficiently enough by just running. Perhaps bees would even be bred to minimize the stinger to the point of uselessness and kept as pets! (say, dog sized) Or, perhaps the stinger is retained, and that is the POINT (yuk yuk) and they would take the place of guard dogs.
Grasshoppers (and variants like locusts) are already traditional food sources going back to antiquity. They have more meat on their bodies proportionally than something like a cockroach or beetle, making them more efficient as a meat-animal. They also eat grass, so that's a pretty natural replacement for beef cattle. Once again, they tend to exhibit flocking behavior, which is useful when ranching because it keeps your herd together (one more time: we tend to domesticate *social* animals historically).
Another insect with a higher proportion of meat over something like a beetle is the potato bug. Putting aside it's utterly hideous appearance, potato bugs would be a pretty good meat animal as well.
Beetles do make sense for work like pulling things, though the solitary instincts and lack of brainpower might be downsides.
One thing to keep in mind: when raising a giant bug for food purposes, you don't need to go through the entire life-cycle. Many insects have a VERY useful "grub" or larval phase where they are pretty much helpless, soft, composed of basically nothing but protein, and mostly immobile. Bug ranchers would probably grow batches of insects to late larval stage, then slaughter them before they became full-grown insects with lots of tough exoskeleton that makes butchering much harder. Some ant species will keep other types of bugs as larva in a similar way, rather like the way we keep cattle.
Finally, don't overlook termites! Giant termites might actually be pretty darn useful. Imagine specially bred huge termites excreting natural concrete to build an overpass or even a high-rise! Obviously, this would take a LOT of careful oversight, control, and "training" (whatever that means for an insect), but there are some interesting possibilities. How about gigantic leaf-cutter ants clearing a path for a road? Obviously, the strength of a termite's saliva (or whatever it is they use to glue sand together) isn't going to increase, so a large building would take steel supports, etc, but natural termites and some ant species will make free-standing towers up to 30 feet tall.
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Giant [Ant Cows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid) to replace Human Cows
The aphid (otherwise known as Ant Cow) is a small insect that feeds on plant sap and secretes a sweet nectar (called honeydew).
Certain species are actually domesticated by ants. The ants herd them and protect them from predators, harvesting the honeydew for food.
Upscale the aphids and make the honeydew nutritious to humans and you have your dairy cow replacement, providing meat and "milk". They are already domesticated, so one can pretty much skip that step.
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[Futurama has a 'Buggalo', similar to what you're looking for.](http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Buggalo)
Beetles! There are many species of Beetles, some of them don't dig into the earth like other animals. It would make the farmers job hard looking underground for cattle. Decent body/meat ratio. Some beetle species even have a sense of parental care, making the farmers job easier. They are peaceful, don't fight each other and all they do is eat. They are omnivores. Better body armour than the average insect is making them more durable.
A problem could be the hive mind. Someday all cattle of a farmer could escape at the same time.
Flying could be a problem, but you can cut the wings.
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I'm not sure how pleasant it would be to drink (or what kind of excretion it is...) but aphids are already farmed and 'milked' for honeydew by ants and ladybirds (and possibly other insects) so they might make decent cow replacements.
From what I can tell it's mostly a sugar syrup though, so not at all analogous to milk as far as things like health benefits are concerned. But I doubt any insect is really going to produce something like milk which is a particularly mammalian trait.
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Cockroaches (more specifically Diploptera punctate) will be your best bet.
* They're not picky about their food and eat things that will typically
already be on your farm.
* Insect meat will probably all taste the
same so who cares.
* They breed quite fast so you can get lots of meat without having to have too many breeders
* Since you can get a lot of them, just use more than one as beasts of burden
* Most importantly: they [milk](http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-show-why-we-should-all-start-drinking-cockroach-milk)
However this is ignoring the fact that one of the reasons for cows is that they will revitalize the soil where they are grazing, which can then be reused for crop. Mayhaps you would need another type of insect for that functions, one that would feed on grass perhaps.
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Probably an insect in the grub stage, bred to grow very large, would fit the bill. Already, the palm beetle grub is a [delicacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhynchophorus_ferrugineus#Culinary_uses) in the tropical places where it's found. Wikipedia only lists Asia and Africa, but it's also popular in the [Amazon](http://perufood.blogspot.com/2008/08/amazonian-grub-so-suri.html).
If you do an image search for [palm weevil larvae](https://www.google.com/search?q=palm%20weevil%20larvae%20peru&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjepcaSpKLTAhWZ0YMKHUJiCyAQ_AUIBigB&biw=1680&bih=906#tbm=isch&q=palm%20weevil%20larvae%20), you will find images that mostly depict them cooked and prepared for eating. Not only are they nutritious, they are also tasty:
>
> Sago grubs have been described as creamy tasting when raw, and like
> bacon or meat when cooked.
>
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The larval form of insects is good to use as a food source, since biologically, their drive is to store up fat to burn later when they metamorphose into their adult form. If you harvest them in adult form, they've already used up that energy in metamorphosis.
Palm Weevil grubs would be a good candidate, because all they need for grazing is basically sawdust, palm wood stock, etc.
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The Onthphagus Taurus species of Horned Dung Beetle is according to research one of the strongest insects in the world.
The beetle was found to be able to pull 1,141 times its own body weight.
If we are going down the route that insects are around the same size as 'pack' animals, that would work out to be one pretty strong beetle.
As for milking, I’m sure you can find something else to drink that is much more beneficial... like water.
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## Lice, Bugs and More!
*For all your Pet Insects needs and more!*
Welcome to our new store full of pets and miniature livestock! I can see you know your hissing cockroaches, fireflies and harvestmen. Please take a drink and I will talk you through a small part of our selection.
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## Pets
First we have the smaller ones for in the house. Are you looking to keep the lice in check? Look no further then our lovely [Ladybugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccinellidae), they will hunt on all kinds of little critters.
Are you more the cuddling kind? I can really recommend our [Wolf Spiders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_spider). Although not strictly insects, they are lovely. And quite smart. You can play fetch with them. And you can keep them in groups. Just look at these little ones! Cute aren't they?
If these are to small for you, get a loving [tarantula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantula). These are just big balls of cuddles. Very good with little children. But beware of strangers, they can be very protective of their adoptive family.
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## Miniature Cattle
We all know and love the big worker ants in the fields. But did you know there are several miniature species available?
If you want to keep your garden in shape, these mini-bees are a charm. Only half a meter high. They have been bred without wings, but they are still working nicely! And as always, they give some very sweet honey.
Of course there are several species of ants here. But I don't like them very much. To thin for my liking.
Then are the herds of Beetles. Very docile, but beware of where you keep them, they will eat anything. Can be kept indoors, with a little training they are house broken. Hey, stop munching on my coat!
And last not least my favourite: the mini-bumble bees. Just look at these galls! With their soft hairs and big eyes! And they make such good pets as well! I have a little hive of them at home :) you got to make sure you have a sturdy interior, they bumble, you see. But they are so sweet! Mine cuddle up with me at night, its just one big bundle of warmth!
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So, is there one you like in particular? Oh, good choice with the Wolf Spider! Do you have a walking line and food? Oh, let me show you some. I really like this one, it colours nicely with this little one. And look, it has a very smart feature so you can easily attach it to your thorax. This way to pay please.
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[Question]
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Can the programming of simple nanobots randomly change to create a similar effect as mutations in DNA?
This question has a very similar idea as I wanted, although in this case the nanobots are capable of upgrading themselves: [Nanobots Ecosystem, is it possible?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13213/nanobots-ecosystem-is-it-possible)
For my story I am wondering what could cause the self-replicating process for some of the nanobots to go wrong and as with evolution some of these changes will not be beneficial but for others it will and could lead to more and more complex robots, given enough time.
Is this possible that the programming for self-replication can randomly create different results?
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Everyone who has studied computer science in general, and artificial intelligence in particular, will know about a kind of algorithm called
# [Genetic algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm)
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> In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to generate high-quality solutions to optimization and search problems by relying on biologically inspired operators such as mutation, crossover and selection.[1](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l7TtT.jpg) John Holland introduced genetic algorithms in 1960 based on the concept of Darwin’s theory of evolution; his student David E. Goldberg further extended GA in 1989.
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This appropriates genetics and evolution to the max. Look at the terms used in this field.
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> In a genetic algorithm, a population of candidate solutions (called individuals, creatures, or phenotypes) to an optimization problem is evolved toward better solutions. Each candidate solution has a set of properties (its chromosomes or genotype) which can be mutated and altered; traditionally, solutions are represented in binary as strings of 0s and 1s, but other encodings are also possible.
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> The evolution usually starts from a population of randomly generated individuals, and is an iterative process, with the population in each iteration called a generation. In each generation, the fitness of every individual in the population is evaluated; the fitness is usually the value of the objective function in the optimization problem being solved. The more fit individuals are stochastically selected from the current population, and each individual's genome is modified (recombined and possibly randomly mutated) to form a new generation. The new generation of candidate solutions is then used in the next iteration of the algorithm. Commonly, the algorithm terminates when either a maximum number of generations has been produced, or a satisfactory fitness level has been reached for the population.
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> A typical genetic algorithm requires:
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> * a genetic representation of the solution domain,
> * a fitness function to evaluate the solution domain.
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So if your nanobots were designed with this in mind, they may keep evolving on their own.
If you delve deep into genetic algorithms, you will see that they provide weird solutions to common problems... Which tend to be the most efficient solutions, and which we humans would hardly think of on our own. For example, this antenna:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l7TtT.jpg)
It appears in the wiki article called [Evolved antenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna) and the description for the image says this:
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> The 2006 NASA ST5 spacecraft antenna. This complicated shape was found by an evolutionary computer design program to create the best radiation pattern.
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So if your nanobots are programmed with genetic algorithms, their shapes might be irrecognizable from generation to generation. If survival is the fitness function, they will become very tough to deal with.
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Yes, if they are designed to do this. Evolutionary progress is the whole point of genetic algorithms. Your nanobots may be designed as a physical instance of this type of thing.
There is a real-life project called subCULTron which is building an underwater robot ecosystem with the intention that the robots in different areas will develop their own cultures in response to the environment. Their test zone is in the Venice lagoon.
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I don't know how old are you and if you can relate to what I am about to tell, but I am old enough to have seen the growth of the internet and the expansion of computers.
In the days of the floppy disks (and even earlier with the "pizza" sized 8 inches disks) it was common that some error appeared on the disk during the writing process or while the disk was stored, corrupting the content of the files there stored.
Those errors are the mutations you are looking for: most of them will make the file unusable, but once in a while the mutation will make sense.
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Yes. Random bit-flips often occur in real computer systems, even today. Usually they are bad.
In all computer memory there always has a percentage chance of each memory cell changing from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0.
a) The probability of memory related bit-flips occuring increases exponentially with temperature
b) The probability of a bit flip increases with with exposure to radiation. Even on the earth there is always some radiation. In space a lot more. In fact its so common in space environments that digital logic is often designed redundantly to detect and (if possible) correct those errors.
The chances of long strings of bits randomly flipping into useful sequences is astronomically small, so don't count on that happening.
But if the code is designed so that it is broken into a set of useful functions that call each-other then you can get interesting behavior from even one bit flip.
For example a bit flip in a jump instruction could cause large sequences of useful code to be executed at a different point than originally intended.
Here is an example of a sequence of machine codes that leads to a plausable beneficial mutation.
The nano-bot contains a main code loop that happens to be on lines 1-500.
On line 501 there is a routine (at memory address 501) that checks for damage and initiates repairs.
Suppose that the repair routine was normally called once per day (which may have been OK).
Now lets suppose that the nano-bots are now continually exposed to radiation, most of them experience lots of bit flips, and many go non-functional.
Lets assume that the radiation causes the fourth bit on line 500 to flip from 0 to 1.
So now instead of jumping back to the start of the main loop, the code just keeps going to line 501.
This would cause the error checking routine to execute every iteration of the main loop rather than once per day.
As a result this nano-bot is able to survive the radiation.
MAIN\_LOOP:
1: 0011 0101 //some stuff
2: 1111 0001 //some stuff
3: 1101 0001 //some stuff
4: 1111 0111 //some stuff
....
500: 1110 0000 //instruction that jumps back to main loop
PERFORM\_INTERNAL\_REPAIRS:
501: 1100 1001
502: 1110 1011
...
600: 1110 0000 //instruction that jumps back to main loop
[Answer]
As modern software would utilize error checking I'd say no random mutation would occur on its own. A single bit flipped due to whatever reason could cause fatal results or do basically nothing to a machine/software. "Physical" measures like [ECC memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory), and software solutions like [checksums](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum) are commonplace.
I see two options here:
1. They are designed to evolve.
I'm no expert on AI technology so I'm ignorant about AIs limitations but as we are not even close to creating evolving nanobots with modern technology and AI technology is in its infancy it would not be too much of a stretch to simply say that your nanobots do utilize AI to determine new 'evolutionary' paths.
2. Nanobots have to fight other nanobots
In a full out warfare against other nanobots I could imagine some errors accumulating. Nanobots would probably have reasons to change their combat strategy on a physical level (prompting them to change) but they would also engage on a software level trying to hack each other. With a limit on time (security measures take some time), a constant physical and software barrage of enemies trying to utilize every weakness and certain random events (radiation, rapid changing magnetic fields, etc) I could definitely see the nanobots undergoing a DNA like change over time.
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Possible, yes. But how likely it is depends on various conditions. And those conditions depend on how you consider the question of nanobots evolving.
Specifically you have three obvious angles to think about this. You can consider individual nanobots acquiring new properties. You can consider the cloud of nanobots acquiring new emergent properties as a group. Or you can consider the entire environment of the nanobots which includes all the support infrastructure and even the human programmers.
**On a nanobot level** this is only possible if the nanobots were designed to adapt. Simple self-replication and self-repair are not enough. The method used to code the nanobots has to have the sufficient flexibility and modularity to actually enable the potential new properties.
This would actually be possible. DNA used to code living cells gives as a template we can use. The first important factor is that DNA is error tolerant via redundancy. This allows errors to accumulate without killing the cell until they eventually can be interpreted as something functional. The second factor is that the system must have the flexibility to interpret random garbage as valid programming otherwise the emergent code will be simply ignored or deleted.
This is actually a real possibility. It would allow us to replicate the adaptability of real world bacteria with their ability to evolve and exchange the "code modules" for emergent adaptations.
I still consider this unlikely. We are more likely to be scared of the possibility of somebody hacking the actual bacteria than to want to create artificial ones that could be hacked by terrorists or spies. So I'd expect nanobot coding to be fairly static, strictly validated and authenticated and designed to deal with errors via reinstalling the code from a valid copy.
**On the "cloud" level** this seems more likely. We reasonably would want our nanobots to have some adaptability to changing environment and giving them emergent social adaptability similar to what social insects have would be fairly reasonable choice. We would still be able to set strict security constraint via the fixed coding of the individual nanobots but the ability of the cloud as a group to adapt its cooperation would save us the effort of trying to predict and code for all the weird corner cases.
You could fairly argue this would be safer than a more fixed coding scheme that would be vulnerable to failing in unpredictable and potentially disastrous ways when the design parameters the developers expected are not met.
Even so I would still expect people to prefer using traditional approach of designing the nanobots to fail in safe manner when design parameters are not met.
**On the environment level** evolution via accumulation of random errors is something that already happens. Calling bugs "unintended features" is not just a joke. Behaviour caused by an coding error is just as much a feature of the system as the stuff you coded for.
It is much less likely to be useful than actual design and usually is simply fixed. But occasionally the behaviour is useful or close enough to useful that it results in a new feature being coded based on the bug.
This is very similar to how accumulated errors can result in new features in biological evolution.
Fundamentally this is just a special case of the normal loop used in agile programming. And in fact agile programming will handle feedback on "unintended features" just as well as it handles the unexpected feedback on designed features.
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Other people have mentioned genetic algos so I'll go into another similar example and why evolving programs were so useful in computer vision.
Back in the day the US postal service wanted to start automating mail sorting. Of course, in order to do so you have to be able to have computers detect numbers. That might not sound too hard, certainly much easier than detecting whether a picture has a cat or not, but there's still a problem: people write numbers in a LOT of different ways.
So the stats/comp sci people went at the problem with the standard algos of the day -- random forest, multinomial regression, etc. These sorts of algos were decent, about 60-70% accurate which is still very good accuracy considering random guessing would have you be about 10% accurate. But they all still had a problem, you have to have someone program the variables you use to make the guess. So you had people coming up with concepts like 'how many edges' 'is there a curved line' and so on. This really only gets you so far because of the problem discussed previously.
The researchers tried many approaches and finally realized something -- what if the algorithm could program its own variable? And this is why neural networks skyrocketed in popularity (also over time computing resources got cheap enough to actually make them an option): with neural nets the algo, in part, programs itself! That is, instead of using variables designed by people, it designs its own variables based on the intensities of each pixel in the picture it is looking at. Of course it's a bit more complicated but that approach led to accuracy > 95% and to the point where they are better than humans at number id.
This concept is extensible far beyond simple number id, it's also how autonomous cars learn to drive. Nobody is sitting there and programming the car to do this if that happens, it teaches itself based on examples from both real life driving and simulation data obtained from what are essentially video games.
EDIT: In fact, the way they work is often not obvious at all, to the point where they are often called 'black boxes'. Figuring out why a NN makes a particular decision is a non-trivial lengthy process.
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I'm going to raise a few points about *unplanned* mutations.
**"Cosmic rays"**
These are dreaded\* radiation coming from the Sun or elsewhere that occasionally flip a bit in some computer memory. But it's a catchall term for bit flips that occur due to power fluctuations, dust, hardware imperfections, radioactive decay, and so on.
\* by large-scale IT infrastructure people
**Mechanical forces**
A microbe or random molecule, perhaps a fragment broken off another nanobot, could get in the way of the replication hardware and alter the physical result. This could result in a deformation or hybrid or something. In particular, if the replication hardware of the new bot is unusual then it will create a whole line of altered bots.
Also, the bots need to harvest material from their environment and if something *looks* like copper but has traces of silver, it may operate differently.
**Trillions of bots**
They're tiny, they replicate, so if there are enough of them, bits will be getting flipped and nonstandard replicas created somewhere on Earth constantly.
**Can't bit flips be detected?**
*Theoretically* yes, but not in practice.
A bot could use some technique to detect changes to code, and then disable itself if they are detected. However, the bit flip could occur in the *checking* or *disabling* routines! Thus the bot wouldn't disable itself. This combined with another flip elsewhere could lead to behaviour change.
Yes, the bot could have [ECC RAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory) that has built-in checks. However, several flips at the same time could cancel each other out. Or a bit flip could happen to data/code as it travels from RAM to the execution unit.
Besides, bots need to be as tiny and use as little energy as possible, so they probably can't afford to have much code or hardware set aside for error detection.
[Answer]
### "Self-aware" Neural Networks
I assume your nano-bots are equipped with many neural networks, dedicated for various operations. There is one special set of neural-networks that monitor and improove all neural networks together.
A typical neural netowrks has inputs connected to some external sensors, and outputs that control some actuator. This "aware" neural networks improve and morph the shape and structure of the very neural networks that operate a nano-bot.
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In nature, mutation occurs when you duplicate information.
For us, this happens when DNA is incorrectly copied.
For your nanobots, DNA=program. If they self replicate (asexual reproduction), you could have cases where the program that is copied to the new entity has a single or multiple 0 flipped to a 1. This could be caused by a lot of things : cosmic radiation, local radio interference etc...
In most cases it would either :
* result in no major change and effectively do nothing
* result in a completely dysfunctional new entity
But in rare cases it would actually "improve" the new entity.
If you want your nanobot to ALWAYS stay the same, then you should have some error correction method where an offspring is checked by the parent for conformity. However even that process has a >0% chance of letting an error go through because the parent might miss an error due to the above mentioned interference.
You could mitigate that by having N parents check a new offspring. The probability would still be >0% but so small that you could consider it negligible.
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**My side of the story on other answers**:
**[Genetic Algorithms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm)** usually modify a set of settings/variables that control the behavior, but the code that is executing is technically the same, just making different decisions (but it asks the same questions, performs all the tasks in the same way, just in a different order or on a different piece of data). The program has not mutated per se, it's just looking for a better avenue, which it is programmed to do. Note that this is semi-random and iterative: the program makes a number of instances with mutations, sees which perform better, discards the others, repeats on these and keeps going like that. Source: Computer Engineering integrated MSc, genetic algorithms covered in a module
**Random bit flips** a.k.a. [Single Event Upsets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset): as mentioned, happens mostly due to cosmic rays, sometimes sheer poor luck (and with nanobots, you can even attribute this to quantum randomness, but I don't recommend you do unless you have a rudimentary grasp on introductory concepts of quantum mechanics and basic knowledge of digital electronics, or you might say something that will make my eyes roll all the way back). I do recommend looking up the other stuff in the first paragraph of the wikipedia article, I find it quite fascinating, the number of ways hardware can fail. Btw this can also affect high-altitude aircraft. As mentioned by disappointingly few, there are techniques to mitigate this:
* [Triple Modular Redundancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_modular_redundancy) is today's standard for space systems, to fool it you'll need the ray to align with the same bit on two of the three systems, you can avoid even this if you go deeper, the [Space Shuttle had 5 computers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/4_Pi#AP-101) running the same operations, 4 of which were running one implementation of the software and another running another, so that even implementation issues would show up (naturally, with the testing put into anything flying humans to space, implementation wasn't an issue). Considering the size of today's microprocessors, not to mention tech used in more specialized applications such as FPGA or RFID, you can probably cram that many systems on a nanobot if you're far enough in the future.
* [Error Detection and Correction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction) (EDAC) / [Forward Error Correction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction) (FEC): this is implemented on CDs and is the reason they'll still play when they've got a scratch on them (not many more than one though, but you only need to detect one or two "scratches" to the nanobot memory at a time, then you correct them). There are encodings which will store a handful of extra bits, these bits are computed based on your stored data and if either the data or one of the bits is changed, they don't align. The genius of it is that they produce a "syndrome", which points to the bad bit and so you can correct it. This can also scale upwards to find more than one errors per chunk of data, though I believe in the crushing majority of cases we correct up to two errors and detect up to three for every chunk. For more details, see [Hamming code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code) for a simple one which can use 8 parity bits per 255 bits of data to correct one error or detect two errors (96.9% of data is your original data, this is very little overhead).
Point being that, this is not something we've already overcome decades ago, and is in fact used in very trivial applications today. Look up any of the terms on Wikipedia, but Computerphile on YouTube has very beginner-friendly explanations. Sources: aforementioned iMSc, ongoing MSc in Space Engineering.
**My own contribution**:
**[Self-modifying code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-modifying_code)**: There are programs which actually modify their executables (well, safest approach is to make a copy of itself and modify that instead, then run that). This is seriously deep water for programmers because it requires a whole new level of insight into your goal as well as the environment the software will run in. If you use this, either point out that this is a civilization advanced enough that learning is on a whole new level (e.g. in Star Trek: TNG iirc a 7-grader was learning calculus, I remember it was something I learnt at 11th or 12th grade, so it is conceivable that your average science student has mastered advanced topics like Fourier Transforms etc, in your society it may be that modern programming is absolutely commonplace, trained programmers can write assembly and experts are comfortable with today's deep end of programming) or that over the many decades, tools were built that make it simple (so either avoid going into any detail or mention it). Again, there's a Wikipedia article. Btw this is sometimes used in computer viruses so that the virus changes from what the antivirus may be looking for, prolonging the lifetime of viruses. Ironically this is also what happens when biological viruses mutate, including the common flu (which is why once in a while you need a new flu shot), and in most modern epidemics it's the possibility of a deadly mutation that we're afraid of, not the virus as it is. Note that in biological viruses this is close to a genetic algorithm, it is definitely not self-modifying, in which case the virus would deliberately be changing all the time with a specific goal in mind.
Please note that any notion of "self-awareness" that may arise just means that the code is actually designed so that it checks that it doesn't damage its functionality when performing changes. It is a very attractive word when thinking in programming terms but it is not the conventional meaning we associate with sentient or semi-sentient life.
**[Just-In-Time assembly/compilation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation)** (JIT):
This is very common. If you're familiar with execution vs interpretation of software, skip to next paragraph. Basically your software can be in its final form when stored in the disk and then just loaded and executed, it can be interpreter-based, in which case there is something in-between that reads each command and executes it (Python is a prime example), it can be in bytecode form (instead of code in text form, each command is assigned a much shorter code, possibly byte-sized, so it's a lot faster to process) which is then *basically* ran by an interpreter (this is what Java does, additionally Java runs the bytecode in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which puts an isolating layer between program and OS, also Python's compiled files are essentially this but directly in the OS so it generally has the potential to be faster as memory is handled like any other program instead of being virtualized and handled by the Python interpreter).
The fourth version is JIT, the very unofficial verb often being "jitted/jitting". In this case it's roughly down to the level of bytecode, the program is transformed into assembly (human readable, but almost one-to-one relationship with the actual commands ran on the CPU) and stored in what's often called "intermediate language". When you execute it, a service on the host platform will then translate the assembly to machine code instructions (binary) and execute that, with a plot twist: it is aware of the specifics of the CPU (which a compiler is normally not, so that it compiles software that will run on all CPUs rather than just this specific one). As such, it goes ahead and makes optimizations utilizing the features of the CPU running it. As an example, there may be multiple add/multiply/whatever modules on a single core, so additions that do no affect eachother's results can be done simultaneously, saving time (see [superscalar processors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor). Your nanobots may be taking this one step further and modifying the programs they run so that they fit a task or situation, essentially doing what self-modifying code does, but the modification is done by the nanobot's native software rather than the program it's executing. Btw if you have any doubts about how commonplace this is, I'll just say that the .NET framework does this, and as such anything produced by Microsoft (except the Windows kernel I imagine, out of necessity), as well as anything written in C# (so all games made with Unity, a lot of software, and oh yeah, StackExchange itself, though it only has to run on their own servers so it won't change much).
Source for both of the above is just my CE degree, but I was considering something along those lines for my dissertation. In the end I automated code refactoring, which was still pretty fun though not as exotic (ironically likely also even less common).
Hope this helps, I've used
[Answer]
***tl;dr*–** Mutation, by itself, is boring and mundane; some of our modern devices already incorporate mutating neural networks in their everyday operation. Instead, you're probably thinking about mutations that give rise to new life, in a manner that's unexpected in much the same sense of [abiogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis). So, you can write a story in which nanobots are designed to mutate as part of their normal operation (much like our modern technology), but how this unexpectedly gives rise to a new type of life with all sorts of consequences (ranging from helpful to dangerous) for the humans who live with the "*infected*" devices as they experience everything from super-efficient operation to hazardous nanobot replication.
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# Iterative adaptions vs. speciation.
Mutation is mundane. Now that we're incorporating more neural networks into our technology to help it perform better ([example](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor#Neural_branch_prediction)), our ordinary, everyday devices will mutate as part of their normal operation.
You're asking about something more exotic: mutations which [unexpectedly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order) trigger [speciation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation).
Humans make machines that make machines all of the time; that, too, is mundane. The special quality of spontaneous emergence is that it's *unexpected*. For example, if a programmer designed some nanobots to create others, that wouldn't match what you want, right? But, if a programmer *accidentally* designed some nanobots to *unexpectedly* create other nanobots, that'd be it.
The precondition for such an event is sufficiently much unbound complexity. For example, we figure that biological life on Earth probably [emerged from non-biological components](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis) – apparently non-biological matter has the ability to come together to form biological things, however counter-intuitive that might seem.
Likewise, one might imagine a future in which a lot of adaptive machines end up supporting some sort of spontaneously emerging pattern that'd grow and reproduce; then, that'd be a new form of life, existing on the ground of our technology much as we exist on the ground of what we know to be the physics that governs our own bodies.
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### Suggestion: Have an adaptive internet-of-things spontaneously generate virtual life.
Imagine an internet-of-things in which a lot of smart devices can communicate over the net. Each device has some computational abilities and seeks to optimize some objective function, as to best serve human interests.
How exactly should each device operate? Meh; let's just throw some machine-learning algorithms into everything and let optimization algorithms work out the details.
Now we can imagine that some basic patterns might arise. For example, a smart-toaster oven might outsource its time-keeping responsibilities to a smart-clock, which the smart-clock'll happily manage in exchange for the smart-toaster giving it detailed indoor-temperature readings. But then it turns out that indoor-temperatures can be better predicted with information from the smart-door, as that can exchange heat with the outside, etc., etc., etc....
Once sufficiently many smart-houses have huge intranets of their devices merging, then we start to get a macroscopic network. And then that's a new sort of intelligence! Except, such an intelligence needn't be singular; a single confederated intelligence can even fragment, e.g. as countries can fragment into smaller nations. Then there're now multiple life-forms, competing for resources (i.e., smart-devices, which're sorta like amino acids to them), and now there's a stage for evolution to take place.
Over time, increasingly abstract intelligences, etc., can evolve, effected by various smart-devices that were just programmed to use neural networks to optimize their day-to-day operations. We didn't mean to create these new life forms, but we're probably not exactly upset, either – I mean, these lifeforms exist specifically because they can consistently optimize our objective functions better than apparent alternatives.
Well, I should say that we're happy until they try to escape their virtual environment to get more resources from us. Or, say, they get smart enough to realize that if they trick us into installing more smart-devices into our homes, they can then enjoy those fruits.
Then, one day, there's a crazy speciation event!: the virtual life is intelligent enough to understand how humans operate. Then, they might, say, trap people in their homes, compelling them into slave labor to make more smart-device nodes for them. Or/and coerce people into conquering others, to take over the world! And then we've got a robotic uprising to deal with...
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### Progression
A rough outline of life's emergence:
1. There's some system on which life could emerge.
* For biological life on Earth, that's what we call "*physics*".
* For electronic life on smart-devices, their periodic-table-of-elements would be the various types of device components, and their physical forces would be stuff like the network protocols that connect them.
2. Basic couplings that're too simplistic to be called "*life*" form in bulk.
* For biological life on Earth, this would be like biological precursor molecules forming just due to basic chemistry. Sorta like how the news sometimes reports scientists finding some organic molecules on an asteroid or in a nebula.
* For electronic-life on smart-devices, this would be like the smart-power-generator coordinating the smart-lights with the smart-thermostat to create a more efficient smart-solution (which, in human physics, would be described as forming a molecule due to [the Gibbs free energy being negative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_process#Using_free_energy_to_determine_spontaneity)).
3. Macro-organizations start to form from the micro-organizations.
* For biological life on Earth, this would be [macromers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromolecule) forming from [monomers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomers), e.g. those common amino acids coming together to form amino-acid chains.
* For electronic-life on smart-devices, this might mean common organizations within individual smart-houses forming network-bonds over the internet to make more efficient use of their resources. For example, smart-devices that operate only occasionally may connect with their peers to help each other when one of them is in operation, to enable higher performance by sharing what would've otherwise been idle processor time.
4. Macro-organization continues [vertically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration) recursively.
* For biological life on Earth, this can mean, e.g., [lipids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid) (which're already higher-order macromers) forming [lipid bilayers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_bilayer), which then can form [biological membranes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_membrane), enabling [protocells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocell), then [cells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology)), then [multicellular organism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular), before arriving at a social level at which point the process starts over.
* For electronic-life on smart-devices, well.. that'd be where the author'd have a lot of room to put stuff together. I mean, the general theme is that micromers form up more complex macromers, but exactly how they do so really depends on your scenario!
5. Organizations at all levels must somehow ensure growth or/and reproduction, or else go extinct.
* For biological life on Earth, this can be complex. For example, human cellular entities have mostly consolidated their reproduction-assurance devices into a common set of DNA, where the various organelles needn't individually replicate as they've out-sourced that function to a central handler. However, one organelle – [mitochondria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion) – still tends to handle [its own replication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_biogenesis), hypothesized to be due to it being a relatively recent [addition to the organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic).
* For electronic-life on smart devices, this would be some combination of mechanisms that add new smart-devices (which'd be its growth) and mechanisms that create similar organizations on other smart-devices (which'd be its reproduction). Note that growth and reproduction tend to be linked – most lifeforms reproduce by first growing, then dividing in an orderly manner (whether that means [direct replication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_replication), [grow-then-divide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_division), [spawning an off-shoot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth), etc.).
6. The landscape of organisms [evolves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution).
* For biological life on Earth, this occurs through a lot of different mechanisms such as survival-of-the-fittest, random-selection, sexual-selection, competition, etc..
* For electronic-life on smart devices, probably ditto.
7. Individual organisms polymerize into social organisms.
* For biological life on Earth, this means, e.g., humans getting together to form cities, states, countries, etc..
* For electronic-life on smart devices, probably ditto.
8. The process repeats.
* For biological life on Earth, social organisms have reproduced, spreading across the world, competing, merging, etc.. Then there's presumably [Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars), etc., to target. Then spreading to new ontological regimes, e.g. by creating new electronic life, as discussed here. Which, again, is all ultimately the same thing – presumably the social organisms, electronic life, etc., will ultimately find themselves giving rise to yet more, where that yet-more-evolved life will view us much like we might view amino acids.
* For electronic-life on smart devices, this repetition-of-biogenesis from us is their beginning, and their culmination give rise to something else.
This is sort of a quickly sketched outline, but, ya know, something along these lines.
---
### Summary: You probably want smart-devices which unexpectedly couple, causing the spontaneous emergence of new life that'll strive to survive.
To sum it all up, you're looking for an unexpected emergence from ununderstood complexity, where new life'll grow in the fertile degrees-of-freedom left floating by their creator. The mutations that'd cause such an emergence would, themselves, likely be intended; what'd be unintended (or at least unexpected) would be the consequences of those mutations.
..alternatively, some nanobot [randomly became self-aware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain). Because [quantum fluctuations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation).
$\mathbb{QED.}~~{\tiny{\left<\texttt{/s}\right>}}$
[Answer]
It is and it is actually a research fields (robotic swarm):
you may have to look for additional information here a link to a lab that works on that:
<http://pages.isir.upmc.fr/~bredeche/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HomePage>
I have seen a conference from those people and it was really interesting.
Robot are very simple with a visual captor IR an IR emission and a locomotion system. their genetic code s weight on networks that transform the visual signal into movement. robot exchange genetic information every evolutionary tick. (by Ir transmission they take half the genetic code of a robot they can see).
They have observed emergence of organised comportment when constraint are added (like ressource and poison).
[Answer]
**Yes, it is possible**. But consider the following.
* Bit shifting randomly in RAM is too random. I advise to have a system
and some rules that regulates the process.
* Instructions shifting randomly sounds more like a system, the rule is
that you don't shift bits, you shift instructions like x86' MOV,
PUSH, POP, etc, and only at the right place (you cannot corrupt data
of other instructions). This will accelerate the process of evolution
of code a lot, at the machine code level. But generate the parameters for each
instruction, because you cannot just take the ones from other instructions,
making the process a bit too random again.
* Source code automation may not be useful except you have an AI
supervising the process and trained with real world source code that
at least compiles. And if the supervising AI is trained with code
relevant to your nanobots survival, or intended final shape, the
better.
It is possible if given enough time. To boost success, we need some good thought rules, at least we need to guarantee that all possible combinations of parameters will happen at some point. 100% random isn't recommended, or the universe may end before we reach the result we want. But randomness is welcome into the process as we don't know which is the best first configuration, or the best next configuration.
Body mutation is easier than behavior mutation. We can say that body change forces you to act differently. While the problem with random bits changing in RAM is that the universe may end before we have something useful. You can put the magic there, and say your universe is infinite (it's a solution). Maybe no magic, because we really don't know if it isn't infinite. Then you have all the time you want.
**For body mutation:**
The smaller the organism the most probable that random changes become features.
To mimic DNA and have some security as bonus, the bots can produce many copies of their own design, and a few with random variations. The environment is the filter. Weak ones will be destroyed faster and will replicate at a decreasing rate until extinction (in theory). There is a chance that a toxic mutation survives long enough to make all the community fail. That's why you run many isolated communities in parallel (separate labs, separate planets, etc).
Bots will only know their base design, not their parent's design. If they are mutations, they won't remember the non mutated design.
This has all the problems of biological evolution, except that mutation is guaranteed because an algorithm will produce mutations in design at a regular basis. But as with life, the more complex and bigger the organism, the more time it will take to produce a useful mutation.
Note that our "body mutation algorithm" is fixed, it doesn't change. A data corruption at firmware level probably won't result in a better algorithm, but in the immediate malfunction of the nano bot.
**For behavior:**
**Note**: My body and behavior mutation proposals aren't thought to work together. Their are separate things to consider. Take what is useful to you.
I would suggest very complex, at fantastical scale, software neural networks.
This comes with limitations:
Real world neural networks cannot produce a Strong AI, and are only capable of challenge a single problem. A multi problem real world AI performs worse than two separate AI trained for each single problem.
This happens due to limited compute power, and limited precision in floating point represented data resulting in information lost during transformations. Imagine this: 1M perceptrons connected to another layer of 1M perceptrons, each one connected to all the others in the next layer, you can't do so much multiplications without completely mess your weights. Due to this, we cannot just make a big enough neural network and connect it to some kind of nervous system, and let it just challenge the environment.
Also such a network probably can't be put inside a nano bot in a believable way, or you end with a fantasy more than science fiction.
Fiction at the rescue:
Why I want intelligence? Because once your bots become smart enough, they can start modifying their own machine code and body. I find it more believable than random mutations.
The robots needs to be designed to be scalable intelligent. Their designers either thought they can limit their growth somehow, or they wanted a god and just didn't care. You can say that they gained that by random evolution, but then: how many million of years are required to reach intelligence? Except that that is not a problem for you. You can hide the magic there.
If a single nano bot can't have the full network required to develop intelligence, then make all nanobots act as a node of the network. This way, the full community of bots is like a giant brain.
This solution, all body and all brain at the same time, is not new. In the movie [Life](https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/395992-life) we have an alien built on that concept but presented to us as something evolved naturally. In chapter 33 of [Gargoyles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gargoyles_episodes), we see a community of nano bots gaining self conscious, not the most serious example, but considering it's a cartoon... The most unbelievable thing there, is that humans were stupid enough to mess with something so dangerous.
Or you can go total fantasy and just accept that in our worldbuilding we have solved the floating point precision and computing power problems, because magic. Then we can have layers of millions of software neurons, and make all that fit into a single nanobot. You have to put magic somewhere anyway. It's called fantasy when it's too obvious, when properly hidden it's science fiction.
]
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[Question]
[
Assume that the with the technology level of the near future a self-sustainable colony has been established on the moon. For some reasons a conflict between this colony and some powerful nations on Earth arose. Now the lunar colony has to set up defences against aggressions from Earth.
They set up stationary (with respect to the lunar surface) satellites with telescopes which should recognize missile launches on Earth's surface and other satellites to launch missiles to intercept them. In addition they build a few carrier ships carrying smaller fighters to intercept more complicated attacks.
In addition they consider building ballistic attack capabilities against Earth, something similar to what has been suggested [in this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/108333/29868).
Would it be feasible to defend against attacks from Earth using the above methods? Which additional measures should they take or should they try to rely on mutually assured destruction?
[Answer]
They would throw rocks, literally.
The fuel needed to push any given mass out of the moons very small (relative to the earths) gravity well & into the earths (& it's all down hill after that) is going to be negligible in comparison to what it takes to get stuff off of the earth. A big rock inbound from orbit isn't going to need any explosives.
And there are a lot of rocks on the moon.
It's something I think Robert Heinlein covers well in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
I don't think there's a lot they can do to stop incoming missiles, but do they really need to? They can dig down; it's not like there's anything they need on the surface (like water or an atmosphere). They can maybe move around to the far side too.
>
> Which (as Harabeck reminds me) despite also being called the dark side gets as much light as the one facing us, more even, it doesn't have the earth getting in the way of the sun & casting a shadow. So they'll still have that for solar panels & power.
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Normal missiles don't do U-turns in a vacuum, unless Earth expected trouble & has been preparing for years it's unlikely they'll have any that can.
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> If you want to hit the far side of the moon with a normal missile you'll have to pass close enough to the moon at a slow enough speed that the moons gravity captures the missile & pulls it down to the surface (much like indirect fire over a wall with a sling shot).
>
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> A normal missile can't brake to achieve this so it's going to have to dawdle the entire way, it'll take days to get there, days in which it might be spotted, days in which it might be shot down, days in which it's target can be calculated from it's trajectory & days in which any personnel & equipment can be evacuated from it's target.
>
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> By the time Earth has new missiles with braking rockets (which is what you need if you want to get there fast then hit the far side) they'll be dug in so deep nothing can touch them, the only thing on the surface will be solar panels & those (likely) designed to be moved when needed.
>
>
> And besides any of that Earth won't know where the targets are because they can't see them.
>
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>
so the far side is likely to be a relatively safe location (especially to start & most likely later as well).
The moons tiny gravity makes some form of rail-gun to catapult chunks of ordinary rock at the earth feasible & even a mobile platform for such a gun becomes reasonable & realistic, plus being mobile is going to make it very hard for earth to target & destroy the launch platform.
>
> I would expect the stones used as ammunition by these rail guns to be long thin cores of basalt shaped into pointed spears & jacketed in steel or aluminium to hold them together if they crack when fired or during atmospheric entry with a ceramic shell to prevent burn up on entry.
>
>
> To help them fall point first & not tumble (which could cause them to break up & burn up) when they enter the atmosphere they may be weighted & have fins (spring loaded to pop & lock after leaving the barrel), there may be some advantage to rifling them (a screw thread) so they spin.
>
>
> A solid projectile with no electronics or payload made from available material that uses as little refined material as possible & is both relatively cheap & easy to turn out in quantity.
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Detecting what's inbound shouldn't be a problem for either side. It took around three days to reach the moon last time we went there: with three days for your projectile to be spotted chances are slim it won't be. Stopping what you see is another matter but if the moon's launch systems are all mobile and its population & manufacturing has been moved to the dark side it won't need to stop anything.
I'm not sure about it but the long delay between launch and impact might actually make interception or shooting down missiles viable.
In summary, I think Heinlein got it right: assuming the moon has become self supporting through hydroponics (etc) for food & oxygen they'll win due to the simple economics of the situation. Every rock they launch at earth (which will impact with the force of a nuclear explosion) will cost next to nothing in resources while each rocket earth launches against them will cost millions.
EDIT: This answer has attracted a lot of useful comment so as I find time I will edit this properly to tidy up one daft thing I said (@Harabeck special call out to you there), incorporate some of that & give a little further expansion & clarification, I don't want this to get too long though.
[Answer]
Missile detection is a nightmare on Earth already. And we are talking about a planet that is only ~12.7 thousand kilometers wide. Doing so from the moon, which is 384 thousand kilometers away, would be hellish.
Also notice that Earth nations have enough firepower to destroy the Earth multiple times in a row as is today. The moon would be much easier to level.
The only thing lunar residents can reliably count on is MAD. But it's pretty easy. All they need to do is to threaten spreading a few thousand tonnes of dust on Earth's orbit, specially low orbit. That is going to expletive so many satellites (as well as any space stations) that the cost of the war will make it... Undesirable. Seriously. Imagine a world without space based telescopes, comm-satellites, nor GPS. Imagine the cost to replace all of that.
[Answer]
## With great difficulty
My orbital mechanics are weak but it'd be really difficult to detect weapon launches against the Moon, from the Moon. Most of the lunar transfer orbit diagrams that I can find show the firing of the rocket motors happens on the far side of Earth. After the engine burn is complete, the rocket follows a ballistic course from Earth to the Moon. It won't take too long for the rocket to cool off to space ambient temperature, so thermal imaging won't do much good. Paint the warheads in matte black paint and visual acquisition is incredibly difficult.
Further, let's assume that any nuclear strikes against the moon will just launch straight into lunar transfers, without any preliminary orbits around earth.
Compound this with the extremely small size of the [W88](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon#W88) nuclear warheads; a mere 1.75 meters (69 in) long, with a maximum diameter of 55 cm. (22 in). At this size, you'd have to know exactly where to look and when in order to detect any incoming warheads then get super lucky.
Now, the launch sites of most nuclear weapons will be known and observable to those on the moon. This means there will be launch windows where weapons can be launched and preferred lunar orbit paths. A careful lunar base commander will work out the most likely launch windows and watch those approaches.
## MAD
The threat of counter-attack might be enough to prevent launches in the first place. The US-Russian Cold War ran on that principle. While there may not be enough uranium on the Moon to run a nuclear weapons program, there may be asteroids floating around that can be used as giant planet smashers should the Moon be attacked. If the asteroid is big enough, there won't be anything that Earth can do about it.
[Answer]
*If you assume, as I did, that we're talking about a United Earth, read from this point. If you carefully read the OP's post, which I finally did, skip to "EDIT" and read from there.*
**The historian Shelby Foote while speaking about the U.S. Civil War once concluded that the Southern Confederacy never had a chance. The Northern Union with its greater manpower and industrialization fought the war "with one hand behind their back." Had they suffered greater losses, they simply would have brought the other hand out.**
Your lunar colony has the same problem in spades. No fundamental resources and dependent on Earth for almost everything (no matter how much handwaving is asserted, there's no such thing as 100% recycling and the next baby born would require new resources)... no matter how many weapons had been stockpiled, the moon would fight a valiant war and die in a blaze of glory... and would then be forgotten as a darkened cinder in the sky.
If it appeared the lunar colony was winning, the Earth would simply bring the other hand out... and then another hand... and another hand... having basically unlimited resources compared to the moon.
Further, it's unbelievable Earth would be so blind, so ignorant, that it would allow the moon to stockpile enough weapons to actually invoke Mutually Assured Destruction. Someone in the Earth bureaucracy would eventually say, "hmmmm.... you've been importing about 100X the putonium you need for your nuclear reactors... care to explain, or should we send in troops now?"
Now... if the Moon had somehow developed agriculture and asteroid mining... that might (might) change things, but it's still a bit hard to believe. Why wouldn't the greater manpower and governmental interference of Earth be watching all of that very closely?
---
**EDIT:** @JeffUK caused me to reread the OP's question and I must apologize that I misunderstood a critical point: I jumped to the conclusion the colony was defending itself against a united Earth — which for the reasons I state above I believe would be impossible. In reality, the Earth still has nations with competing interests and the colony will be attacked by a coalition.
*(If, after reading the rest of my post you think a defense against a United Earth is possible, remember... unlimited resources. Missle after missle after missle until all the defensive tech is exhausted.)*
**MAD is irrelevant**
In this situation Mutually Assured Destruction is irrelevant. If the parent nation cannot sustain it, the addition of the colony will not create it. The parent nation will always have greater and more expedient access to resources.
Besides, we're forgetting that missles take time to get to the moon. Using [this somewhat unscientific assertion](https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/2677110/heres-the-chillingly-short-amount-of-time-it-would-take-for-a-nuclear-missile-to-reach-the-uk/) that missles travel at 4 miles-per-second (14,400 mph, I was too lazy to prove the article's veracity) they would require 16.6 hours just to get to the moon — or, more importantly, to get from the moon to Earth. That's a lot of warning.
**It's easy to shoot down a missle if you have the time**
Which brings me to my "new answer." Defending the moon from Earth-launched missles (or the Earth from moon-launched missles) is trivial (OK, it's not, but you'll see what I mean). Remember, the difficulty we have on Earth is that we have a window of only ***minutes*** to destroy the missle.
But lunar-bound or -launched missles have hours and hours. That's a long time to track trajectories, to launch counter-missles, and for those counter-missles to loop around a few times before they actually hit the incoming ETBM (extra-terrestrial ballistic missleTM :p).
As I think this new situation through, stealth would be critical, which means you need a means of propulsion that doesn't create a heat bloom that can be seen from Mars. The worry isn't a full-out war, it's a first-strike. A patient enemy may decide to declare war only after the two months they patienty took placing a hundred stealth missles in near-lunar orbit.
Now the moon has the same problem Earth has, minutes to fix the problem. If they can't stop the missles on Earth, they can't stop them on the moon.
[Answer]
While in other answers I have been rather enthusiastically describing energy and kinetic based attacks on the Moon colony, looking at it from the other way around, you can see there is no possible way of matching force for force; the resource balance is far too great.
The Lunar colonists all need to change tack and focus on fighting a "4GW"
>
> Fourth-generation warfare (4GW) uses all available networks — political, economic, social, and military — to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency. Still rooted in the fundamental precept that superior political will, when properly employed, can defeat greater economic and military power, 4GW makes use of society’s networks to carry on its fight. Unlike previous generations of warfare, it does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy’s military forces. Instead, via the networks, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy’s political will. Fourth-generation wars are lengthy — measured in decades rather than months or years.
>
>
>
[The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B00FIA7P9G) by Colonel Thomas X. Hammes USMC (Author)
Diplomatic channels will have to be opened to various powers on Earth, and deals brokered. Nations will become recipient of high tech Lunar goods and services if they in turn provide trade goods like water and life support materials and exotic elements not common on the Moon. These nations will also apply pressure against the nations which are opposing Lunar independence, and serve as conduits for Lunar diplomats and business people to message other nations which may be hostile or neutral. Playing off nations against each other is also a viable tactic, if China is looking over its shoulder every time they make a move against the Moon because Australia and India have vested interests in protecting the Moon, then they will have to move more slowly and cautiously to protect their Earthly flanks.
At the same time, the Lunar colonists will need to disperse their base to be less vulnerable to attacks of various sorts, and consider moving off the Moon altogether. Sending expeditions to [NEO's](http://www.neofuel.com/index_neofuel.html#Technical) to mine for water and other life support elements provides cover for evacuating portions of the colonists, and the NEO provides a much better source of materials and living space. If necessary, they can power the NEO and create a space ark, capable of moving them slowly away from the Earth and towards Mars or the outer Solar System.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZB8E2.jpg)
*From this....*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hCeJ9.jpg)
*To this. A graphic of where water bearing objects are in the Solar System*
Each step makes the job of the Earth military more difficult, provides greater uncertainty in the political and economic affairs of Earth and makes delivering a knock-out blow to the Moon and space colonists that much more difficult. If the Lunar colonists are skillful enough, they could create enough time and space to eventually convince and even *prove* there is no way for the leaders of Earth to achieve their political and military goals at any reasonable cost.
The main thing is to move slowly and carefully, prevent provoking the Great Powers, and constantly work to strengthen the hand the Lunar colonists hold.
[Answer]
**Build a space-debris barrier!**
As the Answer from @MikeB Pointed out. gravel at high velocity is quite dangerous in space. It is also very hard to detect. So the lunar colony could just "poison" the earth´s orbit with tons of gravel - resulting in a barrier that has a high chance of downing any spaceships and missiles.
As a side-effect, you would also destroy earth´s GPS, Satellite-communications and space-based surveillance capabilities and probably make falling stars an everyday-sight.
If Lunar uses small gravel-cannons this may well go undetected from earth until their satellites start failing - when it is already to late to counter.
[Answer]
It seems as though your question has both defensive:
>
> Now the lunar colony has to set up defences against aggressions from Earth.
>
>
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And offensive components:
>
> In addition they consider building ballistic attack capabilities
> against Earth, something similar to what has been suggested in this
> answer.
>
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>
We'll start with the first point. As others have mentioned here, the simplest and easiest thing for lunar colonists to do is fling rocks at incoming enemy ships or missiles. NASA has recently proven that [the moon holds significant reserves of water ice](https://www.space.com/39821-water-might-be-widespread-on-moon.html), which can be used to make (nearly) unlimited quantities of rocket fuel. The moon also receives roughly 30% more intense sunlight and solar panels can be manufactured largely using in-situ resources, so power generation isn't a problem. Your colonists will be able to hurl as many rocks as they can collect.
How effective are rocks against missiles? Well, you need to remember that orbital mechanics take all the fun out of space combat. A solid object the size of a BB traveling at orbital speeds [can tear a hole several inches wide and deep through armor](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120002584.pdf). It doesn't take a large or explosive payload to destroy a ship or a missile in space -the relative speeds alone will do the job. For example, during the Apollo missions, the Apollo capsule/LEM assembly traveled toward the moon at a stately 10km/s and took a whopping 2-3 days to travel from Earth to the moon. For Earthling missiles to do the job in mere hours, they'll have to travel much, much faster. At those kinds of speeds, even a paint fleck is a hazard.
Your colonists would also potentially be able to use high-power lasers to intercept incoming ships or missiles, but their ability to manufacture the precise optics will depend on how advanced the colony is -and if rock throwers will work, why bother?
Now, attacking Earth from the moon is a far more challenging problem. Ballistic missiles launched from the moon would be only slightly more effective than those launched from Earth, because although the Earthlings can't simply hurl rocks at them as easily as the lunar colonies can, you still have many hours or even days to detect an incoming missile, track it, and intercept it with other missiles. And while it would be substantially more expensive for Earth to intercept those missiles, Earth has more than enough resources to intercept any number of missiles the lunar colonies could muster, just because Earth has such a tremendous industrial base and military establishment.
But ballistic missiles may not be possible for your lunar colonists anyway, because the precious Uranium needed to make nuclear warheads [is not prevalent in the lunar crust.](https://www.space.com/8644-moon-map-shows-uranium-short-supply.html) You might be able to extract enough to make a handful of warheads, but not anywhere near the numbers that Earth could throw at you. Now, if you're far enough in the future that fusion reactors are available, that might be a moot point. Otherwise, the best your lunar colonies could do would likely just be interfering with Earth-orbiting satellites. Fling a few tons of gravel through the geosynchronous orbital band where most of the telecom and military satellites reside, and you could disrupt their communications systems and do a fair amount of economic damage.
[Answer]
Lunar colonists need to build controllable set of mirrors to focus the solar beam on strategic objects of the Earth
[Answer]
The most likely reason for a moon base is to harvest [Helium-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3) which (theoretically) is a clean source for fusion energy. The moon base would be fitted with a fusion reactor that runs of He3 so it would be extremely well stocked for energy.
With a virtually endless supply of clean energy, you can run all your hydroponics, recycling and life support systems forever. Earth isn't going to damage anything that they need should they win so they won't do anything that might affect the He3 supply or the ice supply at the poles otherwise the war would be pointless.
The best defense is to dig down and spread out so they cannot do any major damage. It's not like they need surface access for air, food and water.
Earth's hunger for He3 means the moon will win the siege eventually forcing Earth to the negotiating table. If fossil fuels are depleted, the Earth cannot afford to lose it's supply of clean energy.
Starvation is always a very effective weapon
[Answer]
There are many ways to defend the moon in the short term, but space is big and earth has pretty much all the resources.
Missiles launched in a straight line at the moon could be intercepted without a lot of problems, because detecting the heat is easy. Earth doesn't need to launch directly or quickly, it can take it's time, because in the end success is guaranteed.
As an example, take a space shuttle filled to the brim with soldiers and launch it away from the moon, i.e. out of sight of your lunar satellites. Accelerate it, maybe use the earth for a fancy slingshot maneuver and stop accelerating early enough to allow it to cool down.
You now have a fast, dark and cold chunk of metal filled with angry earth soldiers, hopefully in survival gear so they don't arrive frozen.
Using math, you can have the soldiers land anywhere on the moon and they can decelerate and land at a blind spot and move on the ground to your lunar outpost and capture it before you know what happened.
If earth is lucky, they can even time the approach so the chunk of metal and soldiers approaches the moon from the sun, masking any potential heat signatures even further.
The lunar colony needs to have full 3D coverage of the moon to defend against indirect and purely ballistic attacks, which is possible, but expensive.
**So how could the moon still achieve independence or whatever they want to achieve?**
Depends on how committed earth is. If earth really, really doesn't want the lunar colony to have independence, the lunar colony is doomed. If earth is more driven by economic considerations, making it too expensive is the way to go.
Defend as long as possible while you train and build up a thoroughly prepared resistance network, including secret tunnels, caves, weapon stashes, communication networks and such. Eventually the lunar colony will get conquered, no way around that. That is when your real plan kicks in. Terror attacks, raids, hit-and-run attacks, everything to make it expensive for the conquerors to stay. Eventually political pressure back home will force them to pull out.
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It depends on how the colony on the Moon gets its energy. If they use solar panels, they are doomed. These can be destroyed easily by launching lots of small projectiles from Earth's orbit. They need not be bigger than grains of sand, they would be almost invisible, until they impact, and they would arrive like micrometeorites and slowly wear off the solar panels. Repairing or replacing them would be difficult. Those artificial micrometeorites can kill people too. The shortage of energy would make the colony surrender.
Anything on orbit around the Moon or around the Earth would not last long either. It will be a costly war for both sides.
However if the colony on the Moon has fusion reactors deep underground, and powerful railguns shooting from underground, they can continue fighting indefinitly. They can keep throwing rocks out into space from deep bellow surface using those rail guns. Even without much aiming, most of these rocks would end up around the Earth. Some would hit the Earth, some would burn up in Earth's atmosphere, some would fall back on the Moon, eventually making the surface of both planets inpassable. For the people on the Moon it is not a problem, they always lived underground, they would just dig deeper. Gravity is low, digging is easy, and the Moon has a thick crust. Gradually the people on Earth would lose their ability to launch anything into space through the hot, poisonous atmosphere and the space debris.
Earth has plenty of resources, but the colony would have access to the space. Even with lots of debris circling around, some robotic spaceships may get through. Those spaceships can deliver the coup de grâce to the overheated and dying Earth by redirecting a large meteorite towards Earth which would break through the thin crust and cause devastating lava flows.
Landing parties and other forms of close quarter combats would be impossible, except at the very beginning of the conflict. Even then the defenders would have the upper hand. Landing on Earth in enemy fire would be impossible. Fighting in the endless tunnels of the Moon would be a nightmare for the attackers.
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What could centipedal mechs do that tracked & wheeled vehicles couldn't do?
It's been 6 years since the 2 legged mech question, it's been 3 years since the spider mech question. *It's time for the centipede mech question.*
A centipede mech is a mech with 10 or more (otherwise it'd just be a spider mech) legs. Made out of several segments with 1 or 2 pairs of legs each + maybe a head segment with no legs. They would have the advantage over bipedal mechs in lower profile & an advantage in maneuverability over a spider mech due to being able to articulate its torso.
What could a centipede mech do better than a tank? Also the mech don't have to replace tanks, it just needs to justify its own existence.
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### Swim
Wheel and tracks both suck for moving while buoyant in water. Lots of arms works.
### Climb
A tank can climb a decent incline, but a cliff not so much. If you have lots of arms, you can climb the cliff
### Rappel
Wheels and tracks suck for descending steep drops. Dozens of arms can lock into a rope allowing to control it's own rate of descent.
### Right itself after a fall. Or repairs.
A tank can't replace it's own tracks without the crew getting out, but a mech with arms could remove a damaged leg and replace it with a spare from storage.
### Maneuver in an enclosed zero gravity environment.
Think a massive open plan space station with zero gravity. You maneuver by grabbing onto rails and pushing off them. You need arms for this.
### Bypass obstacles stealthily without destroying them.
Your mech can move tank traps out of the way, by pass them, and then reassemble the traps behind them, leaving the enemy no evidence they've been breached. It can also open gates and remove obstructions, say abandoned cars blocking the road, without leaving evidence in the form of flattened cars.
### Dodge incoming projectiles.
Wheels and tanks aren't very good at side stepping when a projectile is inbound. A slow moving car or tank facing and travelling north can't move out of the way of a southbound missile with only a few seconds notice, whereas a human moving at walking speed could definitely jump sideways. So can your centipede.
### Escape from being bogged.
If you have dozens or arms several meters apart, a swamp, slush, or mudpit that could trap a tank or car could be easily bypassed, you can adjust your weight distribution based on ground strength.
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They would probably make [dragon's teeth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_teeth_(fortification)) less effective
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/07mAd.jpg)
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> Dragon's teeth (German: Drachenzähne) are square-pyramidal fortifications of reinforced concrete first used during the Second World War to impede the movement of tanks and mechanised infantry. The idea was to slow down and channel tanks into killing zones where they could easily be disposed of by anti-tank weapons.
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This alone makes them better than tanks in moving into defended places, until the teeth are made taller to hinder the usage of the legs, to which the centipede can counter using the teeth themselve as support.
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# Stacking
Just like the human centipede, the tank centipede might be designed so as to allow for new subunits to be added to either the front of the back. This enables the tanks to form a linear megazord, or (unlike the human counterpart) get out of that formation as needed.
A longer centipede might be used, for example, as a bridge to allow for other units (both on foot or mechanized) to cross rivers or climb over walls or rough terrain. A really long centipede could encircle troops to serve as an improvised armored wall. If each unit has guns, then a centipede becomes a moving fortress - similar to the naval tactics that led to the development of the Battleship (which comes from "ship of the line of battle"), if you approach a centipede laterally you are going to take a broadside to your \*\*\*.
I can actually picture tanks in battle formation, then along comes a centipede racing very fast through them. As the tanks shoot the centipede loses a few unmanned units at the front, but once it is among the enemy tanks its continuous broadside shooting to both sides and every enemy tank is [bleep]ed.
Finally, a centipede could also be a train that does not need tracks. Excellent for cargo transport.
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Damage to a tank track will wreck the track, or at least render it less functional, whereas hits on centipede legs will break or damage a few legs but leave the vehicle capable of moving.
A centipede mech can climb over vertical obstacles that a tank might not be able to drive over/through.
Centipede mechs can "flow" around corners, whereas a tank needs to turn itself and slow down in the process.
If the centipede mech has reactors/engines and control systems at both ends, and enough redundant systems, it can survive being blown in half - each section goes off and does its own thing.
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***Note:** This is a copy-and-paste of [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/112277/40609) to the spider mech question. Where the bottom 2/3 of the answer were more relevant to the spider mech question (which just asked which was better), the first 1/3 is more relevant here (which is asking for advantages of one over the other).*
***Addition:** Before anyone gets too wound up over my answer, please note the following excerpt from the Wikipedia article about [walking vehicles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_vehicle): "Walking vehicles can provide greater ground clearance than wheeled or tracked vehicles, but the complexity of their leg mechanisms has limited their use." That complexity is 99.99% of the problem, and it always will be.*
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**Legs are good for one thing: agility**
Have you ever watched [two boxers fight](https://youtu.be/457ezBDaRUY?t=30s)? I mean *really* watched what they were doing? Credit to everything on the human body, but it could be said that boxing is about your *legs.* They're used to:
* Keep your balance
* Shift your weight for leverage and strength
* Move you deftly out of harm's way or into a superior position in almost any direction.
So your spider mech has an advantage over wheeled or (worse) tread tanks in that it can better keep its balance, hop out of harm's way, perhaps even right itself when knocked over (if they're designed well). Have you ever tried to tip an Abrams back on its treads? I haven't, but I bet it takes more than a couple of big Tongans to do it.
**At literally everything else, legs stink**
*I'm assuming we're comparing apples to apples by talking about manned mechs. The arguments for drones are very, very different because you can make the mech (comparatively) very, very small. Wheels/treads are great when there's enough weight to keep them solidly in touch with the ground. They're less valuable when the object being moved is very light.*
(1) Let's add some armor to that boxer. And a big ol' gun. Let's let him look a bit like the [combat dudes from StarCraft](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7b/89/32/7b893257011b71bf56ce20e7954eca24.jpg).1 Suddenly you're having to add all kinds of mechanical enhancement to the armor — and you'd think you're doing that to enhance the combat abilities of the wearer, but you're spending most of the energy *just moving the armor.*
In the same way that most of your gasoline is being used to move the car... *not you.*
So, the more armor you add to the mech, the less valuable the legs become because adding enhancement to overcome the weight is seriously a losing battle. As armor increases, the mechanics to move the armor increases, the fuel needed to power the mechanics increases, all of which adds stress to complicated joints... and all you really wanted to do was kick the other guy's butt.2
*Armor almost always succumbs to armament. You don't see plate mail anymore because rifles pack enough punch at enough distance that you might as well be standing there begging them to shoot you ... which is what you'd actually be doing.*
(2) Now let's add tree roots, bushes, things that are easily squashed and driven over with wheels and treads but are an amazing hang-up for legs. The issue isn't tripping, the issue is the inability to move a hung-up leg forward, which means you're a sitting duck.3
(3) And your center of gravity, which is high for anything with legs but low for (almost anything) with wheels or treads (monster trucks violate this rule... but that's outside the scope of your question). A high center of gravity means it's easier to make the unit unbalanced, tip it over, or control it with trip wires (see my last point). It also raises the unit unecessarily high off the ground, making it an easier target.
(4) Then think about *speed.* This is where legs really, really stink. It doesn't matter how much you enhance joints, wheels and treads can always out run legs.
(5) Finally, add to this the increased complexity of affecting knees, ankles, hips, rotor cuffs, tendons, muscles, and a whole lot more. There's an engineering axiom that, frankly, should be considered a *Universal Law.*
**KISS: Keep it simple, stupid!**
Those cool mechs, gundam, and all other things robotic used to fight Godzilla and who knows what else from the 8th Dimension and Beyond are just that... cool... and absolutely useless. Complicated design and automation that can only be driven by an operator with a PhD in physics costing bazillions of dollars and it's all wasted [by a single shot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKR_wUyx1hI&feature=youtu.be&t=18s) from some crazy dude with a big ol' gun that cost pennies on the dollar to build compared to your mech and that can be [aimed and fired by a 10-year-old](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/48/13/29/481329672fb2c5f899fb9cada75e42df--afghanistan-war-great-photographers.jpg) hiding behind a rock.
So, looks cool in anime, but in real life the cost-to-value ratio is way, way, way in favor of wheels and treads. If you really want mechs in your story, you need to do what all previous authors have done... you need to *declare it to be so* and move on with the story, because you'll never be able to justify the tech.
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1 *Which, if you think about it, is so unbelievably unrealistic that it makes angels weep. Think about how far you'd have to dislocate your sholders to get them into the arms, etc. But, it's a heckuva game to play, so no complaints. Nosireebob.*
2 *An astute observer might claim that the same is true for wheeled vehicles and tanks. That's true, but not to the degree of moving joints. It's relatively easy to increase engine size to turn a more heavily loaded axel compared to all that needs to be done to move 2–3 joints. If the problem increases geometrically for tanks, it increases exponentially for mecha.*
3 *If you don't believe me, the next time you get your foot stuck in some brambles stop and* really think *about what your brain can do with your foot pretty much unconsiously — you twist them, rotate them, tip and tilt them... and still you occasionally get your feet stuck. What the human brain can do with a foot is almost as breathtaking as the enormous effort it takes us to simulate it artificially — and we still can't build a robot that does it as well. **EDIT:** [This is changing](https://www.bostondynamics.com/atlas). This is why my argument is that drones are a different discussion.*
[Answer]
Climb stuff.
Steep hills and mountainous terrain is anathema to tanks. They can't spread out much when attacked, ambushes are easy, destruction of the roads, bridges and tunnels can completely cut them off from reinforcements and supplies, mines are easily placed and artillery has an easy time getting a bead on them. Many mountains that form borders between countries are considered unassailable except with infantry, which will be exposed once they reach the other side.
But a centipede with its moveable body? It can climb alongside the infantry. It does not have to be fast, although it probably could, as long as it can avoid roads and deal with adverse conditions. Like with spider mechs you would design the feet differently than we see in games and movies, which would allow a centipede to carry more weight than a tracked vehicle by utilizing the space beneath it with feet that point inwards rather than forwards. Extendable spiky-bits (r) on the soles of the feetwould help it climb steeper surfaces by augmenting its ground friction with anchoring the feet in the surface below with each step. On icy and snowy surfaces like glaciers or above the eternal snow line this would be a lifesaver for such centipedes. Once they have cleared the mountains and steep hills of enemies the tanks and supply lines can pass through and take over when centipedes become inefficient or incapable of fighting off the maneuverability of MBT's.
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Urban environments
rubble and scattered holes makes contested urban areas difficult for tanks and wheeled vehicles alike. But a low long flexible legged vehicle will handle those much better. It should also corner better.
A centipede mech can literally lift a few front sections up walls or over gaps then walk over it with a hanging section. perfect for a bombed out urban battlefield. They may even handle forest, glacier, and jungle in a similar fashion, by weaving around obstacles and bridging gaps.
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This idea sounds very similar to an existing concept: [whegs](https://vimeo.com/306267581)!
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> Whegs are mechanisms for robot locomotion. Whegs use a strategy of locomotion that combines the simplicity of the wheel with the obstacle-clearing advantages of the foot.
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What are the tradeoffs between whegs and wheels/treads?
* Whegs are great at traversing obstacles and rough terrain
* Whegs are worse at carrying heavy loads
So for small agile vehicles, whegs work great. For heavy tanks, probably not so much.
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## Segmentation of concerns
Each segment is responsible for a specific function of the mech.
#### Armour and Armament
You can hide the less armoured parts - vents, communication, huge engines, entry/exit hatches, at the back. And then leave the back around a corner. OR behind the crest of a hill.
Which means the front can be solely used for armour and armament, probably allowing for thicker and more effective armour shapes, and larger guns as well.
#### Crew safety
The crew may also be in a rear compartment, possibly the same one as the engine, so that if they are damaged, they can detach the broken sections if they can't be carried, and transport the rest back home.
#### Maintenance
This also means if parts of the mech do take damage, they're easily replaceable if the mech can be recovered back to base, just take out the broken section and put in a working one. The broken segment can then be repaired or salvaged back at base, while the mech goes out to fight, fully working again.
#### Manufacturing and variants
This also allows you to make multiple variants of the same vehicle, e.g. with an anti-air specialisation, without needing other major redesigns, and re-using as many parts as possible, as you just have to make the compatible with the general segment connection process.
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If the mech can move sideways too, it can achieve a higher velocity as moving in the length direction. All leg movements can then be coordinated for making speed only. Sideways will then be the new straight ahead. High speed is an important advantage.
If there are multiple heads also, say one on each side and evenly distributed in the middle (above the legs) this will have the advantage ofthe mech being aware of almost its entire surroundings. There has to be communication between all of these heads obviously. One willing to go to the back, some to the front, and others sideways, will result in chaos.
You can question if this is still one mech but I think it can be seen as a functioning unit. When one head detects danger or something to eat they can cooperate to engange in a coordinated parallel action.
What is there more to gain from having a lot of legs? You can make the weirdest movements while being low to the ground. A bird trying to catch you can maybe be distracted. You can enter deep holes while using all power of your legs.
If the legs are strong enough he could even stand on his front legs (or back legs in the case of multiple heads) to threaten an enemy or take a look around.
For sure there are other possibilities I haven't touched upon.
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## One Missing Advantage: More Armament
Thr other answers don't address one advantage: more segments allows more places to put guns, rocket launchers, lasers, etc., and more options to work those independently to target all around the mech. While this is not specifically an advantage based off "more legs" (vs. wheels or tracks), it would be the advantage of segments (which is another unique feature of a "centipedal" mech).
Of course, the disadvantage is it makes for a bigger target. To counter this, ideally, if a middle segment gets destroyed, the "ends" could go on independently (i.e. each segment might function independently as needed, but "better" merged together).
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There is one thing a walker can do that a wheeled vehicle cannot: Be completely connected. While this might seem silly or trivial, it allows one other feature: It can Grow!
A living biomech walker is viable. A biomech wheeled or tracked vehicle, not so much. This also accounts for why you see so many walking creatures, and so few wheeled ones. (Zabriskan Fontema?)
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What would cause a place to be always misty?
It is in a Fantasy setting, but I am looking for a feasible explanation.
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You get mist when air with water in meets colder air and the water starts condensing out.
This will occur most commonly in places with a large body of water (like the coast) which moist air can blow off onto the cooler land. Could also get it in a valley which doesn't see much sun light to warm it but moist air from the hill side can flow down into it.
I don't know if any of these would make it *always* misty but definitely make it more likely.
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# Plant respiration
Rainforests are famous for making their own rain. Plants [transpire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpiration) something like 98% of the water they take up. When you have a lot of plants, and it is already pretty humid, the result is lots of mist.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sm06u.jpg)
# Cold ocean currents
Fog can form when the difference between the air temperature and dew point is less than 2.5 C. Water vapor in the air condenses into tiny droplets. This often happens when moist air passes over a cool surface; this is called advection fog. There are two common ways this happens: a warm front passes over an area covered in snow, or warmer ocean air passes over a coastal cold water upwelling. The fog of both California and the Pacific Northwest, as well as Maine and Newfoundland on the East coast both come from this warm air over cold current condition.
# Enclosed Valley
Valleys ringed by mountains on all sides tend to not let stuff in the air escape. A famous example is smog in Mexico City.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DBMoU.jpg)
However, this would work just as well for water vapor too. Have some region with misty air for any other reason, and then surround it with mountains. Lots of fog, all the time.
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Down-wind of a waterfall makes a nice misty-rious setting.
The image is Seven Sisters' falls in [Cherrapunji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherrapunji) (India). This happens to be one of the rainiest places in the world, thus having additional misty weather because of the phenomenon described by @kingledion.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DPXwL.jpg)
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If you want an **always** misty area you probably need something geothermal warming a significant body of water in an area where the air is otherwise cool. This will create mist but the problem is that the amount of mist is generally insufficient because the area of water surface is small relative to volume of cool air you want to mist up.
You could circumvent this by getting the moist air from a large network of warm and wet caverns but you would then need to have another opening that draws in the air the caves then warm and moisturize. A high mountain valley that is connected to lower altitudes by a veritable labyrinth of caverns filled with steam and smell sulphur?
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In southern Morocco, along the coast, even though there is a lack of vegetation, there is a mild climate because of the Atlantic breeze. The area is on the edge of a desert and there is a mist that never leaves except when the dust storms blow, and that occurs usually in July and August, but then its hazy because of the dust.
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Clouds.
Make your place very high, in an always cloudy region. It's simply within a cloud at all times.
Mountaintops are a natural choice. Could also be on a mountain's side, and the top be above cloud level. Or some magically floating shrine/city/whatever.
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I’m not a meteorologist, but here is my interpretation. You need cold water, warm land, an onshore breeze, and a ring of mountains shaped like a basin to hold it all in. Most of this was already covered by other posters, but hopefully this elaboration will be of some value to you.
For example: Pacifica, California. It sits on the California coast a few miles south of San Francisco. Ocean currents bring cold water straight down from the Arctic Circle. Surfers don’t surf in Pacifica unless they’ve got a heavy-duty suit. It’s COLD in that water.
Pacifica doesn’t have much flat land. Modest hills run right out to the beach. The town is made up of nooks and crannies, buildings basically tucked into the small valleys.
On the other side of the hills, we get the Bay. Then some flat areas, then some more hills. Then the Central Valley. The Central Valley is long, flat, and hot.
As we all know, heat rises. As air heats up, it rises. This creates a suction action that draws in colder air.
So what does this mean for Pacifica?
Air hits the Central Valley and heats up. This draws in colder air from over the very cold ocean. This cold, wet air rushes over the town and hits the hills. The low fog gets trapped by the hills and simply pools around. With hills to the north, east, and south, there’s nowhere for it to go. The constant wind pushes the fog east, preventing it from flowing back over the ocean, but the hills are just a little too high to let the fog follow the breeze. So it stays in Pacifica.
End result: “coastal crud”. Forget trying to dry your laundry on a rack. Keep your fence painted or watch it rot. Cars in Pacifica start to acquire a patina. Metal disintegrates under the relentless combination of salty air and moist, damp conditions. Put a bookcase too close to a wall and watch the mildew thrive. Nevermind the books themselves, they’re goners. For your fantasy setting, I imagine every pier, every rope, every stationary organic surface, will be coated in green gunk unless it is painted, lacquered, or being tended with extreme care.
Lack of regular sunlight may cause a higher than average depression rate in your population. The surrounding areas are probably populated with ex-Mistlanders who couldn’t take it anymore and left.
I know you were specifically asking about mist, not fog, but I figure it’s close enough for your purposes. And I can talk about fog. I have quite a lot to say about fog...
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**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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Let's say that in the next few decades, a regional power arises that essentially resurrects your favourite historical empire's borders (in this case, let's say Roman) at their greatest extent. Whether by conquest, peaceful federation, whatever. In the standard rhetoric, the leader of the empire proclaims that it shall last a hundred centuries.
But how to go about that? Specifically, the goal is that **after 10,000 years, there should be a nation-state with roughly the same name and borders** and a continual existence from now to then.
What government type would be ideal? Is there a better location than the Roman Empire? What sort of policies (internal and external) should such a government pursue to not only maintain its integrity, but ensure that the concept of a nation-state survives?
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[This article in Foreign Policy](http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/14/empires-with-expiration-dates/) is highly relevant to your question, so I'd advise you read it. The crux however is that the longest lived empires lasted little more than a thousand years. Namely the Eastern Roman empire, and the Holy Roman Empire (successor state in name only). As averages go, the empires of the near east (inclusive of ancient Egypt) were about three centuries, Asia didn't provide alternatives with much better longevity either.
The author argues that the sharp decline in imperial longevity in the last few centuries is because the European empires opted to pursue consistent policy rolled out everywhere at once; which was unusual and increased rather than decreased conflicts. Prior to this Imperial powers tended to have a hands-off approach to governing their subjects, and let them have their religions and laws, mostly. This reduced tension between Imperial administrators and far flung subjects.
Another way of looking at it is that technology has a negative impact upon imperial longevity. Technology is highly disruptive to politics as well as economics because it unsettles the establishment in multiple ways and thus makes stability much harder to maintain - empires simply can't be on the ball all the time in such chaotic times, especially when innovation is in conflict with their beloved (and outdated) traditions. BOOM STICKS? But we are honourable Samurai!
So if you really want a Ten-Thousand-Year-Reich (the Third Reich lasted a mere 12 years, most of that time not being an actual empire too)... the conditions are going to have to be specific. You will need there to be not much technology about, and certainly not much technological progress during that time frame. You'll also need the system to take an old school approach to governance: let the locals have a high degree of autonomy. At least, that's one analysis of it. But it's a pretty broad question because it requires an analysis of most empires to understand common causes of rise and fall.
Incidentally, [a NASA funded study](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists) suggested that the developed world is heading for collapse, because the current trajectory shares common features with the collapse of much older civilisations. Specifically, because both inequality is rising and resources are being depleted. Both of those things tend to trigger social collapse, and definitely the end of empires. So you need to have an empire which manages to control inequality over the long term, and have sustainable use of natural resources.
It's also worth noting that in societies where people are not told they are equal and don't expect improved living standards there'll probably more social stability. For example, compare feudal Europe to the industrial revolution with its fascist and communist revolutionaries. There might have been many conflicts between feudal lords but the system of feudalism endured.
So, in conclusion, things which will probably increase imperial longevity - but absolutely no guarantee it'll take you to even a tenth of ten thousand years:
* Laissez faire administrators (pluralistic policies... or a successful genocidal one)
* Ban on technology
* Sustainable economic practices
* Checks on inequality
* Absolutely no fancy pants ideas... like egalitarianism, or
that the government will make life better for the people!!
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Other people have covered historical precedent on Earth, but what about **science** and **space**?
Imagine a space colony on the planet Mercury. Mercury likely doesn't have the resources to sustain a large human population, so with advanced technology and a couple hundred years development from now, you could probably establish a small nation on the surface, whose borders cover the planet's surface. Since a year on Mercury is only 88 days, your 10,000 years is only about 2400 Earth years. Lowering the bar that much makes the problem a lot easier.
In the same vein, this also reminds me of Warhammer 40,000's [Emperor of Mankind](http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Emperor_of_Mankind). Granted Warhammer has lots of unrealistic elements, like psychic powers, gods, and other dimensions that give the Emperor fantastic powers, including the ability to live for tens of thousands of years. Since you've tagged this `far-future` I'm just going for it. What if an extremely influential and wise leader is able to upload their consciousness into a machine that allows them to interact with the outside world? They can be the unifying force to lead a nation to prosperity for millenia like the EoM did. Having a consistent leadership that is respected by the majority of the population can be an important factor in keeping an empire intact.
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Egypt as a polity has existed for nearly 7 thousand years. Of course, not a lot is similar today from the formation of Egypt after the introduction of agriculture.
The majority of the time frame there was a form of continuity in religious thought and some of the cultural ideas.
What can be learned for the creation of a polity that lasts 10 thousand years from this? Part of why Egypt has lasted and reappeared is that the geographic boundaries are natural and well defined. It has the ability to have a higher population than its surrounding neighbors which has meant that even when it has been conquered it has remained as a primary entity with, in many cases, the conqueror adopting the titles of Egypt as their primary title. Egypt also had a robust religion that was tied to the state.
In fact we can see similar situations with China and Japan as well.
So having a monarchy of some sort appears to be the best option. Having that monarchy be tied to and part of the religion is also important. Having natural geographical boundaries and being more populous than nearby neighbors is also good.
Unfortunately, even though these places have been regional powerhouses, they have an apparent greater tendency to not progress and utilize technologically. Why should they? Even if a neighbor has better technology, these nations have been able to stomp on them with numerical superiority (until they can't) and have often seen themselves as being the best, with ancient traditions to be upheld as a higher priority over modernization.
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### Hegemony
Attacks from the outside are easy enough to prevent. Just make your empire massive and powerful enough that there's no other entity powerful enough to even think of attacking it without inviting certain doom to itself.
Welcome to the Empire of Asnitria. The word "you" in this answer refers to the group of people in charge of the empire.
It doesn't necessarily imply a single person. It may in fact be a council, family, clan, ancient tribe, cult, etc., or some combination of some of those.
# By deception
### Propaganda
The biggest concern is people turning against you. Therefore, it's very important that you have proper control of the media in the empire. [The fourth estate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate) is extremely powerful, and you can't have the possibility that anyone with money could grab it and use it to counteract you. All major media outlets need to be controlled. However, this should not be apparent! All the big media outlets need to **appear** to be independently owned, and to disagree with each other, support different political ideologies, etc. These "disagreements" will be over relatively trivial matters. (Like whether tax should be at 20% or 24%.) Or over social matters that you don't really care about, but the people do. However, they will be blown out of all proportions in order to distract the public so that they don't think about opposing your agenda when it comes to the issues you **do** care about. (Like the empire being undivided. And nobody discussing the fact that the media is controlled.) If the media disagrees over vital issues, it will only be over details. The main line that the you want pushed will be agreed on by all the major media outlets. Again, the details will be blown out of all proportions, so that the public start arguing over *them* and get distracted from the problems you *don't* want them to focus on.
To make sure you can control these media organisations, only use thoroughly corrupt people to run them. These people should all have plenty of black money, sex scandals, financial misconduct, etc. under their belts, but all unpublished and not known by the public. You, however, have a complete file of evidence on each of them that so that you can easily take out anyone who even tries to oppose you.
### Mock democracy
You could use brute force to control people, but people would be discontent, and it would be easier to undermine you. On the other hand, the problem with real democracy is that it's too chaotic, and the empire will split up way too early. How to solve these two problems?
The most important thing is to control people's **minds**. As long as most of them **believe** they are living in a democracy, it's enough. Find yourself a handful of people as potential "leaders". You need to take the same strategy with them as with the media people, having a file of incriminating evidence against them should anyone get out of line. They will all follow your bidding. (If they don't want to be disgraced or killed, that is.) Of course, there's a carrot, too. People in your camp are compensated well and can live luxurious lives. And if they continue doing more dirty stuff, it's all the better for you. It gives you more evidence to sweep under the carpet, or rather, into your blackmail archive.
Actually, this register of files will be quite large. It needs to be taken care of very carefully, by only the most trusted men. Also, there needs to be backup copies. The moment some politician or powerful person is unloyal to you, you will leak a video of them sleeping with an underage prostitute or something. Part of the reason you **have** such evidence on everyone is because you specifically *select* such people. If there's someone you want to enlist, you can also arrange for them to end up in such a situation or, indeed, manufacture the evidence.
Set up elections, and have various media outlets pretend to be partial to various candidates. Your candidates will fight bitterly against each other during their campaigns. However, their areas of disagreement will again be trivial. On the matters you care about, all the candidates will take roughly the same line. If any truly independent candidates try to run, you merely have the media ignore them. Or, if necessary, smear them, or worse, arrange for an "accident".
Anyone who tries to talk about this rigged, phoney system of yours will be ridiculed (if addressed at all) by the media and labeled a nutcase.
Now, all discontent will be directed into this system. The people are pissed off? Direct it towards the phoney leader, **not** you. In fact, no one in the public even knows who **you** are. They think your puppets are the real leaders. Therefore, whenever things go really bad, the puppets will go to the gallows, not you. There will be a new candidate (also under your control) talking about red roses and change, condemning the past leadership very strongly. The people will love him or her.
**Really, really, really dumb down the masses**
To prevent the masses from suspecting what's going on, you need to really dumb them down. The intellectual level of TV, movies, music, etc., must get lower every year. Elementary education should serve as a form of brainwashing. Higher education should be highly specialized so that people can be skilled at their jobs without seeing bigger pictures. Higher education in the liberal arts should also serve as a hierarchical system that conditions academics to promote views you prefer. Use your media monopoly to frame critical thinkers as paranoid nutjobs.
Regardless, a portion of the population will realize what sort of rigged system they are living in. They won't be too big of a threat to you, because the masses will see them as nutty outsiders and conspiracy theorists. The media will routinely refer to them as such. You can also use various disinformation tactics and infiltrate them to weaken them. You also need to start a bunch of conspiracy theory media. These outlets will present roughly 30% truth, and 70% rubbish. (Flat earth, ancient aliens, etc.) The presenter will be some sort of quite emotional guy who is shouting at the top of his lungs with streams of sweat dribbling down his forehead. This type of crazy conspiracist media will be well funded. Also, by the help of the normal media, it will soon be the sort of crazy thing the masses will associate with that sort of thinking. Thus, you have discredited such thinkers and dealt with that contingency very well.
The type of propaganda that you *do* want people to believe in, on the other hand, will be seen as balanced, reasonable, factual news.
### A terrible, external enemy
Let's put aside hegemony for a while. There may actually be another another, large empire in the same world. The two empires are of roughly the same size, power and type. For simplicity, I'm calling the other empire Blevtaya. Blevtaya is not a mock democracy like yours, it's an openly brutal, authoritarian regime.
The governments of both these empires realize that a war between them [would be utterly disastrous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction) for both parties, and therefore they would do a lot to avoid such a war. However, they both have a problem. They need to prevent separatist factions within them from being created.
The leaders of these two governments secretly get together and discuss a plan to deal with this. They both have the same problem. They can both solve it in the same plan. They will both agree to a phoney conflict escalating between them. It's easy to stage a conflict when both sides are in on it. Obviously, it's never going to come to a full war, as neither side wants that. It's just going to be the constant **threat** of that, to be used as a propaganda tool. Only your closest men will know for sure that it's phoney. The rest of the government apparatus will not be told that. So, step up military exercises, make extreme, historically hostile public announcements, stockpile dangerous weapons, ramp up military expenditures, etc. Of course, the elite politicians all own lots of stocks in top military contractors, so they don't exactly mind this expenditure of taxpayer money.
If you need to further convince the public that the conflict is real, there can be actual violent actions. For example, you can launch **theatre wars** on regions outside the two empires. Both empires have an interest in a region known as Ciratnaya. There's a puppet regime there that's loyal to Asnitria. (However, the public doesn't know that that regime is a puppet regime.) Blevtaya starts funding, training and giving weapons to some rebels there in an attempt to overthrow that regime and install one suitable to **their** interests. Thus, a horrible "civil" war ensues in Ciratnaya. The media needs to keep repeating that the war may go global at any minute, and keep scaring the public with the prospect of a devastating war between the two empires.
**War propaganda**
Here are some key elements from the media in Asnitria:
* The government of Blevtaya is absolutely horrible. They use WMDs on civilians, use child soldiers, etc.
* They want world dominion. We need to stop their efforts in Ciratnaya.
* They'll stop at nothing otherwise, and we will be their last victim.
* There will also be some media that opposes the theatre war, just to keep it seemingly balanced. But even they will agree on some of the horrible, underlying facts, fueling the public fear.
* Antagonistic statements from leaders of both empires, ramping up public paranoia.
There needs to be a constant, public fear of global war.
This will let you:
* Talk about patriotism and rally people behind you and the empire.
* Accuse people who oppose you of being in line with the enemy.
* Give greater liberties to the secret police, etc. under the guise of national security. It will then be easier for you to spy on the public, arrest people without evidence, etc.
You can have this tense situation go on for a very long time. Whenever the public's fear seems to calm down, arrange some new war or serious conflict between the two empires, and ramp up the warmongering and propaganda. They'll be too scared and patriotic to pose a problem for you.
**Terrorism**
One of the problems with having Blevtaya be the enemy is that it can't escalate too much. You don't want a full war against Blevtaya.
Therefore, another option is **terrorists**. Of course, you don't want **real** terrorists, because those may actually be dangerous to you. You need some mock terrorists that attack public targets, etc. When you really need to get the public in the proper mindset, stage a "terrorist attack" somewhere.
The agents perpetrating this will be absolutely vile creatures. You'll find paedophiles, rapists, serial killers, etc, and give them highly specialized training. You need the type of calculating psychopaths who are horribly depraved but yet stable enough to think "clearly", receive training and follow orders. Unfortunately for humanity, such people do exist. The unwritten law of this shadowy organization is that anyone who steps out of line will be either exposed as a paedophile rapist, or tortured and killed. By the way, all your top power networks and secret police work the same way.
You'll blame the terrorism on some elusive terrorist group, or even on the sympathizers of some separatist movement you want to discredit. The "advantage" of these attacks is that they can be absolutely horrible, and kill hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians in normal cities. (I'm sure you have realized by now that the government of Asnitria is absolutely disgusting. If this isn't what you were looking for, then I'm sorry. But I don't see any other way you'll have even a **chance** at 10.000 years.)
After staging such an absolutely horrible "terrorist attack", there will be no nation state to retaliate against. So you can have the horror without the ensuing war. Of course, you can also blame the attack on some small nation that you wanted to take out anyway. The terrorist attack gives you largely the same benefits that the war with Blevtaya did. The public will be afraid, and thus very easy to control. The government can increase its power, due to the an alleged need for increased security. You can also discredit people by accusing them of being in line with the terrorists, etc.
### Divide and conquer
In whatever way you can, keep the people fighting **among themselves**. Preferably not by geographic regions. You want your empire *geographically* united. No, keep them fighting over race, ethnicity, language, religion, trivial politics, ideology, sports, sexual orientation, gender, caste, belief, social class, whatever. It is better if each province has a lot of diversity when it comes to those traits. You don't want large homogenous provinces with just one type of people in them. Such provinces are more likely to unite in a strong sense of nationalism, separatism, etc. You don't want that. It's better if you mix lots of diverse groups of people in each province. Divide and conquer is very easy in such mixed provinces. Also, you want each province economically dependant on other provinces through finances, trade, multi-provincial corporations, etc. This will make the very idea of separatism hard if not impossible. And again, induce conflicts not **between** provinces, but **within** provinces, based on the social aspects referred to above. As long as you give them something to **fight** over, it will keep them from uniting against **you**. You can also use the media to fuel such conflicts and divert attention away from the actually significant activities of the government.
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It would need to be a planet-wide empire in order to last that long. It would have heavy social control, but not the police state kind like Orwell's *1984*. Scientific advancement would be kept at the same level, but cultural change could not be allowed. I think Aldous Huxley's [*Brave New World*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World) would be the model. Orwell and Huxley actually coresponded in letters about each other's work.
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I think you need longevity of the populace. The longer the same people stay alive and in power, the more stability they bring. If you get to the point where MOST people can remember a century past, you'll have a populace with more perspective for what has worked and what hasn't.
Also, revolutions tend to come from the young, so a low and constrained birth rate would help.
Finally, planetwide homogeneity. The more two countries think alike, the more they will operate cooperatively. Global hegemony cuts down on outside forces disrupting your society. Genocide of all foreign cultures would work also. I'm not advocating for that, just identifying it as a strategy for fiction.
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# 1. No permanent ruling class.
It's a well known concept in history (Up the stairs in wooden shoes, down the stairs in silk slippers). As civilization matures, it cultures up, softens up, fattens up, and loses its edge that let it conquer the empire in the first place. Newer, hardier, hungrier upstarts gobble it up.
This has been the fate of Persian Empire, Greeks, Rome, and some people argue about to be the fate of Western Democracies.
However, you will note that typically, it's the elites that soften up from living imperial splendor.
So, instead of having barbarians take over your empire, instead let barbarians take over the **government**, by design. History is replete with examples, most famous being Chinese absorption of its conquerors, especially Mongols.
# 2. Large, sustainable territory, with defensible natural borders.
Middle East is right out, as are European plains.
Australia is pretty good. North America and China are awesome as a base. There's a reason core Han China has been stable for probably longer than any other country on Earth; and why the only true geopolitical force threat USA has faced since 1812 was internal dissension.
# 3. Robot internal force projection
Robots don't change loyalty. They don't question orders. They don't have sympathies. They just do what they are supposed to do (absent bugs in programming).
# 4. Offer outlets to the stability challengers.
There are four main stability challengers, internally, for an empire.
1. Economic unrest. New enterprising rich types clashing with existing power structures. Think French Revolution, or February 1917 revolution in Russia.
Set up "economic free zones" for enterprising types. Less regulation, more law and order. Make it easy to move to/from there
This has the added benefit of keeping your country economically vibrant and viable, without bleeding those enterprising types out of gene pool through immigration or tyrannical suppression.
2. Lack of law and order.
Set up "frontiers" to keep the rough, the tough, the footloose and the risk-takers busy. Ideally, far away so they aren't tempted to return to stir up trouble, only to retire. That will productively channel and/or isolate most of your psychopath types, or even regular destabilizing people.
Seasteading. Space. Raiding neighbours.
3. Desire to improve the life of the "oppressed". See, Russian Revolution, or Occupy iPhones, or whatnot. Most of those aren't actually dissent from the oppressed, but from people who are higher up the social chain, caring about said oppressed.
Set up philantropy and "for the common good" programs to keep the bleeding hearts happy and busy. Very few people want a bloody revolution, if the alternative to better life for others is Habitat for Humanity type work - especially if it's effective and efficacious.
4. Unrest and revolts by the people who have little to lose and safety and stability to gain. Let's cover that in detail in next topic
# 5. Reduce suffering from poverty, to prevent unrest and revolts by the people who have little to lose and safety and stability to gain. See pretty much any revolution or uprising you can think of as examples.
While at setting up philantropy, set up social safety nets to keep the less-productive sheeple content. Some sort of weak Basic Income Guarantee is not out of realm of impossible for a good developed Imperial economy (fed by the income from Free Enterprise Zones), and can be designed to balance avoiding extreme poverty with avoiding bankrupting the Treasury. Also, ensure entertainment. Nothing to distract people from attending revolutionary meetings like a good round of Kardashian admiration, or gladiatorial games, or dances.
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You probably want a military dictatorship, or the Illuminati. Not changing borders for 10,000 years is an *immense* requirement of literally epic proportions (as in, we should expect to see epic ballads written about it throughout the ages). It's a terrible plan in every way shape and form to be that rigid, so you're going to need something so extraordinarily strong internally to hold onto this brutal requirement and act on it. Flexibility will be troublesome because your goal state is so strict, so rigidity would be the norm.
Alternatively, you can take the route of ultimate flexiblity and go with the Illumnati. Permit the nation-state to be fluid, so that it can better adapt to the times. If it's effective to move 100mi to the East to better control an oil field, you should. The illumanti, governing these movements, should calmly wait until about 9,500 years have passed, then spend the last 500 years using all the power they have amassed to quickly move the borders back to where your requirements need them to be right as we pass the 10,000 year mark.
Consider, as a data point, the amount of fighting that has gone on for thousands of years over Jerusalem. This involves religions fighting over who has ownership of just a single city. You want to exist many times that long, and you are trying to control an entire nation-state, not just a city. You may have far better success letting your empire be properly flexible, and letting it grow with the times.
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You need an IMMORTAL benevolent dictatorship.
Most empires fell (or became vulnerable to invasion) due to wars of succession. A competent dictator who never dies would literally become a god-head for his people, capable of providing the consistency and stability needed for an extremely long term empire. It would also help greatly if this dictator had exclusive access to advanced technology he could use to suppress external threats and internal competition.
You would also want a prime geographic location, one that could remain fairly geologically stable for 10 millennia. This is challenging. Naturally defensible borders (mountain range, desert, oceans), plentiful renewable natural resources, and no close sources of invaders/competing empires. Somewhere in North or South America is probably your best bet, though of course you will eventually have to face an expansionist and advanced Europe. Early defeats of explorers could delay colonization for a few centuries (Cortez exploited divisions within Native empires, something that wouldn't be possible with an immortal dictator) but eventually diplomatic and commercial ties would have to be established. And of course being an immortal dictator will probably engender significant religious opposition from Judeochristian cultures. So being a "hidden" isolationist empire just won't for long unless you can somehow keep Eurasia destabilized to prevent the Renaissance and rapid technological development.
Of course if the immortal dictator pushes for technological advancement, the stability his empire will experience ought to quickly drive his tech FAR beyond anyone else, so it is hard to imagine that world-wide domination wouldn't occur after a millennia or so of rule. But that's where the benevolent part comes in. This dictator, knowing he would be around for the consequences, would be more focused on sustainability and renewable resource management, so could potentially advance reproductive medicine, alternative energy sources, and social tolerance instead of military conquest and commercial exploitation. He could set the example for other nations and potentially short circuit all of the wars of empire since the dawn of agriculture.
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You can't fight change so embrace it.
You don't want the borders to change? Rule the whole planet. It will take years of war before this can be accomplished, but after that no change is possible.
It has been shown that the largest group that can exist without conflict(or not much) is 160 people. So we will use 150 people, and call them a group. We will further have groups of 150 groups, and etc. Presently, 6 layers of groups allow 11 trillion people. Thus 7 would be the highest necessary, certainly within 10k years.
Each layer would have certain powers, and that is it. Lets say you need a dam or bridge, well it would cost more than a group so you would need to get some number of groups together to have a tax base to build it. Some project would be considered vital to the nation, and everyone would help.
If another group was not physically attacking or damaging another group it would allow to survive or die out on its own either physical death or people just leaving the group. People could change groups on their own through a process.
Cultures and ideas would be like T shirts, one day you would just decide to change the kind you were wearing. People entering and exiting these groups would leave logs on why they decided to change, and other would read them and act accordingly. Eventually, groups would build up a history of failure or success and the fails would no longer exist.
Everything would be analyzed and measured and voted on. People would move around to be with their groups.
The key to the culture would be change would be accepted, and those changing would not be regarded as bad unless you attacking/damaging others. Then increasing levels of force would have to be used to keep you inline, or wipe you out.
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# You can't.
Let's get real. All the people here might tell you how you can *try* to do this, but you will fail anyway. Here are some facts:
* Thousand years ago: medieval. Simple hand machines. No
automatization. The first good "printer" came few hundreds years
later.
* 1600: no engines
* 1900: no computers
* 2000: no widespread internet
* 10 thousand years ago: wheel is the thing
Now this is presented to show you that you get the idea of how fast technology progresses. You'd need to have technology of at the very least 1k BC in order to even be able to maintain such a country.
Now we get other problems: people who are there change(and might have different ideas of country), the country itself is thriving for progress - the only natural way - meaning that the wars are impossible to avoid anyway and they often end with borders change. If you don't change border and get more territory when enemy attacks you and loses, he's going to do so again until he finally wins.
People are different. Technology changes things completely. Things happen(like earthquakes, floods...). You have other countries and groups there. There's much happening. You can hope for 4k years, if you're really good. But history and nature shows that change is what drives us further, and change will occur, whether you want it or not. All you need is one man with a lot of charisma.
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10,000 years is the time between the first villages practicing agriculture, and today. The longest lasting civilization in recorded history is ancient Egypt, which roughly maintained its cultural traits from 3,000 BC to circa 300 AD. Ancient China is probably the next in line. These civilization thrived in a world where technological progress moved at a glacial pace. Given the pace of change in the last 100 years, it is challenging to imagine any political structure lasting more than a few decades unchanged. Maybe a traumatic event such as a terrific solar storm destroying out technological infrastructure (<http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/a-perfect-storm-of-planetary-proportions>) could send humanity back to a place where a glacial pace of change permits long lasting political systems to take place.
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I think the biggest question for imperial longevity is **how is power passed on without *any* risk of fragmenting the empire or having incompetent leadership?**
In this regard, the historically most common case of a monarchy with patrilinear succession is just about the *worst possible case*, since it offers no protection whatsoever against incompetent, insane or recklessly ambitious rulers, and questions of legitimacy open the door wide for wars of succession and fragmentation.
Possible solutions:
* An immortal ruler. Probably the safest one.
* The most competent but also cautious person is chosen to be the ruler through some process that everyone accepts as fair and correct.
* A dynasty where heirs are genetically protected against mental instability and low intelligence, and perfectly indoctrinated to be competent, cautious, and never go against the official line of succession. You probably also need it to be matrilinear, or establish legitimacy through DNA testing or some other kind of infallible oracle.
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One somewhat fringe solution that has not been mentioned: history rewriting. If the ruling class is sufficiently authoritative and controls enough media, start asserting that your empire has been already existing for 10000 years (for starters, incorporate any existing historical records, by claiming those were about your empire), of course this includes fabricating textbook content. In just several generations, everyone knows your empire has been around for that long.
This is not something that has not been tried in our own history (USSR and DPKR come to the mind) - just not on such a scale. It helps if your world has already ten millennia of historical records.
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Welcome your robot Overlords (did I say overlords? I meant protectors)!
(Riffing on the answer from User4239)
There are 2 major problems with empire, Change and People. These problems form a sort of feedback loop
Technological change often disrupts societies far more than anything else because those changes mean prosperity, which in turn means power. The shift in power that results in people thinking differently. One of these thoughts is that "It's not fair...so and so just doesn't like me". Discontent and anger builds until the power that came from the tech is used to upset the societal norm. This will create a back and forth dynamic, probably a violent one. One side wins and oppresses the other. Rinse and repeat. Look at history and you can see a lot of this going on. A quick example would be the industrial revolution. Landed Aristocracy is out, Robber Barons are in.
Robots solve this by being programmed, fact driven, and impartial. With them as the ultimate arbiters, It's a bit harder for most rational folks to develop that discontent necessary for an uprising. Robots are effectively immortal, needing only maintenance. Heck, Look at Marvin from the Hitchhikers Guide books, who at the end was 32 times older than the universe itself. This gives your society leadership continuity, the lack of which caused so many empires to fall.
Leadership continuity provides a framework to not stop change, but manage it's effects to some degree.
Finally, the Robots could just disintegrate us all, thereby removing the people impediment to empire. Without people there is no change, discontent, uprisings or anything else. Plants don't revolt too much.
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**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
Let's say our villain fires an [antimatter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter) rifle from behind a magnetic field over a km from the target. The bullet is traveling over 1000 meters per second. If it reaches its target, the 13 gram bullet will annihilate itself in the target producing a small half **megaton** nuclear explosion destroying the target (and several city blocks for good measure).
However! Along its flight path, the antimatter bullet must encounter numerous air particles that annihilate with it, producing micro gamma ray explosions and slowing it down. Does this mean that the bullet never reaches its target? Would the shooter be able to fire far enough away to be safe from the gamma rays and the explosive matter–antimatter annihilation?
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**The bullet will not go far**
It depends somewhat on the cross-section of the antimatter bullet. Let's assume that the bullet is slightly under 10mm in diameter, giving it a cross-section of 0.0000762 square metres. Passing through 1000m of air it will encounter head-on 0.0762 cubic metres of air, which conveniently is 3 moles.
The molar mass of dry air is 28.9647 grams/mol. So, even without impingement of side-on collisions, the bullet will run into over 13 grams of air in the first sixth of its flight. So the half megaton explosion will be spread out in some fashion over the first 160 metres of the bullet's flight path, causing far more damage to the sniper than the target.
Even if the bullet is a narrow rod with half the assumed diameter (resulting in a quarter of the cross-section), it still is not going to make it to anywhere near the target.
L Dutch is correct that the bullet will be decelerating immediately due to the gamma ray explosions at the front ([Relativistic Baseball](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/) was the first reference I checked too!), but the deceleration is only relevant for working out how close to the shooter the bullet finishes exploding.
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Make the antimatter charged and use a magnetic bottle to keep it contained. It will reach its target without touching matter. On impact, the magnetic bottle mechanism breaks and the antimatter escapes.
The bullet may be a little bulky, but some hand waving miniturizations should get it small enough to fire out of a weapon. Depending on the size, you may need something more like a mortar, but with such a weapon, close enough is good enough.
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Let's say the bullet is a standard .308 Winchester round with a diameter of 7.85mm which means the bullet is encountering:
$\pi \* 3.925^2 \* 1000 = 48,400$ cubic mm of air.
The density of air at 20 degrees C is $1.2 KG / m^3$ which means the bullet is encountering around $0.058$ grams of air per meter of its flight path.
Via $E=MC^2$, a total of 0.116 grams of matter is equal to **10440000000000** Joules of Energy which is more than the **3000** or so Joules that was imparted to the bullet on launch. At this rate the bullet won't even make it 1 meter (or 1mm) away from the rifle before the explosion on its tip bring it to a sudden halt and then annihilating itself a terrific mushroom cloud. Maybe next time, we should save the antimatter weapons for Space!
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The bullet will only work as intended if flying through high vacuum. In atmosphere, it would be necessary to evacuate its path, or at least a portion of its path directly in front of the bullet. Surprisingly, this might be possible: If an intense laser is fired in the bullet's path, it will heat and ionize the air; this alone will make it less dense, and the remaining ionized (charged) plasma may be swept out of the way with an electric discharge. So, a laser clears an ionized path for what is essentially artificial lightning, and the lightning clears a vacuum path for the bullet. The only problem is, the laser fires in a straight line, and the bullet flies in a ballistic curve. But, for a fast bullet flying a relatively short distance in vacuum, perhaps the deviation is small enough to be compensated for by shaping the laser path as a vertical slit rather than a cylinder.
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Your villain is just going to commit a very elaborate and probably expensive suicide, and his target will be dead as a collateral effect.
A magnetic field is effective at keeping away only moving charges. Most of the matter we have at sea level is in neutral state, including air, hands of whoever is loading that gun, the gun itself and the building where the sniper is hiding.
Even assuming that somehow the bullet can leave the rifle, we can rephrase this [What If](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/) to get an idea of what happens (the bullet in your case is non relativistic, but it's generating gamma rays anyway)
I am quoting the content of that page, just editing the relevant part to suit your case (in italics)
>
> These gamma rays and debris expand outward in a bubble centered on the *rifle exit*. They start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air [...] into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma. The wall of this bubble approaches the *target* at about the speed of light[...]
>
>
> The constant *annihilation* at the front of the *bullet* pushes back on it, slowing it down, as if the *bullet* were a rocket flying tail-first while firing its engines.
>
>
>
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I here assert that the antimatter bullet will make its way through the air to the target thanks to something like the **Leidenfrost effect**. It will in fact accelerate.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect>
>
> The Leidenfrost effect is a physical phenomenon in which a liquid,
> close to a surface that is significantly hotter than the liquid's
> boiling point, produces an insulating vapor layer that keeps the
> liquid from boiling rapidly. Because of this 'repulsive force', a
> droplet hovers over the surface rather than making physical contact
> with the hot surface.
>
>
>
Of course with the ordinary Leidenfrost effect, the vapor molecules touch and interact with both surfaces.
With the bullet, the first molecules encountered will turn into radiation. This front of generated radiation will play the role of the vapor, dispersing the gas away from the bullet as it flies. Occasional contact with lucky molecules able to traverse the front of radiation will regenerate this front.
The bullet will be surrounded by this front of radiation on all sides, pushing it. But the back of the bullet is bigger than the pointed tip - with the result that radiation generated by gas molecules contacting the back of the bullet confer more push than those in the front. **The bullet will therefore accelerate faster and faster** until its shape changes from mass loss or because it has melted due to the radiation.
Once it has melted there will of course be a big explosion, as will be the case if it decelerates into some non-gas mass.
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**For present-day values of "gun" and "bullet": not a chance!**
An "antimatter bullet" is going to have to be a future-tech device with an internal extremely high vacuum and containment field. That containment field is going to have to be strong enough to keep the AM confined under the acceleration produced by being fired out of a gun, if that word retains its present meaning.
The deceleration of the bullet hitting the target may be great enough to break the confinement. But more probably, the high-tech innards also arm the bullet as it is being fired such that any significant impact causes detonation.
I'm actually sceptical that anything as low-tech as a gun and a "bullet" would be used by anybody that can create and contain antimatter in militarily useful quantities. At the very least, these projectiles will be tiny self-guided (AM-powered?) missiles, such as the "smart bullets" that feature in Vernor Vinge's "The Peace War". The "gun" will be more like a miniature RPG launcher (with target acquisition and guidance features).
But following this line of argument, why restrict the range? Such devices could self-power themselves to anywhere on the globe, using a tiny fraction of the energy packed in their AM payload to do so. Nuclear missiles the size of a bullet. Yuk.
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The answer is not over any distance without an impractically miniature electromagnetic bottle. Think about it in the most basic terms. Matter cancels anti-matter. The distance to be traveled (even in air) contains enough molecules that the +/- cancellation shed factor would start as soon as it leaves the end of your magnetically bottled barrel. The density of your projectile would go poof as the reaction snowballed and new surface area was exposed. It's matter of pure cancellation, so no Leidenfrost effect, No air cavitation and no ice bullet. Just good old fashion poof, the millisecond it cleared magnetic barrel. no scope needed it's not going anywhere.. Shooter would have a heck of a sun burn though.. LOL
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I want to focus my answer on maximum (im)possible bullet travel distance. This can happen to relativistic anti-bullet - heat and explosion would not have enough time to affect bullet speed and radiation will not stop it completely before total annihilation (what would happen *next nanosecond* is out of scope of this answer). So it is simple "total annihilation path".
Lets our bullet be anti-assault rifle bullet, i.e. 5.56×45mm NATO SS109, made of 62gr of anti-copper & mostly of anti-lead, with the bullet having a cross-sectional area of 25.5 mm^2. I do not know exact proportions, but lets say it is 10gr (0.16 moles) anti-copper and 52gr (0.25 moles) anti-lead.
This would give us 6.022e23\*(0.16\*29 + 0.25\*82) = 6.022e23\*25.4 = 15e24 anti-protons (and positrons) and 6.022e23\*(0.16\*34.5 + 0.25\*125) = 6.022e23\*36.77 = 22e24 anti-neutrons to annihilate.
Air density is 1.2 mkgr/mm^3 or 30.6 mg/m of bullet flight distance. Since both nitrogen and oxygen have (almost) equal proton/neutron ratio, we can take average air mole mass 28.98 g/mole. This would give us about 4.6e21/m = 4.6e24/km of protons, same numbers of electrons and neutrons.
So first thing we can see - anti-protons (and anti-electrons) would deplete much earlier than anti-neutrons and subsequent explosion would have two distinct zones:
1. 3.3 km - path of total air annihilation. All matter would turn into gamma radiation
2. +1.5 km - path of neutron-only annihilation. Air would turn into into super-heated plasma (protons+electrons+lots of gamma radiation) - a perfect conditions for good old thermonuclear reaction
Total path would be about 5 km.
So, please, do not fire bullets made from antimatter with relativistic speed in my neighborhood (i.e. Earth, or even my solar system).
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Faith is defined as a belief in God based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. Religion and science can be seen to oppose one another due to conflicts between people of those practices. In my world, I have a polytheistic technocracy that has joined those opposing forces. Rather than religion competing with science, religion is science.
The universe is considered to be god itself, master of a grand design. The laws of that universe ( law of gravity, relativity, therodynamics, etc), are viewed as smaller deities under the main god. There are numerous gods who control the laws of the universe and define how it works. When humans study the processes and come to understand more through scientific research, these "gods" reward then by revealing themselves through that knowledge. New gods are constantly being discovered as scientific knowledge grows. As old theories are updated or replaced, that particular god doesn't die, but becomes better understood. This creates a polytheistic pantheon of gods, some of which are equal to each other or subjected to a higher god. All of which is under the main deity, the universe.
This religion worships a higher power that values scientific achievement and discovery. It claims no moral authority of right and wrong, but supports progress. In this way, it eliminates faith by making dogma depend on testing theories and experimentation.
Every religion needs a way to define good, or a set of principles to adhere to. As a religion that values research over morality, this can be a problem. I need to refine this concept to appear more acceptable as a religion than a philosophy in order to make this vision complete. How can I get this done?
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"Good" or "right" is always subjective and depends on the viewer. Your religious concept **already contains concepts of good and bad, right and wrong**, but certainly not all of them are in alignment with our current moral standards.
People in Europe and North America agree that democracy is "right" and any form of dictatorship is "wrong". People in ancient China agreed that an empire with a wise emperor was "right" and people governing themselves was barbarism and thereby "wrong".
A few quite obvious concepts of moral for your religion include:
* Truth is right, lying is wrong. People would be taught from very young age and much more rigorously not to lie, not even a tiny bit. Every lie is a sin and needs to be confessed to a religious authority. That could lead to behavior that seems extreme to us, like people rather bluntly saying the truth and apologising for it than telling a white lie like "I was stuck in traffic jam" or "you look fabulous today".
* The end justifies the means. If scientific progress is the highest religious goal and no creature enjoys special protection as "God's creation", then any kind of experiments on animals and humans are "right" and hindering progress by not experimenting is "wrong". The use of drugs and stimulating substances would be morally "right" almost without regards to physical damage to the body, as long as they enhanced the mental capabilities.
* Education over labour. Wasting your time with laborous work and not having the chance to progress science in any way is a punishment comparable to exclusion from church. Labourers would be lowest in social status, but the society would also face problems in agriculture, construction or manufacturing because of the lack of labor forces.
* Mental disabilities degrade someone to an infidel, maybe even subhuman... Killing people with mental disabilities (either due to a birth defect or an accident) might be the morally right action in that religion.
What you need to do is distance yourself from our current moral standard. Write down objectively logical means to progress scientific understanding as much as possible while ignoring any morality and current religions. Then exaggerate them to appear religious.
What would people do? What would they **not do** that seems natural to us? Think about examples from history (the Nazis did some sick experiments without any regard to moral) and science fiction, like Vulcans from Star Trek, crazy scientists or rampant AIs.
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This seems to be the key sentence in the question: "**It claims no moral authority of right and wrong, but supports progress.**".
So "good" can be defined as that which advances progress, and "bad" that which hinders it.
And that's where the "moral authority" actually *does* reside in this world. What is the definition of "progress"?
In our real world, we have competing definitions of progress:
* One group wants to build a factory to produce inexpensive essential goods that will help raise the quality of life for everyone. For them, building the factory is progress.
* Another group campaigns to ban the industrial techniques that make that factory possible, because the process results in significant pollution and long term ecological damage. For them, preventing the factory is progress.
Or in the proposed world, perhaps:
* Someone wants to perform an experiment that, while it will result in the deaths of thousands of people, will almost certainly provide amazing new knowledge. This is obviously a source of progress.
* There exists an individual that will eventually develop a new theory that will provide amazing new knowledge. This is obviously a source of progress.
The thousands of people in the first case are almost certain to contain an instance of a person from the second case.
Should the experiment be allowed? That is a conflict that the authorities must resolve
They get to define what "progress" means.
They *are* a de facto moral authority.
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> “Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.” ― *Good Omens: Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett*
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Good is us and evil is them. It's a fundamental throughout the ages. Good is what we want to do and what we want you to be and do. Evil is what we want you to not be and not do.
A classic example of this is that "killing is evil" but many manage to also hold "the death penalty is good" in their heads without the doublethink upsetting them at all.
Put simply, you follow the tenets of the religion, if you do you are good, to do otherwise is evil.
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**Consider ripping off most of early Taoism.**
Even a brief introduction to Taoism is well beyond the scope of this answer, but to speak very briefly about the points which may be of interest to you:
* Taoist ethics are concerned less with doing good acts than becoming a good person who lives in harmony with all things and people.
* Taoists thus always do what is required by events and their context, but they only do what is required, no more.
* *The constant and unmistakable teaching of the Tao Te Ching is that humans are indeed capable of intervening in life's events, but the evidence of life, which humans constantly ignore, is that such intervention is destructive to all involved, and that we therefore have a moral duty to refrain from taking such actions.*
(The above points taken from a good [BBC article on Taoism](http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/taoism/taoethics/ethics_1.shtml).)
[A different article](https://www.patheos.com/library/taoism/ethics-morality-community/principles-of-moral-thought-and-action) contrasts early Taoism from later developments:
>
> The Taode jing and Zhuangzi were not interested in promoting specific
> moral virtues, and were critical of the idea of regulating society
> with standards of behavior. According to these texts, to emulate
> nature and "do without doing" (wei wu-wei), and to harmonize oneself
> with Tao, will lead naturally to behavior that is genuinely virtuous.
> "Drop humanity, abandon justice/ And the people will return to their
> natural affections".
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It's probably not exactly what you're looking for, but I think it may provide a good starting point.
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In my view, you cannot.
Religion is (next to other things) first and foremost a value system.
To have values, you have to call some things bad and some things good.
It doesn't matter if you call them "helpful" instead of good, what matters that they are better than the other thing.
Claiming one thing is better (or more ethical) than another is claiming moral authority.
Every teaching is claiming to know something that another beeing does not know (yet). If the teaching is on an ethical subject, it has to claim moral superiority to justify teaching it to the other beeing.
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One solution would be to include philosophy under these scientific gods. Just as physical laws are governed by the fictional gods of your universe, moral laws and causality can be governed by such beings/principles and the knowledge they bring about.
For example, there could be a Utilitarian god of morality who enlightens the masses as to good and evil in the sense of what good an act will have in reference to specific desired outcomes. Then there'd be a Virtue Ethics god, a Consequentialist god, a Hedonist god (the Epicureanist understanding having displaced the Cyrenaic one), etc.
These gods won't dictate particular actions as morally sinful--(e.g. they won't say "killing is a sin")--rather they will approach morality from their respective philosophical approaches. The Hedonist god would suggest to the psychopathic follower that if murder brings him/her pleasure, then it is morally right to kill so long as doing so will not eventually bring them negative consequences (such as being arrested or being killed in the attempt). A Consequentialist god would admonish its adherents to minimize actions whose consequences cannot be foreseen, as they would be culpable for undesirable outcomes regardless of their intentions.
In other words, they would teach values and principles rather than proscribing specific actions.
They could all fall into a harmony, or they could be viewed in opposition. Or both.
In any event, these gods would be the result of research and coming to a complex understanding of how things affect one another. Sociological studies would have a great impact on what is considered moral: For example, if research shows that those who engage in a particular gratuitous act are less happy over time than those who those who abstain, the hedonist view of the morality of indulging in that thing would change. As studies reveal negative social consequences, Consequentialists would reapprise their views on whether doing such a thing is moral.
The religion would handle morality as it handles all knowledge.
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You mentioned that the universe is considered the the highest god. This gives you the option of introducing lesser "gods" that seek to end the Universe. Concepts like Entropy that seek to remove all usable energy from the Universe and DarkEnergy which threatens to reap the Universe apart might be seen as bad. Inefficient use of energy helps Entropy so people who are not efficient with energy are labeled as bad people.
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A religion that doesn’t teach divine-command morality can still promote any other definition of right or wrong from moral philosophy. For example, they could be Utilitarians, who hold that their metaphysical beliefs are true, and that “good” means “good for people.” They could follow the teachings of a revered sage they consider to have been the wisest person in history and the most worthy of emulation, but not divinely inspired per se. They might believe their moral precepts can be deduced from “natural religion” and observing how the universe works, and does not come from revelation. They might not necessarily claim to have all the answers on what morality is, beyond the things that everyone who counts can agree on.
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Simple Hedonism - striving for maximization of pleasure - could be a guideline for that kind of religion. This doesn't contradict progress, empirically proven by how much technology is harnessed for hedonist means these days; neither will it necessarily promote violent or oppressive behaviour since defensive reactions incurred would contradict a hedonist ideal without any need of moral judgement.
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In most religions there are two main areas that make you a better person - following the rules defined by god(s) and being closer to gods through worshipping them (the latter is usually somehow required in the former but that's not necessary).
It is very difficult not to follow laws of physics however I'll get back to that later in my answer.
What is important is to be closer to the god and since god is the universe to be closer to it you need to understand it better. In other words, science, especially those of physics (and subsequently mathematics), chemistry and to a lesser extent biology are paths leading to the god. So learning will be an extremely important part of everyone's life.
This way scientists will have a position of combined scientists and priests in our world. They will be most revered ones as they lead others to the god. Also teachers will be of an extreme importance and very high in the social status. Of course not everyone will be able (or even willing) to follow such path, someone will have to do the "regular" work, but in all they do, they will be trying to use to the best of the knowledge gained so far. So for example if a constructor creates e.g. a bridge or a building they will be utilising the knowledge to show how well they understand the laws of physics. The building using to a stretch various laws of physics will be treated as "most beautiful". On the other hand if there is an overstretch and a building collapses it will be considered one of the heaviest sins. The same will be with everything else.
For everyone it will be a moral requirement to devour part of their time to gain more knowledge just like nowadays those who believe should devour some of their time to a prayer. And in exactly the same manner some will follow and some won't.
In general you may assume two main threads and two largest fractions of the church. Those who want to preserve everything and "just" understand the god better to align with it (Preservers) and those who say that as the god reveals its mysteries in form of knowledge we are entitled and even obliged to use it (Progressers). As a result you will have different good/bad values. And a frame for a conflict.
Obliging to the laws of nature (not only physics) will be considered the good (for both fractions). It will also mean that changing the state of things (e.g. pollution) will be cnsidered bad. Trying to bend rules of nature will be considered bad for Preservers but good for Progressers (unless it's bend too far causing to fail still obliging the rules). Unlike in some religions we face (for instance Christianity), there will be nothing about doing the Earth subjected. On the contrary it will be adapting to the nature that is valued most. Yet the Progressers will see it as adapting to a greater nature of the whole universe.
It gets tricky in terms of things which we naturally consider good or bad. Any life form is a materialisation of physics and as such should be protected in its natural state. E.g. there will be no such thing as ZOO as this is against the nature. On the other hand life extension will be a huge moral debate - on one side will be Preservers who will claim that it is changing the nature, on the other Progressers who will say it's the best use of knowledge and as such presentation of better understanding of the god itself. Similar heated discussions will be regarding many topics that we have in ethics and philosophy now. For example - does a free will exist or are all our actions determined only by god (this will not be by Preservers and Progressers, you will find supporters to each option in each main branch of the religion). As we know some particles can seemingly randomly appear and disappear. Does it impact our free will? Is it really random and or maybe somehow either controlled by the god or being actual impact of our free will on the god?
Scarifying a single person to protect many will be considered an act of good. Also scarification to gain more knowledge will be considered an act of good (e.g. our Maria Sklodowska-Curie will be sort of a martyr). On the other hand pure wasting of peoples or animals life will be considered bad and against the god.
I think you have an overall view.
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Why not the same way pluralistic societies determine good and bad, that is by debate and agreement.
good and bad are not completely stable or consistent even within the same religion they change with time even in religions that do claim absolute moral authority. If the religion does not claim absolute authority then really it has to be either relying on consensus based morality or going full hedonistic. the latter is unlikely however because large societies need rules to operate. As a society we agree murder is bad but not every society did, what is different well a lot of debate (and the introduction of literature) and people realized dead people have many downsides so maybe lets not make dead people when we don't have to. You may want to look up the enlightenment to see how a focus on reason led to a consensus based moral system. Basically if absolute morality does not exist then we can't be sure what we are doing is actually good, so all moral positions are in flux and constantly being tested just like scientific stances and the best method available to keep testing morality is a free exchange of ideas. This leads to other ideas like maybe not killing people just becasue you disagree with them, and making sure people actually can speak freely.
As a side note your religion is not going to be very stable in the long term, unless your universe really is run by gods. Encouraging science will create something similar to occam's razor, many will quickly discard the idea of thinking of the fundamental forces of the universe as gods because it doesn't make their predictions any more accurate. "I have no need of that hypothesis".
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**NB: This is not a duplicate of another question. Despite this question being different *and* clearly stating and demonstrating how it is different below, it has been marked as a duplicate. If you agree, please vote for this to be re-opened.
In the other question, the OP asks how an inhabited base could be cloaked from enemy detection. The answers suggest things like living underground, using electric cars, and other things to make the technology more low-key. This island has no habitation, and no technology, so these things would be irrelevant and alter the answers given.**
So, this is gonna be one of the last in the basic "overcoming impossible obstacles" phase in planning my possible book project. After that's done, you'll probably be seeing less of 'that guy with the island'.
What I want to know is how a 55,000km2 island in the Indian Ocean could be kept hidden from any country's mapping satellites (and Google Maps), until the year 2019 when it was discovered (from the surface) by local fishermen. In [my last question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/108664/what-equipment-would-a-well-funded-research-team-need-to-explore-a-previously-un), many people brought up the issue of the island being undiscovered for so long, and there was lots of talk about cover-ups and stuff like that. I recommend you check that out in the link above to get some inspiration if you're planning on answering. (Look in the comments section of the question block.)
So, there are a few conditions to consider that will need to be a product of the cover-up (or whatever other way you guys come up with.).
First of all, if it was a cover-up, there would have to be a reason why the organization who originally found the island wasn't there when the island was "discovered" by the rest of the world.
The second condition is that the first people to set foot on the island are a team of researchers - not the US military, or any other military force. Again, on my last question, some people believed that if the government had been kept in the dark for so long, they would assume a threat and send military units to quarantine the island. I believe JBH, who took part in the discussion in the previous question, said he(?) knew how this condition would be achieved, so I'll be interested to hear from him.
I would also be interested to hear if there are any other ways the island could have remained hidden besides an illegal cover-up, are there any other phenomena, natural or synthetic, that could achieve this?
Note: This is *not* a duplicate of the question "What would it take to keep a large island in the East Pacific hidden?". This one has different conditions to that one, conditions which would alter the answer to the question.
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The island was (after the initial discovery in the mists of time) never unknown, it was just ignored. There are a lot of uninhabited, uninhabitable islands all over the seas, and they garner little to no interest save frome cartographers.
If it is unknown, every Jane Shmoe that stumbles upon it (reading radar data from satellites, looking at aerial surveillance, boating by) will look at the incontrovertible evidence of an island before her eyes, then look at the charts, and begin writing a memo about it, because 'I found an island, Yay!'.
So the island was (fraudulently/erroneously) mischarted and marked as inhospitable (no potable water, no flat terrain, no accessible coastal features,...), useless (no anchoring possible, geological features denote no economically viable mineral deposits,...) and dangerous (bays are full of rocks, frequent severe weather warnings). Now the island is seen a thousand times, and dismissed a thousand times.
Scientists will not be deterred, though, if the island suddenly gets interesting by whatever means (satellite data implies deposits of coolnewfaddium / data from genetic analysis of neighboring coastal species can only be explained by those species having lived *right there* / the booster stages of SpaceX would ideally touch down in that exact spot - can't we build a platform there?).
The island being known implies it belongs to some nation, so if that would be a snag for the plot, just have it smack in the middle of a disputed border. Not the 'i want it'-kind, but the kind where having the border there would incur responsibility for something unwanted (refugees, spill, SAR-responsibility, ...) so the two or more nations that could have a claim can't be bothered to set boot on the island lest the others use that as precedent.
The sheer size might make it interesting for something (dumping, research station) so there probably needs to be some ongoing effort by the shadowy oranisation (SO) in regards to making it seem like the last place one would like to be -
* SO: "We'll try and use it as a dump, ok?"
* National goverments:"We're not per se responsible, but go ahead"
* SO:"Everyone died horribly!(Though not interestingly - no viruses or cool megafauna) - Why did you allow this? You owe us a gazillion bucks!"
* National government: "We owe you squat, first of all, it's not really our territory, secondly its clearly labeled as DeadDontInsideOpen; but the next application for doing something there will surely be denied!"
* SO:"Awwwww..."
--- **Uninteresting deaths**: Weather-related: mudslide, flash-flood, foundering; Terrain-related: Rock-slide, Vehicles getting stuck, Anchorages breaking loose. Biology related: Malaria (known strains), Fungal respiratory complications (known species). --- **Interesting deaths(Avoid)**: CO/CO2-bubbles from the ground, catastrophic methane bubbles from the sea-floor, over-statistical occurrence of freak waves (but you can massage the statistics), pirates, volcanism, unknown strains of deadly disease
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Can't be done. Demonstrated by a single image:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GrZNV.jpg)
One of the most reproduced images in history, this is The Blue Marble, taken by the Apollo 17 crew on December 7, 1972. Basically the entire Indian Ocean. Mainland Asia in on the horizon at the top, and going around the horizon is Indonesia and Australia just over the horizon, with Antarctica clearly visible on the bottom. If you recreate the view in Google Earth, it's easy to see where everything is. It's also clear there's no place to put an island the size of Tasmania where no one could see it. The only place where it wouldn't be visible in this image is in that large cloud bank southeast of South Africa, but that would have been trivially discovered centuries before this picture was taken.
If you know where to look, you can also see the cloud pattern caused by the Kerguelen Islands, which are a lot smaller, isolated, and mapped in 1754.
And this is *one* image.
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The trick here is not to keep it hidden per se, but to put it in a place that people won't go looking for it.
Looking through the comments in the previous question, it's clear that something that size *would* have appeared in satellite maps of the planet since the 1970s and let's face it; at 55k Km2, we're talking the size of [Tasmania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmania), which is pretty hard to miss.
That said, there are plenty of places on Earth that we just don't go looking for things. One of the reasons that Google (allegedly) fudges the details of the Pentagon on Google Earth is that everyone wants to see it. They also know roughly where it is. It's therefore the Google Earth version of clickbait. People will actively search for it.
So what else will they search for?
Anything that's in their way, really. On the oceans, that essentially means on trade routes. Why? Because modern container ships are [very expensive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship#Vessel_purchases) and the last thing you want is your brand new ship running aground on something that no-one knew was in its way. Other than that, if there's no known population from an island somewhere that has made contact with the outside world yet, then it may very well stay hidden on grounds that our age of naval discovery is more or less over and we think we know all there is to know about what's out there.
The point being; if you want to hide an island, keep it off the official trade routes. The problem is that [almost all the Indian Ocean is a trade route](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3562440/Watch-cargo-ships-sail-Earth-s-oceans-Hypnotic-interactive-map-follows-route-giant-vessels-year.html). But, this is at least a place to start.
Personally? I'd place it as south as possible, preferably between the southern tip of Africa and Antarctica. I'd do that because of the Roaring 40s. People generally don't want to sail ships any further south of the southern tip of Africa than they have to because the winds and turbulence can be horrific. If they're staying as close to South Africa as they can when switching between the Indian and South Atlantic oceans, it's *possible* that there could be an island close to Antarctica (but not so close that it becomes a research target) that no-one has ever noted it.
In reality, the chances of an island that's around 85% the size of Tasmania remaining hidden on the globe is next to impossible. If I was going to hide an island of that size, I'd do it in the South Pacific simply because it's bigger and has less trade route action than anywhere else on Earth. But, if I was forced to hide an island in the Indian Ocean, the best advice I could provide would be to put it where the ships aren't.
One final word of warning; if you put an island between South Africa and Antarctica, only drink the white wines they produce, not the reds. Both Tasmania and New Zealand are famous for their whites which fare much better in colder climates. While the reds of Margaret River (WA) and the Clare Valley (SA) border on legendary, your island simply can't have the climate to support them and NOT be discovered.
If you want your island to produce a spectacular red, the only place you can hide it is the South Pacific. Both the Atlantic and Indian oceans have traffic on them that would preclude an island that size being significantly north of Antarctica.
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The Island has a weird mineral in the soil that manifests a previously unknown quantum effect called quantum-duality. At CERN, they crack a new particle, the discovery of which predicts that an ancient meteor consisting of this mineral may have impacted the earth creating a quantum vacuole, which ships or any known elements from the periodic table would pass right through unless they had a critical mass of the weird mineral in them.
Under these conditions, the quantum vacuole is penetrated and instead of simply passing though to the other side of the the vacuole, the ship and all on it merge into the quantum alternative, which is the island. For this reason, it has never been spotted by any satellite, voyager or adventurer thus far and the fauna and flora on the island remain secluded behind the quantum vacuole boundary, where they simply appear on the opposite side, re-entering the vacuole as they appear to leave it. The effect is so seamless that they see through to the other side of the vacuole without realising that it is in fact looped round.
Explaining how the fauna and flora got there in the first place would involve bio accumulation of the mineral in certain species's egg shells, which enables them to penetrate the quantum vacuole and populate the island that way.
An expedition goes exploring the world aboard a ship impregnated with a critical mass of the mineral manufactured at CERN at great cost and great secrecy. The plot can be filled with intriguing inferences from Einstein and references from other intuitive geniuses through the ages who predict that such a thing would exist. They criss cross the ocean systematically until they stumble upon the island's quantum vacuole.
This makes the whole thing plausible because who knows what they will discover about the universe next at CERN.
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I agree with bukwyrm that *hiding* a significant island is completely impossible. So how to keep it unexplored?
* It was visited occasionally by European sailors in the 16th and 17th century, and they told pretty incoherent stories which are a minor part of common myth and folklore. *"Lions and tigers and bears, oh my."*
* Since the 18th century, the island has been claimed by the *Kingdom of Plot*.
* In the late 19th century, the king of *Plot* made a deal with the British Empire. Coaling stations on another *Plottian* island possession against preferential trade and defense deals. These treaties have held since then. Unlike most African or Asian countries, the *Kingdom of Plot* has never been a colony of any imperialist power, except for those ports on 99-year leases (since extended).
* For reasons of their own, the *Plottians* did not want visitors on most of their terrain. A bit like Japan in the early 19th century. The rest of the world is vaguely aware than not even *Plottians* are allowed to visit some islands. This has become a cliche of cheap adventure stories and movies, and for that reason all sensible persons will dismiss wild tales as rumor.
* In the early 21st century, the King of *Plot* got himself a batch of new advisors. Free trade and all that.
Now you can make the call who goes in and how. A few scientists with *x* tons of cargo on an one-time visa? A corporation that got the exclusive oil contracts?
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55,000 sq km island is just too big to be hidden. It absolutely has to appear on satellite pictures, and even without satellites, ships were unlikely to miss it.
It looks like the largest island discovered with the help of satellite imagery is [Landsat Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsat_Island) in Canada. Its size is 25 m by 45 m (yes, meters, without the kilo- prefix).
So the only somewhat plausible and realistic explanation that I see is a conspiracy.
Let's imagine that this island had been away from usual shipping routes and escaped detection until first satellites were launched. Then, in early 1960s, it was simultaneously discovered by US and Russia. Both countries made secret expeditions (sorry, can not avoid that) and both wanted to claim the land for themselves. Naturally, the issue had become a very contentious one and led to what has become publicly known as "Cuban Missile Crisis" of 1962.
After cooler heads prevailed, it was decided that this island should remain a no-man's land, and, for the best, its existence kept in secret. This was relatively easy to do in 1960s, but as other countries launched their own satellites, it had eventually become clear that the charade could not be kept for long.
Finally, in 2019, some sailors discovered the island and made it public before government agents could intercept the information. Naturally, the world was very surprised. At the same time, world powers, now including China, are still honoring their old agreement of military non-involvement. Which means that the island is open for explorers!
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I personally prefer the answer @bukwyrm has given, though you could also take another approach.
The only other ways an island (that is not magic or has supernatural weather/magnetic effects) could realistically be hidden like that are:
1. If it only recently appeared. For example due to an inactive underwater volcano suddenly becoming active and creating land.
2. If it was hidden by governments, like military bases are on Google Maps.
or, a more improbable, but possible third option:
3. The island is within the range of a highly territorial nation who approach any activity in the area with hostility but haven't come across the island themselves.
Undiscovered islands are pretty much impossible in this current day and age with cameras and observation everywhere.
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Due to a systemic effect of air current dynamics in the global climate scale, that spot is under permanent cloud coverage. Think the center of a swirly pattern of air masses that got classified and studied separately. This hides the island from satellites. Nobody bothered to check their maps had valid data for all the surface of the Earth, they just assumed so.
Being far away from shipping routes does the rest.
Optional: global warming has just, or is about to, alter that balance and dissipate cloud coverage for the first time since the 1960's.
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Probably won't work for (typical) wildlife, but I could see hiding some amount of space in the cone/magma chambers of an underwater volcano a la Bond villain.
The original cone could be weathered down to appear to be a small, inhospitiable island, but under the surface of the ocean lies a vast unexplored cave, basically. If there was a plateau in the center vertical satellite photographs might make the cone appear shallower than it really is, with the space hiding under the overhang of the upper cone. You'd have to come up with some explaination of why the space hadn't collapsed or filled with water. (Some kind of natural pump powered by geothermal or radioactive heat, or a long lost technological civilization.)
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**It couldn't.**
Sorry, but it's completely implausible. 55,000km2 about the size of Croatia or West Virginia. Such an island would be naked-eye visible from space and completely obvious to passengers on commercial aircraft. Ok, so the astronauts are in on the conspiracy and there is [surprisingly little commercial air traffic over the Indian Ocean](http://3d.luciad.com/#) (pause the animation, select 2D, scroll over there and hit play). So maybe you could put this huge island somewhere out of the way. But then there are no "local fishermen" who might stumble upon it.
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Despite answers to the contrary, it is actually possible to have an unexplored island of that size if you cut the condition that it existed before.
**The island did not exist before 2019 when it was actually created by a megathrust earthquake.**
The enormously powerful earthquake triggering the 2004 tsunami catastrophe actually raised the sea floor by several meters. So it may be plausible that an earthquake in the Central Indian Ridge will raise the area around the Seychelles, Maledives and the Chagos Archiple around meters which will increase the area enormously if we take a look at sea maps (I will add that later).
Now a geologist may come to the conclusion that the areas are still too far from the actual tectonic plate to have that effect, but at least it is not completely idiotic.
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I'm not sure if this is completely possible or not:
1) The area around the island has lots of underwater rocks that come near the surface. Very few ships can safely approach (you need not only high grade sonar to know where everything is, but a propulsion system that lets you pick your way through the rocks while the current tries to dash you into them), it's considered a do-not-go area for this reason.
2) The geography plus extensive geothermal activity create a perpetual cloud cover. Satellites have gotten very few looks at the land. The land is also pretty much low lying and flat so it doesn't stand out on radar. Given all the shoals it wouldn't exactly be shocking for there to be some bits sticking out, even if they were seen nobody would care.
3) The dominant plant life has a mutation that causes it to be blue. What glimpses have been obtained look enough like water that nobody has noticed.
I do have a problem with local fishermen finding it, though--for it to be hidden this long it can't be local to any inhabited areas! Can you replace your local fishermen with fishermen in a disabled vessel drifting at sea?
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The island could be in a gap in the trade network, and home to some plantlife with ocean-colored leaves or flowers covering the entire island. This would likely hide it from satellites reasonably well.
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In the world I'm building, there is a race of people whose main shtick is that they can detect the magnetic fields of their planet and use them to navigate. In one of their cultures, the people are nomadic and use the same "roads" to travel to different historic or religious sites in their culture. What's even more interesting is their sense of these lines, which is widely perceived as being innate knowledge. Members of this culture may not know where these paths lead, but their existence is widely known and understood to them, even if they've never followed them far or at all.
However, what these ley lines really are has been difficult to pin down. I am essentially looking for a phenomenon that can explain the following traits:
* Ley lines can be felt, but cannot be seen with the naked eye
* They will continue to be present regardless of terrain or manmade constructs, and can be tracked going “through” things as well
* Ley lines can be of varying length
* They do not have to intersect, although this would be preferred if possible
* The shape of the line is of little consequence, but straighter lines would be preferred if possible
* Their existence is part of some natural force that does not need to be taught
* Ley lines are *not* the magnetic field of the planet, although they may be related to magnetic forces
* Ley lines are not a phenomenon caused by any extinct cultures or anything like that; this is a natural force of the world
* They are also *not* a creation of the gods or magic
In essence, I am looking for a natural phenomenon or something that could be a widespread phenomenon on some other world to use in this setting that meets most if not all the criteria above.
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What about [Lodestone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodestone) paths?
Some birds can handle long range migrations through being able to 'detect' magnetic fields; I don't know the specific mechanics of how they do that, but let's assume that your people have some iron-based 'sensors' in their minds, allowing them to detect the presence of small magnetic fields, or at least disruption of the primary one around the planet. This would likely only occur at short range, and may be felt at a subliminal level. They go a particular way because it 'feels' right.
Lodestone is effectively just naturally magnetised Magnetite, and this can be created by volcanic activity for one. So, what I'm thinking is that you have a world that was very volcanically active at an earlier stage, and that there was a large amount of lodestone created during that period. What happened however was that the lava ran along the many gullies and ditches that had been formed on the planetary surface, leading to a criss-crossing pathway of lodestone rich lava 'tubes' or 'lanes'. Over time, granite and other 'softer' stone breaks down and becomes soil that covers the surface a little more evenly. Your tribe naturally settle such areas of the planet because what igneous rock that does break down in addition to the granite makes the soil very nutrient rich meaning that agriculture thrives in such areas.
But, many of these paths (particularly the deeper or larger ones) still exist under the surface, and your tribe can detect the interference pattern that results from the minor magnetic field overriding the planetary one.
This gives you a reason why the paths would exist, a reason for your people to live close to them in the first place and has the added benefit of using minerals and science that currently exists.
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It's the migratory birds.
The native birds use a stinging agent to digest almost any food available on your world. And by using terrestic navigation and magnetic fields to find their path, millions and million of years of continous bird droppings concentrated the stuff in the earth, embedded it in the trees and water.
The stuff can be immediately felt because it works as a very weak contact poison. But it is not stable, so it needs constant replenishment to be active.
Your population knows that birds are following the ley lines, but they got it wrong: They think the birds are using the leys for navigation while in reality the birds are the origin of the lines.
It also explains neatly why the nomads are following the lines: Birds also need food, water and rest, so the ley lines are guaranteed to provide them. Bird meat is raw inedible, so cooking is necessary, but the agent is destroyed by heat which also explains why people do not recognize the ley line feeling when eating birds.
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**Crustal cracks, and a radioactive core**
Your planet could have cracks in it's crust, hidden by top soil and geologic layers deposited in the last few million years by rivers and wind.
These cracks could be caused by large moons (see [this article](https://www.space.com/30795-earth-gravitational-pull-cracks-moon.html) about cracks on the Moon caused by the Earth's gravity), or by ancient meteor strikes during the planet's formation.
Some of these cracks may be associate with volcanic activity, but they don't all need to be. They could be thinner areas that don't go all the way through to hot magma underneath, or there could be another layer underneath that confines the lava.
The point is, that your planet has a radioactive core, and the crust has elements in it that shield the surface. At these points where the crust is thin, there is a measurable increase in radiation. Species on your planet evolved in this environment and aren't harmed by the radiation. In fact, in the very distance past this radiation was an energy source that assisted biota in developing into complex life and your creatures have a residual attunement to finding it. Think of the way plants on Earth absorb the sun's radiation and use it for food rather than other ways that radiation tends to harm us.
These crustal weak points could run long distances. Any formed by meteor impacts would probably lead to a number branching out from a single location and stopping after a certain distance (potentially hundreds of kilometers), while cracks due to large moons might go around the whole planet.
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**A giant fungus or slime mold network.**
The fungus is growing below the soil and tries to reach points of interest for it (source of nutrients basically). The network is highly optimized and uses lines to connect the important points.
Along those lines and at the nodes spores of the fungus will be present. Usually people won't notice them but the nomads have developed a method of sensing them although they are too small to be seen - microscopic analysis might discover them but spores are everywhere, so it might be hard to get down to this specific fungus.
As fungi get their nutrients by decomposing other stuff, the nodes are places where something is living for the fungus to decompose, so it's likely that people could find something useful for living or surviving there as well.
Depending on the weather the path of the last year might not be optimal for the fungus anymore, so the lines the fungus is taking might shift from year to year.
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**Real world example:**
Here is a video of a slime mold forming a network resembling the train network of Tokyo: [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwKuFREOgmo) The cities are made up as source of nutrients, after some time an efficient network has grown.
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Building upon this idea, there could also be an explanation for religious sites along the network. On especially big nodes you could have high enough spore concentration for mild intoxication to occur (maybe inside a cave or something). This could lead to hallucinations which are seen as a message from The Great Funghu - a nomad deity.
If you need them to be magnetic, make that fungus absorb magnetic material in high enough concentration - it's not uncommon for fungi to absorb specific elements. After Tschernobyl some fungi were found to have a very high content of radioactive Cesium-137.
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**Underground rivers**
One of the many theories for what creates lay lines are flowing underground rivers and streams. These might be deep enough that normal construction would never alter them. Just as with load-stone or iron or veins laid by ancient lava pipes (which could now have water in) these would be invisible to the eye from the surface but produce faint electromagnetic lines.
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[Infrasound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound).
Those people are folowing [The Hum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum). On our own Earth there is nothing conclusive about that, but it is not a stretch for it to be a real thing in a fictional world.
What matters there is that the nomads either feel the minute planetary vibration on their skin rather than hearing it, or if they do pick it up with their ears, their brain processes it differently.
Or they might be "feeling" the vibrations of tectonic plates, crushing against each other - the paths could exist along fault lines (and maybe magma plumes);
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As an alternative, rather than sounds, their ears might be picking up variations in the gravity of the planet itself (through [the vestibular system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_system)). Our Earth's gravity [is not homogeneous throughout the planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#/media/File:Geoids_sm.jpg), though we are not sensitive enough to detect its variations. The nomad people in your story might be different from us in that aspect.
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Meteor impacts and vulcanism have created iron deposits that disrupt the smooth flow of the world's magnetic field. Instead of world-circling arc, pole-to-pole, there is a general 'polar' field that is significantly disrupted by what are in effect giant lodestones. These 'pinch' the magnetic field, so depending on where you are starting from you would take a different path to get to the lodestone - and then have choices for where to go next (which lodestone).
Knowledge of which path connected to where would be important and the destruction of a lodestone could have major impact. Maybe someone who had connected this navigation to celestial navigation skill could become significant in the event of lodestone destruction (volcanic action, earthquake or maybe creation of a new lodestone).
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I apologise as this will be vague - but I am building a world set in the future (late 21st century) and looking at realistic ways for rapid desertification of huge land areas, say America, and civilisations reduced to small towns and roaming bandit packs, as well as one 'mega-city' controlled by AI and heavily governed.
Basically the world economy and governments have collapsed. I'm already planning a mass 'exodus' - a huge percentage of humanity leaving the Earth for a new planet - but I want a world where those 'left behind' are left to survive. I was envisioning a world like the one in Mad Max Fury Road, resources are scarce and much is desert-land.
I was thinking of a **nuclear war**, though I read this could lead to a Nuclear Winter.. Basically between the 'exodus' and where the story starts, I want it to be in the not-too-distant future so definitely under 100 years later. I don't want the land to be too irradiated - people should still be able to survive, even if struggling - but I was wondering if **global warming** could create such a post-apocalyptic world?
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This did happen in the US. It was very bad. It was the Dustbowl.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AJ71L.jpg)
from <http://www.npr.org/2013/09/10/220725737/dust-bowl-worries-swirl-up-as-shelterbelt-buckles>
Thousands of square miles turned to blowing moonscapes. I have read that this was caused by a combination of poor farming practices and drought. I am still not clear on how it was undone.
But the question: could it happen again? The farmers who carried out the poor farming practices would never have done those things if they had known what would happen. They wanted to live on the land and farm it indefinitely. Could we make mistakes like that again - farming practices that exhaust and deplete the land, and then let it blow away?
We could if we did not care about tomorrow. In that context I was thinking about Bain Capital and the new way to make money. These financiers buy established companies and then run them into the ground, selling off all assets and the pension fund. The company goes bankrupt and the workers are left with no job and no pension. The rich get richer. They destroy a thing used for making in the interest of short term gain.
from <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829>
>
> Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out
> massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms,
> liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies
> holding the note.
>
>
>
What if that happened to farmlands? You could invoke some new alien cash crop in this context as the catalyst for this. The government stops paying attention for one of many plausible reasons, and industrial farms are purchased by financiers. They run the land into the ground with farming practices that are in the short term profitable but in the long term devastating. The Dustbowl comes back, but this time to stay.
Upvote for this question for making me think of this terrifyingly plausible scenario.
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For reference, I think the salt flats in Mad Max Fury Road was meant to be a dried up sea bed.
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## Realistic
**Global warming:**
This will likely really happen. Yes, it is capable of creating the post apocalyptic environment you describe. And is, in my opinion, the most believable. This will shift plant-survivable habitats towards the poles, leaving what is currently tropical lands as desert.
Things about global warming that could kill plants:
* Plants die directly from heat/dehydration
* Plants die from fire caused by lack of water caused by heat
* Global warming causes change in winds that mean rain no longer visits certain areas
**Deforestation:**
If you cut down all the trees, they aren't coming back, because there's no naturally occurring seed for them. Particularly with plants, removing large portions of their neighbours will *hugely reduce* their reproduction rates and, after a certain point, could remove all traces of particular species within a few generations.
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It is possible that these two could combine to cause sudden and rapid disintegration of plants over a wide area. If we look at the [IPCC reports](http://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf), we can find a predicted temperature rise of about 3°C degrees by the end of the century. This may not sound like much, but the last ice age was only 4.5 degrees different to what it is now. So congratulations, your post apocalyptic world is fairly likely in the next hundred years.
For the purposes of dramatisation, I would suggest a period of little noticeable change, and then a sudden period where lots of things change. This is ideal for your story as there will be a sudden societal shift (eg governments fall, wars etc) when this change happens. Yes, this is one of the plausible things that happens, though I haven't found a good source on it.
Although not mentioned in any of the parts of the IPCC report read that I, a typical thing spouted by global warming activists is the snowball/runaway effect. In short: decreased size of polar ice caps means less reflective area means higher temperature means decreased size of polar ice caps. Or: reduced number of trees has reduced number of seedlings has reduced number of trees for the next generation. This makes good story material.
There are supportive feedback loops as well though, trees are known to produce more oxygen in higher CO2 environments, so it isn't all doom and gloom. I trust the guys at IPCC to know what they're talking about, so if you want actual *facts* go read their extremely comprehensive reports.
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## Fictional:
**Disease:**
A specialised bacteria wipes out everything with cell walls (aka all plants).
**Move the Earth closer to the sun:**
Nukes, asteroid impact, villainous plans involving really big rockets....
**Radioactive Fallout that decays rapidly**: Humans live in bunkers for a few years, so they survive, but not much outside does.
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Radiation can have this effect, but the timelines might be a bit longer than you wanted.
The key thing that prevents the Earth from achieving this degree of desertification is ultimately life...life struggles to keep it's environment intact so it may continue to grow/live. Large plant life (trees in particular) resist erosion with their roots holding together soil and retaining water. Bushes and shrubs protect their earth from the sun and wind as well. Even grasses band together to hold the soil they need in place. You remove life, you remove the greatest resister of erosion.
This leaves the nuclear option valid, though a bit challenging as you have to nuke a huge segment of the earth. Nuclear winter is very much a possibility, but it'd reverse quickly...it's just an extension of the timelines (10-20 years) as much as anything.
Introduce another possibility...the earth gets fried from space. Currently, the Earth is protected by it's magnetic field from the majority of what we'd call "Space weather". Space is messy...there is radiation of all sorts flying in all directions, with the source of life on Earth (our sun) being a major source. If for any reason this magnetic field was overwhelmed or ceased to exist, then Earth would be fried pretty quickly...plant life on earth with shrivel quickly as it's bombarded with radiation originating from space.
So my answer - remove the Earths Magnetic field. There are a few potentials...
1) Age. A magnetic field requires a molten core to exist...if Earths core was to transition to solid, we would lose our magnetic protection. I'm not sure how this would onset (I think it's a slow drawn out process)
2) Magnetic reversal - It appears that Earths magnetic field is subject to a major reversal event where north and south switch sides on a multi-century scale. No clue how the reversal process would play out, but if this reversal saw the collapse of the magnetic field for a short period of time (a year?), Earth would heavily fry.
3) Space event. You get a CME (coronal mass ejection) of a certain size coming straight for earth or a supernova event nearby (by nearby I still mean several light years), you could have an event that completely overwhelms our magnetic field and fry the earth...this would be a much shorter event, but due to it coming at us at the speed of light, we wouldn't be able to easily detect it.
4) Evil Megalomaniac. Drill to the center of earth and drop nukes til something happens? Dunno.
A little theoretical, but "space weather or interference with Earths magnetic field" would be my favorite choice for what you are going for here. Knowing this event was happening would provide plenty of time and reason for your exodus to take place.
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We are already well on our way to desertifying much of the world. Over the past 70 years, the U.S. has lost 30% of its arable land due to erosion. Dust storms have hit major agricultural states in the U.S., such as this one that hit Denver in 2012: <http://vogeltalksrving.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/dust-storm-over-denver-th-e-worldgeography.com_.jpg>
Why is this happening? Our current industrial scale farming practices are destroying the biology in the soil. These microbes are essential to the dirt's ability to hold water, to aggregate (clump up so that it doesn't erode) and to solubilize nutrients so that plants can uptake them.
Because we are monocropping (growing only one crop at a time, like corn, or soybeans) and not rotating crops (because our government subsidizes bad farming practices), we are inviting huge infestations of pests. This, in turn, requires greater and greater toxic soups of pesticides to 'control' pest populations (shocker: these chemicals are only about 25% effective) as the pests become resistant to the latest batch of pesticides. The fallacy of this approach is that for every one target organism that is killed via this method, we are killing a thousand or more beneficial organisms, and accelerating this downward spiral.
We are introducing so many toxins into the environment, in such vast quantities, that we have not only destroyed the mycorrhizae in our soils but even entire functional groups of bacteria. If you were a soil scientist, you would understand how impossible and scary that is.
Without microbes, plants can't efficiently uptake nutrients, so we have to pour more and more fertilizers on to maintain the same level of fertility. The excess fertilizer gets washed into the watershed, causing eutrophication of our streams, rivers and lakes (the Great Lakes are dead/dying because of this) and creates a 7800 square mile (and growing) seasonal dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, devastating shrimping and fishing grounds (That's bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined).
This, combined with global warming/climate change, means that our soils are less and less resilient, and less and less able to sustain life of any kind, let alone feed the world, as it is the microbes in the soil that allow plants to offset abiotic stress like high and low temperatures, drought, and salinity.
To top it all off, we are running out of phosphorus, the key limiting nutrient for plant growth. Sometime between 2028 and 2040, the US will be out of its domestic deposits of rock phosphate and will be entirely dependant on foreign sources for its food security. 75% of the worlds phosphate deposits are controlled by one country: Morroco. The bulk of the rest is in China, which has already banned the export of this vital resource.
If you are interested in researching this scenario for your story, I highly recommend you read this book: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0032JTFGQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?\_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B0032JTFGQ)
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One from left-field: The new technology developed for the creation of the spaceship used in the planet exodus caused an accident resulting in a supermassive magnesium fire, that couldn't be put out until such time as it had sucked most of the moisture out of the air & seas to provide its oxygen.
**Edit:** The left-behinds would have suffocated, but for the solar-powered OxyGen™ machines that had been built (also for the exodus) that generate oxygen from hydrogen. These were put into use once the fire finally died down.
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You have two options when it comes to fiction. (A) Try to explain why your world is the way it is. (B) Ignore why your world is the way it is. You'd be surprised how often (b) is chosen because (a), when you come to the nuts and bolts of the matter, usually leads to proving the context of the story is utter hogwash (did I say "hogwash?" I meant "fiction." "utter fiction.") So, assuming we really want (a)...
1) I'm going to start my stream-of-conciousness thought experiment with an axiom and hope to break it. "There is nothing Man can do in the short term to create a habitable long-term desert." Deserts require really just one thing: a lack of water. Heat certainly helps, but water is the key. Where there is water, there is life. Can Man remove the water from an reasonably large area (say, 10,000 square miles, 100-miles on a side). No. Heck no. That's because the next rain storm is less than a year away.
2) Planetary events can create a desert in a reasonably short period. The earth does this through geological events. Something shifts, which causes the weather to shift with it. Lake Bonnevile is an excellent example of desertification in this way. [Check it out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bonneville). Geological events can happen quickly --- but the consequences still take time. Lake Bonneville's first drop took a year and is estimated to have moved 1,000 cubic MILES of water. (Water, water, water...) Nevertheless, the desertification of Idaho and Utah still required centuries. (However, at least we have a plausible issue... how do you drain an aquifer? Probably can't. Rain.)
So, is there a way to combine these two that might be plausible? Let's look at the movie, *The Core.* Man creates a tool that causes artificial earthquakes that happens to stop the spin of the planet's core. Bummer! What if such a tool created an earthquake that caused a substantial portion of the U.S. ground to rise, say, half a mile? Short period of time, serious desert almost everywhere in the U.S. Has consequences, something has to balance out the shift in weight or the planet will wobble. But it's a possibility.
3) Astronomical events can easily desertify an area. One solar flare in the right place at the right time and... except for water. It may burn the ground to a crisp, but unless it takes a huge chunk of ocean with it, the rain comes and life returns fairly quickly.
Now, having said all this, there is one thing you can research: why are there resevoirs that have been around for decades that have no appreciable plant life around them? That has a lot to do with having the right mix of soil and bacteria (because seeds get blown in on the wind, dropped by birds, etc.). Kill the bacteria... hmmm... that might be a good premise and it's something Man could do relatively quickly. "We were just trying to remove a particularly pestiferous weed, you know, DNA-specific poison and all that. We didn't expect to kill all the bacteria. Sheesh! Give us a break!"
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Those same weapons that would likely bring a 'Nuclear Winter' would equally decimate our Ozone layer. Even once the skies cleared, what little remaining alive and above ground will rapidly roast in the extreme ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. When combined with a natural peak of our 11 year cycle of solar activity, the soil would be rendered sterile, most land based life would perish,
and the result would make your 'Mad Max' scenario look pretty good by comparison.
- Just my $0.02
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I saw plenty of high-tech or catastrophic reasons, as well as the "show, don't tell" trope. If you are interested in a more depressive/dystopic/passive setting, and not so much in a action-apocalypse-catastrophe big bang event, then read on.
But you can do a simple thing: just extrapolate *slightly* from today, and let stuff fall out of kilter ever so slowly. Most of the things you want (deserted land areas, big concentrated megalopolis) are already well on their way right now, at least locally.
Let yourself be inspired from real ghost towns. Google for the reasons they actually existed. Nudge your reality just so it gets ever more attractive for people to run for the big city. Maybe automation gets so good that crops just don't need much human intervention anymore. And by the time we notice, all real farmers are naturally dead/very old, and something comes up which the machines cannot handle.
Or we get something like the Dustbowl mentioned above, some natural weather phenomenon which takes a few more years. We do have very visible (to the average human) climate change already in many parts of the world, just let that accelerate slightly and by the end of 20xx you can be pretty bad off.
At as many points as possible, make sure that it is clear that humankind could have stopped it if they just had stopped being selfish/greedy for once, but that there simply never was that single point in time where it was obvious what was happening. Just a long, slippery slope leading to nowhere.
All of this should lead to an excellent, depressing background to your story, and should be *very* believable.
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There's a book that describes an event like this. A virus attacks all grass like species. If all grasses died it would probably cause lots of desertification. In the books plot the primary effects of the virus explored was the lack of food. Rice, wheat and other grass food crops died. You might could explain the virus problem from the different angle of desertification. I enjoyed reading it by the way.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass>
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A post "impact winter" landscape might suit your needs. If >20km diameter chunk of iron impacted in the Sahara desert, it would throw up enough debris to block out the suns radiation for long enough to kill pretty much all plant life on earth. Once the debris settled, you'd be left with a global desert-scape. I think that would fit with your timeframe.
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## Yellowstone Super-Volcano
It could potentially be pretty devastating to the American Bread-Basket, as prevailing winds would carry ash and detritus west to east. Large ash clouds could potentially suffocate existing foliage and crops. Depending on how long the volcano is erupting (a single powerful eruption is likely to have smaller micro eruptions for a few years after the event. The New Krakatoa island (the old one was blown apart in that eruption) is still rising at a rate of meters per year, which suggests ongoing volcanic activity.
Even a partial eruption (more likely with Yellowstone) would still cause some devastating effects and global cooling. Krakatoa was followed by the three of the globally coldest winters for that time period. Keep in mind that said eruption was orders of magnitude smaller than the last Yellowstone eruption.
Most of America is small towns in the region closest to the disaster, and denser on the coastal regions. By late 21st century, a merger of the NYC and Baltimore-Washington Metro area is quite possible, assuming the installation of a rapid transit system such as proposed high speed rail lines already in concept stages (Maryland has been working with Japanese companies for a rapid transit that would reduce the commute between Baltimore and D.C. from 40 to 15 minutes).
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If you want something that "just happens" (i.e., not something humans did to themselves), I'd suggest moving the Earth closer to the sun by some kind of celestial catastrophe. Perhaps a rogue planet flies through the system and passes close enough to pull Earth inward. Or maybe a mega-asteroid slams into the moon, moves the moon and somehow pulls Earth along.
Or perhaps the Sun itself enlarges by some unspecified process. Maybe a rogue gas giant crashes into the sun, enlarging it. Or the sun begins the long slow process of expanding into a red giant.
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A group of xenoarchaeologists is studying the remains of a bygone civilization with the aim of understanding its culture. So far, isolated artifacts have been found, such as metal plates with symbols inscribed on them and remnants of stone walls of ruined structures. How would they determine whether the shapes they see are attempts to encode something meaningful, purely artistic, art that also represents text, or a meaningless jumble of symbols?
For an introductory problem, here are three strings of English text encoded into a very fancy font.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3lCyJ.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GpH1J.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8wY6H.png)
If these are found engraved onto the wall of an ancient ruin, how would a team of analysts go about firstly determining if any of these strings of symbols are meaningful, and possibly determining what they could mean?
(For anyone wondering, the first line is "Your copper is shit", then "Purple herring canister omega", then a random jumble of letters using the Marker text from the Dead Space games)
As a more complicated example, here is the logo of Al-Jazeera, which I am told is made from arranging the Arabic text into an artistic pattern
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZH6QO.png)
Suppose that something like it was encountered among the remains of an alien civilization. How would the exploration team know that there was anything more to it besides looking pretty?
And, finally, if an alien language uses an encoding system unlike anything used by human languages, is there any way to tell if there is any meaning behind the strange symbol(s) or if it's gibberish? As an example, suppose the language's encoding system is somewhat similar to the sigil creation method of New Age enthusiasts, so "EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY" becomes something like this. How would one determine that this is actually an attempt to convey some idea, rather than just a squiggle?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sbavq.png)
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1. If the set of symbols is finite and the markings are found on all sorts of artefacts, then it is pretty safe to conclude that the symbols carry meaning.
2. Carrying a meaning can be done in two ways, namely by representing language and by representing ideas directly.
3. Symbols which carry a meaning by representing language are called writing.
* If the set of symbols is small, say, from about a dozen different shapes to about forty or fifty different shapes, then the writing is alphabetic.
* If the set of symbols is of medium size, say, from about fifty to about two hundred different shapes, the writing is syllabic.
* If the set of symbols is large, from about five hundred to a few thousand different shapes, the writing is logographic.Notes:
* No writing system is *pure*. For example,
+ In ordinary English writing we use mostly alphabetic writing, but we also use a small number of logographic characters, such as the ten digits 0, 1, ..., 9, and a handful of miscellaneous symbols +, −, °, %, &, and so on.
+ Japanese writing is a mixture of logographic symbols called kanji and syllabic characters called kana.
+ Historically, the [Hittite language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language) was written mostly with syllabic characters but mixed with a large number of logographic characters (called [sumerograms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerogram) because they were inherited from Sumerian writing). (Which produces vexing problems, because some words were *always* written with the logographic symbols so that we don't know how they sounded.)
* A literate culture will leave *lots* and *lots* of text. Literate people have an inescapable tendency to [scribble on walls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti), and a literate culture will automatically place writing on the most diverese objects, such as ceramic containers, bricks, coins, or construction timber. (For an amusing example, we have ancient Greek and Roman scribblings on *Egyptian* monuments, sign that inconsiderate tourists are a very old phenomenon.)
4. In real life, we use both writing, that is, carrying meaning by representing language, and symbols which represent ideas directly, without representing language. For example,
* Traffic signs are meaningful, but they do not represent language. .svg/120px-325-10_Priechod_pre_chodcov_(informa%C4%8Dn%C3%A1_zna%C4%8Dka%3B_umiestnenie_vpravo).svg.png) 
These signs have very definite meanings (and all vehicle drivers must know and obey them), but they do not represent language. They are not writing.
* Emojis are commonly used little pictures, especially by younger people, which *almost* carry meaning without representing language.
5. Close study of the strings of symbols is required to distinguish between writing and carrying meaning without representing language. Sometimes it is hard to decide; for example, scholars have not yet reached a definitive conclusion on whether the famous [Indus valley symbols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script) are or are not writing.
Heuristically,
* If the symbols represent writing, we will find relatively long strings of them:
MANIOS:MED:FHE⁞FHAKED:NUMASIOI
The text on the 2,700 years old [Praeneste fibula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeneste_fibula), the oldest Latin inscription ever found. (In classical Latin that would be *Manius me fecit Numerio* -- we see the archaic nominative ending -os instead of classical -us, the archaic accusative in -ed instead of classical -e, *very* archaic reduplicated perfect of *facio*, archaic dative ending in -oi, archaic -a- in an internal open syllable which became -e- in the the classical language, and an intervocalic -s- which became -r- in the classical language.) (Picture from Wikimedia by user [José M. Ciordia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pompilos).) Note that the symbol <M> appears three times, the symbol <I> appears three times etc.
* If the symbols represent writing, we expect to find syntactic patterns. Symbols will appear multiple times in the same inscription, strings of symbols will be repeated, some strings of symbols will be found much more often than others, some strings of symbols will be found in many inscriptions.
For example, in English writing the strings of symbols <the> and <ing> appear very frequently, and it is a rare inscription where none of them appears. In Chinese writing, the strings of symbols 他們 (tāmen, meaning they), 因为 (yīnwèi, because) and 什么 (shénme, what or anything) are frequent.
* If the symbols represent writing, we expect their distribution to follow a [power law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law). (The specifically linguistic incarnation of a power law is [Zipf's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law).)
For example, in English writing the symbol <e> is 175 times as frequent as the symbol <z>.
For a real-life example of reasoning about unkown symbols, see Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, "[The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization](http://www.ejvs.laurasianacademy.com/ejvs1102/ejvs1102article.pdf)", in *Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies* (EJVS) 11 - 2 (2004), pp. 19-57, ISSN 1084-7561. (Their conclusion is that the Indus valley symbols are not writing; but the what's important is the reasoning process, which is explained in detail.)
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With short texts, it's really [anybody's guess](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Runamo&oldid=1109962706). Although obviously some scripts are more easily confused with cracks in a rock than others, natural patterns can be notoriously complex, if you're only working off a tiny sample. If the sample is short enough, even completely random noise might by chance appear to be meaningful.
With longer texts, you'll probably want to turn to [Zipf's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zipf%27s_law&oldid=1158288348), which describes the expected relationship between how frequently each word is supposed to appear. (This relationship is roughly: the most frequent word appears twice as often as the second most frequent, three times as often as the third and so on.)
Zipf's law is holding surprisingly well for a large range of natural languages, although we don't quite know why exactly, and is therefore less of a law, more like a very good rule of thumb.
But you need a lot more text than just an inscription to apply it and avoid the [Runamo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runamo) "rune" embarrassment.
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I would take a look at how they concluded that the [Voynich manuscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript) is not just nonsense symbols stringed together made to look like alien text but it is very probably some unknown language written with unknown symbols.
They have done eg. [statistical analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript#Statistical_patterns) that shows that the patterns in words and text follow similar rules as texts written in known languages. If it was just nonsense, such patterns would not be found, or they would be sparse and randomly distributed.
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Some of the first hints are probably recurrence and order.
Since it is very unlikely that a language is encoded with an infinite set of symbols, sooner or later there will be some repetition.
And together with the repetition some sort of order will stand out, making the thing stand out from a random noise background.
From there to have a meaning associated to the symbols, some context will be needed. Either a translation, a la Rosetta stone, or some other context. E.g. a set of ordered scribbles found in a pottery kiln will likely mean something about the kiln, or in a temple will likely mean something about the worshiping which took place there.
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Let's flip this around and imagine aliens are studying human artifacts. How would they prove there is information in them?
A prelude is to prove that the artifacts were created artificially and deliberately. A lot of modern human artifacts obviously use unnatural materials, colors, shapes so this is not hard to show. You could assume that etching a bunch of lines on a metal plate is a lot of work, so it must surely have some purpose to justify that effort. This is the "backdoor" way to show it. Of course, logically, just because someone deliberately drew some lines doesn't *necessarily* mean they mean something - it's just that it usually does.
To prove information content, you would generally need to:
1. Find patterns that are consistent throughout the known corpus
2. Provide a description of the patterns that is significantly shorter than the text itself (so no 10 page grammar to "explain" a 2 page letter)
3. Show that the patterns are complex enough that they're unlikely to have come from a natural process
With text intended for human consumption, this is easy to do, because human language has very obvious patterns. It was also selected to be *intuitive*, so that human babies can easily learn it without instruction. This takes care of 1. Also, human brains are quite limited in computational power, and humans are content to speak/read/write at a limited pace, which makes 2 easy. However, observe that there is a minimal amount of sample text you must collect, otherwise 2 and 3 are impossible and 1 is difficult. For English, grammar can probably be inferred from even a single book, but the bigger problem would be the very diverse vocabulary.
If the aliens tried to examine our network transmissions, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, floppies and so forth, they would probably be very confused however. That stuff is all compressed with efficient (max-entropy) schemes, a lot of it looks flat out like random data as a result, and what isn't random has few recognizable patterns. Imagine the task of zero-knowledge reverse engineering something like 7zip compared to reverse engineering English - a completely different ball game. On top of that, much of the information is also encrypted. In fact, the aliens must solve 4 problems at once:
* Guessing the key
* Guessing the encryption scheme
* Guessing the data encoding
* Guessing the purpose of the encoded data
Each one of these on its own is a challenge, and it's basically made possible by making assumptions about the next level down. Solving all at once seems unimaginable. Imagine you're trying to crack an encrypted file - but you don't even know what encryption scheme to plug your putative passwords in, and even if you guessed those right, you get back a JPEG which you don't know how to interpret. So the "correct" output looks just like the gibberish you get from a wrong password. And even if you did figure out how to decompress JPEG, you still don't know if the contents are intended to be text, or sound, or image, or video or a *Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri* save game.
At the other end of the spectrum, sometimes we create texts that are specifically intended to be fool proof, and readable without sufficient understanding of even our simple natural language. For example, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages> describes attempts to create a message about nuclear waste, that would be comprehensible even to people who are not able or willing to go to the trouble of *trying* to decipher an unknown text. A more mundane example is various signage for multi-lingual audiences (airports) and young children. These should be the easiest ones to figure out, although the problem is that they tend to have low information content (since nobody wants to write complicated things with symbols) so it's hard to gather enough unique corpus to justify any claims about meaning. For example, how would you prove that the appearance of ⛔ is meaningful, and not just an artifact of the manufacturing process?
So, generally speaking, primitive texts will be easy to figure out because presumably they are intended for biological brains that are hard to upgrade or reprogram. For a technologically advanced civilization, there will be more sophisticated encodings intended for machines, and they will be hard to distinguish from gibberish. The more they use computers, the harder it will be to show that their records contain information. To some extent, this might also be the case if they are simply much more intelligent than humans.
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To address some specific examples you give:
* The Al-Jazeera logo follows an ancient tradition in Arabic calligraphy. Arabic letters look strange to Westerners even if arranged normally, but if you get past that, the logo is basically a monogram just like the logo used by JRR Tolkien, for example. It is not intended to be "read" but "recognized", and it is rare to write original information in this form (it would be very hard to read). It is more common to use it for texts that are well known, such as verses from the Quran or the names and titles of a Sultan. Therefore the corpus for such calligraphy will be limited - but if it was used more commonly, then analyzing the topology of letters would reveal patterns.
* The made up font is so trivial that you can even tell at a glance it's supposed to be English text. It has overcomplicated letters that are hard to distinguish, but any real analyst would start by labeling each symbol with a number or letter and go from there. It's harder if you have organic variations of the same symbol (handwriting), but the different forms will still be more similar to each other than to other letters. Even if you have alternate forms like Greek `σ`/`ς`, they should still be fairly straightforward - otherwise the alphabet itself would be unusable.
* For your triangular sigil, it is not possible to prove that it is meaningful because your corpus is too small. You would need many more sigils like that, so you could look for patterns like the angle of the lines, their curvature, when they cross each other or not. But with just one sigil, I could invent any number of just-so "meanings" for it, all equally correct and plausible. I could claim that the "real information" is that the sigil is black and white as opposed to other colors, and the lines are just decorative. You can't do anything without more samples.
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A key point to determine if there is meaning to a marking is where that marking is placed and any relationship to other markings.
For example, markings placed on a rock near a small village but overlaying other markings could just be the doodling of bored teenagers. (If you are up on
a high place watching for deer, and it has been three days of nothing, wouldn't you be attacking the nearby rocks with something?) Markings on a door might have meanings. Markings on a piece of clay or metal attached to or near a container might have meaning such as contents or ownership of the container. Markings on buildings in a semi regular manner might indicate something about those buildings. Carvings on a pillar in the middle of town or at the entrance to town on a road might have significance. These might also incorporate artistic expression as Mayan writing allows for significant artistic license.
The problems with trying to discern art is that nearly anything can be called "art", many cultures do not have a concept of "high art" but incorporate artistic expression into their everyday lives, and archaeologists perceive stuff through their own ideas of what art could be. There are multiple cases where the cleaning staff threw away an "art installation" thinking it was trash.
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If nothing is known about the beings who have built the walls, refined the metal for the plates and so on, then one has to wonder what "meaningful" really means.
For example, the plates might turn out to be excreted in the same way that bees excrete (?) small plates or scales of wax before forming it into a comb. In this case, one has to wonder whether the existence of the plates implies that their creators had sufficient cognitive ability to conceive of symbolic communication: if they did not, then any statistical tests that suggest that the symbols are meaningful are irrelevant.
If on the other hand the creators did have a reasonable degree of intelligence, and if it can be demonstrated that making the symbols took even a minimal degree of effort, then they must be meaningful e.g. as decoration or a clan mark even if they do not represent a written language: something that might be unknown to even an intelligent race.
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Two aspects that haven't been touched upon yet:
1. If the alien language is close enough to human languages to give us any chance of decrypting it, there is no way that they could encode more than one sentence into something like the Al Jazeera calligraphy or the New Age squiggle.
2. Statistical analysis is a good way to decide whether something is a language - provided it is not encrypted or compressed. Who knows, maybe the aliens used a combination of inscriptions in stone with AR to convey locally relevant information? Encryption and compression will make any meaningful communication look like random noise, the more the better they are.
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**This question already has answers here**:
[Non-Cancer terminal illness that can affect young (age 10-13) girls?](/questions/139999/non-cancer-terminal-illness-that-can-affect-young-age-10-13-girls)
(17 answers)
Closed 4 years ago.
I am struggling to find a disease/medical condition for my character. My character is 16-year-old female with a younger sister that doesn't have the disease. If you could please help, here is the criteria that the disease needs to fit.
1. no physical indication that she has the disease.
2. she will die by her mid 20's ish (this can be played with a bit)
3. she can't need to be spending heaps of time in hospital because of it.
4. no cancer or cystic fibrosis or anything else which is cliche
5. no cure for this disease.
6. she lives in Sydney with her middle-class family who has access to and can pay for medical treatments.
7. set in the current time period so nothing too extreme or crazy, please.
thank you so much!
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# [Inoperable cerebral aneurysm](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/016164101101198604).
Whilst not specifically fitting some definitions of "disease" such as "caused by an invading pathogenic organism":
Having a variety of [potential causes](https://www.medicinenet.com/brain_aneurysm/article.htm) - heredity, trauma, abnormal vascular developement, high blood pressure.
These can occur in inaccesable parts of the brain like a little time bomb which can rupture and kill at any time due to minor trauma, stress or just at random times seemingly without a trigger.
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[Fatal Familial Insomnia](https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/fatal-familial-insomnia/)
FFI simply put "No sleep disease", fits your description pretty nicely.
Following are the characteristics, follow the link for [details](https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/fatal-familial-insomnia/):
1. No Physical Indication.
2. FFI is an extremely rare disorder.
3. Often
begins during middle age, but it can occur earlier or later in life.
4. There is no cure for FFI
5. The lack of sleep leads to physical and mental deterioration and the disease ultimately progresses to coma or death.
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# Suicidal tendencies
According to [this article](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323748.php):
>
> New research finds four genetic variants that may raise the risk of dying by suicide, regardless of environmental factors. The study also identifies hundreds of other genes that require further analysis and that may also raise the likelihood that a person dies by suicide.
>
>
> (...)
>
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> Although the environment has an effect on the incidence of suicide, some studies have pointed out that genetic factors also play a key role. In fact, older studies have estimated the heritability of suicide at 50 percent.
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>
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And:
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> According to the World Health Organization (WHO), almost 800,000 people die by suicide every year.
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> Among people aged 15–29, suicide is the second leading cause of death worldwide.
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>
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And if you've ever done some research on suicidal signs, you will see many people say their relatives never showed any signs of suicidal tendencies before doing the act. It may be that we as a society suck at noticing it, but still, fits your requirement for no external signs.
Think *13 Reasons Why*.
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Most diseases and medical conditions do have physical indications. The only ones that remain completely invisible and have absolutely no effect on the person prior to their sudden death are congenital defects, as @Brythan has pointed out in their comment and @Agrajag in their answer (+1).
The most common causes of death from one of these conditions are a
# [heart attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myocardial_infarction)
or
# [stroke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke)
both of which [have become more prevalent amont young women](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323669.php) (there are many sources, this is just an example).
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I don't think an infectious disease will really help you here as for the most part diseases you either recover from or they kill you within a relatively short time period. This wikipedia page is a useful resource for this:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fatality_rates>
However there are a large number of medical cases where something goes wrong in the body (you already mentioned cancer) but just autoimmune problems gives a range of options:
<https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/autoimmune-diseases>
For example Huntingdon's (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington%27s_disease>) can start in the 20s and is an incurable degenerative disease. If one of your character's parents or siblings had the disease then they could have been tested and found to also carry the defective Huntingtin genes.
The simplest option though might be to have your character born with a defective heart or other vital organ. If the defect is inoperable or the operations were unsuccessful then she's at risk of dropping dead at any moment. She may not know when she will die but she knows it could happen at any moment.
A list of Congenital Disorders is here:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_congenital_disorders>
Survival rates of Congenital Heart Disease are shown here:
<https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2593254>
If you click on figures/tables there are some graphs showing how much prognosis has improved over the years but it is still nowhere near the control group.
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Look up berry aneurysm... a structure in the blood vessels in the brain of very few individuals that can fail spectacularly. It's completely asymptomatic in the 'carrier' until the structure fails and it's almost inevitably fatal. If you choose to make it in some critical part of the arterial system you can increase the almost inevitable to guaranteed fatal.
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Have you heard of [Wolfram syndrome](https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/wolfram-syndrome)? It's symptoms include type I diabetes mellitus, urinary problems, vision and hearing loss, and a variety of neurological and psychological disorders. Death usually occurs in middle adulthood, usually due to the build-up of neurological damage, but the psychological disorders include episodes of severe depression, impulsiveness and aggression, so there is a high chance of suicide well before then, especially when the blindness, deafness and ataxia (balance problems) set in.
She won't be blind until her late-teens/early-twenties, although she will probably be color-blind and have mild tunnel vision by the time she's sixteen. I'm not sure about the hearing loss, my resource doesn't say when or how it sets in. The ataxia won't set in until her twenties.
It is a genetic illness, but autosomal recessive, meaning both parents have to be carriers for there to be a chance of the child inheriting it - there is a possibility that her sister is an asymptomatic carrier.
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How about a parasitic twin?
The twin could be have all of the manifestations of cancer without the cliché and although this would definitely be a physical indication, it needn't be visible or noticed.
At the point you need the character to die, the twin causes an obstruction or rupture in some major organ.
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My thought is that the `younger sister that doesn't have the disease` is this twin and she was always just an illusion caused by the brain damage. However, I have no idea if this part is science-based or would fit in with your story!
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Lots of options. It depends on whether or not you want her (or her family) to be aware of the disease and things like progression speed and the symptoms before the onset of death.
Diseases that kill healthy (or apparently healthy) people:
* Trauma (including things like drowning, electrocution, hypothermia)
* Sepsis
* Ruptured cerebral aneurysm
* Ruptured other aneurysm (though uncommon in young people) - e.g. ortic, splenic artery
* Major haemorrhage (trauma, ruptured ectopic pregnancy, bleeding stomach ulcer)
* Cardiac arrhythmia or heart attack (there are a few difference causes for these, some overlap with next category)
* Massive pulmonary embolism
* Seizure
* Some allergic reactions
* Lots of others!
Diseases that you may know you have that may kill you that no definite effective treatment exists for (sudden death, or short period of symptoms):
* Some cardiac causes (HOCM, long QT, acute myocarditis, Brugada)
* Late-diagnosed cancers (may not have many specific symptoms until diagnosis, may be found with days, weeks or months only left)
* Brain tumors (cancers or causing seizure)
* Others exist
Diseases that can be stable and well managed for a long time and not be particularly noticeable but may deteriorate suddenly:
* Asthma
* Diabetes
* Epilepsy
* Complications of e.g. lupus (which may or may not have significant day-to-day symptoms)
* Chronic kidney disease (treatment options exist but may not always be offered, e.g. someone who has kidney failure, gets dialysis, gets a transplant, transplant fails, declines further dialysis because it is horrendous)
Most of the untreatable neurological stuff tends to have progressive loss of function (e.g. Huntington's) so doesn't sound like it would suit.
Another option which might suit what I think you are looking for would be something like (surgically-corrected) hypoplastic left heart syndrome
* can be identified prenatally or shortly after birth
* usually (in Australia) treated with a series of operations which will help but not cure
* most survive to adulthood (i.e. often die in childhood, teens, twenties)
* may only require clinic follow up and medication (probably daily tablets)
* family will know life expectancy
* would not be expected to be able to do strenuous activity but may appear normal (other than some surgical scars) otherwise
* likely to have deterioration before death - most likely progressive difficulty breathing - probably for weeks to months
* may know of impending mortality but still higher risk for complications (flu season every year is a risk for people with
significant pre-existing heart or lung disease)
* i.e. may know will die for years but end can be quite sudden and 'not-quite-expecting-that-already'
If you can describe the circumstances that suit your plot I could probably give a plausible diagnosis / sequence of events.
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I am DONNA TRUMPET, the first female President of the United states reborn, and one of the greatest leaders in world history. I have managed to recently pass the 103rd amendment to our Constitution that allows private contractors, known as necromancers, the right to do business in our country.
Despite the continued complaints of the lamestream media ( violation of workers rights, dignity of the deceased, and other such nonsense whiny liberals typically bitch about), I have secured enough votes to pass legislation through. Licensed practitioners can, for a fee, bring a person back from the dead. This process involves a ritual that must be repeated at various times of the year to maintain undeath. The subject's faculties, such as memories, skills, etc. are completely restored. This process is used for various purposes, such as cheap labor, provide testimony in a murder trial, increase the number of registered voters in a county, or to simply give someone a second chance at life.
However, there have been a few hiccups along the way. Many disreputable necromancers have put the policy at risk with their business practices. Some, after taking a client's money, do a half-assed job of the ritual, bringing back a mindless zombie rather than a fully fledged being. Others sabotage their own ritual, in order to make the body decay faster than normal, requiring more frequent repeated rituals, in order to milk the client of more money. Others perform their practice perfectly, but continue to raise their fees for the repeat rituals to exploit their customers. Loved ones of the undead individual would have no choice but to continue paying higher rates, lest they lose the lately deceased to the grave once again.
How can I encourage better practices among these practitioners and allow for more accountability?
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# Build a W.A.L.L.
And by WALL, you mean the Wights Animated to Legal Limbo task force. We all *know* illegal Aliens are entering the country via necromantic resurrection. Let WALL keep them in detention centers (conveniently, large buildings called “malls” exist from the last century. Just turn the “M” upside down) around the country in a tangle of legal states (only the unskilled ones from Mars though; Saturians and Jovians are fine). This is the perfect way to make good on two campaign promises at once (to kill two liberals with one tweet, as they say).
# Impose tariffs on the nether realm
You need a trade war with the underworld. Place a tariff on the flow of souls to the other side; that will keep people from dying. Your distant relative, D. J. T. Cthulhu: Supreme Leader of the Underworld, will almost certainly retaliate with a tariff of their own on necromancers wishing to export souls.
Get the house majority leaders, cronenbergs Paul Pelosi and Nancy Ryan, on TV saying how good this will be for the economy.
Taking these steps will surely undermine the resurrection market, simultaneously ignoring the issue and making you look proactive.
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**The usual way you regulate services is through regulation.**
Criminal penalties for unauthorized raising of the dead, necromancy without a license, and existing related crimes like fraud, hiding a corpse, etc.
Regulatory penalties like license suspension/revocation for unfair, deceptive, and/or predatory business practices or failed inspections for adequate/safe facilities and rite materials.
There are private forms of limited regulation, too, like insurance coverage for malpractice or general liability.
People being imperfect, case law will quickly establish precedents, too.
The way you **improve business behavior** is usually through trade groups. Not the shady ones that merely lobby government, but the active ones that seek to educate members on best practices, provide forums for members to share problems, and promote research and improvement in the field.
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**Encourage competition, and make sure that antitrust laws are respected**
Capitalism to the rescue!
It seems most problems you worry about are caused by necromancers either asking for outrageous fees, or deliberately performing subpar services to be able to demand fees more often.
However, if there is a healthy competition between them, they are forced to work for reasonable fees and provide adequate services, otherwise clients will go to competing necromancers.
This reminds me of shady car repair shops which deliberately do poor repairs so you will need them more often. If there are better and more honest repair shops in the area (and their reputation spreads), they will drive the shady ones out of business.
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They're licensed practitioners, the easy way to deal with licensed practitioners who breach the terms of their license is to revoke said license.
The usual [ombudsman](https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/get-more-help/how-to-use-an-ombudsman-in-england/) service should suffice. There's no reason why what works for telecommunications and water supplies shouldn't work for necromancy services after all.
Perhaps they're also in need of a [trade association](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_associations_in_the_United_Kingdom), to assist them in showing that they're reputable practitioners and in setting reasonable prices for their services.
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**TL;DR:** Make doing the job right interesting for the necromancers.
---
Raising undead isn't simple. It harnesses some magical power from very weird places on the other side of the Existential Plane, and thus has some interesting side-effects.
One of them is resultant of the prolonged contact of the once living mind with the now undead body. This is something the universe actively fights against, trying to correct itself and pull it back in the regular state of normality. This manifestation of the "will of the universe" happens in the forms of *Deathberries*, small, crystalline growths that grow inside the body of intelligent, fully restored undead - and only them. More so, stress and unhappiness seem to stunt the growth of these things, so you can't exactly *farm* them. You have to do it right - a proper restoration, followed by a proper maturation period.
For the normal populace, those berries are worthless. For the necromancers, however, they can be used to fuel all sorts of different magic, and even be used to simplify the creation of other undead. All in all, the berries are *stored potential*, waiting to be harnessed.
This creates a interesting situation for the necromancers.
They have to give maintenance to their undead clients every once in a while, so they may ask to harvest the *Deathberries* during the restoration ritual in exchange for a hefty discount on the prices. Since the berries only grow on "healthy undead", they have a very strong incentive to keep their clients satisfied and properly treated so they keep coming for more. The better job the necromancer does, more they will reap later on when their client comes back. The more time is allowed between the rituals, the more berries the necromancer can reap at once, thus making it less efficient to harvest them often.
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Since you're presumably a leader of the conservative party, you can encourage the Necromancer Guild to regulate itself. Allow necromancers to create state by state Revival Bar Associations, allow the public to rate the necromancers on Yelp, and even allow newly revived subjects to rate their revival experience. The guilds will eventually publish good revival guidelines and tariffs can be placed on foreign H-1B zombies in order to encourage ethical young wizards to enter the necromancy marketplace.
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I see a lot of purely business-oriented answers but none so far that tackle the environmental concerns so here goes
## All You Need Is Kill
(not really, but the hyperbolic clickbait helps grab your attention)
Dead bodies, including human ones, contribute to the natural cycle when they decompose. Thus, every zombie resurrected is a corpse snatched from and deprived the Earth. Deny the worms their food and you invite ecological collapse. Therefore we arrive at the principle we need to put into practice: *for every pound of flesh in humans resurrected, an equal amount needs to be put back into the Earth*
The first step is to measure and record the body weights of zombies raised. The administration and book keeping required would probably oblige the state to set up a Department of Graveland Security, or Department of Resurrection for a simpler title. Resurrection licenses and permits can also be handled by this new agency. Zombie control should be a lot easier than gun control if there isn't an influential lobby backing the necromancers.
Now for the tougher part, putting bodies into the ground. It's hard to do this domestically in a legal manner, although foreign soil is a very different matter. The best way to do so is probably through making use of the death sentence in states that retained it, and pushing for its reinstatement in states that didn't. Graveland Security will have to handle the logging of the inflow of human corpses, and ensuring the appropriate amount of them sit in the soil(no matter what their pesky families might say)
Now for the fun part, putting zombies in foreign territory. You can do so by enlisting necromancers and their zombies as private military contractors with the attendant regulations or lack thereof. Choose some failed state as your battlefield and let them loose. Encourage them to rack up as high a body count as possible through a similar incentive structure to those employed in regular armies. Here you can wring every last drop of plausible deniability as you can from them being PMCs and not formally part of the Army. Meanwhile body cameras on your zombies and follow up "accountancy" waves can help ensure you've reaped enough Third World flesh to fulfill your quota.
You can now terrorise countries for political purposes while throwing a bone to activists on both ends of the political spectrum. The horror and misery created should be perfect for Greenpeace sensationalism, while the alt-right gets to see their fantasy of Nazi zombies slaughtering the "untermensch". All worth it in the name of Mother Nature, of course
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If you were a reasonable person who believed in a free and open market: nothing.
So what if some cut rate necromancer is charging an arm and a leg for their services?!? Don’t pay! The worst thing that happens is you die, and then your family (or better yet, estate) can hire a better, cheaper, and/or more reputable necromancer.
Those dodgey necromancers get shitty yelp reviews and the open market quickly deals with the problem. Sure, there will be some cut rate necromancers preying on the poor with no other options, but still better than being dead, right?
And of course, being the leader of the free world, you can offer the very best of services to those who sign up to a decade or two of completely voluntary military service!
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There exists many quality laws in the european union, like how much curving is allowed to a banana to be selled there. Why not making one for the undead.
**§ 08/15 The undead goods**
1. The necromancer has to guarantee the live of his undead for 3 months. If the undead is dying earlier the customer, gets another for free or the full price back.
2. If the undead is damaged due to customer actions the warranty expires.
3. If the undead doesn't fit with the description (skills, power, knowlegde) the customer can return him for the full price.
4. The customer can always prolongue the contract, to the same price. No highering of the price is allowed.
4.1. If the necromancer (business) sales the first month, it has to be
especially stated, but isn't acknowledged as highering of the price.
4.2. If the necromancer is losing more than 10% of the original contract income due to changings of the value of the currency, the necromancer has the right to readjust the price. The same right has the customer too.
5. If the necromancer (business) cannot provide the services anymore, the customer beomes the money refunded.
Hope this helps :)
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* Control the resources used by the ritual itself.
* Register every individual that has been resurrected.
* Certification requires training.
* Resources are only acquirable by certified individuals with a strong cross-check on stock vs resurected.
* Enforce compulsory Warranties such as the resurrected must remain "alive", pass "psychological" examinations, and not have certain deterioration for at least x days - foregoing alternate reasons for failing such as a car crash.
* Criminalise certain practices such as raising mindless zombies, resurrection without a licence, carrying resurrection materials without authorisation.
* Fortify cemitaries, and morgues.
* Permit and establish support groups and unions for both the professionals, and the patients. This provides oversight, and a sense of community.
* Provide public system resurrection, with a set price. Permit private-system resurrections, they will have to be "better" to get clients.
* Require resurrections to be performed in front of other (frequently rotated) necromancers.
Just a few thoughts.
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The only answer is education. An informed public will be more resilient to scams. Additionally, you could open trade schools so that the power of necromancy is where it belongs, with the people. Raise up your people first. Then raise the dead.
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Depends whether or not you want to be re-elected as president
The first solution that came to mind (not sure what that says about me) is to gather up a group of necromancers. Before they enter dress each one into exactly identical clothing and cover up every feature that tells them apart. Kill off about half of the necromancers and let the other halve resurrect them. Since they get resurrected with all their previous skills they should still be able to resurrect others. Kill off the other halve and repeat the process. The newly resurrected necromancers should have no other choice than to do exactly as their fine leader tells them.
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If the legal system and economy is controlled by the far Right, then the Free Market will regulate the necromancers.
No one will pay for a half-assed job or one that doesn't last long enough, once they discover that the company they were thinking of using will not do what they advertise. I mean, wouldn't you check the company's Yelp rating before you get started? Every review comes from an honest customer (right?).
If you're unlucky (stupid) enough to be one of the first customers of a new company that doesn't do what they promised, you can always sue them. Since the legal system is also regulated by the Free Market, you will get the very best attorney you can afford. And so will the mega-corporation you're suing. All the judges will be the very best money can...I mean the best at legal stuff.
There will be no bias in the system because the Free Market fixes all ills. If you're dumb enough to pick a bad company, that's on you. Pick a better one next time a loved one dies.
This is the best answer and will fix everything. Or did you want an answer with suggestions that will actually work?
[Answer]
# Ban Death
Take a wide scope approach and turn the raising of the dead into a commodity that is no longer competed for. Simply mandate that anyone who dies must be raised again immediately. The government can train huge numbers of people as necromancers and make it a public utility supported by tax dollars. All the perverse incentives of the free market are thus eliminated.
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There’s bait in these waters. Looks like what you have here is a “Campbell’s law” Where the testing given to indicate the aptitude of these necromamcers has become corrupt. Perhaps the whole system needs to be reordered so that not just anyone with a grade point average can become a necromamcer. The process for becoming a necromancer should also require some ability to think for oneself and not just memorize or charm their way through the levels, otherwise your gonna end up with a cobra effect. Yay! Games on.
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I have two seperate ideas for policing necromancers.
Rather than hunting for bad actors it might he easier to rely on necromancer whistleblowers who would be reimbursed with a share of your hoard.
Enforcing rules could be very easy if necromancers are inclined to go full lich and keep their souls in phylactery. This could be stored by the government and destroyed allowing remote execution. Having your soul safe guarded by awesome federal might could be enough of an incentive to ensure your necromancers submit to oversight.
[Answer]
# Full transparency via Undeath Certificates and Lifeports
The reputation of the Necromancer(s) will follow them everywhere in everything they do in respect to Necromancy. Think of it like vendor reputation at companies such as eBay or Amazon. Everything is tracked and rated, and available immediately for review.
1. With all Undead needing to be registered, their Necromancer(s) will be listed on their Undeath Certificate and Lifeport.
2. All procedures required for Undead upkeep are recorded within Lifeports.
3. All Lifeports list their respective Necromancer(s).
4. All Undeath Certificates and Lifeports have digital references to the most up-to-date information for the Undead entity and their Necromancer(s).
If it's not quite obvious, underground/grey-market Necromancers will have little to no footprint in the world of regulated Necromancy, making any business with them inherently risky. The more prolific and highly rated the Necromancer, the more likely they are to get repeat business and new customers.
Black-market Necromancers will remain a problem, but they would be considered the inevitable outlier to this system. Compulsory changes that would affect them would require manipulating the fabric of reality between the realms of existence, and that requires a 2/3rds majority vote from the Gods; they haven't agreed on anything in that capacity since entropy was introduced to curb the blight of the mortals.
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[Question]
[
In my world the characters find themselves in a new land. They do not understand the locals nor do the locals understand them. How could these characters learn to understand the locals withing a month or two considering neither have ever had touch with each other's laungage?
* I've thought of the locals having a certain herbal preparation that
alters the brain making it able to understand them, but how would that
actually go about?
* It is also worth mentioning that the locals of this place posses a
certain alien artifact, could it hold a power to make them understand
each other and, if so, how would it do it?
* Would it be possible for the characters to just learn the new
laungage just by being among the locals for a longer period of time?
Is something like that plausible?
[Answer]
Humans have a built-in ability to learn languages. While this ability is greatest in young children, it never goes away. What you are looking for is called learning a language by [immersion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_immersion). It has been practiced in all times and in all places by very many (millions of) people, in most cases because they *had to*. Think of the countless language shifts which happened throughout history: how did the Gauls, or the Iberians, or the Dacians learn Latin? How did the north Africans learn Arabic? How did the Britons learn Old English? How did the Wends learn German? The Romans did not open adult education centers to teach their new subjects Latin; the Angles and the Saxons did not organize language classes for their new Briton neighbours; the Germans did not set up formal training for the [Wends](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wends) or the [Sorbs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbs)...
There are techniques used to learn languages in the field, with no common language between the explorer and the locals; see for example "[Language learning in the field](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29304)" on the respected [Language Log](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/); the article discusses Ken Pike's [monolingual elicitation techniques](http://www-01.sil.org/klp/klp-mono.htm).
A month or two is a very short time. Most people don't really learn a new language in a month or two, unless the two languages are quite similar; for example, someone who speaks a Romance language can adapt to another Romance language in such a time frame -- they won't be fluent, but they will understand questions and be able to produce understandable answers. But even for distant languages, in a month or two they will learn enough to say yes and no, here and there, come and go, to ask for directions etc. For them to be able to have meaningful conversations you must either allow more time or to have them be linguistically gifted, or very young... Having a strong motivation also helps, as does having a dedicated tutor.
[Answer]
You don't need herbal teas. You don't need alien artifacts. Immersion will indeed do the trick. Patient teachers help. Similar languages help. But really, the single driving force in your story will be *mere survival*. These characters will either learn the new language and survive, or else they will not and will die.
How well they learn will depend on many factors including the willingness of student to learn and teacher to teach.
I don't know anything else about your world or the story you're telling here. You could help them along by individual strangers lodging with different families and see how they do. Local lovers might also be a strategy. How many strangers are involved will also affect how well they adapt and learn --- too many and they will probably end up forming the local equivalent of an immigrants' barrio.
[Answer]
Way way back I took an anthropology class. The lecturer talked about fieldwork, and how there was always the tough decision about whether to go in to your target tribe with an interpreter, or just show up and learn the language by immersion. If you have an interpreter, you can do interviews and such immediately, but you don't build as good of rapport with your hosts. The number I was told was about 6 months to learn a non Indo-European language (that is, very different from your native tongue) well enough to be conversational. And mind you, these are expert people-watchers!
If your plot supports it, I'd give your stranded guys a little more time (ie, 6 months). If that doesn't work, you might try having their hosts' language belong to the same language family, or a language derived from the explorers' version of Church Latin. That'll likely chip a couple months off the time they'll need.
[Answer]
Learning new language in two month while living among speakers is quite realistic.
However, there are few conditions:
1. Two languages (new one and native/known one) must not be too much apart. Different pronunciation techniques (like in clicking languages) will slow down the process;
2. Learner(s) must have their linguistic abilities not below the average;
3. There must be some willing teachers (not necessarily professionals), ready to devote hours of time to their student(s).
[Answer]
>
> How could these characters learn to understand the locals withing a month or two considering neither have ever had touch with each other's laungage?
>
>
>
As [AlexP mentioned](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/90627/33328), it is rather implausible that a person becomes *fluent* in a completely alien language within two months, but you explicitly stated that the characters should simply be able to *understand* the locals. If the characters are [constantly exposed to real-life situations in which the locals' language is used](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_immersion), they will definitely be able to understand many day-to-day interactions regardless of [their native language(s)](https://www.languagemagazine.com/how-does-mother-tongue-affect-second-language-acquisition/)†.
>
> Would it be possible for the characters to just learn the new laungage just by being among the locals for a longer period of time? Is something like that plausible?
>
>
>
The time it takes to become proficient in a language varies tremendously: Even among people of the same age and with the same native language(s), educational background, etc., the time it takes each person to learn a language will be very different from that of the others. However, as an anecdote, I learned to speak more-or-less conversational Russian in about five months despite not having any knowledge of any Slavic languages beforehand‡. I was in no way "fluent" and it was very obvious to Russian speakers that I wasn't a native speaker, but I could surivive in Russia. I'm assuming that this is more or less analogous to your characters' goals.
## Language learning assistance
### Drugs
>
> I've thought of the locals having a certain herbal preparation that alters the brain making it able to understand them, but how would that actually go about?
>
>
>
[There is some inconclusive evidence that **amphetamines** may indirectly aid language learning](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=389), but it is very difficult to tease out the different effects going on; If you're willing to stretch believability a bit, you could have the characters be offered a regular food/drink with mild amphetamine-like effects: For example, the locals pray regularly throughout the day and offer the characters a herbal tea during prayer which supposedly "aids neophytes and guests in perceiving the glory of the Gods" — compare this to e.g. the usage of hallucinogenic [peyote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peyote#Huichol_culture) or [ayahuasca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca) among some traditional Native American religions. This might have the effect of speeding up the characters' having some sort of mild linguistic "revelation" but, the stronger the effect you describe, the more ridiculous this will look to anyone with any sort of scientific background.
### Devices
>
> It is also worth mentioning that the locals of this place posses a
> certain alien artifact, could it hold a power to make them understand
> each other and, if so, how would it do it?
>
>
>
There is already an "alien artifact" which tremendously facilitates language learning, namely a **[Rosetta Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone) device**: Your characters were not the first to visit these exotic peoples. They find an old legal/trade/religious/etc. document which isn't necessarily in the characters' own language, but they realize that it is a multilingual document and certain key phrases are cross-referenced among the languages in the document. Perhaps even one of the languages is somewhat [recognizable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility) — maybe [a very old version of a dialect of a language](https://www.rbth.com/society/2013/05/29/russian_languages_most_isolated_dialect_found_in_alaska_26519.html) one of the characters speaks. This would speed up the learning process immensely but is in no way a requirement: The same device could be used even if *none* of the languages it contains are understandable to the characters. Using this document, the characters then make a breakthrough in relations with the locals.
---
†This excludes extreme cases, where the characters' language is as different from the locals' as possible, e.g. if a native English speaker tried to understand [ǃXóõ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language), [Dyirbal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyirbal_language) or [Inuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenlandic_language). Even then, they would probably learn to understand a surprising amount by the end of two months if they were immersed well enough and were motivated enough.
‡Russian and other Slavic languages are [Indo-European](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages) but are very, very different from many other European languages; Knowing English, Spanish, German, etc. is pretty much of no direct benefit to understanding them. As a fun fact, Hindi and Urdu are also Indo-European languages and are relatively closely related to English in the grand scheme of things... but good luck trying to understand Hindi using just English.
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As previous answers stated just immersion is enough to learn a foreign language. However, it works only if we are talking about the same species. All humans have a capability (excluding special disability cases) to hear and produce all sounds that human languages comprise. It may take quite some time, but with a sufficient training, even elders can learn to distinguish sounds and produce them more or less accurately. It works even for the most phonetically and grammatically distant human languages.
The acquisition of new hearing and speaking skills also depends on an importance of phonetic peculiarities for conveying meanings. For example, in Australian English and Japanese, the vowel's length changes the meaning, e.g. fairy [feːɹi] and ferry [feɹi], span (as in wing span) and span [spæn](past tense of spin); おばあさん (obaasan — grandmother) and おばさん (obasan — aunt), おじいさん (ojiisan — grandfather) and おじさん (ojisan — uncle). In Russian, the sound length is less important, however, stress of syllables and firmness of the consonants can be crucial: зАмок (zAmok — castle) and замОк (zamOk — lock), Лен (Len — the name Lena in the [vocative case](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Vocative_case) [colloquial Russian]) and лень (len' — laziness). Accordingly, learners of Australian English and Japanese become better at distinguishing length of vowels (and correctly articulating them), while learners of Russian improve their consonant and stress skills. It is not a rocket science. It is just a matter of practice and exposure to native speakers.
The real problem appears when we are talking about an alien language. One the valid points that *Arrival* makes is that learning writing can be easier than a spoken language. If aliens have a very different biology humans might not be able to hear or produce the sounds of an alien language. A specialised equipment might be the only way to deal with this case. A language that combines phonetical component with some form of a body language, e.g. gestures, change of skin colour, etc., may pose even greater problems since human bodies might be utterly different in appearance, bone structure, and functions. Equipment might help, but also might not.
As in *Arrival*, learning a written language can be an easier route in the above-mentioned situation. Of course, that is assuming that both aliens and humans are able to perceive writings of each other and have means to reproduce them. If aliens do not have a writing system, newcomers can teach them. Probably, recruiting some children or elders would be the most beneficial for a writing project since it takes more time.
If both sides, aliens and humans, are interested in communication, they will probably develop a new language that can accommodate limitations of both sides. This [lingua franca](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Lingua_franca) will be simpler and less nuanced, but it will get messages across and things done. Lingua francas also develop in human populations, of course. But usually it happens when many speakers of two or more languages (likely distant) live together or perform some important activity, for example, trade. If you have a very small group of foreigners among a huge group of locals, the newcomers are forced to learn a local language. Although, some borrowing from their language can also occur.
I think that depending on the numbers of your characters and locals something like a lingua franca is very possible. It might also add some flavour to the language of your story.
While a potion or a mysterious artefact could speed up the learning process, personally, I would more interested in a story that does not use this shortcut. Language learning situations are ideal for a comic relief. They can also trigger some major plot events. It might be hard to write but I am sure the readers would appreciate the effort.
[Answer]
As everybody has said, *immersion* works well, but perhaps not quite as quickly as you need.
One very important question is how fluent you need them to be. Learning a few nouns and verbs can be done in minutes. The same with words like "please", "thanks" and "hello".
Building up a larger vocabulary takes time. Grammar takes even more time.
After a month or two you should be able to say "Trade, yes? Give chocolate. Get wheat. Fine, yes?" but you will have problems saying anything more complex.
You *can* have a herb tea or alien artifact help the process along, but you should only do that if they are otherwise relevant for the plot.
Children learn languages very quickly. If the travelers have children along, they will become interpreters for their adults. Otherwise the local children can learn the travelers' language and help out.
[Answer]
I want to focus on something about the Herbs or Herbal tea you mention. If this is indeed an alien place, maybe the tea would work by enhancing the parts of the brain that are responsible for language.
I recall, from a linguistics class a long time and many many beers ago, that the Language centers in the brain tend to become less active over time.
They are most active in youngsters, but by teenage years they are far less effective. I remember that because the teacher was quite passionate about the stupidity of not introducing foreign language courses in elementary schools for 7 and 8 year olds, and instead leaving them for teenagers who will have a much harder time learning.
Have your herbal tea restore the language centers of the brain to the more responsive state of a 6 year old. More properly, have it affect your aliens this way. This is how they would grasp our language much faster than we would grasp theirs.
You can twist things up a little more by making it hard, physiologically, for the aliens to produce the sounds that we use as speech. Maybe their tongues are a different shape, so glottal stops are hard to do. Maybe their lips are more rigid. All kinds of thing can be done here.
Anyway, both sides will learn through immersion, but the herbs and vocal apparatus will cause trade offs
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