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View Full Version : What Would Be the Effect Of... (Science, History, etc. etc. appreciated.)



SowZ
2012-06-12, 03:44 AM
So the world has about a billion people, is actually a moon, and is set in a fairly futuristic world. (Like, most people have similar standards of living to most of us, I'd imagine, with most cars and guns and such being electric. There aren't flying cars hovering around, but there is tech on the brink too expensive to produce that could make something like a motorcycle fly. And there are a few energy guns but the energy expenditure is so ludicrously expensive and they are so hefty it is pretty impractical.)

SO! I need to know what would be different in this world from ours with these things in mind...

1. There is some sort of field or something around the moon making all types of space travel completely impossible. Assume tech we discovered because of the space program was independently researched, but are there techs that really could not have been discovered? Also, there are no satellites so GPS is dead and cell phones work more like long range radios that need to be close enough to towers, I assume. If there is some reason such a field could actually exist, I am curious as to what it is. Otherwise, it is supernatural.

2. About one in a hundred thousand people has super powers, but most of them are easy enough to conceal that the majority of the population does not know about it.

3. Time is neither a line or a circle or a branch but basically a bunch of semi-parallel venn diagrams intersecting this way and that basically meaning time can act like any of the three, depending. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Probably six or seven score alternate dimensions.

4. A small continent where mammalian life never really evolved. Why would this happen? I have no idea. But I'd really like for mammals not to be there. That would be cool. The idea is that life kept evolving from insects and so there are fairly large insectoid type creatures or whatever. I never took biology classes after high school, I am really just about the concept here. How or why this would happen is what I need help with. I'm not talking ten foot tall spiders, here. But, like, a three to four foot tall praying mantis would be awesome to justify. I understand this probably means exoskeletons don't work and for each large insect there needs to be tons and tons of little ones. Maybe the way insects reproduce wouldn't work with large creatures because the populations of that insect would be too low or maybe they could have adapted to change that. I really want to make it work, though. Right now the aesthetic is a little bit deserty but to justify enough insects lots of fauna is maybe needed, or not, I'm not sure. I like the deserty idea but am not stuck to it.

5. There are these things called orbs. They are supernatural so don't worry about the physics of them. Basically it is a super condensed ball of energy somewhere between a baseball and basketball. Orbs appear in some places more often than others and are mined like crazy in these zones and they form pretty regularly and only take a couple years to form. Ever since technology was developed that allowed orbs to be consumed for energy I figured technology exploded but the tech requires entire orbs to sustain so the tech is too expensive to be common. But even city infrastructures and standard tech would boom when these things became useful. A single orb could power a not too big city for a whole day. Quite a few orbs are mined, but don't ask for an exact number. While I have my ideas, I want to know what you all think about the effect this would have on various technologies and economies.

Thanks, guys. I really want a world that, while maybe not be super believable, at least not be zany and break anyones suspension of disbelief.

Yora
2012-06-12, 04:00 AM
You could just have particularly nasty solar radiation combined with a very powerful magnetic field of the planet. On the surface, everything would be the same. But a few kilometers up, radiation is deadly even inside spaceships and highly energetic solar flares fry all electronics within a few days.

Hubert
2012-06-12, 06:29 AM
4. A small continent where mammalian life never really evolved. Why would this happen? I have no idea. But I'd really like for mammals not to be there. That would be cool. The idea is that life kept evolving from insects and so there are fairly large insectoid type creatures or whatever. I never took biology classes after high school, I am really just about the concept here. How or why this would happen is what I need help with. I'm not talking ten foot tall spiders, here. But, like, a three to four foot tall praying mantis would be awesome to justify. I understand this probably means exoskeletons don't work and for each large insect there needs to be tons and tons of little ones. Maybe the way insects reproduce wouldn't work with large creatures because the populations of that insect would be too low or maybe they could have adapted to change that. I really want to make it work, though. Right now the aesthetic is a little bit deserty but to justify enough insects lots of fauna is maybe needed, or not, I'm not sure. I like the deserty idea but am not stuck to it.

If the bigger insects are intelligent, you can have something like this:

http://www.quizz.biz/uploads/quizz/126935/3_eMS7M.jpg

The huge creature grew on an "insect-only" world with lower gravity, allowing for more massive creatures with exoskeletons. After landing on a world with higher gravity, they had to reinforce their exoskeleton with metallic pieces. You can suppose that these giant insects landed on your world some centuries/millenniums ago and "terraformed" one continent by removing the local fauna/flora and importing various species of plants and insects from their world. For some reason, e.g. what Yora proposed, they are not able to travel in space anymore and are stuck on your world.

Sampi
2012-06-12, 06:48 AM
If the bigger insects are intelligent...

Insect breathing would be a problem with that size. The largest insects ever to live on Earth evolved during the Carboniferous period, when the atmosphere's oxygen levels were very high. Those got up to and a bit over one meter in length. But in general, insects could be a dominant phylum on said continent. AS well as lizards, crustaceans or any other phylum, or several.

As to how a continent evolved without mammals, that's easy. It's just been isolated since the mammals evolved on the other continent(s). Not only would it have no mammals, all the other animals would also be completely different. A long enough isolation would cause a major difference in everything.

Yora
2012-06-12, 07:41 AM
Insect size is mostly a facor of oxygen. When you can have dragonflies with 65 cm wingspan, than exoskeleton strength of walking insects could potentially support much larger sizes. If the wings of a dragonfly don't snap of or collapse, leg joints should not be a problem either.

The reason insects are limited in size is because of the way their breathing system works. Since it's a fictional world, the creatures we are talking about are not actual insects but something that evolved analogous to insects. But there's no reason that these creatures did not evolve a breathing system that allows for larger size. Give them lungs and blood and that factor is basically out of the picture. After all, we have blue whales using that system to transport oxygen to their cells, so you apparently can scale it up to almost any size.

Because of the square/cube law, exoskeletons would have to be much thicker in relation to overall body size. If you make a 10 cm praying mantis 100cm tall, making the exoskeleton only ten times as thick would not be enough and probably very easy to snap. Make it a hundred times as thick and you probably won't have much problems. After all, insect skeletons are extremely thin. Make it 100 layers and it's still not very thick.

Gravitron5000
2012-06-12, 08:20 AM
SO! I need to know what would be different in this world from ours with these things in mind...

1.<snip> Also, there are no satellites so GPS is dead and cell phones work more like long range radios that need to be close enough to towers, I assume.

<snip>

4. A small continent where mammalian life never really evolved. Why would this happen?

<snip>


For #1, this is already how cell phones work. If you are not close enough to a cell tower, your phone is no longer any use. The cell towers are connected by optical fiber, or in some rare cases, wire. There is a lot of stuff going on in the background to make sure the calls get connected properly. No satellites required. We do have satellite phones, but they are too expensive to be in general use.

For #4, isolation. Make it hard enough to get to, and separated from everything else for longer than mammals have been around, and this can happen. One example is New Zealand. Until people showed up, the only mammals on New Zealand were seals and bats. The Galapagos Islands also have very few mammals for similar reasons (rats, bats, seals and sea lions).

Griffith!
2012-06-12, 09:24 AM
<snip>

1. There is some sort of field or something around the moon making all types of space travel completely impossible. Assume tech we discovered because of the space program was independently researched, but are there techs that really could not have been discovered? Also, there are no satellites so GPS is dead and cell phones work more like long range radios that need to be close enough to towers, I assume. If there is some reason such a field could actually exist, I am curious as to what it is. Otherwise, it is supernatural.

<likewise cut>



In theoretical physics? An electromagnetic wave effect caused by an extra particle of helium-3 in the ionosphere would disrupt electronic devices that attempt to pass through them. It's Rubber-band science though, so it may as well be supernatural. It's not like we have helium-3 to test it with or anything.

Anxe
2012-06-12, 11:12 AM
I'll try to answer them as I can.

1. People have said massive solar radiation of some kind that is stopped by the ozone layer. If that's the case, wouldn't some of the solar radiation get through the ozone layer and affect the humans, plants, and animals? You could say that every human has to take a radiation pill every morning to prevent that, but you should address it.
My idea for #1 was to make the field physical. A bunch of asteroids create a field around the moon. Kind of like the rings of the gas giants, only the rocks orbit in all directions creating a field with no entry/exit points. This means that there would be a lot more asteroids falling to the moon and the planet. There'd also be a lot more minor eclipses. Any spaceship or satellite that is sent up is hit by a rock.
I have another idea that goes back to the radiation. What if the planet had a nuclear war that destroyed everything and left a massive amount of radiation there? That radiation could spill over into space and scramble the instruments as everyone has been saying.

2. Do you want a rational explanation for the super powers? Because we'd need to know which ones are allowed before that. In general it could be just the next step in human evolution. This new amount of evolution could be due to the small amount of radiation getting through the ozone layer.
As for the people themselves, they might start forming secret societies to help each other. Comparisons could be made to X-Men, the Mutant Brotherhood, the Illuminati, or even gay culture in real life (Although be careful with that last one so no one is offended).
Does the government know about it? If they do are they trying to secretly control the mutants? Is there a private organization that is trying to control them as well?

3. I have no idea how to handle this one.

4. As has been said, insects can get bigger if more oxygen is introduced into their environment. Perhaps this can further explain the hefty ozone layer over the planet. There's just a hell of a lot of oxygen on this planet. Every species has evolved to deal with it, so no one is going blind or whatever. The oxygen creates a thicker ozone layer which keeps out the worst of the radiation. The insects grow bigger because of the huge amount of oxygen. Flames all burn brighter because of all the oxygen. Metals rust faster.
For all this oxygen you'd probably want to introduce a few microorganisms that can reverse various affects that remove the oxygen from the environment. Algae are one that you're already familiar with. Have there be some that due it for metals and for CO2 as well. When someone makes a new appliance out of iron they slap some Ferrae (Ferric Algae) on it to prevent rust. They renew the coat every year/3 months/whatever.
Back to the insect continent though! As has been said, having zero to few mammals is definitely possible. However, what hasn't been explained is why the insects aren't bigger in other places. If the whole world has high oxygen atmosphere, then why aren't the insects bigger on the other continents? Well, because there are mammals there that have evolved to prey on big insects! I'm not sure what those type of mammals would look like, but you can dream them up.

5. Orbs probably wouldn't be that different than any other energy tech. People would worry about orb meltdowns. You might even want to have an orb Chernobyl or something like that. Maybe the orbs are responsible for the superpower development. Some people might worry that the orbs are eventually going to run out and would encourage us to invest in renewable energy. Some companies would be trying to develop orb weapons or consumer orb tech. Some scientists or wizards might even be trying to figure out what produces the orbs so that the humans can replicate that, for good or evil.
I'm drawing a lot of parallels to nuclear tech with this one. The orbs probably should be treated like uranium because of that. Very high security. Lots of protection for those that work with them to prevent contamination. Orb mining areas would show up extremely low resolution on the moon's version of google maps.

This sounds like a really cool setting. Hope I helped. And ask questions so we can see what other stuff can come up.

The Glyphstone
2012-06-12, 12:15 PM
Regarding #1....do they know it's impossible and thus never tried? Or is the 'it's impossible' a strictly out-of-universe conceit? You're already aware of how much modern technology has its roots in the space program, and all we had for a motivation was the moon. If we were moon people looking at Earth, that'd be equally as much motivation or more to try and reach that other world for exploration; there is no fruit sweeter than the one you can't reach, after all.

Unless there's a plausible reason for why they wouldn't even have any desire to reach 'their' planet, they would be trying for it, and whatever reasons they have for failing would have as big an impact on their society as the space race did on us. If it's technological - say, radiation as has been suggested or magnetism-related, their studies in those related fields would be significantly advanced, so ponder what unusual technological innovations might have resulted from such research. Similarly, if it's a supernatural phenomenon, you would have an active mystical/spiritual element of the community - after all, they have blatantly undeniable evidence of magic/the supernatural.

Hylas
2012-06-12, 04:04 PM
For the orbs you can think of them as super batteries. If you're into crunch (I'll do quick Googling for rough numbers, your numbers may vary and mine may be completely inaccurate, but this is for sake of example), I'd suggest figuring out about how much power they have. I've gotten numbers around 10,000 Megawatts for how much power NYC uses in a day.

Electricity costs for NYC are around 15 cents per kWh.

So for an orb to be cost effective it should match that price. Let's say an orb has 10,000 MW of power in it, so that orb would be worth 10,000,000 KWh x 15 cents = $1.5 million per orb.

If orbs are worth less than that, say only $150k, then it would indeed lead to cheap, economical, and clean power, assuming there's no environmental impact from mining or drawing the power this could either lead to people being A) Very environmentally concerned and set for generations or B) Environmentally apathetic since there's "never anything bad about using electricity." I'll let you decide.

If devices for harnessing power are small and light, then you can put these orbs into cars or buses. Let's say using a car is 50 kWh each day. A 10,000 MW orb would power this car for over 500 years. Alternatively you can put them into trains for easy high speed rail that doesn't need electrical lines to power them, or super buses, or airplanes that can fly around the world several times without refueling.

Gasoline has 36.6 kWh/gal or 13 kWh/kg. Let's say you have super cheap US gas at $4/gal. That's 10.9 cents/kWh, which seems like a good deal, but remember that internal combustion engines aren't 100% efficient (closer to 25%), so it's more like 40 cents/kWh. Let's say you have magic 100% efficiency orb energy converters then it's definitely a step up to use orbs, or mini-orbs, and just hand down the orb for generations to power up the family car, at least for rich people and the orbs will pay for themselves in 100 years and the rest is gravy. It'll definitely be worthwhile to power up trains and planes with it, or whatever large vehicles your setting has as corporations and governments can afford the up-front costs.

A 747 uses 12,500 gallons of jet fuel, which has the same energy density as gasoline, to cross the Atlantic ocean. That's 457,500-ish kWh. A 747 can make nearly 22 crossings on a single orb. Probably more since the fuel will weigh less (again, assuming the machines to convert the power weigh less than what they're replacing). Transportation could become very cheap depending on the price you give the orbs.

Can you convert a big orb into smaller, weaker orbs? Can you make the orbs small enough to be the size of a cell phone battery? Cell phones that never need to be charged, as they use power in the milliwatts range. Portable computers that can run for years. Cell phones could have a much larger range as they can pump more power into their signal. And if a cell phone can reach multiple towers you can triangulate and use "GPS" that way. Getting lost in the wilderness is still getting lost in the wilderness and you can fly over the ocean and never be heard from again. Portable tech could become much more prevalent than what we have today.


What you can do with the orbs is really limited on the price you want to set for them. Even if you make them 10x as expensive as regular electricity they'll still have usage for military applications for super-nuclear subs and airplanes flying overhead. Probably portable applications where batteries are expensive and heavy the expensive orbs are still viable.

I should note that if you can find a way to release all of the energy from an orb at once you have an atomic weapon akin to what was used on Japan in WW2. Hiroshima was approximately 17,000 MW.

Siosilvar
2012-06-12, 05:03 PM
3. Time is neither a line or a circle or a branch but basically a bunch of semi-parallel venn diagrams intersecting this way and that basically meaning time can act like any of the three, depending. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Probably six or seven score alternate dimensions.

Who's to say it doesn't work like that already? I really don't think there'd be much difference from the real world, or if there was you wouldn't notice it. Déjà vu might happen a bit more often, but that's about it.

Of course, my understanding of such theories is very limited, but I don't think anyone would notice, in-universe at least.

Gnomish Wanderer
2012-06-12, 06:15 PM
Also, there are no satellites so GPS is dead and cell phones work more like long range radios that need to be close enough to towers, I assume.
Just wanted to say, that IS how cell phones currently work. :smallwink:

Edit: Ah, Ninja'd by 10 hours. I should really have paid more attention.

CET
2012-06-15, 08:22 AM
1. There is some sort of field or something around the moon making all types of space travel completely impossible. Assume tech we discovered because of the space program was independently researched, but are there techs that really could not have been discovered? Also, there are no satellites so GPS is dead and cell phones work more like long range radios that need to be close enough to towers, I assume. If there is some reason such a field could actually exist, I am curious as to what it is. Otherwise, it is supernatural.


How about the Kessler effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)? Nothing says 'your not getting off planet' like a debris belt so thick that it pulverizes anything that leaves the atmosphere.





4. A small continent where mammalian life never really evolved. Why would this happen? I have no idea. But I'd really like for mammals not to be there. That would be cool. The idea is that life kept evolving from insects and so there are fairly large insectoid type creatures or whatever. I never took biology classes after high school, I am really just about the concept here. How or why this would happen is what I need help with. I'm not talking ten foot tall spiders, here. But, like, a three to four foot tall praying mantis would be awesome to justify. I understand this probably means exoskeletons don't work and for each large insect there needs to be tons and tons of little ones. Maybe the way insects reproduce wouldn't work with large creatures because the populations of that insect would be too low or maybe they could have adapted to change that. I really want to make it work, though. Right now the aesthetic is a little bit deserty but to justify enough insects lots of fauna is maybe needed, or not, I'm not sure. I like the deserty idea but am not stuck to it.


People have already done a great job addressing this one . . . I just wanted to add that Australia and some of the south pacific islands have interesting examples of divergent evolution (Komodo dragons!). Also, I ran across a book a while back by WETA (a special effects group) called the Natural History of Skull Island (http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Kong-Natural-History/dp/1416505199). If you can find a library copy or the like I'd check it out - plenty of nasty reptile (dinosaur and non-dinosaur) and insectile monsters, and awesome art.

SowZ
2012-06-17, 05:56 PM
You could just have particularly nasty solar radiation combined with a very powerful magnetic field of the planet. On the surface, everything would be the same. But a few kilometers up, radiation is deadly even inside spaceships and highly energetic solar flares fry all electronics within a few days.

Alright, I may use this. It sounds the easiest to implement.


If the bigger insects are intelligent, you can have something like this:

http://www.quizz.biz/uploads/quizz/126935/3_eMS7M.jpg

The huge creature grew on an "insect-only" world with lower gravity, allowing for more massive creatures with exoskeletons. After landing on a world with higher gravity, they had to reinforce their exoskeleton with metallic pieces. You can suppose that these giant insects landed on your world some centuries/millenniums ago and "terraformed" one continent by removing the local fauna/flora and importing various species of plants and insects from their world. For some reason, e.g. what Yora proposed, they are not able to travel in space anymore and are stuck on your world.

The insects are going to be more of a monster challenge. In a world without much fantasy, I still want some monsters so the insects are probably not very smart. They may have evolved beyond just a brain stem, like real insects, but not truly smart. This gets me thinking, though. Could insects have evolved such a structure? As in, an exoskeleton for most of their body, (no rib cage or bones in their limbs, for example,) but they still have a spine?


Insect breathing would be a problem with that size. The largest insects ever to live on Earth evolved during the Carboniferous period, when the atmosphere's oxygen levels were very high. Those got up to and a bit over one meter in length. But in general, insects could be a dominant phylum on said continent. AS well as lizards, crustaceans or any other phylum, or several.

As to how a continent evolved without mammals, that's easy. It's just been isolated since the mammals evolved on the other continent(s). Not only would it have no mammals, all the other animals would also be completely different. A long enough isolation would cause a major difference in everything.

Okay, good to hear. The insects will just have lungs, then. Yeah, I could make dangerous reptiles on the island. Divergent evolution works. What conditions would make insect life more dominant and mammalian lifeforms succeeding less likely?


Insect size is mostly a facor of oxygen. When you can have dragonflies with 65 cm wingspan, than exoskeleton strength of walking insects could potentially support much larger sizes. If the wings of a dragonfly don't snap of or collapse, leg joints should not be a problem either.

The reason insects are limited in size is because of the way their breathing system works. Since it's a fictional world, the creatures we are talking about are not actual insects but something that evolved analogous to insects. But there's no reason that these creatures did not evolve a breathing system that allows for larger size. Give them lungs and blood and that factor is basically out of the picture. After all, we have blue whales using that system to transport oxygen to their cells, so you apparently can scale it up to almost any size.

Because of the square/cube law, exoskeletons would have to be much thicker in relation to overall body size. If you make a 10 cm praying mantis 100cm tall, making the exoskeleton only ten times as thick would not be enough and probably very easy to snap. Make it a hundred times as thick and you probably won't have much problems. After all, insect skeletons are extremely thin. Make it 100 layers and it's still not very thick.

Alright, yeah, I'm sure I'll give them lungs, then. So they could have really thick exoskeletons? I suppose I could use this to justify them being really tough and hard to kill. I imagine if they had proportionate strength a three foot tall praying mantis, for example, would be crazy strong. Would they need to eat a lot to maintain such a heavy thing or to have the strength to carry such a skeleton? If so, they would have to eat so much there probably wouldn't be that many of them, would there?


For #1, this is already how cell phones work. If you are not close enough to a cell tower, your phone is no longer any use. The cell towers are connected by optical fiber, or in some rare cases, wire. There is a lot of stuff going on in the background to make sure the calls get connected properly. No satellites required. We do have satellite phones, but they are too expensive to be in general use.

For #4, isolation. Make it hard enough to get to, and separated from everything else for longer than mammals have been around, and this can happen. One example is New Zealand. Until people showed up, the only mammals on New Zealand were seals and bats. The Galapagos Islands also have very few mammals for similar reasons (rats, bats, seals and sea lions).

Alright, good to hear. Are there any other common technologies instead of satellite phones and GPS that would be affected by lack of satellite? Obviously, TV will have to be cable.

Alright, cool, the island will just be isolated. Humans aren't native to it, anyways.


In theoretical physics? An electromagnetic wave effect caused by an extra particle of helium-3 in the ionosphere would disrupt electronic devices that attempt to pass through them. It's Rubber-band science though, so it may as well be supernatural. It's not like we have helium-3 to test it with or anything.

Sure. That is interesting and I may look into it but I may be a bit more general with radiation and magnetic fields around the moon. If someone playing really looked into it maybe I would have to use a more specific explanation so I will keep this info about Helium-3 stored away.


I'll try to answer them as I can.

1. People have said massive solar radiation of some kind that is stopped by the ozone layer. If that's the case, wouldn't some of the solar radiation get through the ozone layer and affect the humans, plants, and animals? You could say that every human has to take a radiation pill every morning to prevent that, but you should address it.
My idea for #1 was to make the field physical. A bunch of asteroids create a field around the moon. Kind of like the rings of the gas giants, only the rocks orbit in all directions creating a field with no entry/exit points. This means that there would be a lot more asteroids falling to the moon and the planet. There'd also be a lot more minor eclipses. Any spaceship or satellite that is sent up is hit by a rock.
I have another idea that goes back to the radiation. What if the planet had a nuclear war that destroyed everything and left a massive amount of radiation there? That radiation could spill over into space and scramble the instruments as everyone has been saying.

2. Do you want a rational explanation for the super powers? Because we'd need to know which ones are allowed before that. In general it could be just the next step in human evolution. This new amount of evolution could be due to the small amount of radiation getting through the ozone layer.
As for the people themselves, they might start forming secret societies to help each other. Comparisons could be made to X-Men, the Mutant Brotherhood, the Illuminati, or even gay culture in real life (Although be careful with that last one so no one is offended).
Does the government know about it? If they do are they trying to secretly control the mutants? Is there a private organization that is trying to control them as well?

3. I have no idea how to handle this one.

4. As has been said, insects can get bigger if more oxygen is introduced into their environment. Perhaps this can further explain the hefty ozone layer over the planet. There's just a hell of a lot of oxygen on this planet. Every species has evolved to deal with it, so no one is going blind or whatever. The oxygen creates a thicker ozone layer which keeps out the worst of the radiation. The insects grow bigger because of the huge amount of oxygen. Flames all burn brighter because of all the oxygen. Metals rust faster.
For all this oxygen you'd probably want to introduce a few microorganisms that can reverse various affects that remove the oxygen from the environment. Algae are one that you're already familiar with. Have there be some that due it for metals and for CO2 as well. When someone makes a new appliance out of iron they slap some Ferrae (Ferric Algae) on it to prevent rust. They renew the coat every year/3 months/whatever.
Back to the insect continent though! As has been said, having zero to few mammals is definitely possible. However, what hasn't been explained is why the insects aren't bigger in other places. If the whole world has high oxygen atmosphere, then why aren't the insects bigger on the other continents? Well, because there are mammals there that have evolved to prey on big insects! I'm not sure what those type of mammals would look like, but you can dream them up.

5. Orbs probably wouldn't be that different than any other energy tech. People would worry about orb meltdowns. You might even want to have an orb Chernobyl or something like that. Maybe the orbs are responsible for the superpower development. Some people might worry that the orbs are eventually going to run out and would encourage us to invest in renewable energy. Some companies would be trying to develop orb weapons or consumer orb tech. Some scientists or wizards might even be trying to figure out what produces the orbs so that the humans can replicate that, for good or evil.
I'm drawing a lot of parallels to nuclear tech with this one. The orbs probably should be treated like uranium because of that. Very high security. Lots of protection for those that work with them to prevent contamination. Orb mining areas would show up extremely low resolution on the moon's version of google maps.

This sounds like a really cool setting. Hope I helped. And ask questions so we can see what other stuff can come up.

I like what you suggested about higher oxygen content and an increased ozone layer. Metal needing coatings to prevent rusting is a cool little detail that makes the setting feel unique and alive. Fire being more intense would actually be neat and I could justify some very damaging fire powers. Maybe there is slightly more radiation on the surface because the ozone doesn't block it all. I don't think I will make that a big deal but if that was the case, would areas where ozone depletes faster, (above the moons equivalent of the north pole,) be super radiated? I kind of like the idea of more asteroids. It may have an asteroid belt thing, but it probably is just a belt and the radiation is what will prevent space travel.

Oh, yeah, I haven't thought that much about which animals will have killed the giant insects. That should be fun to design. I have thought that the animals in this world are deadlier than our own, in general.

I'll probably incorporate most of what you've said about orbs, yeah.

As for the powers, basically there are four different planes of existence. Material Plane, (everyone is aware of this,) energy plane, astral plane, and temporal plane. Anyone with a power has it by accessing one of these three extra planes. There are groups that try and destroy or manipulate or duplicate powers just as there are groups of super powered individuals but most common people are unaware of it.


Regarding #1....do they know it's impossible and thus never tried? Or is the 'it's impossible' a strictly out-of-universe conceit? You're already aware of how much modern technology has its roots in the space program, and all we had for a motivation was the moon. If we were moon people looking at Earth, that'd be equally as much motivation or more to try and reach that other world for exploration; there is no fruit sweeter than the one you can't reach, after all.

Unless there's a plausible reason for why they wouldn't even have any desire to reach 'their' planet, they would be trying for it, and whatever reasons they have for failing would have as big an impact on their society as the space race did on us. If it's technological - say, radiation as has been suggested or magnetism-related, their studies in those related fields would be significantly advanced, so ponder what unusual technological innovations might have resulted from such research. Similarly, if it's a supernatural phenomenon, you would have an active mystical/spiritual element of the community - after all, they have blatantly undeniable evidence of magic/the supernatural.

Well, if it is impossible because of magnetic fields and radiation maybe they have advanced magnetic trains and support structures for buildings using magnets. Would a sort of gun that shoots concentrated radiation be possible? More people believe in the supernatural/super human abilities then do in our world.


For the orbs you can think of them as super batteries. If you're into crunch (I'll do quick Googling for rough numbers, your numbers may vary and mine may be completely inaccurate, but this is for sake of example), I'd suggest figuring out about how much power they have. I've gotten numbers around 10,000 Megawatts for how much power NYC uses in a day.

Electricity costs for NYC are around 15 cents per kWh.

So for an orb to be cost effective it should match that price. Let's say an orb has 10,000 MW of power in it, so that orb would be worth 10,000,000 KWh x 15 cents = $1.5 million per orb.

If orbs are worth less than that, say only $150k, then it would indeed lead to cheap, economical, and clean power, assuming there's no environmental impact from mining or drawing the power this could either lead to people being A) Very environmentally concerned and set for generations or B) Environmentally apathetic since there's "never anything bad about using electricity." I'll let you decide.

If devices for harnessing power are small and light, then you can put these orbs into cars or buses. Let's say using a car is 50 kWh each day. A 10,000 MW orb would power this car for over 500 years. Alternatively you can put them into trains for easy high speed rail that doesn't need electrical lines to power them, or super buses, or airplanes that can fly around the world several times without refueling.

Gasoline has 36.6 kWh/gal or 13 kWh/kg. Let's say you have super cheap US gas at $4/gal. That's 10.9 cents/kWh, which seems like a good deal, but remember that internal combustion engines aren't 100% efficient (closer to 25%), so it's more like 40 cents/kWh. Let's say you have magic 100% efficiency orb energy converters then it's definitely a step up to use orbs, or mini-orbs, and just hand down the orb for generations to power up the family car, at least for rich people and the orbs will pay for themselves in 100 years and the rest is gravy. It'll definitely be worthwhile to power up trains and planes with it, or whatever large vehicles your setting has as corporations and governments can afford the up-front costs.

A 747 uses 12,500 gallons of jet fuel, which has the same energy density as gasoline, to cross the Atlantic ocean. That's 457,500-ish kWh. A 747 can make nearly 22 crossings on a single orb. Probably more since the fuel will weigh less (again, assuming the machines to convert the power weigh less than what they're replacing). Transportation could become very cheap depending on the price you give the orbs.

Can you convert a big orb into smaller, weaker orbs? Can you make the orbs small enough to be the size of a cell phone battery? Cell phones that never need to be charged, as they use power in the milliwatts range. Portable computers that can run for years. Cell phones could have a much larger range as they can pump more power into their signal. And if a cell phone can reach multiple towers you can triangulate and use "GPS" that way. Getting lost in the wilderness is still getting lost in the wilderness and you can fly over the ocean and never be heard from again. Portable tech could become much more prevalent than what we have today.


What you can do with the orbs is really limited on the price you want to set for them. Even if you make them 10x as expensive as regular electricity they'll still have usage for military applications for super-nuclear subs and airplanes flying overhead. Probably portable applications where batteries are expensive and heavy the expensive orbs are still viable.

I should note that if you can find a way to release all of the energy from an orb at once you have an atomic weapon akin to what was used on Japan in WW2. Hiroshima was approximately 17,000 MW.

I will have to answer these after I have contemplated them more. Hmmmm. Interesting. Thanks for the help with the numbers, I do need them. I've already spent a long time calculating percentage of people with powers and how much higher their death rate is/how many die a month to justify how big powers hunting groups are and such so I rely on these calculations a fair amount. Thanks. Hmmm. Yeah, they could be used as superweapons. I'll have to make the process to do this super expensive and hard, though, since the orbs are fairly common and I wouldn't want every joe shmo with access to an atom bomb.


Who's to say it doesn't work like that already? I really don't think there'd be much difference from the real world, or if there was you wouldn't notice it. Déjà vu might happen a bit more often, but that's about it.

Of course, my understanding of such theories is very limited, but I don't think anyone would notice, in-universe at least.

Oh, okay, sure. Yeah, I suppose no one can prove this idea wrong...


Just wanted to say, that IS how cell phones currently work. :smallwink:

Edit: Ah, Ninja'd by 10 hours. I should really have paid more attention.

Thanks anyway. (:


How about the Kessler effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)? Nothing says 'your not getting off planet' like a debris belt so thick that it pulverizes anything that leaves the atmosphere.




People have already done a great job addressing this one . . . I just wanted to add that Australia and some of the south pacific islands have interesting examples of divergent evolution (Komodo dragons!). Also, I ran across a book a while back by WETA (a special effects group) called the Natural History of Skull Island (http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Kong-Natural-History/dp/1416505199). If you can find a library copy or the like I'd check it out - plenty of nasty reptile (dinosaur and non-dinosaur) and insectile monsters, and awesome art.

Would a moon have enough gravity to have such a debris belt? Anyway, yeah, intersting I may borrow some of those creatures or vary them up a bit. (:

Hylas
2012-06-17, 07:23 PM
Would a moon have enough gravity to have such a debris belt?

Depends on the size of the moon. Some moons in the solar system are the size of planets. Even Pluto has a moon nearly the size of it. Since supernatural things exist in RPGs you can pretty much make up whatever you want.

Also, in real life asteroid fields aren't nearly as dense as they're shown in movies, like Star Wars (Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones). In fact such asteroid fields wouldn't be able to exist because there'd be too many collisions and they'd naturally dissipate out. However, it is possible to have a kessler type thing going on and make it so satellites would be knocked out of orbit relatively quickly. I also don't think it'll make space travel impossible (the chances of Voyager 1 hitting an asteroid in the asteroid belt was less than 1 in a million).

Rather than doing one big bad issue that prevents space travel, why not do multiple medium sized problems? You can have large rocks flying around, trying to knock stuff out of orbit, then they're also made out of magnetic material which causes radio interference and makes communications with the surface impossible while in space. Throw in some solar wind, some mana flares, or good ol' fashioned gamma radiation and you have a host of problems.

Anxe
2012-06-18, 12:47 AM
*Snip*

Maybe there is slightly more radiation on the surface because the ozone doesn't block it all. I don't think I will make that a big deal but if that was the case, would areas where ozone depletes faster, (above the moons equivalent of the north pole,) be super radiated?

*snip*

The ozone depletes largely due halocarbons which were commonly found in aerosols. The bad stuff has been removed from aerosols, so the hole wouldn't necessarily form in your world if the people there no longer use halocarbons. You can read more about it on wikipedia. From what you've described, the moon sounds like a utopian society by our standards. They probably would no longer use halocarbons and thus the ozone layer would not be significantly weaker at any location.

The ozone is weak at the poles because the "halocarbon + ozone -> not ozone" reaction only happens at super cold temperatures. Depending on the fantasy elements you've introduced it could happen at other locations as well.

As for the means of replacing satellites. People are going to be using cable for communication and entertainment broadcasting. There would also be large towers on the largest hill in an area that broadcast radio signals. Smaller towers would be abundant in civilized areas (and they are in the real world too). Planes and ships would all have radios that kept contact with the large towers to power their radio GPS. Nothing would be super different except there would be no satellite access in remote uncivilized areas.

Dervag
2012-06-18, 01:03 AM
The great thing about radiation is that you can block an arbitary amount of it by piling heavy stuff in the way. If your civilization has a nigh-inexhaustible power supply (magic orbs or whatever), and is close to developing antigravity, they could literally build a "spaceship" that's nothing but a giant concrete bunker covered in slabs of graphite, lead, depleted uranium, or whatever else would stop radiation from penetrating the walls. Then they just hover that sucker up into space.

Debris, on the other hand, can be vaporized from ground level using things like giant laser beams, if you have an adequate power supply. This has been seriously proposed if space debris makes low Earth orbit too dangerous to put satellites or people in.

One interesting question is the source of all this radiation. Dangerous radiation comes from high-energy processes that involve subatomic particles: particles being accelerated to very high speeds, particles brought to a stop by crashing into something at very high speeds, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, radioactive decay, and so on.

So what's doing it here? Does the planet's magnetic field act as a highly efficient "trap" for fast-moving subatomic particles from the sun? The Earth's field traps particles from the sun (the "solar wind,") but with limited efficiency, so the resulting zones full of trapped particles (the "van Allen belts") aren't really all that dangerous as long as you move through them briskly.

There are actually proposals to remove the radiation from the van Allen belts. All those trapped particles currently swirling around waiting to smack into something and give it cancer could (in principle) be deflected and kicked out by putting electrically charged tethers in orbit and letting them spin around up where the belts are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt#Removal

So these problems might not be permanent, which could be a source of campaign hooks.

Ashtagon
2012-06-18, 01:29 AM
QUOTE=SowZ;13382459
So the world has about a billion people, is actually a moon, and is set in a fairly futuristic world. (Like, most people have similar standards of living to most of us, I'd imagine, with most cars and guns and such being electric. There aren't flying cars hovering around, but there is tech on the brink too expensive to produce that could make something like a motorcycle fly. And there are a few energy guns but the energy expenditure is so ludicrously expensive and they are so hefty it is pretty impractical.)

SO! I need to know what would be different in this world from ours with these things in mind...

1. There is some sort of field or something around the moon making all types of space travel completely impossible. Assume tech we discovered because of the space program was independently researched, but are there techs that really could not have been discovered? Also, there are no satellites so GPS is dead and cell phones work more like long range radios that need to be close enough to towers, I assume. If there is some reason such a field could actually exist, I am curious as to what it is. Otherwise, it is supernatural.

No satellites means no GPS. It also means no satellite-linked phones. However, conventional mobile/cell phones really are short-ranged radios that link to towers. These towers generally connect directly to national phone grids. So mobile phones generally won't be affected.

However, with satellites, trans-oceanic comms would be via undersea cables, and these are hella expensive to maintain. Such contact would be far more expensive than in our world. Islands may also face such issues.

2. About one in a hundred thousand people has super powers, but most of them are easy enough to conceal that the majority of the population does not know about it.

3. Time is neither a line or a circle or a branch but basically a bunch of semi-parallel venn diagrams intersecting this way and that basically meaning time can act like any of the three, depending. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Probably six or seven score alternate dimensions.

Can't comment - no idea what you are describing.

4. A small continent where mammalian life never really evolved. Why would this happen? I have no idea. But I'd really like for mammals not to be there. That would be cool. The idea is that life kept evolving from insects and so there are fairly large insectoid type creatures or whatever. I never took biology classes after high school, I am really just about the concept here. How or why this would happen is what I need help with. I'm not talking ten foot tall spiders, here. But, like, a three to four foot tall praying mantis would be awesome to justify. I understand this probably means exoskeletons don't work and for each large insect there needs to be tons and tons of little ones. Maybe the way insects reproduce wouldn't work with large creatures because the populations of that insect would be too low or maybe they could have adapted to change that. I really want to make it work, though. Right now the aesthetic is a little bit deserty but to justify enough insects lots of fauna is maybe needed, or not, I'm not sure. I like the deserty idea but am not stuck to it.

5. There are these things called orbs. They are supernatural so don't worry about the physics of them. Basically it is a super condensed ball of energy somewhere between a baseball and basketball. Orbs appear in some places more often than others and are mined like crazy in these zones and they form pretty regularly and only take a couple years to form. Ever since technology was developed that allowed orbs to be consumed for energy I figured technology exploded but the tech requires entire orbs to sustain so the tech is too expensive to be common. But even city infrastructures and standard tech would boom when these things became useful. A single orb could power a not too big city for a whole day. Quite a few orbs are mined, but don't ask for an exact number. While I have my ideas, I want to know what you all think about the effect this would have on various technologies and economies.

These orbs - can they be used to power cars? buses? ocean liners? aircraft carriers? Or are they limited to immobile power stations? They are basically a handwave for really cheap energy, but how mobile the engines that extract the energy from the fuel is will make all the difference.

Yanagi
2012-06-18, 02:53 AM
4. A small continent where mammalian life never really evolved. Why would this happen? I have no idea. But I'd really like for mammals not to be there. That would be cool. The idea is that life kept evolving from insects and so there are fairly large insectoid type creatures or whatever. I never took biology classes after high school, I am really just about the concept here. How or why this would happen is what I need help with. I'm not talking ten foot tall spiders, here. But, like, a three to four foot tall praying mantis would be awesome to justify. I understand this probably means exoskeletons don't work and for each large insect there needs to be tons and tons of little ones. Maybe the way insects reproduce wouldn't work with large creatures because the populations of that insect would be too low or maybe they could have adapted to change that. I really want to make it work, though. Right now the aesthetic is a little bit deserty but to justify enough insects lots of fauna is maybe needed, or not, I'm not sure. I like the deserty idea but am not stuck to it.

New Zealand. For most of its natural history it had almost no mammal species...the exception being a few bats.

The results was an explosion of bird species and reptile species, some of which adapted to niches that in other places would be associated with mammals...large grazing herbivores (moas), large apex predators (Eyle's Harrier), small ground foragers (kakapo), and so on.

The Grue
2012-06-18, 03:54 AM
EDIT:

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/22201669.jpg

The Grue
2012-06-18, 03:56 AM
As a mental exercise I'm going to give my take on the OP without reading any of the later posts in this thread to attempt to get an independent response - though I'll go back over it again once I do and add comments since a lot of what I'm going to say will probably have been mentioned already.

Also, you can safely pretend that any given sentence is preceded by "As I understand it" or "As far as I know". It's going to be a lot simpler if I just leave that out, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm a) an expert of any kind or b) a presumptuous know-it-all ass. :D


So the world has about a billion people, is actually a moon, and is set in a fairly futuristic world.

Depending on the size of the moon there wouldn't be much difference from life on Earth. How many earth masses is this moon? Also, mass and orbit from the primary might have some interesting tidal effects (or radiation, if it's a Jupiter-size gas giant). If it's a lot smaller than earth (enough to have a meaningful effect on surface gravity), larger organisms would be capable of sustained flight than on earth, and skeletons would need to be less dense. Life forms themselves would probably not be much bigger, because the upper limit on the size of an organism is constrained more by available food supply than mass restrictions. Take fish for example, most species will grow to varying sizes depending on how much food they have access to. This is especially noticeable in fish kept as pets, where two members of the same species might be different sizes depending on the size of their enclosure.

Also, lower gravity equals lower weight, but mass stays the same. This is important to keep in mind and is something a lot of people take for granted. You might be able to lift, albeit slowly, a car on the moon, but your muscles wouldn't be able to exert enough force to do it at any meaningful speed. Also, once it reached its desired height it would keep on going up until slowed either by the moon's gravity or (unlikely given the above) your own attempt to slow it down. Regardless, as the Apollo astronauts discovered the most energy-efficient to get around in a low-gravity environment is to pretend you're a kangaroo and bounce everywhere. Ambulatory life on such a world would reflect this because, all other things being equal, ecological pressures will select for organisms that expend less energy when seeking food and evading predators.


1. There is some sort of field or something around the moon making all types of space travel completely impossible. Assume tech we discovered because of the space program was independently researched, but are there techs that really could not have been discovered? Also, there are no satellites so GPS is dead and cell phones work more like long range radios that need to be close enough to towers, I assume. If there is some reason such a field could actually exist, I am curious as to what it is. Otherwise, it is supernatural.

It bears mentioning, though you may be aware, that radio signals would not be limited to line of sight. On Earth, radio signals can bounce off the upper atmosphere and reach receivers well beyond the horizon. This may be true for an earthlike moon as well, and given sufficient coverage by ground transceiver stations radio contact would be possible between opposite ends of the world - although there would be some degree of signal delay and degradation, especially in unfavourable meteorological conditions. If there are any fixed objects in the sky an analog to GPS positioning might be possible by bouncing a radio signal off said object and measuring the time it takes for the signal to return and the angle necessary to make contact, but it probably wouldn't be as practical as our GPS.

As for reasons why space travel might be impossible or unfeasible, barring magical energy barriers: Large gas giants like Jupiter have belts of powerful ionizing radiation, so if this moon's orbit lay within this region space travel might be lethal without shielding, and the weight of said shielding would make spacecraft impractical and prohibitively expensive. Then again, a satellite that close would also experience significant tidal effects (powerful enough to be the sole driving force behind Io's extreme volcanic activity), in addition to being bathed with lethal radiation itself.

Magical energy barrier might be your only option here. Any advanced civilization would necessarily develop the means to propel a spacecraft, even if accidentally. We do it by filling a big metal tube with explosives and lighting it on fire, which China was doing on a smaller scale for nearly a thousand years before anyone in the west thought of it.

EDIT: Radiation has been brought up as a possible barrier to space travel, and a magnetic field a reason why people on the surface don't die of radiation exposure. Unfortunately moons don't have magnetic fields. Earth's magnetic field is driven by the motion of its molten nickel/iron core like a gigantic dynamo, and as the core cools the magnetic field becomes weaker and weaker until, in a few billion years or so, it will fade out of existence altogether. While Mercury has an intrinsic magnetic field like the Earth(about 1/100 as strong), Mars and Venus do not, and certainly none of the subplanetary bodies have a magnetosphere of any kind as all available data indicates there is a lower limit on how large a celestial body can be in order to have a magnetic field. It's entirely possible that this "moon" could be Earth-sized, perhaps even a planet that was captured by a large gas giant. However, you're still left with the problem of proximity...which after checking Wikipedia might not be an issue. Europa receives about 540 rem per day from Jupiter's radiation belts (500 is a fatal dose), but is far enough away to be spared the tidal effects that Io suffers from.


2. About one in a hundred thousand people has super powers, but most of them are easy enough to conceal that the majority of the population does not know about it.

Unfortunately, no scientific basis for this here. Which really just means you have a free hand to do whatever's convenient for the story. Societal consequences would depend on, well, the nature of the societies involved, but as a rule people tend to be afraid of things that are even remotely Other(ie "different from me"), and this fear usually manifests as hate. Super-powered individuals would probably be doubly feared on account of being an Other that is not completely Other, which is even more frightening. See also: X-Men, The Chryssalids, Warhammer 40,000.


3. Time is neither a line or a circle or a branch but basically a bunch of semi-parallel venn diagrams intersecting this way and that basically meaning time can act like any of the three, depending. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Probably six or seven score alternate dimensions.

Well for starters, the perception of time as a line is a common one, and is a very good example of a loaded metaphor.

"Time" is an arrow that points from a state of high organization (or low entropy) in the direction of a state of low organization (or high entropy). Human beings visualize time as a river that flows past us while we remain stationary or a line that we travel the length of, but time is not a thing in of itself. A better analogy would be that time is the motion of an escalator moving you ever downwards towards entropy. It is a direction, just like up/down. The only difference between time and up/down is that you can't alter your movement through it. That's expressed as second law of thermodynamics.

Our perception of time is a consequence of the way our brains work, in that some outside stimulus must occur and register with our senses in order to be stored chemically in the brain as a memory; this process requires energy, and any time energy is used for work some of it is lost and cannot be used for work ever again - such a system in which energy is lost and unavailable for work is said to have high entropy. Without linear cause and effect, biology itself is not possible, nor indeed are any of the physical processes we see every day. Basically, you are not describing a planet where time works differently, you are describing a universe where entropy, and therefore cause and effect, and therefore time itself do not exist. Such a universe would be so radically different from our own that I don't see how you could possibly even describe it using human language, let alone write a coherent narrative within it.


4. A small continent where mammalian life never really evolved. Why would this happen? I have no idea. But I'd really like for mammals not to be there. That would be cool. The idea is that life kept evolving from insects and so there are fairly large insectoid type creatures or whatever. I never took biology classes after high school, I am really just about the concept here. How or why this would happen is what I need help with. I'm not talking ten foot tall spiders, here. But, like, a three to four foot tall praying mantis would be awesome to justify. I understand this probably means exoskeletons don't work and for each large insect there needs to be tons and tons of little ones. Maybe the way insects reproduce wouldn't work with large creatures because the populations of that insect would be too low or maybe they could have adapted to change that. I really want to make it work, though. Right now the aesthetic is a little bit deserty but to justify enough insects lots of fauna is maybe needed, or not, I'm not sure. I like the deserty idea but am not stuck to it.

Entirely possible. If not for the meteor strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the earth might very well have become a world where mammals were pushed out of their ecological niches by insect and reptilian species and went extinct. Such a continent would need to be geographically isolated to prevent mammalian species from moving in to fill vacant spots in the local biosphere. Insects would probably be larger on average, and most if not all of the apex predators would be hot-blooded reptiles. Carnivorous plants might even evolve to fill certain niches. I don't know how plausible large "insects" would be though, at least in the way we define the word "insect". Large insects would probably retain their exoskeletons as a means of defence and/or social display, but would likely have developed some kind of endoskeletal structure to better deal with their increased mass - even if this planet/moon were much smaller than earth for reasons mentioned above. An ant the size of an elephant with a carapace to scale might be able to support its own weight in a low-gravity environment, but if it ever fell down or ran into a tree or something its considerable mass and inertia might rupture its exoskeleton.

EDIT: As has been mentioned, the main restriction on terrestrial insect size (and organisms in general) is available oxygen, not, as I stated, food. I was thinking on the cellular level.

Also Yora brought up a good point: an insect with an exoskeleton proportionally thicker than a terrestrial insect's might not have the structural problems I outlined above. My instinct is that it might still develop a rudimentary endoskeleton for weight distribution reasons, but on a low-gravity world this might not be an issue. Of course if this moon is large enough to have a magnetic field like the Earth's, an endoskeleton might yet be needed.


5. There are these things called orbs. They are supernatural so don't worry about the physics of them. Basically it is a super condensed ball of energy somewhere between a baseball and basketball. Orbs appear in some places more often than others and are mined like crazy in these zones and they form pretty regularly and only take a couple years to form. Ever since technology was developed that allowed orbs to be consumed for energy I figured technology exploded but the tech requires entire orbs to sustain so the tech is too expensive to be common. But even city infrastructures and standard tech would boom when these things became useful. A single orb could power a not too big city for a whole day. Quite a few orbs are mined, but don't ask for an exact number. While I have my ideas, I want to know what you all think about the effect this would have on various technologies and economies.

As you've described it these orbs are basically free, clean energy. A society that used them as its primary means of power generation would, obviously, not have to worry about fossil fuels as much as we do and consequently issues of pollution and emissions would not be as critical to them as they are to us (notice how I'm very carefully not going anywhere near discussing climate change. >_>' Not touching that one with a ten-foot pole). Depending on their scarcity they might not be able to power entire societies, but they would at least take the pressure off. I would imagine wars would be fought over them unless other sources of energy were abundant and easy to get a hold of.

Orbs, and by extension energy, might be the standard on which currencies are built rather than precious metals, unless they're idiots like us and use confidence-based currency. Depending on the method of extracting energy from these things and how stable they are when not being used, they could probably be weaponized into missile warheads or bombs, with similar effects for this world as the Cold War on ours.

Gravitron5000
2012-06-18, 09:29 AM
However, with satellites, trans-oceanic comms would be via undersea cables, and these are hella expensive to maintain. Such contact would be far more expensive than in our world. Islands may also face such issues.

They may be expensive to install and maintain, but satellites are even more expensive, although the opposite used to be true (optical communications has gotten better/cheaper at a faster rate than satellite communications). The majority of trans-oceanic communications is done over optical fiber that is run across the ocean floor. This makes for some interesting situations when a fiber gets cut.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/02/failure-happens-transcontinent.html

Hylas
2012-06-18, 11:24 AM
I should also mention I once played in a fantasy RPG where we were on a moon that orbited a gas giant. I can't give any details on how everything worked scientifically because medieval technology couldn't explain any of it, but one of the practical effects was that the gas giant was effectively the sun (I should mention that the planet itself emitted light) and that sunrise and sunset took hours because it was so large.

Speaking of the day and night sky, having a bunch of stuff floating up there will change what the sky looks like. Check out this video for "What if Earth had rings like Saturn?" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT2sQ7KIQ-E)

Man, you could make one cool night sky.

erikun
2012-06-18, 11:58 AM
1. There is some sort of field or something around the moon making all types of space travel completely impossible.
Simply being a moon would probably make space travel difficult. Any kind of satellite would likely be caught in the planet's gravitational field, rather than the moon's, which means that it would not orbit the moon and probably just drift off.

You could also have something in the planet's gravitational field with some kind of nasty effects, like corroding metal or shorting out electronics, that are resisted by the moon's magnetic field but are in full effect outside of it.


2. About one in a hundred thousand people has super powers, but most of them are easy enough to conceal that the majority of the population does not know about it.
Depending on what kind they are, we could be looking at anything from supernatural outlaws to secret world-controlling societies. A bunch of mind-controlling psychics could probably take over the world themselves, after all.

On the other hand, if some people have visibly obvious superpowers, then the world at large would be aware of their presence. It's kind of hard to dismiss bench-pressing a car or unaided flight as just a psychological problem. And once the world knows they exist, it'll be looking for other places for it to exist, as well. How well the world handles it can range in reactions - acceptance, violent oppression, or even pretending like it doesn't exist outside specific cases.


3. Time is neither a line or a circle or a branch but basically a bunch of semi-parallel venn diagrams intersecting this way and that basically meaning time can act like any of the three, depending. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Probably six or seven score alternate dimensions.
Describing time as a venn diagram doesn't make much sense.

If there are multiple timelines and they continuously merge and exchange parts with each other, then you'll have problems with causality. Stuff will (apparently) happen for no reason, because the actual reasons for it happening would be hidden away in another dimension. It would be difficult to attribute guilt or innocence to a person, as even knowing exactly what they did wouldn't mean much when the person you are judging could be entirely seperate.

I'd have a hard time thinking that concepts like science and justice would come about in such a world - there is just too much spontaneously happening that you cannot be aware of to attribute logic to the world.

Depending on how it works, people would likely keep to small societies, and these societies would likely "stick together" when moving to another timeline. This, of course, assumes that stuff sticks together when being shuffled between timelines. If people will regularly wake up and find their husbands/wives not even recognizing them, then society itself would likely never come together - there would simply be no common ground for people to be together.


4. A small continent where mammalian life never really evolved. Why would this happen? I have no idea. But I'd really like for mammals not to be there. That would be cool.
The ocean is basically a rather large "continent" where virtually no mammalian life evolved. :smalltongue:

Anyways, places without a lot of mammalian life tend to see birds inhabiting similar ecological niches. Places without mammals or birds tend to end up like Amazon swamps - rather primordial, with lizards and amphibians moving around and hunting each other.

Of course, if we're talking about a fantasy world, you could have six-foot ants with intelligence and hiveminds and anything else you'd like. There's really nothing stopping you, although the general impression of an insect is not one including a lot of intelligence.


A single orb could power a not too big city for a whole day. Quite a few orbs are mined, but don't ask for an exact number. While I have my ideas, I want to know what you all think about the effect this would have on various technologies and economies.
Orbs = coal or oil. There probably wouldn't be much difference than that, and you'd likely see the same people going after coal/oil and consuming coal/oil as you would orbs.

ericgrau
2012-06-18, 12:38 PM
1. Cell phones already work on towers. Long distance might be more of an issue, but not within the same continent. A highly radioactive moon might make space travel practically impossible. Uranium could release alpha radiation (helium nuclei) and a little beta radiation (free electrons). The charged particles would deflect easily off of the earth's atmosphere. The Aurora Borealis would intensify and expand a little farther south (the existing effect is a dim glow). Besides killing people the particles would mess with most sensors. Thick lead could protect people but still leave travellers effectively blind, and the heavy ships would be incredibly difficult and expensive to launch into orbit.

2. Someone must see it some time, but it would only result in rumours. Most people would hear about them but be skeptical about their existence.

3. Planar travel a la the Sliders TV series. Depending on how easy shifting is, there could be interaction among similar but alternate worlds. Probably difficult to send very much, but nefarious agents could still exchange small important packages like technology data, enriched weapon's grade uranium, orbs, spies, etc.

4. ?

5. Energy drives the world, so basically the availability of orbs would determine wealth/poverty and standard of living. Nearly every product or service uses energy or is related to something that does. Even raw materials. Iron, aluminum and glass are literally as common as dirt but require energy to form. The simple way to handle it is to make a direct conversion between dollars and energy, because chances are the cost of almost everything comes from energy.

Human power would exist but tends to be far more expensive. It would be limited either to cheaper slave labor (or other labor with poor conditions) or fields of high expertise that can't be done by machine.

TuggyNE
2012-06-18, 09:34 PM
Simply being a moon would probably make space travel difficult. Any kind of satellite would likely be caught in the planet's gravitational field, rather than the moon's, which means that it would not orbit the moon and probably just drift off.

I'm not sure why you'd say this; it's not much more difficult to make a satellite orbit a moon rather than a planet than it is to make a satellite orbit a planet instead of a star, or a star instead of the center of the galaxy (in all of these cases, the orbits basically add together). The Apollo missions, for example, didn't have any particular trouble setting up orbits around our own moon; when the moon is 100 miles down, and the planet 81 times its mass is 230000+ miles away, the relative influences are fairly clear.

The various L-points (L1 through L5) are where your description actually (more or less) happens: lunar gravity balances planetary gravity, and the "orbit" is locked into one point, relative to the two bodies. But as you might notice, that doesn't happen in the vast majority of possible locations.

erikun
2012-06-19, 12:36 PM
I'm not sure why you'd say this; it's not much more difficult to make a satellite orbit a moon rather than a planet than it is to make a satellite orbit a planet instead of a star, or a star instead of the center of the galaxy (in all of these cases, the orbits basically add together). The Apollo missions, for example, didn't have any particular trouble setting up orbits around our own moon; when the moon is 100 miles down, and the planet 81 times its mass is 230000+ miles away, the relative influences are fairly clear.

The various L-points (L1 through L5) are where your description actually (more or less) happens: lunar gravity balances planetary gravity, and the "orbit" is locked into one point, relative to the two bodies. But as you might notice, that doesn't happen in the vast majority of possible locations.
Well I was thinking less an Earth-Luna or Pluto-Charon system, with moons roughly the same mass as the planet, and more like a Jupiter-Europa system, where you have a very massive planet whose gravity and affect the moon itself. When the moon is about as massive as the planet itself, you'll see some influence between the two (Luna and tides on Earth) but they are mostly independent. Putting something into orbit around Europa would need to primarily consider the gravity of Jupiter though, I'd think.

As for satellites 'drifting' away, that would be if they specifically aren't in a Lagrange Point. L-points would be "stable" areas in space with respect to an orbiting body; objects anywhere else would not maintain a stable point in the night sky and would gain erratic orbits/drift off in comparison. (This assumes, of course, that you can't just put something in orbit of the moon itself.)


Please note that I'm not an astronomer, so I'd like to be corrected if there's anything wrong here.

TuggyNE
2012-06-19, 06:41 PM
Well I was thinking less an Earth-Luna or Pluto-Charon system, with moons roughly the same mass as the planet, and more like a Jupiter-Europa system, where you have a very massive planet whose gravity and affect the moon itself. When the moon is about as massive as the planet itself, you'll see some influence between the two (Luna and tides on Earth) but they are mostly independent. Putting something into orbit around Europa would need to primarily consider the gravity of Jupiter though, I'd think.

Orbital insertion, even from outside the Jovian gravitational sphere, requires more precision but is by no means impossible. For example, look at the various planned Europan orbiter missions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Old_proposals).

There is always a distance below which the gravity of the moon, however small, outweighs the gravity of the planet, however large; with absurdly small moons/ring particles, that might be only a few meters away, of course, but for a habitable moon it would be at least several thousand km. (Even Io, perhaps the most Jupiter-dominated moon, and very near the Roche limit, has its own Hill sphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere). By the way, allow me to thank you for inducing me to look up the term for that! I learned something today. :smallsmile:)


As for satellites 'drifting' away, that would be if they specifically aren't in a Lagrange Point. L-points would be "stable" areas in space with respect to an orbiting body; objects anywhere else would not maintain a stable point in the night sky and would gain erratic orbits/drift off in comparison. (This assumes, of course, that you can't just put something in orbit of the moon itself.)

If by "drifting off", you mean "take on various possibly eccentric orbits around the planet", yes; the chance of a stray satellite reaching escape velocity just from orbital interactions is fairly low, though.


Please note that I'm not an astronomer, so I'd like to be corrected if there's anything wrong here.

Heh, me neither, I'm just an enthusiast. :smallwink: