Post by rvm45 on Dec 12, 2015 3:25:08 GMT -6
Friends,
Let us suppose that we have a mad scientist type who can actually build relatively small Worlds to order.
I got some of the raw ideas from Phillip Jose Farmer’s “Pocket Universe” books along with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Pellucidar” stories—so please don’t excitedly tell me; “It’s just like…”
I know it is sorta like—I just said so…
Surprising how many folks do that to me when I discuss plot ideas. I can only assume that they skim.
In Farmer’s books the pocket universes can be wastefully large—a sphere a bit larger than Pluto’s orbit. The “Lords” invented the pocket universes. The Lords are all about 50 000 years old, have IQs of about 300 and have modified their bodies to have about 3x human strength.
They killed off all the Physicists 50 000 years ago when the number of Pocket universes had grown to approximately 10 000. All the surviving Lords are Hannibal Lector style nutzenheimers who can’t even repair a ray gun (though they have warehouses stocked chockfull against a time of need) but they are very good at splicing genes and creating odd creatures. They spend all their time plotting how to break into some other Lords’ universe, kill the other Lord and either run his universe or blow it up—seemingly just for meanness. So there are somewhat less than 10 000 artificial universes and somewhat less than 10 000 Lords extent.
If anyone remembers Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar stories: The Earth is Hollow. The shell is relatively thin so the inside surface area is almost as big as the outside—but since the relative amounts of land and water are reversed, Pellucidar has more land area than us.
There is some sort of “Sun” at the center of the Earth. It appears noticeably larger in the sky but it is poorer in UV making getting a bad burn a bit of a challenge. The gravity is 10% to 15% lighter in Pellucidar. It is always high noon. The natives have a very laid back conception of time. Magnetic compasses work very poorly and anyone not born with a homing pigeon sense like the natives will have a very hard time navigating.
Okay, in one of Larry Niven’s stories a dude needs a lot of Deuterium and he sends an inter-dimensional portal to skim the ocean and pass all the Deuterium back to him but to reject any other substance. Lets assume our mad scientist can tune his portals to “Skim” for whatever he happens to want gathered—and nothing else.
Now lets be a bit realistic. Our hero isn’t immortal. He hasn’t a clue how to create Centaurs, Dragons and Gorgons in a gene-splicing lab. He is a bit of an Anarchist and Free Market enthusiast. He doesn’t want the power he’s built to fall into any Government’s hands—especially not his own. However there was some very unlikely lucky accident that led to his creation of the Process. It is extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will come close to recreating his method within the next 1000 years.
It will take centuries or millennium for life to take over a sterile newly created world. Our hero isn’t immortal.
But suppose he can “Cheat”. He tills a few scattered acres and sows all sorts of grass, sets up a few bee hives and places some ants and earthworms in the morning and goes to lunch. When he reopens his little world in the afternoon two thousand years of terraforming has gone on there.
What sort of mini-world crank’s your handle?
I wanted a single continent about the size of Australia and one ocean also the size of Australia. I thought that Australia was about the same size as the US but that’s only if you omit Alaska. If you take the size of America and Alaska and bump it up just a bit you get 4 000 000 square miles with an ocean that is another 4 000 000 square miles.
A Sphere with that surface area of 8 000 000 million square miles will have a circumference of about 5000 miles.
Take a good look at a tennis ball or baseball. See how the whole surface is completely tiled with two “Dumbbell-Shaped” Tiles? Yeah one tile is your ocean and the other tile is your continent.
If I remember correctly, the maximum distance that you can travel by land is 3800 miles.
For any number of reasons I want my world on the INSIDE surface like Pellucidar. God knows how we can get gravity on the inside. Yeah I can spin my world but that only gets anything like full gravity close to the equator and the poles wouldn’t have any gravity.
Anyway, how much gravity do we want? Many years ago Jerry Purnelle quoted some theory that said 20% gravity is quite enough to prevent malignant deterioration of the muscles and joints. Sure you could get out of shape but you’d have the capability of regaining your strength.
Sigh, Lunar Gravity is a wee bit short at 18%.
If I was going o sell he world I think I’d go for 60%. For my own use I’d use 35% gravity.
O and about that spin—I want to spin the thing fast enough to actually add about 2% to the apparent weight at the equator.
The air will have a tendency to just sit. Earth’s Coriolis force gives much of our weather patterns. The little world will have a Coriolis force far greater than Earth’s.
{Parenthetically, lets give it a magnetic force several times Earth’s too.}
Lets make the atmosphere a bit thicker—O say 22 PSI compared to Earth’s 14.7 Psi and lets raise the level of oxygen to about 25%. Light gravity, thick air and more oxygen—big ole birds and insects become possible.
Plants really groove on CO2. At some point CO2 becomes problematic for humans but we’d barely notice if the CO2 in our atmosphere were tripled and plants would be overjoyed.
O on the subject of plants—they could all use a bit more Red and Blue light. Green does little or nothing for plants that’s why they reflect it away instead of absorbing it.
Lets give our plants about 20% more blue and about 35% more red light in summer.
{Some studies show that while we don’t consciously notice much adding in more red makes people tend to feel more relaxed.}
Lets cut tanning UV to about one third and cut burning UV down to about 20%.
Where does our light come from? We set up photon transport portals to intercept sunlight and tinker with it until we get the right proportions. So long as the net doesn’t catch sunlight destined for earth no one will notice for a long long time.
Lets presume that as long as you’re satisfied with atoms you can sieve for enough material to give you two miles of bedrock and soil lining the entire inside of your mini-world—including the sea floor along with plenty gases for atmosphere.
Sorry we probably can’t tune the arriving photons enough to get an apparent sun. Instead the sky will be universally luminous.
Now I love spring and summer and I groove on Pellucidar’s 24/7 sunlight—but there are problems.
I really want temperate hardwood forests—much like Daniel Boone wandered through. With a temperate forest and no old weather to cut the insects and lizards, tiny mammals and birds…
But how long of a winter do we need to regulate things?
Also, ever see those giant vegtables from the land of the midnight sun? Our plants are already supercharged with rich CO2 and extra red and blue light…
And if years were 25% shorter new years, Christmas , 4th of July etc would all come around 25% more often.
Lets have a nine-month long “Year”. Summer is five months long and in summer there is no night.
“Winter” is only four to six weeks long but it is bitterly cold during at least three of those weeks. Just for fun, lets have ten days of continuous night with temperatures well below zero in the dead of winter.
Dudes, it will be pitch black except for fires and artificial lights during those ten days. It would be an excellent time to stay home and hang with the family.
Spring is short—longer warmer days are no real problem. Fall needs to be a bit more gradual—give the trees and plants and everything a bit of advance notice that Winter is coming.
Do I think that oak and hickory, maple and elm, squirrels, white-tailed deer and cotton-tailed bunny rabbits could necessarily survive and thrive in such a sixes and sevens world?
Perhaps not. That’s why I get the whole place growing good with normal Earth conditions then I send it on a 20 000 year journey during which everything is gradually adjusted. Only for me only a week goes by.
Note: Once you sell a world and lock-synch it with Earth the two will never again have divergent time lines. I also like the idea that a portal that sits for a few years becomes a permanent part of the landscape and cannot be closed anymore.
Lets say that I sold one of these to a big city. A world with a single four-lane highway with a double railroad track in between would be a logistic nightmare to colonize and exploit. So lets assume that there is something like a gross of connections to one lobe and each conection can contain two or three dozen closely spaced portals say within a half-mile radius.
But if you sold a world to America you couldn’t bend space enough have one portal in Key West and another in Seattle. You could probably have a portal in Seattle that was within a quarter mile of a portal to Portland Oregon—and it is possible that folks might use that for a shortcut.
If you sold a world to New York City—it is quite possible to have 400-500 connections to the Northern Bulge of the “Dumbbell” and another 400-500 portals to the Southern Bulge of the “Dumbbell”. A fellow might go from North Dumbbell to New York City and then drive a quarter-mile and take a Portal to South Dumbbell and have cut over 2500 miles of travel from the route from North Dumbbell to Southern Dumbbell if he’d stayed inside.
I like to play with the idea that Frontiers are what foster heroes and other rugged individualists.
Japan has about 140 Million people living in a country roughly the size of California.
What happens to Japanese Culture when Maker sells them two worlds covered in forests, with rich mineral deposits (because the algorithms were set up to randomly locate a certain amount of rich ores in the foundation) and their own idiosyncratic climate and seasons?
{I think that 4 000 000 square miles—Roughly the size of America including Alaska would be one Hell of Bargain at $20 Billion Dollars…}
Anyway imagine Maker sells one New World centered on Tokyo and one centered on Sapporo—and just for meanness he adds a third secret world that ties the Tokyo World to the Sapporo World by “The Back Route”…
How would the glut of high quality lumber and ranch and farmland coming onto the Japanese and World Market affect things? World Japanese cowboys or long hunters or even folks who’d spied a big black bear rooting through their garbage be content to remain gunless?
Sell a world to Taiwan. Say goodbye to Taiwan ever needing to reunite with Red China…
Sell Australia a world or two or three. Yeah Australia is about as big as the Continental US but 80% of it is desert.
The Philippines—another crowded island nation.
Sell a world to the Vatican and another to Monaco. They can afford $20 Billion Each. Donate one to Andorra for whatever they can raise. Ireland, Iceland, Belize, El Salvador…
By this time our expatriate just might have enough financial backing and political clout to be able to come back to America and defy attempts to force him to reveal his methods, pay huge taxes and only build worlds for Government Approved Clients…
I mean if the govie really offends him and fails to break him Central Park will never have a 4 000 000 square mile annex…
.....RVM45
Let us suppose that we have a mad scientist type who can actually build relatively small Worlds to order.
I got some of the raw ideas from Phillip Jose Farmer’s “Pocket Universe” books along with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Pellucidar” stories—so please don’t excitedly tell me; “It’s just like…”
I know it is sorta like—I just said so…
Surprising how many folks do that to me when I discuss plot ideas. I can only assume that they skim.
In Farmer’s books the pocket universes can be wastefully large—a sphere a bit larger than Pluto’s orbit. The “Lords” invented the pocket universes. The Lords are all about 50 000 years old, have IQs of about 300 and have modified their bodies to have about 3x human strength.
They killed off all the Physicists 50 000 years ago when the number of Pocket universes had grown to approximately 10 000. All the surviving Lords are Hannibal Lector style nutzenheimers who can’t even repair a ray gun (though they have warehouses stocked chockfull against a time of need) but they are very good at splicing genes and creating odd creatures. They spend all their time plotting how to break into some other Lords’ universe, kill the other Lord and either run his universe or blow it up—seemingly just for meanness. So there are somewhat less than 10 000 artificial universes and somewhat less than 10 000 Lords extent.
If anyone remembers Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar stories: The Earth is Hollow. The shell is relatively thin so the inside surface area is almost as big as the outside—but since the relative amounts of land and water are reversed, Pellucidar has more land area than us.
There is some sort of “Sun” at the center of the Earth. It appears noticeably larger in the sky but it is poorer in UV making getting a bad burn a bit of a challenge. The gravity is 10% to 15% lighter in Pellucidar. It is always high noon. The natives have a very laid back conception of time. Magnetic compasses work very poorly and anyone not born with a homing pigeon sense like the natives will have a very hard time navigating.
Okay, in one of Larry Niven’s stories a dude needs a lot of Deuterium and he sends an inter-dimensional portal to skim the ocean and pass all the Deuterium back to him but to reject any other substance. Lets assume our mad scientist can tune his portals to “Skim” for whatever he happens to want gathered—and nothing else.
Now lets be a bit realistic. Our hero isn’t immortal. He hasn’t a clue how to create Centaurs, Dragons and Gorgons in a gene-splicing lab. He is a bit of an Anarchist and Free Market enthusiast. He doesn’t want the power he’s built to fall into any Government’s hands—especially not his own. However there was some very unlikely lucky accident that led to his creation of the Process. It is extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will come close to recreating his method within the next 1000 years.
It will take centuries or millennium for life to take over a sterile newly created world. Our hero isn’t immortal.
But suppose he can “Cheat”. He tills a few scattered acres and sows all sorts of grass, sets up a few bee hives and places some ants and earthworms in the morning and goes to lunch. When he reopens his little world in the afternoon two thousand years of terraforming has gone on there.
What sort of mini-world crank’s your handle?
I wanted a single continent about the size of Australia and one ocean also the size of Australia. I thought that Australia was about the same size as the US but that’s only if you omit Alaska. If you take the size of America and Alaska and bump it up just a bit you get 4 000 000 square miles with an ocean that is another 4 000 000 square miles.
A Sphere with that surface area of 8 000 000 million square miles will have a circumference of about 5000 miles.
Take a good look at a tennis ball or baseball. See how the whole surface is completely tiled with two “Dumbbell-Shaped” Tiles? Yeah one tile is your ocean and the other tile is your continent.
If I remember correctly, the maximum distance that you can travel by land is 3800 miles.
For any number of reasons I want my world on the INSIDE surface like Pellucidar. God knows how we can get gravity on the inside. Yeah I can spin my world but that only gets anything like full gravity close to the equator and the poles wouldn’t have any gravity.
Anyway, how much gravity do we want? Many years ago Jerry Purnelle quoted some theory that said 20% gravity is quite enough to prevent malignant deterioration of the muscles and joints. Sure you could get out of shape but you’d have the capability of regaining your strength.
Sigh, Lunar Gravity is a wee bit short at 18%.
If I was going o sell he world I think I’d go for 60%. For my own use I’d use 35% gravity.
O and about that spin—I want to spin the thing fast enough to actually add about 2% to the apparent weight at the equator.
The air will have a tendency to just sit. Earth’s Coriolis force gives much of our weather patterns. The little world will have a Coriolis force far greater than Earth’s.
{Parenthetically, lets give it a magnetic force several times Earth’s too.}
Lets make the atmosphere a bit thicker—O say 22 PSI compared to Earth’s 14.7 Psi and lets raise the level of oxygen to about 25%. Light gravity, thick air and more oxygen—big ole birds and insects become possible.
Plants really groove on CO2. At some point CO2 becomes problematic for humans but we’d barely notice if the CO2 in our atmosphere were tripled and plants would be overjoyed.
O on the subject of plants—they could all use a bit more Red and Blue light. Green does little or nothing for plants that’s why they reflect it away instead of absorbing it.
Lets give our plants about 20% more blue and about 35% more red light in summer.
{Some studies show that while we don’t consciously notice much adding in more red makes people tend to feel more relaxed.}
Lets cut tanning UV to about one third and cut burning UV down to about 20%.
Where does our light come from? We set up photon transport portals to intercept sunlight and tinker with it until we get the right proportions. So long as the net doesn’t catch sunlight destined for earth no one will notice for a long long time.
Lets presume that as long as you’re satisfied with atoms you can sieve for enough material to give you two miles of bedrock and soil lining the entire inside of your mini-world—including the sea floor along with plenty gases for atmosphere.
Sorry we probably can’t tune the arriving photons enough to get an apparent sun. Instead the sky will be universally luminous.
Now I love spring and summer and I groove on Pellucidar’s 24/7 sunlight—but there are problems.
I really want temperate hardwood forests—much like Daniel Boone wandered through. With a temperate forest and no old weather to cut the insects and lizards, tiny mammals and birds…
But how long of a winter do we need to regulate things?
Also, ever see those giant vegtables from the land of the midnight sun? Our plants are already supercharged with rich CO2 and extra red and blue light…
And if years were 25% shorter new years, Christmas , 4th of July etc would all come around 25% more often.
Lets have a nine-month long “Year”. Summer is five months long and in summer there is no night.
“Winter” is only four to six weeks long but it is bitterly cold during at least three of those weeks. Just for fun, lets have ten days of continuous night with temperatures well below zero in the dead of winter.
Dudes, it will be pitch black except for fires and artificial lights during those ten days. It would be an excellent time to stay home and hang with the family.
Spring is short—longer warmer days are no real problem. Fall needs to be a bit more gradual—give the trees and plants and everything a bit of advance notice that Winter is coming.
Do I think that oak and hickory, maple and elm, squirrels, white-tailed deer and cotton-tailed bunny rabbits could necessarily survive and thrive in such a sixes and sevens world?
Perhaps not. That’s why I get the whole place growing good with normal Earth conditions then I send it on a 20 000 year journey during which everything is gradually adjusted. Only for me only a week goes by.
Note: Once you sell a world and lock-synch it with Earth the two will never again have divergent time lines. I also like the idea that a portal that sits for a few years becomes a permanent part of the landscape and cannot be closed anymore.
Lets say that I sold one of these to a big city. A world with a single four-lane highway with a double railroad track in between would be a logistic nightmare to colonize and exploit. So lets assume that there is something like a gross of connections to one lobe and each conection can contain two or three dozen closely spaced portals say within a half-mile radius.
But if you sold a world to America you couldn’t bend space enough have one portal in Key West and another in Seattle. You could probably have a portal in Seattle that was within a quarter mile of a portal to Portland Oregon—and it is possible that folks might use that for a shortcut.
If you sold a world to New York City—it is quite possible to have 400-500 connections to the Northern Bulge of the “Dumbbell” and another 400-500 portals to the Southern Bulge of the “Dumbbell”. A fellow might go from North Dumbbell to New York City and then drive a quarter-mile and take a Portal to South Dumbbell and have cut over 2500 miles of travel from the route from North Dumbbell to Southern Dumbbell if he’d stayed inside.
I like to play with the idea that Frontiers are what foster heroes and other rugged individualists.
Japan has about 140 Million people living in a country roughly the size of California.
What happens to Japanese Culture when Maker sells them two worlds covered in forests, with rich mineral deposits (because the algorithms were set up to randomly locate a certain amount of rich ores in the foundation) and their own idiosyncratic climate and seasons?
{I think that 4 000 000 square miles—Roughly the size of America including Alaska would be one Hell of Bargain at $20 Billion Dollars…}
Anyway imagine Maker sells one New World centered on Tokyo and one centered on Sapporo—and just for meanness he adds a third secret world that ties the Tokyo World to the Sapporo World by “The Back Route”…
How would the glut of high quality lumber and ranch and farmland coming onto the Japanese and World Market affect things? World Japanese cowboys or long hunters or even folks who’d spied a big black bear rooting through their garbage be content to remain gunless?
Sell a world to Taiwan. Say goodbye to Taiwan ever needing to reunite with Red China…
Sell Australia a world or two or three. Yeah Australia is about as big as the Continental US but 80% of it is desert.
The Philippines—another crowded island nation.
Sell a world to the Vatican and another to Monaco. They can afford $20 Billion Each. Donate one to Andorra for whatever they can raise. Ireland, Iceland, Belize, El Salvador…
By this time our expatriate just might have enough financial backing and political clout to be able to come back to America and defy attempts to force him to reveal his methods, pay huge taxes and only build worlds for Government Approved Clients…
I mean if the govie really offends him and fails to break him Central Park will never have a 4 000 000 square mile annex…
.....RVM45
