Random Worldbuilding Questions (Biology, Geography, Society, etc.)

[Conners]

Giving more energy. Making them work faster/better.

[Yora]

That's not how either physics nor biology works.

Adding more energy would simply mean to heat the molecules up.

[Conners]

Figured there'd be something someone here would know about which has that effect. I don't know if speeding up the electrons would be of any help, or causing the body to produce something more rapidly.

[Spiryt]

Depending on what biologist/dietetic you ask, keeping healthy internal micro-flora is big to 100% part of good health of the individual himself.

Making regeneration easier and more efficient is certainly one of the profits.


Heart doesn't produce the blood, though, and disregarding the bleeding is certainly not in reach of any human being, no matter of his microbes.

[Yora]

No, that would only result in heat.

I suppose an increase in nutrients and enzymes that repair damage tissue would have some effect, alowing the healing process to go nonstop without having to wait for the body to produce the material needed to regrow cells.
There is at least one known case of a man whose body disposes of a waste product of muscle action that makes muscles sore over time at a faster rate than the muscles produce it, allowing him to keep running for as long as he stays hydrated and the muscle cells recieve the nutrients they turn into energy.
It really comes down to how much of the required chemicals are present and how many cells are working on transforming them into new cells. But even if you would pump an injured body part full with all the required chemical substances there is still a limit on how fast new cells can be laid out to close the gaps caused by the injury. Even under optimal conditions, I would assume that it takes at least a few hours.

[jseah]

EDIT: Enlarge person and other blatant cancellations of physical laws are instantly crossed out. As I said, we're looking upon more of a FMA/Avatar kind of casting. Condensing moisture into water droplets, freezing and shaping into icicles and skewering people, all in one casting.

No seriously, that breaks the same kind of laws that enlarge person breaks. Skewering people with icicles formed from spontaneously freezing water is simply enlarge person but smaller.

Both of them add and remove mass-energy from nowhere.


Microbes:
Biology does not work that way. Energy is biology is the presence/absence of various molecules. It's not inherently moveable.

Also, microbes don't repair your body. Your body repairs itself.


Even the "simple" things like speeding up recoveries or "triggering rejuvenation" (what the hell does that mean?) is insanely complex. The best you can do with this magic is to have a really nice set of surgical tools. And maybe a better plaster cast. Without the micron-level of biology understanding, you're not going to be able to do more than cauterize a wound or set a broken bone.
Sorry, it's just not happening. Not under the restrictions you give that is.


Now, after the invention of the electron microscope and x-ray diffraction, then things start to get interesting. (Note that these two imply the civilization has a good understanding of EM)
Assuming your magic is something that can be manipulated with tools, micron-level understanding may net them early micron-scale manufacturing. It STILL won't let you heal a wound, but it'll let you reconnect severed limbs, rearrange blood vessels, do some complicated surgery. Shortly after that, and some mucking about with phages, DNA is mapped and the world of genetics opens up; after that, I wouldn't dare comment because we haven't gotten there.

What would micron-scale manufacturing let them do? Well, for one thing, they'll understand tissue structure better than we would, being able to build a tissue structure. Conceivably, this might lead to "magical" healing of a wound where you grow the patient's skin and muscle cells in the lab and then rearrange it on a wound, say a burnt area, and replace it. (we can sort of do this, but they'll be better at it)

Even under optimal conditions, I would assume that it takes at least a few hours.

Days or weeks, minimum. Human cells take many hours just to divide once.

[Conners]

Closing wounds (stopping bleeding), setting bones, and increasing the number of good micro-flora, enzymes, and nutrients sounds pretty good to me.

[jseah]

Closing wounds (stopping bleeding), setting bones, and increasing the number of good micro-flora, enzymes, and nutrients sounds pretty good to me.

Would be only about as effective as well-done first aid and antiseptics in RL though. Maybe with the equivalent of an IV drip.

That's nothing to scoff at of course. (majority of deaths from wounds in the past was due to infection, the death toll in the world wars would have been much much higher if medicine didn't have antisceptics and antibiotics)

But it's still not magical healing. And definitely nowhere near instant or anything that could be called "fast".

[Andreaz]

Regenerating that fast amounts pretty much to time warping shenanigans and people who have to eat all the time just to survive.
Instead, try using the modern engineering paradigm: slap "nano" on everything! Millions of nanorrobots repair your tissue! That moves the bull**** to the machines themselves instead of your biology, much easier to handle (or handwave into bull**** magic)

[Rakmakallan]

No seriously, that breaks the same kind of laws that enlarge person breaks. Skewering people with icicles formed from spontaneously freezing water is simply enlarge person but smaller.

Both of them add and remove mass-energy from nowhere.

I wouldn't say it breaks the conservation of mass, since the water is already there or supplied by the caster. Energy is another matter. Ice 1, the natural freezing state of water, should by definition hold a lower energy state than moisture or liquid water, for one due to temperature, but also due to packing in a crystal lattice. The problem would be how to facilitate this energy exchange, either through temperature or by some non-realistic abuse of chemicals as is done in production of crystals for x-ray diffraction. The remaining energy would most probably diffuse as heat.

I like the micron-scale manufacturing for biology, though it would be hard to incorporate without inclusion of some heavy-handed genetics, which I honestly don't enjoy. I believe however it would be plausible to have healing sped up through some currently experimental materials, such as a chitin graft or even handwaving realistic materials.

[Aux-Ash]

Note that the primary obstacle to fast healing is one) that we're very very complex organisms and two) that cells are very very small.
If a cell would be the size of a human, a papercut would be clearly distinguishable on the world map.

Cell division is a very energy- and resource-consuming process (for all intents and purposes it is a doubling of mass, and synthesis of millions of proteins to be used only for the division itself). Couple this with the replication of 3,2 billion basepairs in the DNA (to complete this under 24 hours, which is what most human cells require for an entire division, you need to copy thousands of basepairs a second) in which a single mistake can lead to a nonfunctional or cancerous cell.

In short, there's a very good reason it takes time to heal injuries and it's not that the cells work too slowly (most cells are much more efficient than anything we can artificially create) but that there's -a lot- they need to do.

[Yora]

However some animals have much more efficient regenerative abilities than humans. Admitedly, mostly extremely weird animals and also rather small ones, but still...

[jseah]

However some animals have much more efficient regenerative abilities than humans. Admitedly, mostly extremely weird animals and also rather small ones, but still...

They still take forever. A lizard can regrow its tail, but I'd be surprised if it regrew in less than a week. I'd expect 1-2 months. (I don't actually know though, anyone have a pet lizard?)

I'm not so fussed with magic replacing bones (with artificial ones, regrowing bones will take months) or putting skin grafts (which still doesn't heal quickly);
but heal even a minor wound (paper cut say) in anything under a day and I call shenanigans. Or an *epic* handwave. =D

I like the micron-scale manufacturing for biology, though it would be hard to incorporate without inclusion of some heavy-handed genetics, which I honestly don't enjoy. I believe however it would be plausible to have healing sped up through some currently experimental materials, such as a chitin graft or even handwaving realistic materials.

Well, the micron-scale manufacturing comes from that research group who are trying to build a 3D printer that would work with live cells. Last I heard, they made a blood vessel. That's what I meant.
You have a stock of the patient's cells on hand, and you use magic to literally build an organ or skin or blood vessel from those cells. Nerves are probably not going to be possible with this method, but you can perform near-miracles with that alone.

Also, grafts and supporting gels or similar things won't speed up healing more than maybe 2-3x. And the speed up will only occur for big and serious wounds. You can't heal a paper cut quickly with this, but a huge burn that would normally take months and leave a giant scar? Yeah, this'll help alot, probably bring the healing time down to a few weeks.
Might want to note that being able to do this (especially if the grafts have antiseptics) is *already* working miracles compared to ancient times. The survival rate for having a burn covering a huge area before antibiotics and antiseptics must be near zero. Even today, we can't be sure anyone with too extensive burns will survive.
So yeah, it's already awesome, just not awesome enough to "lay on hands" and have your patient walk out the door.

EDIT: just to say it again, our medical profession would, figuratively, kill to be able to reliably make grafts for tissues, especially once you get to non-skin layers.

[Gahrer]

You can't heal a paper cut quickly with this, but a huge burn that would normally take months and leave a giant scar? Yeah, this'll help alot, probably bring the healing time down to a few weeks.

Agreed. Search for "skin gun" on youtube. You can do some pretty crazy stuff with stem cells when it comes to treating burns. (Or at least will probably be able to in a few years.)

[Wardog]

Does anyone know of any simple climate simulation software?

Such that you could design a world (physical geography, distance from the sun, world mass/gravity, etc) and it would work out the climate zones, wind patterns, etc?

[Beleriphon]

EDIT: Enlarge person and other blatant cancellations of physical laws are instantly crossed out. As I said, we're looking upon more of a FMA/Avatar kind of casting. Condensing moisture into water droplets, freezing and shaping into icicles and skewering people, all in one casting.

I see you're going for a Dresden Files style of magic. Sure you can do crazy stuff with it, but at some level at least superficially it follows physics. Harry actually creates a huge ice sheet in an area by drawing all of the heat out of said area, but to do he basically directed all of the heat energy into the sky (and as such created a massive pillar of flame).

[Beleriphon]

Well, the micron-scale manufacturing comes from that research group who are trying to build a 3D printer that would work with live cells. Last I heard, they made a blood vessel. That's what I meant.
You have a stock of the patient's cells on hand, and you use magic to literally build an organ or skin or blood vessel from those cells. Nerves are probably not going to be possible with this method, but you can perform near-miracles with that alone.

Last report I heard on a CBC science program was an entire bladder. It uses a pretty standard ink jet printer setup modified to hold a resevoir of the tissue material. As I recall all it took was setting up a small cell culture and using the printer to layer it out. It took something like two weeks to build an adult human bladder.

[Yora]

In older technologies, it was proposed to build some kind of porous organic plastic on which the cell culture is placed, which later dissolves and is consumed by the growing cells.
Maybe they are using something like that and emplyong 3D printers to make these "anti-molds" for the cells to grow on.

Does anyone know of any simple climate simulation software?

Such that you could design a world (physical geography, distance from the sun, world mass/gravity, etc) and it would work out the climate zones, wind patterns, etc?

HA!

I am sorry, but HA!

HAHAHA!!!

No seriously, sorry. Not making fun of you.

But climate systems are often called "the most complex system known in the universe" which is a job for the most powerful supercomputers that are working for months for a single simulation. And they are still rather clunky.

Any software that would run on a home computer would be extremely rudimentary and basic, unable to make any accurate predictions.
I think it might even be better to learn the basics of earths climate and then come up with your own models by freehand drawing. Those would still be good enough that you'd need a supercomputer working for days to determine if it would be possible or nonsense.

[TuggyNE]

Does anyone know of any simple climate simulation software?

Such that you could design a world (physical geography, distance from the sun, world mass/gravity, etc) and it would work out the climate zones, wind patterns, etc?

The problem is that climate is inherently chaotic. Even the tiniest of errors in calculation can have an increasingly large effect on later simulations; this is the origin of the "butterfly effect". This was discovered when a simulator was paused during a run, later resumed, and then restarted at the paused point; the two simulation runs diverged utterly (think tornado vs calm, rain vs blistering sunshine) within days after the pause point, because the printed data used to manually restart the simulation had two less digits than the internal calculations.

[Vahir]

I have a question: How would different races react to each other? Would they try to eliminate the alien races?

[Yora]

We only have one known real world precedent, which is Homo Sapiens moving into Europe, which is already inhabited by Neanderthals. From what is currently known, there is no indications that wandering groups treated each other differently, when they met. The reason for the eventual disappearance of the Neanderthals is not entirely clear, but it does not seem that they lost a violent conflict. Disease is a strong candidate, which would match well with the genetic traces of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans to indicate more or less peaceful exchanges. (Enslaved Neanderthals wouldn't carry diseases back to other Neanderthal groups.)

In more recent times, we instead have cases of colonialization. While the american people where almost entirely wiped out to the point of extinction, it was accidental because of disease. While the Spanish certainly attempted to enslave the locals on a big scale on many occasions, exterminating them was neither intended nor desired.

Very recently we have the case of Australia, where the white European society attempted to "uplift" the native people by stealing their children, forced educating them in western institutions, and teaching them that they should marry white people so their children will have less of the native DNA and the black will be "bred out" in a couple of generations. But that was the result of race theory that really just started in the 19th century and didn't exist (at least on large scale) in any other time of human history. It is also not a neccessary part of modern society, so fictional societies and societies on other planets might never develop it at all.
The only thing similar in the western world before that was simply the concepts of Believers and Heathens, and important theorists of the middle ages, both Christians and Muslims, generally followed the assumptions that heathens simply had not been informed yet and just need to be missionized. Once you join, you are equal, and everyone can join. This was even extended to assumed mythical "demi-humans" like the Dog-People, giants, and extraterrestials. If they have consciousness, they have a soul, and as such they are equal to any other believers once they converted.

[Conners]

Funny you should mention that incident. Remember a story about a film they made about that subject. Ironically, the film director ended up doing the same thing. And the children escaped from him, too.


Anyway... it really depends on how different the behaviour and goals of the creature is. If it's like a bear, just look at how humans interact with bears. If it's mostly the same but looks or acts a bit differently, you can mostly look to the political, cultural and economic situation.

[Tirunedeth]

Does anyone know of any simple climate simulation software?

Such that you could design a world (physical geography, distance from the sun, world mass/gravity, etc) and it would work out the climate zones, wind patterns, etc?

I found some climate simulations which run on personal computers a while ago. However, they were rather slow, and I don't think they are very amenable to being run on user-defined geography. A better option might be to look up Expeditious Retreat Press's A Magical Society: Guide to Mapping, which is a free PDF talking about how to apply some real-world climate principles to world-building. I think you'd get results which are just as plausible using the PDF, and it should take less time than getting a climate simulation running to your satisfaction.

[Ksheep]

Does anyone know of any simple climate simulation software?

Such that you could design a world (physical geography, distance from the sun, world mass/gravity, etc) and it would work out the climate zones, wind patterns, etc?

If you wanted REALLY simple, you could try SimEarth. From 1990, so very poor graphics, and a lot of the stuff is quite simplified, so I'm not sure how accurate it is.

Actually, its been so long that I can't even remember if it shows climates. I'm fairly sure it will show wind patterns and temperature, and you can place different biomes (although they will change based on rainfall, temperature, etc). You can also edit certain constants, but I'm not sure about planet mass/distance from sun. It may still be worth a look, but remember that it would be a VERY rough estimate.

[Ormur]

I had a few question about this and eventually just drew up a map after a few days perfunctory study of sea currents, atmospheric circulation, climate zones and rain shadows. To simplify I just assumed most things, except the geography, were similar to Earth in historical times, it could be harder if you want a radically different layout of continents or a climate tilted towards some specific biome.

There are so many variables one could never account for them all. But for my purposes it was sufficient to make something I would be satisfied with and had none of the obvious fantasy mistakes like a patchwork geography with jungles next to deserts and tundras, forests in rainshadows and impossible mountain formations.

Some of the resources I used:
Examples of various biospheres someone on the internet made up, often by tweaking Earth conditions. They look convincing at least and it's useful.
-Tip on how to make them.
Climatology for world builders.
World building from the ground up.
Weather and world building.
Some useful climate maps.
A few of the Wikipedia sites I used most.
-Atmospheric circulation
-Ocean current
-Köppen climate classification
-Plate tectonics

[Yora]

What options are there to treat the dead in a cold land without many trees?
Burning is out of the question since it's difficult to get the wood for a pyre. Burrial would be difficult with rocky ground that is often frozen. Tombs would probably be the best choice?

Also, does anyone know what nomadic people do with their dead?
The backstory is for a people that has moved a lot over the last centuries and is still occasionally relocating. They already switched to portable shrines for the spirits of the founders of their clan from worshiping the spirits of the land they live on, but what about the dead? Simply burrying them and leaving them behind when the clan relocates doesn't seem satisfactory. And carrying the bones of the whole clan with them every time also is not practical.
Any idea for methods to keep the spirits of the ancestors in contact with the living?

[Inglenook]

I know Tibetan nomads and some Mongolians practice(d?) "sky burial", i.e. leaving the corpse on the steppes to be eaten by scavengers, sometimes breaking it up into pieces first. This might be culture dependent, though, since Buddhism doesn't really care about the body after death.

Building a cairn on top of a body might be a quick solution, as long as you have some stones at hand. Or if the nomads regularly travel through the same areas, perhaps they'd cave in and build a dakhma for those who died while in that area.

You could always make up some random cultural thing as well. Say that they believe the spirits of all a person's ancestors enter a person's body after death. So all you have to do is take a single bone—a jaw or thighbone or something—from your father's corpse when he dies, and his spirit and all his forefathers reside in that bone, protecting you.

[HeadlessMermaid]

What options are there to treat the dead in a cold land without many trees?
Burning is out of the question since it's difficult to get the wood for a pyre. Burrial would be difficult with rocky ground that is often frozen. Tombs would probably be the best choice?

They may lay the body on the ground and cover it with pebbles and rocks - small enough to carry, obviously. (I saw that in "The Proposition", in a decidedly NOT cold environment, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work in the cold.) That's a very low-tech solution.

Or, if the climate is more arctic, they can dig the ice, bury the body, and then cover it with snow.

But yeah, tombs make much more sense. And if we're talking about a really rocky place, you can even have rock-cut tombs.

Also, does anyone know what nomadic people do with their dead?[...]
Simply burrying them and leaving them behind when the clan relocates doesn't seem satisfactory.

And yet, that seems to be the case for most nomads. Altaic and Turkic peoples left burial mounds (or just graves) behind as they moved on. Sky burial was sometimes used in East-Central Asia and in America, ranging from "leave the corpse exposed on a tree or a hill and split" to ritual stripping of the flesh and pounding of the bones, while nearby vultures were having a blast.

Any idea for methods to keep the spirits of the ancestors in contact with the living?

So, ideas (unrelated to actual history, unless I'm real lucky):

1) Each clan (extended family within the tribe) carries the remains of one important ancestor. Assuming that it's the clan and not the individual that's considered the "cell" of society, the smallest "unit" if you like, the skull or finger-bone of great-great-grandad will do just fine representing the entire bloodline. A pouch of pounded bone would do, too. Perhaps even a tool or jewel belonging to the deceased, and not actual remains. Depends on what sort of burial rite you prefer for your tribe.

2) Whenever they relocate, the first thing they do is set up a burial mound (or stone tomb or whatever), and bury in there something symbolic, remains or items. There's no corpse inside it yet, but it's considered to contain all their ancestors for as long they stay there.

EDIT - Ninja'd, mostly...

[Yora]

Sky burrials at least in Tibet are mostly waste disposal, since treatment of the remains have no affect at all on the spirit that has already left. Im not even sure there is any ritual to it and I don't think it includes any priests, just the "undertakers", so to speak.
But that doesn't really fit the situation.

Tombs really seem to be the best solution, but I think I'm going with communal ones with idividual ones only reserved for exceptional heroes. Not exactly sure what kind of rites to model around that, but starting with the environmental neccessities and building on that is actually a preferable thing with the setting in question.

For the people that have relocated several times in the past centuries, a portable proxy-grave was something I've also been thoinking about earlier.
After they left their homeland, they made a reliquary for the remains of the first leader that started the migration, who would be the Ancestor. The ancestor spirit stays with his remains and after members of the clan die, their spirits merge with the ancestor spirit, and all children born to the clan also come from the ancestor spirit. And every time the clan moves to a new home, the reliquary is taken from the shrine until a new one has been build in the new settlement.
And every time a group splits off to go into a different direction, their first leader becomes te new ancestor. A bit complicated for the deaths that occur while the leader is still alive, but I guess the best explaination would be, that the new ancestor spirit is still a branch of the old ancestor spirit, so one is never really severed from the dead one left behind with the old clan. After four or five generations, nobody will care anymore and to everyone it will be as if there always had been just the current ancestor spirit.

[Conners]

Anyone know what gas would be the best for floating a very heavy person (one in armour)? How large a container of the stuff would be necessary, to float someone of about 180 - 200 pounds (that's including their equipment)?