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

[Yora]

Still depends on whom they are working for.

I would say as a rule of thumb, their standard of living would be somewhat below that of their clients. If you divide people by wealth into 10 categories, my rather random quess would be to put them two or three levels lower.

[Conners]

Good way of putting it. Thanks.


What are the challenges of getting a lizardman, gnoll, and things like that?

[awa]

first off the head their typically not depicted with a high enough forehead so theirs not enough room for a big brain.

[Jeff the Green]

What are the challenges of getting a lizardman, gnoll, and things like that?

As prostitutes?

[awa]

its possible that's what he was referring to but i assumed he was referring to the biological difficulties in having animal people.

[Conners]

What awa said .

[Inglenook]

As prostitutes?

Cloaca.

[Jeff the Green]

Cloaca.

Better than pseudopenises.

[Conners]

What technology is required to reattach limbs/body parts?

Let's say you had a surgeon capable of this sent back to the past--what equipment would be required for them to reattach a limb effectively?

[Xuc Xac]

Microsurgery to reattach limbs requires a microscope (5 to 40x magnification) mounted to a floor or ceiling with a flexible arm to allow it to be repositioned while operating. The microscope also require a high powered light source that can be focused. The operation is usually done in a darkened operating room help provide more contrast.

In addition to the microscope, you'll need special surgical instruments that are specially modified compared to normal surgical instruments. They need to have very small business ends but big handles to hold comfortably and they need a flexible vibration/shock absorber in the middle to cancel the minor tremors in the surgeon's hands (otherwise, they would be shaking all over the place under the microscope's magnification).

The instruments include little forceps and clamps as well as needle holders and various sizes and shapes of suturing needles. You'll also need special tools for opening the severed ends of blood vessels. For the needles, you'll also need thread for stitching things together. Thread can be made from silk, linen, gut, or various synthetics (basically the same stuff as used to make stringed musical instruments). The threads need to be very fine (about 0.001mm or 1/100th the diameter of a normal suture thread). The needles are small enough that you could pack 7 of them into the opening of a mechanical pencil designed to hold 0.5mm lead.

You'll also need the standard operating room tools like irrigators to wash the area you're working on and antibiotics to fight infection after the surgery. Your patient would also appreciate some serious painkillers.

The process isn't as simple as just stitching the meat together. First you have to pin the bones back together on both sides of the cut. Then you have to splice the blood vessels back together with half a dozen stitches each after you've cleaned and trimmed the ends for a neat connection and opened them up if they were pinched or crushed shut by the injury. Then you have to reattach the nerves, which is extremely tricky. Blood vessels are hard enough but they're just simple tubes that can be attached in any orientation. Nerves are multiple layers of fibers that have to turned and properly aligned on both sides before being connected and you have to worry about attaching the inner fibers and the outer sheath that covers them. If a section of nerve is too short, it will need to be lengthened by a graft taken from another part of the body (usually the lower leg) which will leave a numb spot in the donor site.

[Aux-Ash]

What technology is required to reattach limbs/body parts?

Let's say you had a surgeon capable of this sent back to the past--what equipment would be required for them to reattach a limb effectively?

Unfortunantely this is one of them questions that requires the counter-question: Which bodypart?

Reattaching a toe is a completely different matter to reattaching an entire leg and that's entirely different for the "reattachment of an internal organ" (ie. transplant).
I'll spell technologies needed with italics and discuss them further down.

The key to successfully reattaching anything is that a majority of the organ have not gone into apoptosis (volountary death)/necrosis (involountary death). There need to still be functioning nerve-ends, bloodveins, lymphatic veins and functional cells on both sides of the separation. If done swiftly after the injury, one might not need particularly much equipment. But for every fraction of an hour the need for proper Refrigeration increases. Ice helps, but is not nearly efficient enough.
You can reattach thumbs and toes hours after injury, but the quicker the better. Larger bodyparts have vastly higher requirements for oxygen (and thus goes into apoptosis later). If rigor mortis has begun to set in it's too late.

Now, assuming we have access to that or we have enough ice and a short enough timespan to mitidgate that, what is need, particularly for larger limbs and organs, is blood. We will need to reattach blood veins and in that process the risk os great that blood will be spilled. The arteries in the arms are fairly large and the ones in legs are even larger. For fingers, toes and thumbs we haven't nearly the same problem. But for a larger limb this is crucial.
This means we have a need of proper Refrigeration to store blood, Antibodies to be able to correctly identify blood group (because I assume killing the patient is not on the table), Anticoagulants to ensure that the blood does not coagulate.

Next up is the reattachment of nervethreads, Less of an issue with the small ones. A massive one with limbs. Here we need Very Precise surgical tools and preferably powerful Lenses to magnify so we can see what we're doing.

Then it's the issue with the patient surviving. Infection is a huge risk so Sterile Locales and (especially if the lack the locales) Strong Antibiotics. Then there's the risk of bloodclots as well... so throw in Anticoalgulants as well.

That is, in a nutshell, what tools are needed.

Refrigeration pretty much requires electricity. But with enough ice, some easily produced compounds, decent insulation and short enough time you could probably pull it off without it. Thus with plenty of resources you could probably go as far back as 16th century technology... but you need a good alchemist here. Easier with 18th century technology and a decent inventor. Without good resources we're looking early 19th century.
For blood storage we need electricty. Period. 20th century technology. Anything else is too hot.

Antibodies are very difficult and infrastructure-demanding products. We're looking at mid 20th century. This isn't so much strictly needed as such, but not having access dramatically lowers the successrate.

Anticoagulants can be produced with late 19th century chemistry. Like with the above, it isn't so much needed as it it's needed to make it safer. A direct transfusion could work and would need no anticoagulants. However if a complication does happen and this is not available it's all down to luck.

The surgical tools needs 20th century technology I'm afraid.

Lenses of sufficient quality is a 17th century invention.

Sterile Locations can be done with late 19th century technology, but the later the better. Antibiotics on the other hand is a 20th century invention. If our surgeon is a very good chemist, got a background in microbiology and has a lot of luck... pennicillin could be produced in the 19th century easily though. But it's very unlikely to have the sufficient chemical equipment available any earlier.

Assistants who knows what they're doing will be impossible to find prior to the 20th century I'm afraid. And the surgeon will need them.

A transplant of organs is easily late 19th century. But other than that... depends on the size of the bodypart in question.

Unless it's the head

[Nyes the Dark]

Question:

What would be the implications of a planet within a binary system, and as such having 2 suns? Would it be able to support life? How would the distance need to change?

Corollary: What does a planet need to support life (sun x light years away, other planets, etc.)

[TheWombatOfDoom]

Question:

What would be the implications of a planet within a binary system, and as such having 2 suns? Would it be able to support life? How would the distance need to change?

Corollary: What does a planet need to support life (sun x light years away, other planets, etc.)

I asked this question a few pages ago. Let me see if I can drudge it up for you...

EDIT: Page 10 on, post 296 on, though some of it is talk on other things as well.

[Ksheep]

Question:

What would be the implications of a planet within a binary system, and as such having 2 suns? Would it be able to support life? How would the distance need to change?

Corollary: What does a planet need to support life (sun x light years away, other planets, etc.)

For the corollary, it would not need to be light-years away, rather light-minutes. The distance will vary depending on size and brightness of the star, as well as atmospheric content, so there is no straight-forward answer. However, it will typically need an atmosphere and, assuming carbon-based life, an atmosphere with carbon-dioxide (for photo-synthesis) and oxygen (for animal life). Other than that, there is no tried and true formula, and even those suggestions can vary depending on the sort of life you're looking for.

[Tirunedeth]

Question:

What would be the implications of a planet within a binary system, and as such having 2 suns? Would it be able to support life? How would the distance need to change?

Corollary: What does a planet need to support life (sun x light years away, other planets, etc.)

I'm probably reiterating some of what came up in the discussion Wombat linked to, but probably the most important aspect in the habitability of a planet is how much light it gets. There are other factors, such as the makeup of the atmosphere, the planet's composition, the spectrum of light it's getting, the presence or absence of plate tectonics, and many many more, but for fictional purposes fudging it down to just amount of incoming light should almost be sufficiently accurate.

If you know the luminosity of a star, then the distance in astronomical units (1 A.U. ~= 150 million km is approximately the distance from the Earth to the Sun) at which a planet would receive the same amount of light as the Earth is simply sqrt(L/L_sun). The square root is a consequence of the fact that the intensity of light from a point source (which a star effectively is) is inversely proportional to the distance from the source. Note that the spectrum of incoming light is also important to habitability: life generally doesn't like too much UV. Note that neither of these needs to be exactly sunlike; moving the planet in or out by, say, 4% or less should just result in a slightly chilly or warm planet, especially if there's a different amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. UV is particularly easy to manage, since ozone - which blocks UV - happens to be created by UV hitting oxygen. The more UV, the more ozone forms, the more UV is blocked, resulting in a nice little feedback loop which should prevent the surface from being sterilized unless you go very overboard with UV.

Oh, one other important thing is that the planet not be too different in mass from Earth. Too small and you won't get plate tectonics. I'm not too clear on the effects of the planet being too big, but certainly at some point you're going to run into issues with gravity being too high.

Finally, the main issue with binary stars is orbital stability. If the secondary star passes too close to the planet, it will disturb the planet's orbit. I seem to recall there is a rule of thumb for how close the secondary star can approach the planet, but I don't remember what it is. At a guess, I would say so long as a roughly solar mass star stays at least 10 AU away from the planet at all times, the planet should be relatively stable. Alternatively, I believe you could also get stable orbits if the two stars are very close to each other (see contact binaries).

All of this, except the orbital stability stuff, assumes fairly Earth-like life: based on carbon compounds, using water as a solvent, etc.

Of course, as Ksheep mentions, this isn't a very well understood subject. We only have one example of a habitable planet, and it is notoriously hard to extrapolate from a sample size of one. Basically, my post boils down to just saying "pick parameters that aren't too different from those for Earth."

[Yora]

Life does not need light. All that live needs is a source of energy and chemicals that can react with each other when recieving energy.
Sunlight is merely one source of energy but the heat inside of a planet can take billions of years to fully cool off. Alternatively, moons orbiting massive planets like Jupiter and Saturn are constantly squeezed when their orbit gets them a tiny bit closer and farther away if it is not perfectly round. Which it almost never is. Also, planets like Jupiter do not glow to the visible eye, but they still create significant radiation that can also be an energy source to power chemical reactions on the moons.

However, for plant and animal life you need sunlight and liquid water. All life on Earth started with these two elements and if you start with something else, the results will be completely different. But once life did exist on earth, some organisms evolved ways to survive without one of those and replace them with something else. On the ocean floor, water enters cracks in the ground where it is heated by the hot rocks deeper down. Then the hot water rises back to the surface and can replace the sun as a source of energy for bacteria. And then you have a wide range of animals that eat the bacteria, and smaller animals eating larger animals. And the larger animals get most of their energy from their food.
But there is no reason to believe that live could not start there without the detour to the surface where there is sunlight. This is just as it happened on Earth.

There are good reasons to suspect that it is very much possible for planets to form around a star but not being in a stable orbit and drift away from it with enough speed to go flying out of the system. Even without a star anywhere nearby, the heat in the planets core would still be retained for billions of years, providing the energy needed for life to evolve and be sustained.

How far away from a star a planet can be to support Earth-like life depends on the size and intensity of the star. Massive and supermassive stars produce such unimaginable amounts of light and energy that a planet would have to be much farther away than Earth from the Sun to not be burned crisp. Earth is 8 lightminutes from the Sun, but near a massive star, I think it could very well be a couple of lighthours.

And regarding two suns, the most simple configuration has the two suns so close together and the planet far enough out, that it doesn't make any difference to a single sun. The planet would get less sunlight and energy when it is in a position where one sun is covered by the other, which would happen twice a year, but probably be only for a few days at the most and not affect climate much. Maybe a short cold snap for a week at the most.

A similar question had been on page 4, where I made this cool image:

Spoiler

Show

White and Black are two stars, blue and green are binary planets, and red is a moon.
A planet around a binary star could be like the Red moon around the binary planets Blue and Green, then nothing would be much different.
Or the stars could be very far away from each other and then the planet would orbit only one of the two stars, like the blue and green planet orbiting the White star.

[Nyes the Dark]

Very helpful, I think that cold snap concept is really useful. This is a great thread, by the way. Super helpful!

[Conners]

The threads about elves got me wondering. Perhaps elves would consider the idea of keeping livestock so you can slaughter them barbaric? Whereas, if you kill an animal by hunting it, it's considered honourable. It might be considered OK to eat a cow which dies from an accident or old age--though I'm not sure what dying of age does to the meat.

This of course brings interesting questions... How possible is it for a small community to survive without livestock? How badly does this limit population?

There's also questions of alternatives to slaughtering the animals. Such as, letting them go when they come of age, then hunting them. That would bring its own set of problems: How do you stop them from over-eating the countryside? They also might be poor sport, if they were reared.

[awa]

their is actually at least one groups in south America that specifically don't eat any domestic or tame animals they get most of their calories from plantains although they also hunt.

so not eating livestock would be incredibly easy.

edit actually if you get some plants with good protein then you can ditch meat entirely and end up with a potentially larger maximum population then a society that makes use of live stock.

there are tricks you can use to make human waste safe for fertilizer making livestock even less important.

[Yora]

Unless a group has specific ethical policies about not eating meat, almost all cultures everywhere on earth base their cultural norms of what is eaten and what is not on pretty much purely economical factors.
Do you get more nutriton for your work when you raise the animal and butcher it, when you leave it alone and hunt it when you want the meat, when you raise it and put it to work as a helper in farming and hunting, or if you simply ignore it.

Pigs have an almost identical digestion to humans so everything that a pig can digest can also be digested by humans. To raise pigs, you basically have to feed them with human food or you need cool forests where the pigs can roam free to search for roots, mushrooms, and fruits by itself. Everywhere where pork is forbidden, you also have an environment where you have neither option to feed the pigs.
Goats, sheep, and cows eat grass that can not be digested by humans, but can grow almost anywhere, even in many parts of the desert. That's why you'll be hard to find any place where these animals are not eaten.
In Europe, we used to have lots of wild boars, deers, bears, wolves, and all kinds of birds that you can either hunt for meat or which are a danger to your herds. The huge amount of work that is taken from you if you have a dog to help you will get you incredbly more food than if you would kill the dog and eat it. In China and Indonesia, dogs aren't really that useful and don't help at all to get you fed. So into the pot they go.
Another case are horses, which are on and off the menu in Europe every couple of generations. Sometimes the horse is such a great help that you can't eat it. At other times food is hard to come by and a horse can't really help with that, so it goes to the kitchen.

If you have an animal and want to eat it, you won't let it run away to run behind it. Hunting takes a lot of energy from the hunter and if you don't catch it again, all that energy is lost and all the food you gave the animal to eat is also gone. Religious believes nice and good, but nobody would ever risk throwing away such a huge investment of labor and resources just to give the food a fighting chance.

[Nyes the Dark]

How difficult would it be to devise a civilization that is reasonably advanced, that uses the barter system? How could this translate into a D&D Campaign?

[Yora]

Easy.There were a lot of very advanced civilizations that used barter. Coins probably came around only by 500 BC, but the Sumerians had advanced administration and payrols for civil servants thousands of years earlier. They didn't exactly have money, but they often used clay cheques that would get you to be paid out in the indicated amount of grain at the treasury/grainery. There are even wage lists that specify extra government grants for female employes with children under the age of 3. All without money.

[awa]

actually i disagree with your pure economic idea of animal husbandry. many insects are incredible efficient food sources while cows are very inefficient yet in most western societies we eat a lot more beef then insects.

[Yora]

I actually considred adding that to the post after finishing it.

In Europe we have lots of insects but they are really small and really hard to find in a forest. In places where insects are eaten, they are either much larger or are relatively easily harvested by breaking open termite mounts and similar things. How would you get ants out of an anthill? It's all pine needles and damp soil, you can't just scoop the ants out when you remove the top layer.

[awa]

im pretty sure grasshoppers and crickets live in Europe and while hunting them may be ineffective farming them would be vastly more energy and land efficient than cattle.

[Yora]

Today, that's probably true. But today cattle farming is the biggest waste of efficiency in food production by a wide margin.
Today we feed the cows with plants that are grown on huge fields just for them. But the great thing about them, just as sheep and goats, is that they can eat grass and don't need much more. If you have large stretches of grassland that is unused or maybe even unsuitable to grow crops, all you need is to put the animals there and check on them every few days. In winter you might have to get them inside and you need to store hay and other food for them, but otherwise free roaming lifestock is barely any work and they only use land that has no other use anyway. In that conditions, the huge amount of meat you get from a cow is totaly worth the work of keeping them warm and fed during winter.

I'm not saying it's the only deciding factor that holds true 100% of the time and to some degree it most probably is also a bit random. But there's also studies that societies in which the people feed themselves with their own work, the list of plants and animals that is used as food is quite short, only 20 to 30 items most of the time. Because in addition to the ratio of work employed and nutrition gained you also have the factor of skill. You have to know where to look for certain plants or how to treat certain animals to maximize your food production.
You might possibly be able to develop techniques and specialized equipment to breed grasshoppers on a large scale, just as people might find ways to make use of any possible source of energy and nutrition. But developing such systems takes time, and the food source might not be common or reliable every season. If there is a source of food that is incredibly efficient in feeding people, but it happens very rarely that anyone finds it, people usually just ignore it and don't even try to find it when they can also spend their time finding something edible that is less nurishing but which they are very certain to find on the first or second try.
Quite possible that at some points people were considering breeding grasshoppers for food, but pretty soon someone would have told them to stop playing around with tiny cages and go out to get some apples.

Cattle started out very easy and quite reliable, so it was adopted early and people just stuck with it. And now we are used to it and keep these animals around for meat at huge expanses, simply we can afford to spend the resources for that luxury.
Possibly, that's the origin of delicacies. Foods that are not efficient to feed subsitence farmers, but tasty enough that some people would pay enough for it that you could make a living by getting it.

[HeadlessMermaid]

How difficult would it be to devise a civilization that is reasonably advanced, that uses the barter system? How could this translate into a D&D Campaign?

A system like the one Yora described is a credit system. Sumerians had a shekel which corresponded to a set amount of grain, and nearly everything was calculated in that: what salaries the Temple owed to the clerks, what taxes the farmers and merchants owed to the Temple, what the cobbler owed to the local alehouse and so on. Occasionally, although there were no coins as such, something like a currency would circulate, like bars of grain or (equivalent) bars of silver. And occasionally, you'd have direct trading of goods in the market, like trading blankets for chicken.

But for the most part, the entire system worked on keeping tabs. That way, a clerk who got paid nominally "in grain", could buy food, clothes etc without ever getting his hands on actual grain. The farmer, who would get his yearly income only after harvest (and that was indeed grain), would then pay the inn-keeper for a year's worth of drinking ale at his joint. Meanwhile, the Temple had absolute authority to decide how much silver equals that much grain, and to keep extensive records of who owed what to whom.

That's a credit system which, in a way, counts as pre-currency money. If all that fits your idea of "barter" (it's transactions without coins, at least) then all you need to make it work in D&D is a supreme authority that functions as the Sumerian Temple above. A bureaucracy that keeps tabs and sets value equivalents. It's like a bank with balance-sheets but without bank notes.


Now, there's a popular myth going around that, before people invented money, their only way of doing transactions was barter. As in, the smith would go around the village yelling "people! I just made this nice shovel and I desperately need a pair of shoes! does anyone happen to have one pair of shoes too many, and need a shovel? anyone, people?"

If that's what you mean by barter, then there's no way in hell it could work (in an advanced society or otherwise), it's just as impractical as it sounds.

[Nyes the Dark]

I was thinking of the second one, but the actual method works great too. Thanks again!

[Conners]

Are there ways to encourage the huntintg reserves, so that you can hunt them more steadily and in larger quantities? Killing wolves and such predators would help.

[HeadlessMermaid]

Are there ways to encourage the huntintg reserves, so that you can hunt them more steadily and in larger quantities? Killing wolves and such predators would help.

Predators (wolves, humans, elves) whose primary source of food is hunting are normally nomads. They go where the prey takes them, and competition among predators affects their decision, too. Killing wolves is nice, but it won't help in the long run if all the prey runs off to seek greener pastures.

If you want your elves to live in fixed settlements and eat a lot of meat without keeping livestock, I suggest you invent for them an insanely convenient environment. Say, a hub which intercepts a dozen migration routes. Some large animals, some birds, some fish in the nearby river. Some are on the road to mate, some to give birth, some to find water or a specific food source or a warmer climate.

Migratory instincts are very strong, and pretty much the only case where prey can be predictably found, at a given location, in a given time of the year. The elves must have a lick of brain, and refrain from hunting so many animals that they'll completely decimate the population - the large bulk of it needs to survive, so it can return next year. In between these predicted incidents, they can eat a lot of salted/smoked meat.

Or, you can handwave the whole business, and arbitrarily assume that whenever the elves pick their bows, there is always a pretty deer prancing around somewhere near. :P