What would happen if the length of a day was inconsistent in a small area?

[PhoenixPhyre]

So I've got this patch of land. About 16 sq. mi. It's surrounded by about 100 ft (on each side) of messed-up space-time. Inside the "bubble", time moves normally, but that border region has no consistency. Air motion is affected but not as radically. You get different weather patterns inside and out, but no worries about suffocation or whatever.

An interesting aesthetic I'd like to throw in is that the days are of radically different length, and inconsistently so. So one "day" might have 2 hours of daylight (with the sun zipping across the sky, possibly even jumping), while the next might be 20 hours of daylight, with the sun crawling across the sky. The total elapsed time since the bubble formed (as seen from the outside and experienced on the inside) is the same, but the division into day-night cycles is not.

What effects would this have on things like plant life, weather patterns, moods, etc? What could you see changing about the culture/psychology/habits of the bubble inhabitants (who have little contact with the outside world, as transiting the border is highly hazardous and you might come out somewhere and somewhen at random unless you are with one of the few people who can do so reliably (at huge personal cost).

[Max_Killjoy]

So I've got this patch of land. About 16 sq. mi. It's surrounded by about 100 ft (on each side) of messed-up space-time. Inside the "bubble", time moves normally, but that border region has no consistency. Air motion is affected but not as radically. You get different weather patterns inside and out, but no worries about suffocation or whatever.

An interesting aesthetic I'd like to throw in is that the days are of radically different length, and inconsistently so. So one "day" might have 2 hours of daylight (with the sun zipping across the sky, possibly even jumping), while the next might be 20 hours of daylight, with the sun crawling across the sky. The total elapsed time since the bubble formed (as seen from the outside and experienced on the inside) is the same, but the division into day-night cycles is not.

What effects would this have on things like plant life, weather patterns, moods, etc? What could you see changing about the culture/psychology/habits of the bubble inhabitants (who have little contact with the outside world, as transiting the border is highly hazardous and you might come out somewhere and somewhen at random unless you are with one of the few people who can do so reliably (at huge personal cost).

As randomized as this is, I don't think you'd get seasons, just particularly warm and cool days.

Plants and animals would eventually stop taking cues from the number of daylight hours.

People would find ways to work around the random lack of light / lack of dark, and rely more on some other way to structure their days.

[Mechalich]

It would also depend upon how much variability you really have and on how much insulation the outside environment provides from the local effects. If the variability is totally random and there's no insulation, what you get is everything dies - because at some point every few hundred years the sun will shine for three weeks straight and boil the ground or you'll have two months of blackness and everything will be covered in ice.

For a more thorough (and award winning) exploration of such variability I suggest reading The Three Body Problem (I also suggest not reading its sequel).

[PhoenixPhyre]

As randomized as this is, I don't think you'd get seasons, just particularly warm and cool days.

Plants and animals would eventually stop taking cues from the number of daylight hours.

People would find ways to work around the random lack of light / lack of dark, and rely more on some other way to structure their days.

It would also depend upon how much variability you really have and on how much insulation the outside environment provides from the local effects. If the variability is totally random and there's no insulation, what you get is everything dies - because at some point every few hundred years the sun will shine for three weeks straight and boil the ground or you'll have two months of blackness and everything will be covered in ice.

For a more thorough (and award winning) exploration of such variability I suggest reading The Three Body Problem (I also suggest not reading its sequel).

For reasons of altered physics, I'm not worried as much about the thermal effects--the seasons happen due to elemental plane effects, not orbital tilt. But I wasn't thinking there'd be that much variability, because the proto-demon-prince that rules this area needs a habitable environment and he has a small measure of control over the outside bubble.

My plan is currently:

* No seasons. Every day is the same within pretty tight bounds, except for the amount of light. The temperature is moderate.
* The sky is "overcast" pretty constantly, but that varies between a light haze and heavy clouds, although it rarely, if ever, rains or snows[1]. This haze is close to the ground, so only those in the tall buildings (the rich and powerful) ever really see the sun. Everyone else just sees a light grey or a dark grey.
* Instead of weather forecasts, you have "light" forecasts. Most of them are totally bogus, but the order of Seers (who are connected to the thing that causes this time-bending effect) can make true ones.
* Time is told by a series of clocks and bells. Since the ruler has the aspect of Tyranny, and his whole schtick is mass gas-lighting[2], I'm thinking that the clocks and bells don't tell true time. They drift in small, subtile ways. And sometimes obvious ones. But everyone has to follow the bells. So a shift might be "between the First and 8th Bell", where some cycles that's 14 hours and some it's only 6. And these are unconnected to the solar cycles, just to screw with people. Having a private clock is forbidden.

[1] So how do they grow crops? They don't. Food is provided magically, by converting living souls (from both present malcontents and past victims) into energy that's reprocessed into bricks of nutritional "bread". The whole area is soaked in abyssal-aspected anima from the blood magic involved, but the boss doesn't care. In fact, that's part of his plan, since he needs it to stay on this plane instead of having to flee to the Abyss, which is less comfortable and more exposed. He likes being hidden here in this bubble.

[2] He's been trying to ascend to godhood by convincing all his people that he's a god[3]. That's not enough, so he's also been using time-travel shenanigans to convince groups of people that he's always been a god. Those shenanigans got a crimp in them, so now he's taking a different route. Oh, and he also uses the souls of prisoners, malcontents, or just random people as fuel for his plans. Not a nice guy.

[3] The class distinctions between the "citizens" and the "scum" are in how brainwashable you are. The citizens are all indoctrinated, while the scum are more resistant. The scum are scooped up occasionally as fuel or for experimentation, but otherwise left alone. They're given minimal amounts of food; they can earn more by working for the citizens, who live in idle splendor. Think Orwell's 1984 + Mass Effect Reaper indoctrination.

[Razade]

This really goes beyond just the length of the day being different. That's...a small thing, since "day" and "night" are artificial constructs that we've put in place and they've changed over time. Same with months and years. They're totally arbitrary. So on that front...I imagine they'd do just fine. Either they'd synch it up with the non-warped areas or they'd have some kind of DLST or whatnot.


As for the rest...it's just too random for the sake of random to really establish anything. If it changes literally every 24 hour cycle or less then there's no real getting used to it. If it's that random, there's no real way to adapt. No real way to know how to adapt to it. Plantlife would probably be fine. Sudden changes can be harsh but sturdy plants would survive and the ones that didn't wouldn't. Animals...would probably leave. Same with anything approaching human level intellect unless there was a really good reason not to leave. If traveling through it really is that rough and living there is even more rough...why would anyone stay other than fiat?

The answer is they wouldn't. The place would be too difficult to survive in with your conditions.

As to the rest...

* No seasons. Every day is the same within pretty tight bounds, except for the amount of light. The temperature is moderate.

This has nothing to do with the length of a day and everything to do with planet positioning relative to its sun. If you're saying even that changes..fine but you're now in such a realm of magic that you could say anything and get away with it. So what's the point?

* The sky is "overcast" pretty constantly, but that varies between a light haze and heavy clouds, although it rarely, if ever, rains or snows[1]. This haze is close to the ground, so only those in the tall buildings (the rich and powerful) ever really see the sun. Everyone else just sees a light grey or a dark grey.

See above. Why is it like this? Weather isn't really effected by the length of a day. You've admitted that. So what's it matter to the rest?

* Time is told by a series of clocks and bells. Since the ruler has the aspect of Tyranny, and his whole schtick is mass gas-lighting[2], I'm thinking that the clocks and bells don't tell true time. They drift in small, subtile ways. And sometimes obvious ones. But everyone has to follow the bells. So a shift might be "between the First and 8th Bell", where some cycles that's 14 hours and some it's only 6. And these are unconnected to the solar cycles, just to screw with people. Having a private clock is forbidden.

Time is an illusion. People perceive time, it's a function of us in our environment. Without the passage of the sun and moon and that nonsense we sorta make up our own time. We've got our own internal clocks. So what is "true" time? How are people fooled by this "fake time" when time isn't dictated by how early it gets dark or light?

tl;dr - Your system doesn't work but that's fine because you've basically fudged everything else so what's the point of trying to have it make sense outside its own context? Just make the reason up and go with that. Everything else would make trying to actually explain it realistically makes it stand out from the "It's MAGIC" answers for the rest.

[PhoenixPhyre]

This really goes beyond just the length of the day being different. That's...a small thing, since "day" and "night" are artificial constructs that we've put in place and they've changed over time. Same with months and years. They're totally arbitrary. So on that front...I imagine they'd do just fine. Either they'd synch it up with the non-warped areas or they'd have some kind of DLST or whatnot.

The psychological effects of day length are absolutely not socially constructed. They can be adapted to (the people near the Arctic have done so), but they are definitely real things. Having more or less sunlight affects people in ways that go beyond just keeping time.

As for the rest...it's just too random for the sake of random to really establish anything. If it changes literally every 24 hour cycle or less then there's no real getting used to it. If it's that random, there's no real way to adapt. No real way to know how to adapt to it. Plantlife would probably be fine. Sudden changes can be harsh but sturdy plants would survive and the ones that didn't wouldn't. Animals...would probably leave. Same with anything approaching human level intellect unless there was a really good reason not to leave. If traveling through it really is that rough and living there is even more rough...why would anyone stay other than fiat?

The answer is they wouldn't. The place would be too difficult to survive in with your conditions.

This "warping" is (relatively) recent and came on suddenly. It coincided with an invasion of the area--those inside the area are the descendants of both the conquerors and the conquered. As far as the people inside know, leaving without Kul'Assad's[1] aid is invariably fatal. The rest of the whole thing is making it livable, but not comfortable.

The day length is supposed to be an aesthetic with teeth. Just enough to keep people on edge and psychologically fragile, not enough to make the area uninhabitable. How much variation occurs is a parameter that I need to tune.

Maybe effectively normally distributed around the (season-adjusted) norm, with a variance like sigma = +- 1 hours? Like every day is the start/end of Daylight savings time, with rarer large changes?

As to the rest...



This has nothing to do with the length of a day and everything to do with planet positioning relative to its sun. If you're saying even that changes..fine but you're now in such a realm of magic that you could say anything and get away with it. So what's the point?

Wait...what? The seasons (on earth) have nothing to do with the overall orbital position, and everything to do with axial tilt. This particular planet (and the planar setup) is quite different in its fundamentals. While the outward expressions are the same at the gross level, they're the result of very different underlying principles.

But I should rephrase that "no seasons" thing. It's more "very muted seasonal changes." As if a strong lake-effect were in play.

Spoiler: Not your Earth physical laws

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There are no atoms or molecules. There is only anima, with varying aspects. Gravity (and thus weight) are not related to mass-energy, they're related to earth-aspected anima. Mass-energy is absolutely not conserved and that's a major setting fact--what happens when the built-up anima gets to be too much? The system has built-in checks and balances, mechanisms to "rebalance" the environment, but they always involve large-scale changes and "cataclysmic" events.

Basically, it's what would happen if you took Aristotelian elemental theory, mashed it up with a few other theories, and transplanted it into a D&D-compatible world-frame. There are stable, unchanging physical principles, but they're just not real world ones. Thus, it's a matter of internal consistency--am I following my own principles--not realism. Fantastic things should be fantastic to the core--simply stapling magic onto the real world creates inevitable dissonance that is way more jarring IMO.

See above. Why is it like this? Weather isn't really effected by the length of a day. You've admitted that. So what's it matter to the rest?

My reasoning for the weather goes like this:

1. The pocket environment is buffered from the surrounding area by the warped space-time. This is a setting fact with many other consequences for other neighboring parts.
2. Kul'Assad wants to have total control over the minds of the people in the bubble. He doesn't want them to be able to see the outside very much.
3. The aesthetic I'm going for here is "bleak and numbing (psychologically)" but I want there to be lavish, decadent[2], open-air, orgiastic parties among the citizens.

I lived in the Baltics for a while. I got there in November, and I remember the psychological effect of the grey skies and the constant overcast. It was a rare day that we saw the sun until the winter was over--it went from dark grey at night, lit by the streetlights, to light grey during the day. You knew there was a sun, and occasionally there'd be a shaft of light or a sneak peak at the solar orb, but most of the time there was only a bright spot in the sky. That's the aesthetic I'm going for, minus the bone-chilling cold. Because that conflicts with the other part of #3--no one goes out like that when it's 20 below zero with strong winds.

Time is an illusion. People perceive time, it's a function of us in our environment. Without the passage of the sun and moon and that nonsense we sorta make up our own time. We've got our own internal clocks. So what is "true" time? How are people fooled by this "fake time" when time isn't dictated by how early it gets dark or light?

We do make up our own time, but one thing people like is regularity. Changes in the cycles need to happen over long periods of time. It's why the changes with DST correlate with spikes in bad moods and other psychological issues. And imagine having a shift that's nominally 12 hours. But sometimes it's 6, other times it's 18. And you won't know which it's going to be, unless you're part of the elite.

Since the life of the people is regulated by the bells, they're constantly on edge. Will I get 8 hours of sleep before my next shift? Maybe. Maybe only 3. The whole point is to make truth about everything a political fact, not a physical one. Think Orwell's 1984, except enforced even at the level of the world around you.

At this point I'm going beyond the framing device (the varying length of the day) and describing the rest of the pocket environment. I tend to take setting elements as springboards and then follow an inspiration or consequence to see where it goes. Thus, my requests are mostly for ideas or aesthetic things rather than physics-based challenges. Because really, I am more than qualified to handle those. It's not hand-waved, it's just based on alternative axioms.

[1] The BBEG proto-demon lord. He was the head of the invading army and a powerful wizard. Now he's got designs on the larger setting.

[Max_Killjoy]

As an aside on seasons, the slight elliptical of the Earth's orbit does have some effect, but it's overwhelmed by axial tilt. There's some difference in seasonal extremes between when the two compound vs when they offset, which runs in a cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

[PhoenixPhyre]

As an aside on seasons, the slight elliptical of the Earth's orbit does have some effect, but it's overwhelmed by axial tilt. There's some difference in seasonal extremes between when the two compound vs when they offset, which runs in a cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

True enough. Thanks.

[Mechalich]

My reasoning for the weather goes like this:

1. The pocket environment is buffered from the surrounding area by the warped space-time. This is a setting fact with many other consequences for other neighboring parts.
2. Kul'Assad wants to have total control over the minds of the people in the bubble. He doesn't want them to be able to see the outside very much.
3. The aesthetic I'm going for here is "bleak and numbing (psychologically)" but I want there to be lavish, decadent[2], open-air, orgiastic parties among the citizens.

I lived in the Baltics for a while. I got there in November, and I remember the psychological effect of the grey skies and the constant overcast. It was a rare day that we saw the sun until the winter was over--it went from dark grey at night, lit by the streetlights, to light grey during the day. You knew there was a sun, and occasionally there'd be a shaft of light or a sneak peak at the solar orb, but most of the time there was only a bright spot in the sky. That's the aesthetic I'm going for, minus the bone-chilling cold. Because that conflicts with the other part of #3--no one goes out like that when it's 20 below zero with strong winds.

So like the Pacific Northwest US? In the winter it's cloudy and rains all the time, but the temperature rarely drops below freezing.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So like the Pacific Northwest US? In the winter it's cloudy and rains all the time, but the temperature rarely drops below freezing.

That works. But with less rain. Just the omni-present threat of rain. Because that's even worse, somehow.

[Bohandas]

It could throw off the growth cycles of plants even if the average amount of light per day remains the same

[PhoenixPhyre]

It could throw off the growth cycles of plants even if the average amount of light per day remains the same

Possibly manifesting as stunted/minimal plant life with lots of "primitive" things like fungi and others that aren't so sensitive? Because that matches the aesthetic I'm going for.

[Tube Wizard]

I imagine agriculture would be a bit hit and miss.