Radiant Scuba Diving?

[Ninth of the Night]

With Stormlight (or Voidlight, etc.) it's been proven that our characters can dive underwater without any concern of air so long as they have an adequate reserve of Investiture. 

I assume it would also equate for the amount of pressure they would encounter as they dive further down (granted it would probably require more Stormlight the deeper they go).

So do you think we will be provided more scenes in the future of underwater confrontations? It also makes me wonder at the effectiveness of throwing Yelig-Nar's gemstone into the sea. A Fused shouldn't have any problem scouring the ocean floor in search of the lost Unmade.

Edited November 7, 2022 by Ninth of the Night

[HSuperLee he/him]

The greatest difficulty with more underwater confrontations is that we see in Dawnshard that radiants apparently struggle to breathe in more stormlight while they're underwater. Now that might just be a psychological thing, as its really hard to force yourself to try and take a breath underwater since even babies have the instinct to not do that. But beyond that, I would not count on stormlight equalizing water pressure at extreme depths. RoW had a scene where Raboniel explained that some Fused tried to go to space, and their voidlight didn't protect them from the zero pressure environment. That could be, as I'm sure many people want it to be for rule of cool, that they ran out of voidlight, I would prefer if be the case that the way zero atmosphere damages the body makes it particularly difficult for the lights to keep you alive in that environment, but I'm sure we'll get more detail in the future. My point just being that I suspect radiants can't necessarily deal with water pressure, as, even though it might not kill them, it will quickly render them incapable of moving and eventually of even taking a breath, which would then present issues with continuing to breathe in stormlight.

Edited November 7, 2022 by HSuperLee

[Ninth of the Night]

Good points there. Though I recall Kaladin pointing out that he needed to learn how to breathe in Stormlight underwater, as if it may have been a possibility. Also considering Raboniel didn't seem at all concerned with a lack of air. Of course it was only from Kaladin's perspective, but it gave me the impression that breathing wasn't actually essential for taking in Stormlight (or Voidlight etc). 

Then again the assertion that the Fused couldn't survive long in space definitely puts a strain on my idea, however I'll still point out that oxygen exists underwater. It's not a vacuum like space is. So it could be different as far as Investiture is concerned. 

Heck, there may be ways for them to survive in space as well that they just haven't figured out yet. We know that events are heading towards a sci-fi setting after all. 

[S. Stormy she/her]

1 hour ago, Ninth of the Night said:

Good points there. Though I recall Kaladin pointing out that he needed to learn how to breathe in Stormlight underwater, as if it may have been a possibility. Also considering Raboniel didn't seem at all concerned with a lack of air. Of course it was only from Kaladin's perspective, but it gave me the impression that breathing wasn't actually essential for taking in Stormlight (or Voidlight etc). 

Well, I think that Fused can hold Voidlight indefinitely, right? Also Kaladin probably could have lasted on the Stormlight that he had, except he was wounded and it was trying to heal him, and he ran out early and couldn't get any.

[Ninth of the Night]

Exactly! Although I suspect Voidlight to be less indefinite in certain circumstances -- like the aforementioned survival in the vacuum of space. And deep underwater where the pressure would be lethal to a regular human. Like say on our own Earth, if a Fused dove into the deepest trenches of our ocean I highly doubt their Voidlight would sustain them for long.

[HSuperLee he/him]

I believe we've been told that stormlight substitutes oxygen in the body, though I'm not sure if that's just a result it constant healing or not, but I suppose it is possible that while the Fused are holding voidlight they just don't ever need to breathe. If that's the case, maybe radiants could stay underwater until their stormlight leaks out rather than worrying about it getting used up (unless they heal or use surges). But I do agree with the comment about Fused not being able to survive at extreme depths. The difficulty with healing your way through pressure is that because pressure is constant, no matter how fast you heal you can't just ignore it.

All and all, the lights definitely expand on a person's ability to operate under the water. A radiant with plate may even be able to spend great lengths of time without worrying about pressure or air supply. This thread has made me very interesting in seeing that idea explored.

[Returned]

15 hours ago, Ninth of the Night said:

So do you think we will be provided more scenes in the future of underwater confrontations? It also makes me wonder at the effectiveness of throwing Yelig-Nar's gemstone into the sea. A Fused shouldn't have any problem scouring the ocean floor in search of the lost Unmade.

I do think we'll get some, but not very many. We'll see enough to showcase novel interactions of deep sea issues and Rosharan magic, but it doesn't seem like there is all that much that would happen beneath the waves. Once we've seen a Windrunner and an Edgedancer team up to move easily and quickly through the water, what is there going to be for them to do there?

As for Yelig-Nar's gemstone, the ocean floor seems to me to be about as good a place as any to store it. The region in which it might be is still pretty big and will take a while to search manually. But yeah, permanent solutions for dealing with the Fused are pretty thin on the ground-- we'll see Yelig-Nar again.

[AquaRegia he/him]

I, for one, have no doubt that Stormlight will allow Physical Realm space travel in Roshar's future.

[cometaryorbit]

I would think the Fused in space probably just died when their Light ran out. The pressure reference is a bit odd though - what kills humans in a vacuum is lack of oxygen, not pressure. But I guess they were constantly healing pressure-related injury and so ran out of Light.

Ironically, if they could turn off their healing they'd probably have survived. If the Light kept oxygenating their blood without the need to breathe, I don't think the pressure damage would be fatal. I dont think it would be for a human. (Very very unpleasant, but probably not fatal.) People don't explode in vacuum - the skin is strong enough to retain pressure. It stretches a *lot*, and the person would be all bruises afterward, but there's no exploding or blood boiling or anything. The water on the tongue will boil away, etc. But not blood, that's safely inside the body.

[Returned]

Raboniel is pretty clear that the deaths in space were due to running out of Light. Also, her areas of knowledge probably prevent her from getting too specific on what effects the conditions of space would have so we shouldn't take her assessment to be a complete, literal description 

As for pressure, don't forget about dissolved gasses. Depending on how quickly they ascended, the Fused almost certainly would have decompression issues in space. The bends can cause nontrivial physical damage, including problems that lead to unconsciousness or death. Worse, I doubt that a change in the compression of dissolved gasses in the body would be something that could be fixed directly by Light, and so even if the consequences of the gasses expanding are constantly repaired the problem only gets worse and worse as the pressure continues to drop. At one extreme you might end up with a gas bubble going through the heart, which is pretty bad news. But even just falling unconscious would probably not end well for you.

As an aside, do we have any concrete reason to think that Stormlight oxygenates blood? That seems a step removed from just fixing the damages associated with too little oxygen, and the feeling of "needing to breathe" is generally about ratios of gasses in the lungs. If the mechanism is that blood is oxygenated constantly then the lungs should be filling with carbon dioxide in a quickly-increasing ratio and quantity of gas, causing a perceived need to exhale or at least a pressure problem as new gas is magicked into existence and deposited there. This is almost certainly a place where the magic overrides physical mechanisms, but even then, the mechanism seems more likely to me to be that the magic just deals with consequences directly instead of mimicking physical processes only to magic away subsequence consequences.

[Frustration he/him]

8 minutes ago, Returned said:

Raboniel is pretty clear that the deaths in space were due to running out of Light. Also, her areas of knowledge probably prevent her from getting too specific on what effects the conditions of space would have so we shouldn't take her assessment to be a complete, literal description 

As for pressure, don't forget about dissolved gasses. Depending on how quickly they ascended, the Fused almost certainly would have decompression issues in space. The bends can cause nontrivial physical damage, including problems that lead to unconsciousness or death. Worse, I doubt that a change in the compression of dissolved gasses in the body would be something that could be fixed directly by Light, and so even if the consequences of the gasses expanding are constantly repaired the problem only gets worse and worse as the pressure continues to drop. At one extreme you might end up with a gas bubble going through the heart, which is pretty bad news. But even just falling unconscious would probably not end well for you.

As an aside, do we have any concrete reason to think that Stormlight oxygenates blood? That seems a step removed from just fixing the damages associated with too little oxygen, and the feeling of "needing to breathe" is generally about ratios of gasses in the lungs. If the mechanism is that blood is oxygenated constantly then the lungs should be filling with carbon dioxide in a quickly-increasing ratio and quantity of gas, causing a perceived need to exhale or at least a pressure problem as new gas is magicked into existence and deposited there. This is almost certainly a place where the magic overrides physical mechanisms, but even then, the mechanism seems more likely to me to be that the magic just deals with consequences directly instead of mimicking physical processes only to magic away subsequence consequences.

The stormlight restores the body to an ideal state, part of why you can't lift a ton of weights and then heal the damage to get ripped. So I'd imagine that it would simply change CO2 back into oxygen, and reuse it.

Alternatively it could see CO2 as a poison and is getting rid of it.

Edited November 10, 2022 by Frustration

[Returned]

22 minutes ago, Frustration said:

The stormlight restores the body to an ideal state, part of why you can't lift a ton of weights and then heal the damage to get ripped. So I'd imagine that it would simply change CO2 back into oxygen, and reuse it.

Alternatively it could see CO2 as a poison and is getting rid of it.

Sure, that's possible (especially the latter, to my eye). But the most important "immediate" application of oxygen is probably as the terminal electron acceptor, collecting the free electrons produced when the body uses energy. It seems easier for the magic to just deal with those directly rather than magicking additional matter into and out of existence to accomplish the same thing, especially when that matter isn't part of the body-- just get rid of the electrons, rather than creating and destroying oxygen and carbon to grab those electrons and then destroying all three. We haven't seen anyone Invested with Stormlight for long enough, or with the appropriate observations, to know how the other important uses of oxygen in the body are affected by Stormlight. But either way this possibility reminds me of Allomantic pewter during a pewter drag: the metal does the work even when your body wouldn't be able to, but your body still suffers the effects (if to a lesser degree than would be normal) and so you still have to do things like drink water for when your Allomancy stops.

Another interesting possibility is that the magic just overrides some normal physical processes altogether without the need for (non-Investiture) energy or matter. The feeling of energy that follows drawing in Stormlight might be the Stormlight powering whatever you need your body to do directly; no need for ordinary metabolism or physical interactions, and so no waste electrons or gas exchanges needed at all.

The rules seem unclear, which suggests to me that the magics work above this level of abstraction. When Lopen regrew his arm he didn't need to eat any food to make it happen or constitute the new arm, and we've never heard that a lot of Light healing leaves anyone hungry (except for Lift, of course). But a Feruchemist tapping zinc will feel hungry, which may not be the case for one tapping steel or pewter.

Magical health removes alcohol from the body and not so much illness-causing viruses or bacteria, but does it remove other substances like nicotine metabolites? Miles liked his cigars despite his constant gold compounding, but maybe he just liked the taste or activity. For that matter, Miles never felt sick, never lacked for energy, and didn't need to breathe, but he still needed to sleep; the difference between need for breath and sleep seems an important distinction, given that both are Feruchemical traits and thus more than just the associated physical processes. Did he need to eat? The degree of precision we need for details like those in this thread hasn't been on display, and we haven't seen enough situations to make strong guesses about a lot of the specific, immediate mechanisms. It's interesting to think about though!

[voidlight]

On 11/6/2022 at 7:08 PM, Ninth of the Night said:

Good points there. Though I recall Kaladin pointing out that he needed to learn how to breathe in Stormlight underwater, as if it may have been a possibility. Also considering Raboniel didn't seem at all concerned with a lack of air. Of course it was only from Kaladin's perspective, but it gave me the impression that breathing wasn't actually essential for taking in Stormlight (or Voidlight etc). 

Then again the assertion that the Fused couldn't survive long in space definitely puts a strain on my idea, however I'll still point out that oxygen exists underwater. It's not a vacuum like space is. So it could be different as far as Investiture is concerned. 

Heck, there may be ways for them to survive in space as well that they just haven't figured out yet. We know that events are heading towards a sci-fi setting after all. 

I just assumed that the fused couldn't survive for long in space because the vacuum of space was killing them.