Conservation of Energy with investiture and authoritarianism?

heliovox · February 13

Apologies if this is treading old ground, but I could only find one other post with equations, and it is 6 years old.

One of my underlying interests in the investiture ⇔ energy relationship is that investiture seems to be incredibly energy dense.

I realize that this is scarcely surprising, it is magic after all, but I think this creates some problems that are worth considering, because there are several circumstances where this borders on fairly ‘normal’ people having access to effectively infinite energy.

Infinite energy always causes problems.

One of the places where, for instance, I would argue that, in the x-men, cyclops’ time would be better spent just using his magic force beams to drive dynamo’s, because that would make more peoples lives better.

I’m going to compare energies to earthquakes, so, for reference: Wichita Earthquake Reference

With the advent of the BEU, it looks like Brandon is moving into 'we have the conservation of energy to investiture thing figured out' territory. The BEU is definitely going to be the in universe unit for invested energy. He has also suggested before that there are in universe versions of the laws of thermodynamics - WoB:

Reveal hidden contents

yurisses

You once said that Investiture follows its own version of the laws of thermodynamics. The first one is that Investiture is neither created nor destroyed.

Is the second law of Investodynamics that the amount of corrupted Investiture in the Cosmere cannot decrease?

Brandon Sanderson

Basically, the idea is that there is a third item in the equations--matter, energy, and investiture. That's the basis of how they work.

Entropy is not corrupted Investiture. The second law stands as is. However, there is a fourth law that relates to Adonalsium, which I'm not going to talk about at the moment.

/r/books AMA 2015 (July 14, 2015)

Investiture almost certainly doesn't convert perfectly to normal, everyday energy, but everyday energy has to work more or less the same way in the cosmere as it does in the real world, or, for instance, rocks wouldn't be able to exist.

This means that we should be able to make reasonable guesses about the amount of energy investiture is releasing by the 'real world' results it has.

I am going to use three different examples of 'real world' effects as examples here, in each case, I am going to make some assumptions, but I will try to always assume that *less* energy is used rather than more, so it shouldn't mess up my conclusions much.

The first one is Kaladin flying to hearthstone.

I did not calculate this myself, it came from mccarthenon on reddit:

Reddit Link - Calculating the Energy of Stormlight

The trick here is that, by normal human standards, Kaladin is moving really *fast*. To go ~1000 miles in .5 days he would have to use 3.96x10^12 Joules of energy, about a richter 5 earthquake.

This is on minimal stormlight, because the group has just gotten to Uritheru, and don't have a lot to spare, since they need to open the oathgate a bunch of times.

The second example I want to use is converting rock to food for the warcamps. This is done with savant soulcasters:

We don't know exactly what they are doing, but we can use E=mc^2 to calculate how much energy *has* to be in each of these things, and there for how much energy has to have been displaced.

Rock is about 2.75 grams per cm^3, bread is about .22 g/cm^3.

Technically we are actually losing energy here, but if you were to suddenly remove this much density from the inside of a mountain, you would get similar results.

Rock: E=mc^2 .003*3.8x10^8 (the speed of light)

1140000 joules

Bread: E=mc^2 .0002*3.8x10^8

76000 joules

So that is 1,064,000 joules per gram of food made, they aren’t making grams of food.

So for 5000 kg that would be 5,000,000,000 Joules.

For comparison, that is about the amount of energy released by a Richter 3.5 earthquake.

For my third example, I am going to use:<Spoiler>

Reveal hidden contents

Nomad stealing the minimum number of sunhearts necessary for beacon to operate, after having flown over the mountains.

Sunheart ~200 BEU

Nomad recovers 5 sunhearts from the maelstrom, which is just enough for beacon

After crossing the mountains, beacon is ~9 ships holding 135 people.

~mass of the ships (based off of ‘large’ house weight): 1,725,747 kg

Force required by the sunhearts to keep beacon aloft:

The saturn V had 160 million horsepower and a mass of 2,822,000 kg

We aren’t trying to launch beacon into space, so I’ll cut that horsepower in half, but we are also burning for longer than the saturn V burned.

In order to last long enough to get more sunhearts, beacon needs to last at least 10 hours, I would tend to apply a 1.6 multiplier to that, but I promised to only approximate down.

It took 5 hours to launch the Saturn V into space, so we double the original energy and that cancels out the halving.

1,725,747/2,822,000 = .61

.61* 160,000,000 hp = 7.27803075 × 1010 watts / 36000 seconds

Gives us: 2,021,675.20 Joules per second.

Again, this ends up being around a richter 3 earthquake, generated by ~1,000 BEU.

So Nightblood had ~1,000 Breaths to start with… so, y’know, a small earthquake in sword form (we are not surprised).

For additional context, the reason the Richter scale stops where it does is because a richter 11 earthquake would destroy the earth. It’s calibrated that way.

The reason this specifically interests/concerns me is that, eventually, someone, either on purpose or by accident, is going to try and destroy the planet, and investiture seems like it would make that really easy.

It is reasonable to argue that there are some safeguards in place to prevent that (oaths or shards or other types of investiture resisting it, for example), but it seems to me that, as investiture systems proliferate, it is going to be easier and easier to do this, and harder and harder to anticipate and prevent other people from doing it.

There are several ways to do this, we have been specifically warned about unbound bondsmiths, but I would actually be more worried about unbound elsecallers and lighweavers.

*Making* uranium, using my own equations, would be both very difficult and expensive, but not impossible (more on that below) but what I would be specifically concerned about was someone trying to make anti-matter (or anti-light).

The problem with anti-matter, in this particular context, is that the energy anti-matter contains is not a result of it's density (like uranium) but of its... spin.

As far as we can tell, in the real world, energy is exactly as likely to become anti-matter as it is to become matter, and this means that it doesn't actually 'contain' more energy than normal matter, it is just that when it comes in contact with normal matter *all* that energy is released, and matter has a lot of energy bound up in it.

I actually think the cosmere has a workaround for this. I think the cosmere was *made* safer by having anti-matter replaced by anti-light, which is much more restrictive, but that still doesn't stop the 'uranium' scenario.

A standard atom bomb contains ~25 kg of uranium.

One *person* (kaladin, above) was able to release enough energy, undirected, to generate a richter 5 earthquake.

It would not take that many people to make 500,000 kg of uranium, which would, uh.... be bad.

Ultimately, I think that this may be used as an argument that roshar (in particular) needs an authoratarian government to keep all of this investiture under control, to contrast with the 'freer' government/consortium of scadrial.

And that is terrible, but possibly.... justified?

Edited February 14 by heliovox
Cleaning

Treamayne · February 13

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

Also, sorry for the weird bolding, it won't let me get rid of it unless I hand copy everything for some reason.

When you copy and paste from a website, you should see a pop-up (at least on PC - somebody on mobile can confirm there) asking if you want to paste as plain text. Click "paste as plain text" Example:

Spoiler

You should even be able to edit your original post - just go to the three dot menu (top right of post) and click edit. For each section, highlight and cut the text, then paste it again and click on that pop-up. As soon as you click anywhere else or press another key, the pop-up will disappear (as if you clicked the "X")

Here are some other tips and trick with which you may not yet be familiar:

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At the bottom left of a post you will see a "+" icon, a "Quote" link.
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Use the Hide tool to hide your post if you want to remove it after posting (useful for accidental double-posts)
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Hope that helps.

I'll update this post if I have to more to add after reading the content.

Edit:

A couple things to keep in mind:

In the Cosmere, Investiture is a third axis from the matter-energy continuum. So investiture can become energy, plasma, gaseous matter, liquid matter or solid matter. So Investiture changing a physical state isn't going to use traditional E=MC2 equations.
Soulcasting uses comparitively little investiture, because what it is doing is rewriting the Spiritweb, and those changes ripple through to the physical realm (which is why in WoK Xkg of rock became Xkg of smoke, filling the tunnel until it could dissipate)
With things like Kaladin's use of Gravtitation, normal propulsion equations will not apply, because the Surge is manipulating the person's connection the Gravity - There is no force pushing him in any direction, other than the normal planetary gravity redirected to a different direction. So, the "energy" (work) done by the investiture is in rewriting and maintaining the change(s) - not in lifting a given weight to a specific velocity.

WoBs (fission and soulcasting references):

Spoiler

Quote

Phantine

At the risk of getting too technical, is there anything besides lack of knowledge preventing a soulcaster from turning some rocks into a bunch of plutonium and exploding?

I know you've got some rules attached to time bubbles to avoid those going nuclear so I wouldn't be surprised if there was something or another.

Brandon Sanderson

Well, Soulcasting isn't fission or fusion. It's a spiritual transformation process, not a physical one, and so you don't have to worry about some of these issues. There IS historical precedent of accidentally setting off fission reactions in the cosmere using the magic, but that was a different process. Soulcasting is actually pretty safe. (Well, on a grand scale.)

You could end up irradiating yourself, though, which wouldn't be very fun.

If you know what you were doing, making plutonium or uranium on Roshar wouldn't be difficult. The problem is more a matter of knowledge, and room for scientific exploration. They're unlikely to make atom bombs for the same reason they haven't made gunpowder. Once they figure out that some substances are important, they can learn to make them with Soulcasting (assuming they have Radiants) but some substances just don't occur naturally--so discovering them in the first place is difficult, and would require more modern scientific process.

Phantine

Okay, just to clarify here (since I'm not sure how up you are on early nuke designs)

A big enough chunk of uranium or plutonium will explode regardless of whether it's in a bomb or not. Early bomb designs just slammed two smaller chunks together so they'd be one big chunk.

For plutonium 'big enough' is about 35 pounds in one place - a chunk somewhere between the size of baseball and volleyball.

If I understand properly, people can soulcast from the cognitive realm into the physical, which implies once we get into a more modern stormlight setting soulcasters will make nuclear submarines look like small potatoes.

Brandon Sanderson

Slamming two chunks together so they became one big chunk seems an understatement, from what I remember. I'm under the impression that you had to use a great deal of explosive force to ram them together in order to set off a viable fission reaction. Doesn't it have to be compressed somewhat in order to react with itself?

I'll admit, it's been a long time since I've looked at this, but I remember glancing it over, and deciding that you'd need more than just soulcasting to get it to happen. Though it's not outside of reason that a soulcaster could learn to create super-dense plutonium. The problem is one of understanding, however.

Just like it's totally possible that we, with our current technology, could figure out some huge breakthrough in science allowing FTL or other incredible discoveries. But we don't have the understanding to pull it off yet.

In a modern setting, however, a lot of these complaints go out the window. Let's just say that this isn't the only reason a modern society that can instantly transmute one substance to another is potentially a very interesting place.

Phantine

You're totally right that everyone currently uses an 'implosion' style compression design. It's a lot more bang for your buck, and you need less radioactive material to work with. They're also a lot safer, because just sitting around they're well below critical mass - without the power-boosting tricks they basically can't go off.

The old "nobody uses these anymore" designs were 'Gun-Type'. Very simple - shoot a uranium bullet into the center of a uranium ring (or vice versa). Inefficient as heck (the Hiroshima bomb only fissioned 1.4% of its uranium), but also super simple to put together.

Despite being simple to build, gun-types were also super unsafe relative to modern implosion devices (among other worries, dropping a gun-type device into the ocean could potentially set it off because of how neutrons react with water). Also, getting the timing perfect on the fissile 'bullet' was a problem, so practically speaking it could only be done with uranium.

After WWII, the only use the US ever had for gun-types was in bunker busters and nuclear artillery (because of course that was a good idea).

Darn, that post turned out longer than I expected it to.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see you make something really cool out of a post-scarcity transmutropolis setting (especially since the liespren would be in charge of nuclear treaties), and also my roommate just pointed out all the laying out of nuclear bomb details is pointless if they could just make antimatter instead. D'oh.

Brandon Sanderson

This is useful information for me, but my gut says that Rosharans couldn't get this working with their current tech level. That said, the REAL issue (as you mentioned in your original question) is knowledge, not feasibility. They'd have to know how to make the right kind of Uranium or Plutonium--and would need to be able to get this across to a soulcaster in a way that works, then THEY would need to get this across to spren. Cross that hurdle, and I suppose it's not at all implausible to imagine Alethi during Dalinar's era with nukes. I suspect the right kind of fabrial could make a trigger device to match ring and bullet at the right time. Depends on how quickly it needs to be going, though.
Stormlight Three Update #4 (Oct. 19, 2016)

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, this is in theory similar to Soulcasting. The difference is that a Forged object, upon "Forgetting" the rewriting to its spiritual nature is going to try to snap back and match what it "thinks" it should be like--which isn't going to lead to as much stability as Soulcasting, where the actual soul is changed. The object is going to try to get back to the way it "should" be, with varying results.

The reason the Lord Ruler aged hyper-quickly is related to this as well.
General Reddit 2018 (Aug. 27, 2018)

Edited February 13 by Treamayne
Comments/SPAG

alder24 · February 13

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

One of my underlying interests in the investiture ⇔ energy relationship is that investiture seems to be incredibly energy dense.

Truthfully matter is also incredibly energy dense.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

The trick here is that, by normal human standards, Kaladin is moving really *fast*. To go ~1000 miles in .5 days he would have to use 3.96x10^12 Joules of energy, about a richter 5 earthquake.

This is on minimal stormlight, because the group has just gotten to Uritheru, and don't have a lot to spare, since they need to open the oathgate a bunch of times

He isn't flying, he is just falling. That's what the Surge of Gravitation does. In principle the Surge of Gravitation is actually changing his Spiritual Connection with gravity. So you don't need that much energy to mess with gravity, to accelerate or anything, because you don't do that at all, you only change your Connection:

Whew. It's complicated. Basically, the magic is persuading the Lashed object that it is not actually bound to the gravity of the planet--but to the gravity of a supermassive object in the direction indicated. (But which doesn't actually exist.) Imagine it as a Lightweaving that creates an illusion, but the illusion is of something massive that only is seen by the Spiritual aspect of the Lashed object/individual.

It works pretty well inside of the cosmere's magical framework, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you approach it from the physics of our realm.

General Reddit 2020 (Aug. 12, 2020)

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

The second example I want to use is converting rock to food for the warcamps. This is done with savant soulcasters:

We don't know exactly what they are doing, but we can use E=mc^2 to calculate how much energy *has* to be in each of these things, and there for how much energy has to have been displaced.

At this point you're already wrong. Soulcasting is in general mass-preserving. So technically, by your way of calculating, you don't need any energy to Soulcast, because mass is the same. Of course you do need some energy because you're changing an object's Spiritual characteristic and providing energy for its physical change.

Spoiler

ReaderAt2046

Is Soulcasting mass-conservative (Soulcast a 1kg goblet, you get 1 kg of blood)?

Brandon Sanderson

In most circumstances, yes.

17th Shard Forum Q&A (Sept. 26, 2012)

Spoiler

Sorana (paraphrased)

Is Soulcasting volume- or mass-preserving?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

It's mass-preserving, but there are some strange things going on and that's why we don't get as much explosions as we should. You can see a bit of what is going on when Jasnah Soulcasts air, there are some little reactions, but not as strong as you ought to get.

Stuttgart signing (May 17, 2019)

TSM spoilers:

Spoiler

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

Nomad stealing the minimum number of sunhearts necessary for beacon to operate, after having flown over the mountains.

Sunheart ~200 BEU

No. That was a used up Sunheart, which was powering the ship for weeks until Nomad removed it. Fresh Sunhearts have much more BEU in them and ships require much more than 200.

ch 24:

Quote

He rushed away, Rebeke close behind. Before going to his quarters, he asked Rebeke for permission, then stopped beside her hovercycle and pulled out its sunheart.
Hmmm Aux said. I’d guess around two hundred BEUs in this one. Far less than what powers a full ship.
[...]
Even on highly Invested worlds, a person’s soul isn’t more than three BEUs, Aux replied. You are right about this Investiture coming from somewhere. Keeping this city flying, though it’s much smaller than Union, must require sunhearts worth tens of thousands.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

The saturn V had 160 million horsepower and a mass of 2,822,000 kg

We aren’t trying to launch beacon into space, so I’ll cut that horsepower in half, but we are also burning for longer than the saturn V burned.

In order to last long enough to get more sunhearts, beacon needs to last at least 10 hours, I would tend to apply a 1.6 multiplier to that, but I promised to only approximate down.

It took 5 hours to launch the Saturn V into space, so we double the original energy and that cancels out the halving.

Yes, it's not going into space. It's going over the mountains. On a comically small planet - only around 320 km in diameter. They don't need to go 380 000 km away from the planet's surface, not even 100 km, just at least 300 m - literally. ch 19:

Quote

“Wait, how tall are these mountains?” Nomad asked.
“Tall,” Zeal said. “At least a thousand feet.”
A thousand feet? Like a single thousand?

You don't need a Saturn V rocket for that. It took them like minutes to lift that high. And taking all of that into consideration you need vastly less energy and you have vastly more BEU.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

For additional context, the reason the Richter scale stops where it does is because a richter 11 earthquake would destroy the earth. It’s calibrated that way.

A Richter scale doesn't have an upper end. It just keeps going.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

The reason this specifically interests/concerns me is that, eventually, someone, either on purpose or by accident, is going to try and destroy the planet, and investiture seems like it would make that really easy.

Cough cough Ashyn cough cough

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

I actually think the cosmere has a workaround for this. I think the cosmere was *made* safer by having anti-matter replaced by anti-light, which is much more restrictive, but that still doesn't stop the 'uranium' scenario.

Anti-matter is not replaced in Cosmere, it's still there. But there is also Anti-investiture.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

A standard atom bomb contains ~25 kg of uranium.

What's a "standard" atom bomb? Define please. What's the yield, what's the type?

Edited February 13 by alder24

heliovox · February 13

Fortunately for my argument, a lot of the above issues can be handwaved away because I wasn't concerned with how much investiture was being used, but with how much *physical* energy can be released.

(I will also note that I have no idea how you guys keep track of all this stuff, I have historically just been reading through WoBs and just noting when an answer terrifies me).

Treamayne:

In the Cosmere, Investiture is a third axis from the matter-energy continuum. So investiture can become energy, plasma, gaseous matter, liquid matter or solid matter. So Investiture changing a physical state isn't going to use traditional E=MC2 equations.

This being true doesn't matter. Functionally, the change in the matter will change its density/physical state as a result of that change.

I wasn't calculating the energy used to change the state, I was calculating how much the energy of the matter changed.

I will deal with this a bit more below, when I respond to alder, but the fact that mass conserves is possibly more dangerous than I thought.

With things like Kaladin's use of Gravtitation, normal propulsion equations will not apply, because the Surge is manipulating the person's connection the Gravity - There is no force pushing him in any direction, other than the normal planetary gravity redirected to a different direction. So, the "energy" (work) done by the investiture is in rewriting and maintaining the change(s) - not in lifting a given weight to a specific velocity.

The propulsion equations don't matter, and are not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the raw energy produced. To give a quick example of why this matters, we could think of how this would work if Kaladin had used gravitation to make a 'rod from god': Rods from god.

In this case, despite the fact that what was happening to the *rod* was that it's gravity wasn't the same as other types of gravity, but when the stormlight wears off, you are still going to have a dang well giant tungsten rod in orbit, and when it smashes down, it will deliver all of that energy to.... wherever it hits.

WoBs (fission and soulcasting references):

As the petitioner said in the last quote, Brandon's answer here incorrectly understands fission (not surprising, but it matters).

The Demon Core was only 14 lbs of plutonium, and could have destroyed a city. With enough radioactive material, you don't need to set it off, the fission reaction just happens. Enough plutonium *will* destroy a planet, regardless of where it comes from or what is done to it.

alder24:

At this point you're already wrong. Soulcasting is in general mass-preserving. So technically, by your way of calculating, you don't need any energy to Soulcast, because mass is the same. Of course you do need some energy because you're changing an object's Spiritual characteristic and providing energy for its physical change.

At best this doesn't matter, and a worst its..... worse.

If mass conserves, then if you are *trying* to release energy, what you do is transform a dense, inert substance (rock) into a very low density, chemically agressive substance (flourine).

If our soulcasters had turned their material into flourine instead of food, they would have, at the very least, *burned* the entirety of the shattered plains completely bare, and possibly set the atmosphere on fire.

I actually think, to your future point, that something like this is likely what happened to Ashyn, because they didn't *destroy* the planet.

Cough cough Ashyn cough cough

Ashyn is kinda my point, except Ashyn got *lucky*, the hints we get are that they needed a dawnshard to do what they did, and also didn't crack the planet.

I think you can do both of those things pretty easily.

What's a "standard" atom bomb? Define please. What's the yield, what's the type?

That would be for a tactical explosive, and I don't know off the top of my head, but the Little Boy had a mass of 64 kg of uranium and a yield of 15 kilotons (63 terajoules).

Edited February 14 by heliovox
Spelling, wrong link

Dofurion · February 14

6 hours ago, heliovox said:

Ultimately, I think that this may be used as an argument that roshar (in particular) needs an authoratarian government to keep all of this investiture under control, to contrast with the 'freer' government/consortium of scadrial.

And that is terrible, but possibly.... justified?

Regarding this topic, I don't like to spam other threads that don't belong, but to avoid repeating myself, you could take a look at my first publication in the theory thread about books 6 to 10. If an authoritarian government system were to exist in Roshar it could well be that.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

To give a quick example of why this matters, we could think of how this would work if Kaladin had used gravitation to make a 'rod from god': Rods from god.

G.I.Joe movie, I remember that they are extremely imprecise if they are not located in low orbit.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

At best this doesn't matter, and a worst its..... worse.

If mass conserves, then if you are *trying* to release energy, what you do is transform a dense, inert substance (rock) into a very low density, chemically agressive substance (flourine).

I feel like the answer will simply be Honor put restrictions in place, and they are still active for everyone except the Bondsmiths (Since they are the key to the system). But if you want, we also have a slight evidence that the reactions of the objects manifested by soulcast have slightly attenuated chemical reactions. As one of the WoB posted by @alder24 says.
I believe that eventually we will have an entire physics book published on the laws in the cosmere.

Quote

Questioner

Have you ever considered the energy density of Stormlight compared to real world substances? Example: nuclear fuels. Is it kind of on that level?

Brandon Sanderson

I have a little group of cosmerenauts, fans of the books that I’ve known for the long time who are themselves physicists. And I have asked them to start helping me quantify these things. Right now, I don’t have them exactly quantified. The place we’re starting with is: which forms of Investiture in the cosmere, how much fantastical-unit-of-energy do they have, and how does that relate to a real-world joule, or something like that. And that’s something we’re in the process of doing, because we’ll need it by space age cosmere. But I’ve told them they have years to figure it out.

The nice thing is, in our world, we have conservation of energy. I’ve talked about this in the cosmere: because we can go from energy to matter to Investiture (and any of the three can transfer between), we can pop energy out in interesting ways to fuel things if we need to. We can draw directly from the Spiritual Realm, or you can have some of this matter transferred into energy through becoming Investiture first, in a way that’s a little less explosive than normally getting energy out of matter is, in our world.

That said, the magic system of Dragonsteel (which I wrote long ago, which is not released), one of the primary magic systems of that was actual nuclear physics. And nuclear fission was part of the magic system, being able to see the atoms and manipulate them. I don’t know if I’ll ever do that in actual cosmere, but it was one of the cosmere magics originally. So when you read Dragonsteel (we’ll probably release it sometime around the Words of Radiance leatherbound Kickstarter, would be my guess), you can read about people seeing… in cosmere terms, they’re called “axi.” Or “an axon,” rather than atoms. You can see people playing with that. And I even think there are rumors in the books of people playing with those to the point that they make enormous explosions that cause wastelands. Because you do something a little wrong, and suddenly you’re splitting some atoms, and that can be very bad. That can have ramifications.

Waterstones RoW Release Event (Nov. 18, 2020)

Edited February 14 by Dofurion

heliovox · February 14

Yeah, I think I basically agree with your political point except from the direction of 'thats a terrifying amount of energy, I would hate for a doomsday cult to have access to that'.

I actually still think you could cobble together enough powers on scadrial to destroy the planet (for instance, I think the lord ruler could have done it while not empowered) but it is much harder, and I am still working on it, I currently require someone to be both a steel and iron compounder + .... some other things.

Not impossible, but hard.

It is much easier to be democratic under those circumstances.

On the rods from god thing, for my purposes, it being precise almost doesn't matter, but I think you could probably hit a city from low orbit with the powers we have seen.

As far as I can tell, most of the surgebinder orders have the ability, if organized, to destroy roshar. Maybe not edgedancers or truthwatchers?

I would have almost no difficulty seeing the skybreakers decide the whole planet had to be cleansed, if the laws was written just a bit wrong and I think their powerset could definitely do it.

Rules handed down by honor would not be enough without constant updating or just making it impossible for things to exist.

The rods from god thing is enough for this. If you want to stop that, you need to make the cosmere speed limit much slower *and* the .... mass/density limit much lower.... and planets just wouldn't exist.

Slightly attenuated reactions are.... fine? It either wouldn't matter at this scale, or other reactions would become impossible and we just end up with piles of poisonous gas everywhere.

I actually meant to calculate how much energy 5000 kg of flourine would release, and forgot to:

Flourine releases 328 kilojoule per mole of reactant.

One mole of flourine is 9 grams.

So 5000kg of flourine would be 555555 moles.

182222222000 joules of energy.

Again, this doesn't require you to 'make' a reaction happen, as soon as the flourine shows up, the *air* would catch fire.

With the energy of a 4.5 richter scale earthquake.

Lets say that is cut in half, which messes up a lot of chemical reactions. It is still devastating.

I actually.... very much hope we do not get a cosmere physics book. regardless of how good a job they do, something will get messed up, and it is a lot easier to handwave retrospectively.

I hope they have one in the background.

Edited February 14 by heliovox
spelling

Treamayne · February 14

2 hours ago, heliovox said:

(I will also note that I have no idea how you guys keep track of all this stuff, I have historically just been reading through WoBs and just noting when an answer terrifies me).

Mostly it's just search techniques (though some is looking up similar references repeated, you just memorize by accident. Many repeat questions). Tips:

Spoiler

Using Coppermind and Arcanum:

Go to the Coppermind, you can search a term in the upper right. On the top-right of the page (below the search bar) you will see a circle icon that denotes how "complete" the information is (e.g. solid green means it has all known information, split white/black means unanswered questions, etc.)
- Like any wiki, links to other pages appear the first time they are referenced
- While reading you will find notes ([1]) that take you to the references at the bottom of the page. From there, if the reference is a WoB the link will redirect you to the Arcanum post.
- One useful technique (at least on PC) is to click the [1] note to go to the references section, open the reference link in a new tab, then use the browser back button to immediately return to where you were reading.
On the Arcanum, you can read all of the WoBs from a specific event by clicking: Discover > Events, then select an event.
When looking at a Word of Brandon (WoB - or Peter/Isaac) in the Arcanum, you can:
- Click on the event name to read all WoBs from that event
- Click on a tag at the bottom to make a search of all entries with that tag - such as Soulcasting
- The top right of the WoB has a "Copy" button, to easily copy the WoB contents to add to a forum post spoiler tag (please use spoiler tags to keep posts visually short and let new people avoid spoilers if they desire)
Also, on the Arcanum, you can search for keywords using the search bar in the upper left
- While searching a tag, the advanced search will be at the top of the page, so you can keyword search within a specific tag (example: Searching "Spiritual" in #Soulcasting tag)
In any keyword or tag search the default view will be "accuracy"
- Refine searches with Boolean (+/& for "and" to combine terms - e. g. Spiritual+Soulcasting )
  - Note this method is unfiltered and will return more results than the tag and keyword search above
  - But they can be combined, by filtering a keyword and using a boolean search inside that tag.
- You can be set that to "Oldest First" (avoiding spoilers) or "Newest first" (for recent additions) using the drop-down box
For the Arcanum, learn more at Help and Navigation

Hope that helps

2 hours ago, heliovox said:

how much *physical* energy can be released.

<snip>

I was calculating how much the energy of the matter changed.

Okay, but how are you planning to release the energy? Why would it matter if there was more or less energy if 50kg of rock becomes 50kg of bread you have. . . bread. Not Bread plus a bunch of energy. Remember that these Manifestations of Investiture draw and return excess energy to/from the Spiritual Realm as investiture. It's why Speed Bubbles don't red/blue shift - the energy necessary to stabalize the change in frame of reference is either drawn from the Spiritual Realm, or pushed into the Spiritual Realm as needed. It's a Required Secondary Powers situation - Cosmere laws in Manifesting Investiture also allow for that ability to be used safely (e. g. F-Iron preventing you from smothering yourself in your own weight, A-Atium [Era 1] also allowing you to process the information coming from the Atium Shadows)

3 hours ago, heliovox said:

if Kaladin had used gravitation to make a 'rod from god'

Well, I doubt that is possible (as Raboniel mentioned surviving microgravity and vacuum is nearly impossible [unaided] - not to mention that we have no indication that a Windrunner could get to that type of orbital velocity, much less survive the experience). Given a hypothetical use of gravitation in an exo-atmosphere situation and the surgebinder survives, are you implying that the use of the Surge is "creating" potential energy (that then becomes Kinetic once normal planetary gravity re-asserts)? Maybe I'm not enough of a physicist to understand what you are driving toward? Maybe check out @DrPhysics's Steelpush Thread.

heliovox · February 14

I may need to yell at DrPhysics for this one (or maybe alder will save us), because, yeah, the answer to both of those questions is just 'that's how physics works, if it didn't work that way, the world would be different in hilarious ways, and that isn't the world the cosmere presents us with'.

Okay, but how are you planning to release the energy?

Both the uranium example and the flourine example are self-releasing. The way those elements are shaped will cause them to burn or explode, I wouldn't have to *do* anything.

Arguably, if I was really imaginative, I could soulcast azidoazide azide and then.... sneeze?

Well, I doubt that is possible (as Raboniel mentioned surviving microgravity and vacuum is nearly impossible [unaided] - not to mention that we have no indication that a Windrunner could get to that type of orbital velocity, much less survive the experience).

In my example, surviving this would not be necessary. You could possibly give the rod more energy by going up there to give it energy and then just... dying?

But the way I would do it is by lashing the rod upward with the two times amount of stormlight kaladin used to 'fall' to hearthstone, then let the rod 'fall' upward until its stormlight ran out... then let it fall down again.

Edited February 14 by heliovox

Returned · February 14

I mean, the magic is powerful and its potential consequences are terrifying. But how much protection is a government going to be in the face of that-- any type of government? Even if they can monitor and corral people with magic, a super-powered villain is at least as likely to come from the ranks of the authoritarian government as from outside of it, so I wouldn't feel that much more secure. And even then, how effective would they really be? The Lord Ruler was an authoritarian, but not quite effective enough. Nale was pretty ruthless in prosecuting his approach, but he eventually failed too. If we're taking an "ends justify the means" stance, but there is no reason to think such a government will achieve the ends, then the means are not justifiable either (on those terms). Even if we were to grant that an authoritarian government could be effective this way, I wouldn't trust them not to do the very same destructive things you are charging them with preventing. They have often been... less than awesome in real-world human history.

I think that the Shards themselves are both the problem and the means of control. The magic comes from them and they have far more scope to perceive and deal with magical threats than other organizations generally do, though so far they, too, have not been too effective in exerting that kind of control.

But in the end it's not so different from stories like superhero comics-- there is always a functionally sufficient group of do-gooders around that foil the doomsday plots, and total-annihilation-doomsday is a relatively uncommon goal for the villains. Those do-gooders tend to be extra-governmental though, at least in effect, since their powers make them hard to control.

heliovox · February 14

I don't really have an answer for this beyond 'narrative convenience'.

Ultimately, no one can really prevent anyone from trying anything short of just killing everyone.

And the answer *definitely* could be 'this doesn't happen because the shards say no'.

But from a 'justifying why two major powers have legitimate political differences that would drive a cold war type scenario' I could really see this being a thing.

And in a high energy, surgebinding, oath-intensive culture, I think authoritarian control would probably be both more effective and easier to justify than it is in a system where those things are not true.

I certainly don't think authoritarianism is a great, or even necessarily useful reaction to many or most scenarios, but I do think there is an... at least more reasonable circumstance where an authoritarian government could make a reasonable argument in its own favor if it is relatively easy for any random person to just suddenly have a nuke (or worse) when it is possible for a government to have a near perfect 'nuke detector' and also a way of enforcing the nuke bearer to attach itself *to* said government in the form of pretty aggressively binding oaths (that could, for instance, take the nuke away if the oaths are broken).

On Roshar, at least, the number of ways to access this power decrease quickly if you lock people out of the 'oaths for power' system.

I think Honor in particular is sort of a perfect representation of this.

Honor's *promise* is access to unbelievable power *as long as you follow the rules*.

Sounds pretty authoritarian to me.

As for the 'team of superheroes' thing, both the justice league and the authority certainly represent themselves as heroes.

YMMV on the extent that they actually are (I'm watching you supes, onnnne wrong move).

*edit for holy what the fork*

apparently James Gunn is planning to try and make an Authority movie!?

This is a terrible idea, and I am here for it. I... do not think that either the general populace *or* many real world powers are... looking for an authority movie.

*wow*

Edited February 14 by heliovox
holy *fork*

Treamayne · February 14

Please hightlight and click quote. Quotebox-less italicized "quotes" make your posts very hard to read.

8 hours ago, heliovox said:

Both the uranium example and the flourine example are self-releasing.

I wasn't talking about the obvious nuclear options, I was talking about your bread example I referenced. Where is teh energy release from changing rocks to grain/bread?

8 hours ago, heliovox said:

But the way I would do it is by lashing the rod upward with the two times amount of stormlight kaladin used to 'fall' to hearthstone

Two points here:

That's not a "Rod of God", that's an Anvil Drop (it is not moving at orbital velocities in microgravity), possibly a Colony Drop
That's not how gravitational lashings work (as shown at the Battle of Narak) - the surgebinder would have to go with since the stormlight is added over time, not all at once. It's not like Kaladin added hundreds of spheres' worth of stormlight at Urithiru without adding any more during the trip to Alethkar.
- See Oathbringer where they describe how long-distance falling works with objects (people) other than the surgebinder in the scene travelling to Kholinar.

5 hours ago, heliovox said:

in a high energy, surgebinding, oath-intensive culture (emphasis mine)

You answered your own question - the Oaths are the primary check on this kind of power abuse. Surgebinders cannot use the Surges in ways that do not follow the precepts of their Oaths (which is why Skybreakers cannot access Division until the Third Oath at all, it's too dangerous with lesser Oaths). WoR Ch18 :

Spoiler

Stormlight from the pouch at his belt filled him. Not too much. Don’t let them see. Don’t let them take it away from you!

Pain vanished. His shoulder reknit—he didn’t know if he’d broken it or just dislocated it. Zahel cried out in surprise as Kaladin pitched himself up to his feet and dashed back toward Adolin.

The prince stumbled away, hand out to his side, obviously summoning his Blade. Kaladin kicked his fallen half-spear up in a spray of sand, then grabbed it in midair as he got near.

In that moment, the strength drained from him. The tempest inside of him fled without warning, and he stumbled, gasping at the returning pain of his shoulder.

<snip>

“What happened?” Kaladin asked. “The Stormlight drained from me. I felt it go.”

“Who were you protecting?” Syl asked.

“I . . . I was practicing how to fight, like when I practiced with Skar and Rock down in the chasms.”

“Is that really what you were doing?” Syl asked.

So, even a subconsious abuse of surgebinding can trigger the checks preventing that abuse.

Edited February 14 by Treamayne
SPAG/Clarity

heliovox · February 14

2 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Please hightlight and click quote. Quotebox-less italicized "quotes" make your posts very hard to read.

I wasn't talking about the obvious nuclear options, I was talking about your bread example I referenced. Where is teh energy release from changing rocks to grain/bread?

I was using bread as an example of the fact that investiture can just make energy disappear.

alder actually already corrected this point, which is why I moved on to flourine and uranium, because instead of making energy disappear, those two make energy *appear*.

It shouldn't matter too much unless physics is wildly different outside of investiture interactions, which is something I think Brandon is trying to avoid.

I also, actually already cut the energy predictions for both flourine and uranium in half to account for 'cosmere weirdness' because I definitely don't know what is going on with that.

2 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Two points here:

That's not a "Rod of God", that's an Anvil Drop (it is not moving at orbital velocities in microgravity), possibly a Colony Drop

That's not how gravitational lashings work (as shown at the Battle of Narak) - the surgebinder would have to go with since the stormlight is added over time, not all at once. It's not like Kaladin added hundreds of spheres' worth of stormlight at Urithiru without adding any more during the trip to Alethkar.

See Oathbringer where they describe how long-distance falling works with objects (people) other than the surgebinder in the scene travelling to Kholinar.

What it is called doesn't really matter to me, it would work the same way.

Annnnnd unless the second Szeth/Kaladin (Words of radiance ch. 85) fight has been retconned, what I described is exactly how Szeth tries to kill Dalinar and Roion by lashing them to the sky and just waiting for their stormlight to wear off so they will fall to their deaths. I would just do it with more stormlight.

2 hours ago, Treamayne said:

You answered your own question - the Oaths are the primary check on this kind of power abuse. Surgebinders cannot use the Surges in ways that do not follow the precepts of their Oaths (which is why Skybreakers cannot access Division until the Third Oath at all, it's too dangerous with lesser Oaths). WoR Ch18 :

Reveal hidden contents

Stormlight from the pouch at his belt filled him. Not too much. Don’t let them see. Don’t let them take it away from you!

Pain vanished. His shoulder reknit—he didn’t know if he’d broken it or just dislocated it. Zahel cried out in surprise as Kaladin pitched himself up to his feet and dashed back toward Adolin.

The prince stumbled away, hand out to his side, obviously summoning his Blade. Kaladin kicked his fallen half-spear up in a spray of sand, then grabbed it in midair as he got near.

In that moment, the strength drained from him. The tempest inside of him fled without warning, and he stumbled, gasping at the returning pain of his shoulder.

<snip>

“What happened?” Kaladin asked. “The Stormlight drained from me. I felt it go.”

“Who were you protecting?” Syl asked.

“I . . . I was practicing how to fight, like when I practiced with Skar and Rock down in the chasms.”

“Is that really what you were doing?” Syl asked.

So, even a subconsious abuse of surgebinding can trigger the checks preventing that abuse.

I was trying to answer my own question here, sort of. I think the oaths are part of what would make autoritarianism easier on roshar.

But also.... we have not seen all the oaths and we have seen them be bent to some extent before breaking.

One of the later things I want to make a post on is how oaths interact with insanity. I think it would be fairly easy for a group of, for instance, skybreakers, to decide that all of roshar needs to be cleansed... and their oaths providing little to no stoppage. Still much easier than scadrial.

I'll try, but I find the quoting structure of this site very unintuitive. What I really want to do is respond to specific pieces of your post, and the quote feature locks them all together in ways I don't like.

Edited February 14 by heliovox
Figured out (mostly) how the quoting thing works.

Treamayne · February 14

4 minutes ago, heliovox said:

What I really want to do is respond to specific pieces of your post, and the quote feature locks them all together in ways I don't like.

This may help - there are actually quite a number of ways to quote (and other tips):

Spoiler

On 4/27/2023 at 5:05 PM, Treamayne said:

At the bottom left of a post you will see a "+" icon, a "Quote" link.

At the bottom right you will see an heart icon (and possibly different reactions in the future).

At the top right you will see a hamburger menu (three dots) which shows: Report, Share, and (your posts only) Edit and Hide tools.

Likes/Reactions:

Spoiler

The Heart Icon (Like) is how you thank people or "like" a post

Likes, Mentions and Quotes should all send an alert to the appropriate person - even when added to an old post through the Edit feature.

Report Tool:

Spoiler

Use the Report tool to report any post (your own or others) to a forum Mod

Use this if you do accidentally double-post (sometimes it's the browser or a slow link that causes a double post) - just leave a message that it was an accidental double post and the Mods can fix it. If it was the first post of a new thread that doubled, they usually can merge the threads if they both have answers, so all of the content is retained.

For reporting Spam, only report a single post by the user to let the Mods and Admins know - they get messages for each "report" so reporting each Spam post is annoying and unnecessary. If all posts by a "new user" (bot) are all spam - then all of those posts will be deleted when that account is deleted.

Hide Tool:

Spoiler

Use the Hide tool to hide your post if you want to remove it after posting (useful for accidental double-posts)

Hiding the first post in a Thread will hide the threan as long as ther have been no replies (Needs Testing)

Mentions:

Spoiler

You can "Mention" a person by typing "@" and slowly typing their user name (spelling matters). As you spell their name, the interface will show a pop-up with matches - when you match appears, click it to add the Mention

Likes, Mentions and Quotes should all send an alert to the appropriate person - even when added to an old post through the Edit feature.

Quote Methods:

Spoiler

The "Quote" link is exactly that, when you click it the quote will be added to the reply at the bottom of the thread wherever the cursor is (adding a carraige return if necessary)

So, if you have already started to reply before you decide to quote you can then add the quote before or after your text depending on the cursor location when you click "Quote"

The + icon is multi-quote. As you read a thread, if you want to quote multiple items you can click that for each post you want to quote

As you click +, you should see a toaster pop-up on the bottom right of the browser window showing how many quotes you will have

They are added in the order you click the + icon, not in the original post order, so you can set the order of quotes for your reply

When you are ready to reply, click on the toaster pop-up and it will take you directly to the reply section and add the quotes automatically with one blank line between each for you to add your comment(s)

Finally, you can also highlight a small section of a post and, when hovering over the highlit portion, click the "Quote Selection" button that pops up.

This will also be added to the cursor location, rather than the bottom of the reply.

Also note that you can move quotes after they have been added to your reply.

For example, you add a quote and realize there are no empty lines below it for you to type - so you can hit "enter" before the quote to make an empty line then when you hover over a quote you will see a 4-way arrow at the top-left that you can use to drag the quote up (or down) and move the quote to before the empty line. . .

This is also how you can add quotes to an Edit of your own post. You quote using any of the methods above and the quote will go to the reply section. You then hover over the four-way arrow and use CTRL+C to cut the quote, which you can then paste into your edit window.

Likes, Mentions and Quotes should all send an alert to the appropriate person - even when added to an old post through the Edit feature.

Editing posts:

Spoiler

Use the Edit link to make changes to a completed post or add information to your post if it is the most recent (to avoid double posting)

Quote buttons will still send a quote to "Reply" if you have a post open for edit, but it is easy to cut/paste the quote to the Edit box

Editing the first post in a thread allows the thread-creator to edit the thread title (important for changing accidental spoilers)

Editing allows you to add a reason for the edit (Spelling and grammar (SPAG), formatting, clarification, new information, etc.), but it is not required.

Likes, Mentions and Quotes should all send an alert to the appropriate person - even when added to an old post through the Edit feature.

Other:

Spoiler

Quotes and Spoilers are very similar, but here are the differences:

Spoiler tags are default "closed" and are not attributed - they may be opened by clicking the spoiler box title

Quotes are default "open" (but may be closed by clicking the Quote Title and are denoted by the basic arrow icon on the left side of the quote title), If the quote was added with one of the methods explained above, it will be attributed - if it was added with the quote icon in the Reply/Edit tools, it will not be attributed.

Attributed Quotes will have a curved arrow icon on the right side of the quote title to jump directly to the post from which the quote was taken.

Hope that helps.

6 minutes ago, heliovox said:

One of the later things I want to make a post on is how oaths interact with insanity.

just keep in mind, it's not just what the Radiant feels is right - it's what the Radiant and their Spren agree are right and inline with the oaths. So you would have to have not just an "insane" Skybreaker, but a bonded Spren sharing the same "insanity" and both agreeing the actions are "correct." WoB:

Spoiler

Quote

Q10fanatic

So, the third ideal of the Windrunners. Is it about protecting those you hate or is it more broadly about going against your instincts/wants in order to protect others better?

Brandon Sanderson

For most people, it's going to go along the hatred lines--but it extends all the way to what you're implying. Mostly, I think of it as, "I'll get rid of my caveats about those I'll protect."

You're likely to see the more extreme examples as I write out the oaths for others, particularly in-scene, as I don't want it to feel too repetitive. But you can assume that for most of the original members of Bridge Four (who are slowly hitting this ideal) that it had to do with agreeing to protect a group that they in some way dislike. (So long as it's right to do so, as defined by themselves and their spren, of course.)

Gale_Emchild

At or near the endgame of SA do you think you'd release a guide on the specifics of each orders oaths, so that the fans could personalise their own?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, if I haven't gotten to them all by then, I will release them all.

Psydo5

Will we find out Sigzil's or was it just a fleeting mention? If so, are we going to get a personal 3rd ideal story from every Bridge 4 member?

Brandon Sanderson

Afraid we won't have a chance to see each and every one of them.
Dawnshard Annotations Reddit Q&A (Nov. 6, 2020)

This isn't quite the WoB I was looking for, but the first I found in a quick search

But the oaths are designed to work with neuro divergence. That's much of the point is that the oaths are helping the Radiant deal with and reconcile whatever their individual issue is in a responsible manner. WoBs:

Spoiler

Quote

lupicorn

I had a question about what it means to swear the Ideal of Law. Several fans have told me it means to define the law, in the Nixon, "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal," sort of way. I interpret it as becoming the embodiment of the law such that they can't willingly violate any law without breaking their oaths.

Do either of these interpretations hit the mark? Nale seems to follow the law more so than most and that doesn't just seem like a personal preference.

Brandon Sanderson

I would say that both of these interpretations could work for a given Skybreaker, which is why there is disagreement among the order itself. Perception is a big part of the oaths.

I wouldn't want to squish this discussion by offering too much on one side or the other, as this is exactly where I want the conversation to be going right now.
General Reddit 2018 (Sept. 24, 2018)

Quote

Questioner

So there’s Snapping on Scadrial, where an event happens and then you can use the magic. Is there something like Snapping on Roshar, where...

Brandon Sanderson

Yes and no. They’re working under the same sort of assumption, the spren are just looking for a specific thing that is similar to what Snapping does.
Calamity Seattle signing (Feb. 17, 2016)

Quote

Kogiopsis

Is neurodiversity a requirement to become a Radiant? Like do you have to be non-neurotypical?

Brandon Sanderson

Read the back of Words of Radiance for your answer, the back of the cover.
Footnote: The relevant passage from the back of Words of Radiance reads: It is the nature of the magic. A broken soul has cracks into which something else can be fit. Surgebindings, the powers of creation themselves. They can brace a broken soul; but they can also widen its fissures.
Words of Radiance Portland signing (March 7, 2014)

Quote

AndrewStirlingMacDonald (paraphrased)

Is being a little bit crazy a prerequisite to becoming a Knight Radiant?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Well, so, for many of the cosmere magics to work, you have to... it has to get into the soul somehow. Right? Sometimes you ram it in by spiking someone else's soul and ripping off a piece and sticking it into yours. Sometimes, it just seeps in the cracks. Sometimes the bond allows it to kind of bypass some of this, but it's usually traumatic experience. So crazy is not required, but there's got to be a place for the magic to go, to get in.
Shadows of Self Boston signing (Oct. 14, 2015)

Hope that helps

Dofurion · February 14

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

But also.... we have not seen all the oaths and we have seen them be bent to some extent before breaking.

I have a theory that I am polishing that can give us a good framework to predict what future oaths will be like, and the truth is I think that only the Elsecallers should worry (And even so, just as he said, the probability of danger is reduced by the incorporation of spren morale)

29 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

This isn't quite the WoB I was looking for, but the first I found in a quick search

I think this might be the one you're looking for.

Quote

Krios (paraphrased)

At the end of Oathbringer, Kaladin says that the Oaths are about perception. So, what would happen when a crazy person bonds a crazy spren? Is there a hard limit to what the Oaths allow or could they just go on a John Wick style rampage?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Perception will get you a very long way, like Nightblood proves. So you can go beyond the Oaths, but there will be a hard limit. Although it will be hard to find a such fitting pair of human and spren.
Stuttgart signing (May 17, 2019)

alder24 · February 14

13 hours ago, heliovox said:

(I will also note that I have no idea how you guys keep track of all this stuff, I have historically just been reading through WoBs and just noting when an answer terrifies me).

We're nerds! We read WoBs for fun in spare time. Long time of practice, we had lots of discussions and we were digging up all kinds of WoBs and quotes. And it's good to start with verifying information, searching for WoBs and quotes on that topic and then jumping to writing a post.

13 hours ago, heliovox said:

Enough plutonium *will* destroy a planet, regardless of where it comes from or what is done to it

Sure, if you can get 60 zettatons of energy, that's 3e+18 Fat Man bombs, each with 6 kg of plutonium - that's 1.8e+19 kg of plutonium. The mass of Mount Everest is 8.1e+14 kg. You would need 100,000 Mount Everests fully made out of plutonium to do that. Good luck with that.

14 hours ago, heliovox said:

At best this doesn't matter, and a worst its..... worse.

If mass conserves, then if you are *trying* to release energy, what you do is transform a dense, inert substance (rock) into a very low density, chemically agressive substance (flourine).

If our soulcasters had turned their material into flourine instead of food, they would have, at the very least, *burned* the entirety of the shattered plains completely bare, and possibly set the atmosphere on fire.

I actually think, to your future point, that something like this is likely what happened to Ashyn, because they didn't *destroy* the planet.

I really don't understand what you mean here. Sure, if you know what you're doing, have a lot of Stormlight, and have a Soulcaster that can create everything, you might be able to create a big boom. Would it be as big as you propose? Probably not. Setting the atmosphere is really, really, really hard in real life and requires a huge amount of energy concentrated in a very small place - even with today's nuclear stockpile we aren't able to achieve that.

14 hours ago, heliovox said:

Ashyn is kinda my point, except Ashyn got *lucky*, the hints we get are that they needed a dawnshard to do what they did, and also didn't crack the planet.

I think you can do both of those things pretty easily.

Highly disagree. You can do pretty destructive things with Surgebinding alone, but without any Dawnshard you can't get enough to do what you propose. I think you severely overestimate the amounts of energy Radiants can use.

12 hours ago, heliovox said:

I actually meant to calculate how much energy 5000 kg of flourine would release, and forgot to:

Flourine releases 328 kilojoule per mole of reactant.

One mole of flourine is 9 grams.

So 5000kg of flourine would be 555555 moles.

182222222000 joules of energy.

Again, this doesn't require you to 'make' a reaction happen, as soon as the flourine shows up, the *air* would catch fire.

That's 43.4 tons of tnt. That's really, really not much. It's a tiny amount compared to modern nukes, which can release nearly 1,000,000 times more energy with much less mass. How is 43.4 tons of tnt gonna ignite the atmosphere?

11 hours ago, Treamayne said:

as Raboniel mentioned surviving microgravity and vacuum is nearly impossible [unaided]

Not true. She said Fused sent to Braize didn't survive for long because their Voidlight ran out. Radiants and Fused can definitely make something like a rod from god, but that requires knowledge, a very detailed one about orbital mechanics and energy. Windrunners would never accept risks that came with such a weapon - their morality and Oaths would prevent them from doing things like that, Honorspren would also not agree for such actions. That's what @heliovox is missing - Radiants are bound by Oaths and if their spren decides that it's not right to do such a thing, they simply can't. RoW ch 89:

Quote

Raboniel hummed to an amused rhythm. “No, no, Navani. You can’t travel to Braize in the Physical Realm. That would take … well, I have no idea how long. Plus there’s no air in the space between planets. We sent Heavenly Ones to try it once. No air, and worse, the strange pressures required them to carry a large supply of Voidlight for healing. Even so prepared, they died within hours"

11 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Given a hypothetical use of gravitation in an exo-atmosphere situation and the surgebinder survives, are you implying that the use of the Surge is "creating" potential energy (that then becomes Kinetic once normal planetary gravity re-asserts)?

Yes, but you don't need to reapply normal gravity for that to become kinetic. It's just like dropping a ball from 1m up. 1 kg ball has Ep=mgh=1*10*1=10 joules of potential energy and Ek=mv^2/2 = 0 of kinetic energy. When you drop it this potential energy is converted to kinetic energy as it falls down, it reaches maximum just before touching the ground - all of that potential energy is transferred into kinetic energy because of conservation of energy. The speed at which the ball hits the ground is calculated by converting the equation for Ek to get v - in this case it's between 4-5 m/s (judging by an eye).

So lashings work just the same. It's not that you lash something and it has a potential energy. It starts falling. When it falls it gains more speed, that means potential energy is transferred into kinetic energy. The longer it falls the more kinetic energy it has. What lashings are changing is the direction of gravitational attraction and gravitational acceleration g. So Windrunners can create devastating kinetic projectiles with little to no effort.

When Kaladin lashes himself and changes the direction of his lashings, his speed doesn't change, he doesn't stop, he keeps going, unless he lashes himself in the opposite direction to decelerate. Once a Windrunner lashes some object from space towards the planet with 100g, it starts very quickly gaining speed. Even if ha have enough Stormlight for a few seconds of this, this gained speed doesn't disappear, it doesn't stop - it stops accelerating but speed remains the same until it hits the atmosphere. All Windrunners are doing is making things fall.

11 hours ago, heliovox said:

But the way I would do it is by lashing the rod upward with the two times amount of stormlight kaladin used to 'fall' to hearthstone, then let the rod 'fall' upward until its stormlight ran out... then let it fall down again.

So it would reach the escape velocity of Roshar and either find a stable orbit around the planet, or escape the Rosharan gravity entirely and orbit its sun. You need to know what you're doing to actually achieve what you want, you need to do math - Kaladin doesn't do math, he does spears.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

I was trying to answer my own question here, sort of. I think the oaths are part of what would make autoritarianism easier on roshar.

That sort of government won't go well with Willshapers or Truthwatchers. Willshapers are about freedom, Truthwatchers, quoting Coppermind: "are greatly concerned with the actions of the powerful and might be likened to investigative reporters.^[2] The order will make their opinions known loudly and forcefully, particularly if they think someone in power is abusing that power or lying about fundamental truths."

Windrunners and Edgedancers also won't be on board because that kind of government creates abuse and isn't morally right.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

One of the later things I want to make a post on is how oaths interact with insanity. I think it would be fairly easy for a group of, for instance, skybreakers, to decide that all of roshar needs to be cleansed... and their oaths providing little to no stoppage. Still much easier than scadrial.

Actually their Oaths provide a lot of stoppage, because laws of countries are limiting them and their spren will judge the truth when they are performing their 4th Ideal crusade - their spren won't accept and allow for a crusade that isn't just. Skybreakers are the least likely to destroy Roshar (that's why they didn't participate in Recreance). RoW I-7:

Quote

“Tell me more of this proposed crusade,” the highspren said. It had not blessed Szeth with its name, though Szeth was its bonded Radiant.
“Long ago, my people rejected my warnings,” Szeth said. “They did not believe me when I said the enemy would soon return. They cast me out, deemed me Truthless.” “I find inconsistencies to the stories you tell of those days, Szeth,” the highspren said.
“I fear that your memory, like those of many mortals, is incomplete or corrupted by the passage of time. I will accompany you on your crusade to judge the truth.”
“Thank you,” Szeth said softly.
“You may need to fight and destroy those who have broken their own laws. Can you do this?”

Spoiler

[...]

Questioner

Are you saying that the spren’s view of themself influences how they work?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh yeah, and humans’ view of them because spren are pieces of Investiture who have gained sapience, or sentience for the smaller spren, through human perception of those forces. For instance, whether or not Kaladin is keeping an oath is up to what Syl and Kaladin think is keeping that oath. It is not related to capital-T Truth, what is actually keeping the oath. Two windrunners can disagree on whether an oath has been kept or not.

Boskone 54 (Feb. 18, 2017)

20 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

This isn't quite the WoB I was looking for, but the first I found in a quick search

That one?

Spoiler

Krios (paraphrased)

At the end of Oathbringer, Kaladin says that the Oaths are about perception. So, what would happen when a crazy person bonds a crazy spren? Is there a hard limit to what the Oaths allow or could they just go on a John Wick style rampage?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Perception will get you a very long way, like Nightblood proves. So you can go beyond the Oaths, but there will be a hard limit. Although it will be hard to find a such fitting pair of human and spren.

Stuttgart signing (May 17, 2019)

3 minutes ago, Dofurion said:

I have a theory that I am polishing that can give us a good framework to predict what future oaths will be like, and the truth is I think that only the Elsecallers should worry (And even so, just as he said, the probability of danger is reduced by the incorporation of spren morale)

I don't know what do you mean by "future Oaths," but just to be sure, the Oaths are predetermined, there is a fixed progression path that each Order follows:

Spoiler

Jeremy (paraphrased)

Is the order of the Ideals fixed? E.g. does Kaladin have to say the Windrunner Ideals in a specific order, or are they situation-specific?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes, the sequence is fixed. The oaths for each order are essentially a progression of understanding of the kind of person that each Order of Knights Radiant is trying to produce. The specific wording of each Ideal is not fixed, but the overall idea of each Ideal, and the order in which they are spoken, is.

When Worlds Collide 2014 (Aug. 9, 2014)

Treamayne · February 14

16 minutes ago, Dofurion said:

I think this might be the one you're looking for.

Thank you. That's a good one too, but the one i was tryign to find again just more definitively states what I bolded in the one I posted. The Question was something about how Kaladin's stormlight drained in teh dueling ring with Adolin and if Syl was punishing him. The answer was about how what actions constitute fulfilling or breaking oaths isn't up to just the person or the spren - but what they both agree fulfills an oath.

The nature of the bond will not allow a surgebinder to use stormlight in a way that violates their oaths.

Edited February 14 by Treamayne
SPAG

Dofurion · February 14

4 minutes ago, alder24 said:

I don't know what do you mean by "future Oaths," but just to be sure, the Oaths are predetermined

Precisely, we know that there is a pattern, but we do not know how it influences the orders in which we have hardly seen anything of them.

Here's a preview:

Spoiler

Clearly, I have to translate it and explain the reason for what I propose, but first I wanted to finish with the parts in yellow.

heliovox · February 14

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

We're nerds! We read WoBs for fun in spare time. Long time of practice, we had lots of discussions and we were digging up all kinds of WoBs and quotes. And it's good to start with verifying information, searching for WoBs and quotes on that topic and then jumping to writing a post.

Sure, if you can get 60 zettatons of energy, that's 3e+18 Fat Man bombs, each with 6 kg of plutonium - that's 1.8e+19 kg of plutonium. The mass of Mount Everest is 8.1e+14 kg. You would need 100,000 Mount Everests fully made out of plutonium to do that. Good luck with that.

I really don't understand what you mean here. Sure, if you know what you're doing, have a lot of Stormlight, and have a Soulcaster that can create everything, you might be able to create a big boom. Would it be as big as you propose? Probably not. Setting the atmosphere is really, really, really hard in real life and requires a huge amount of energy concentrated in a very small place - even with today's nuclear stockpile we aren't able to achieve that.

Highly disagree. You can do pretty destructive things with Surgebinding alone, but without any Dawnshard you can't get enough to do what you propose. I think you severely overestimate the amounts of energy Radiants can use.

That's 43.4 tons of tnt. That's really, really not much. It's a tiny amount compared to modern nukes, which can release nearly 1,000,000 times more energy with much less mass. How is 43.4 tons of tnt gonna ignite the atmosphere?

You are a splendid, splendid human being.

Buuuut, I don't think it takes that much energy to crack the planet.

Maybe if I wanted to pulverize it and send its dust in all directions, but if I put the amount of energy necessary to make a richter 11 earthquake, and compare it to the energy produced by the fat man, I get ~200,000 times... the *fat man* (1.8e+19/8.83e+13=203850).

I only need to turn 12,800,000 kg into plutonium.

That is 1/63281250ths of everest, and that isn't even accounting for the fact that roshar actually has less mass than the earth.

Hard, yes, but something that people could do if they were trying? Yes.

One of my original points here was that all of the examples I was giving were either accidental, or things that people did that *could* have unleased massive destruction if they were trying to do that.

The soulcasting example has since gotten a bit away from me, but my point was that, if you were to intentionally scale them up, they could destroy a lot of things really fast.

I will try to do some of the 'extreme' versions of these equations later today, but that was not my original goal.

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

So it would reach the escape velocity of Roshar and either find a stable orbit around the planet, or escape the Rosharan gravity entirely and orbit its sun. You need to know what you're doing to actually achieve what you want, you need to do math - Kaladin doesn't do math, he does spears.

I wasn't specifically picturing Kaladin doing this, but we *could* assume that all windrunners are basically Kaladin.

They still don't really need to do math. With a big enough projectile, you would really only have to do this two or three times to be able to 'walk your shot' into the thing you wanted to hit. It would be hard to justify this as 'protecting' something, but I could really easily see a skybreaker using this to punish a *city* that their particular oaths think has committed a crime, once the fact that you can do this is commonly known.

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

That sort of government won't go well with Willshapers or Truthwatchers. Willshapers are about freedom, Truthwatchers, quoting Coppermind: "are greatly concerned with the actions of the powerful and might be likened to investigative reporters.^[2] The order will make their opinions known loudly and forcefully, particularly if they think someone in power is abusing that power or lying about fundamental truths."

Windrunners and Edgedancers also won't be on board because that kind of government creates abuse and isn't morally right.

So these orders either get marginalized or co-opted. I could see (medium difficulty) convincing willshapers and truthwatchers that my rule is preferrable to the planet being destroyed (or similarly messed up) as long as *I* wasn't specifically the person threatening to do that.

The edgedancers might cry over those harmed, and listen to them, but Lift isn't personally fixing every wrong, and neither will the average edgedancer.

There is a slippery slope here, I am simply suggesting that it might be easier to slip under these circumstances.

Windrunners will be protecting.... everyone by consenting to benign autocracy.

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

Actually their Oaths provide a lot of stoppage, because laws of countries are limiting them and their spren will judge the truth when they are performing their 4th Ideal crusade - their spren won't accept and allow for a crusade that isn't just. Skybreakers are the least likely to destroy Roshar (that's why they didn't participate in Recreance). RoW I-7:

Reveal hidden contents

[...]

Questioner

Are you saying that the spren’s view of themself influences how they work?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh yeah, and humans’ view of them because spren are pieces of Investiture who have gained sapience, or sentience for the smaller spren, through human perception of those forces. For instance, whether or not Kaladin is keeping an oath is up to what Syl and Kaladin think is keeping that oath. It is not related to capital-T Truth, what is actually keeping the oath. Two windrunners can disagree on whether an oath has been kept or not.

Boskone 54 (Feb. 18, 2017)

We haven't seen that judgement yet. I don't think it is impossible that it turns out the corruption runs deep, and a significant number of the shin are complicit and must be purged.

Even assuming they aren't, the way the high spren talks suggests to me that they might not take action until the damage is already done, assuming Szeth were to go axe crazy (not impossible).

First more extreme example (because it is the easy one) if I was to make 1000 kg of antimatter, it would react with the surrounding matter, and release 1.8x10^20 Joules of energy. More than enough to crack the earth.

We damp this to account for cosmere protections, and just... make 2000 kg instead. Easy.

((1000 kg + 1000 kg)*9*10^16)) <- for 1000 kg of antimatter and 1000 kg of normal matter.

Edited February 14 by heliovox
missing information

heliovox · February 14

@alder24 I missed an entire section of your post somehow, I am going to blame it on not being used to the quote system.

I really don't understand what you mean here. Sure, if you know what you're doing, have a lot of Stormlight, and have a Soulcaster that can create everything, you might be able to create a big boom. Would it be as big as you propose? Probably not. Setting the atmosphere is really, really, really hard in real life and requires a huge amount of energy concentrated in a very small place - even with today's nuclear stockpile we aren't able to achieve that.

Part of my goal in using flourine as an example is that I think it would be relatively easy to do by accident. Flouride is *really* common (it is in a bunch of food, among other things, as a pretty common component of many types of salt).

It does not stretch the imagination too much that someone trying to figure out chemistry for the first time (something real world humans started doing ~3000 years ago, easily in a time period that could match RoW roshar) might mess up and make flourine while trying to make *salt*.

That's 43.4 tons of tnt. That's really, really not much. It's a tiny amount compared to modern nukes, which can release nearly 1,000,000 times more energy with much less mass. How is 43.4 tons of tnt gonna ignite the atmosphere?

I didn't actually think it would set the atmosphere on fire, exactly, but it certainly would look like that, part of the problem with flourine is that it is both a gas and *wildly* flammable, so it would both be catching on fire and moving in all directions really quickly.

I almost certainly should have been clearer on this, but there were legitimate scientists that thought the first nuclear bomb would set the atmosphere on fire.

We accidentally set ourselves on fire with napalm all the time, and this would be much worse.

Edited February 14 by heliovox
repetition

Treamayne · February 14

51 minutes ago, heliovox said:

that someone trying to figure out chemistry for the first time (something real world humans started doing ~3000 years ago, easily in a time period that could match RoW roshar) might mess up and make flourine while trying to make *salt*.

Actually, that's probably nearly impossible with Soulcasting. When you Soulcast, it's the Cognitive Identity, the Idea, of what is being changed and changed into. Not to mention that you need a different gem to create a solid or gas - so you cannot accidentally create anything gaseous when soulcasting a solid.

You need to know what you are making (reference Jasnah's horrible attempt to reproduce Strawberry Jam), and the idea of that has to have a Cognitive Identity and the object being changed has to be able to access that Cognitive Identity to assume that form.

The chances that a Radiant (because it cannot be a fabrial soulcaster - which are essence limited) trying to soulcast a particulate sodium molecule and ending up with a gasous poison has got to be astronomically low.

Edited February 14 by Treamayne
SPAG

alder24 · February 14

59 minutes ago, heliovox said:

Maybe if I wanted to pulverize it and send its dust in all directions, but if I put the amount of energy necessary to make a richter 11 earthquake, and compare it to the energy produced by the fat man, I get ~200,000 times... the *fat man* (1.8e+19/8.83e+13=203850).

I only need to turn 12,800,000 kg into plutonium.

I may not fully comprehend the Richter scale, but doing quick google search and using this for reference, a magnitude 11 earthquake (and no, magnitude 11 earthquake is not enough to destroy the entire planet) releases 7.9e+20 J of energy, the Fat Man bomb released 8.8e+13 J of energy, so you actually need 9 million fat mans for that. That's 54 million kilograms of plutonium.

For comparison, the Chicxulub impact event generated around 3e+23 J of energy, yet the planet and life on Earth survived.

But there is another thing to consider - the majority of energy released during fission goes into the air, not ground, as opposed to an earthquake, where the majority of energy is released into the ground. You would need even more plutonium than that.

Those are still impossible numbers. Radiants don't juggle such amounts of investiture.

59 minutes ago, heliovox said:

Hard, yes, but something that people could do if they were trying? Yes.

Strongly disagree.

59 minutes ago, heliovox said:

They still don't really need to do math. With a big enough projectile, you would really only have to do this two or three times to be able to 'walk your shot' into the thing you wanted to hit. It would be hard to justify this as 'protecting' something, but I could really easily see a skybreaker using this to punish a *city* that their particular oaths think has committed a crime, once the fact that you can do this is commonly known.

A city that committed a crime? Every single citizen of that city committed the same crime that is punishable by death and destruction of property? No.

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

So these orders either get marginalized or co-opted. I could see (medium difficulty) convincing willshapers and truthwatchers that my rule is preferrable to the planet being destroyed (or similarly messed up) as long as *I* wasn't specifically the person threatening to do that.

The edgedancers might cry over those harmed, and listen to them, but Lift isn't personally fixing every wrong, and neither will the average edgedancer.

There is a slippery slope here, I am simply suggesting that it might be easier to slip under these circumstances.

Windrunners will be protecting.... everyone by consenting to benign autocracy.

Radiant orders don't work like that. You can't lie to Truthwatchers, or twist the truth - their entire order is focused on finding the Truth. You don't marginalize one order because you don't like it. Not to mention that every Radiant no matter the order can make their own decision and oppose your type of the government, for various reasons. In the recent #SaytheWords video about Willshapers it is said: "If a king is treating their people cruelly, forcing them to act or live in a certain way, well sometimes Willshapers destroy things too." You won't marginalize them, you'll become a target of Willshapers.

Edgedancers don't just cry over harmed, they ACT! They help them, they work for them, they try to make their living better. Lift does that herself. If you're causing misery to people, Edgedancers won't turn a blind eye to that. What did Lift do when Nale was hunting Radiants in Tashikk? Did she ignore that? Walk past that? No, she tried to stop Nale and his acolytes, she faced him and fought him for Stamp's sake.

Windrunners protect those who cannot protect themselves - which means the citizens of your authoritarian government who exploits and harms its population because they can't protect themselves from that.

Spoiler

Dan Wells

Sixth Epoch, Year 31, Palahashes 5.6.1.

Truthwatchers.

They call them Truthwatchers, but I think that's only because truth-seekers and discoverers and enthusiastic declarers is too long. But that's really what they do. Truthwatchers want to know the answers to things, and then they go out and find the answers to things, and then they go out and share the answers to things. And if they think that someone, especially someone in power, like a ruler or ardent, is hiding or misrepresenting the truth about things? Hoo boy. They will come down on that person with all the fury of the scholarly axehound. And they will have all of the citations to back themselves up.

One thing that I love about Truthwatchers though, is that even when they argue (which really isn't as often as I'm implying that it is), they're typically very calm and quiet. They do so with an eager politeness that I've never seen anywhere else. They genuinely want to hear what you think about the world, and why you think that way, and what you might think if presented with new evidence, which is a helpful trait to have. Because despite their endless quest for truth (or maybe because of it), no two Truthwatchers on Roshar can agree on what that truth is. Name a basic fundamental fact about the world and every Truthwatcher you talk to will have different strongly held opinion about how it's actually neither basic, nor fundamental, nor even a fact.

This can be frustrating if you let yourself be pulled into a long conversation or debate, but at least they're usually friendly when they do it.

#SayTheWords (Jan. 24, 2024)

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

First more extreme example (because it is the easy one) if I was to make 1000 kg of antimatter, it would react with the surrounding matter, and release 1.8x10^20 Joules of energy. More than enough to crack the earth.

A question worth considering - can you make antimatter with investiture or do you need anti-investiture for that?

15 minutes ago, heliovox said:

Part of my goal in using flourine as an example is that I think it would be relatively easy to do by accident. Flouride is *really* common (it is in a bunch of food, among other things, as a pretty common component of many types of salt.

It does not stretch the imagination too much that someone trying to figure out chemistry for the first time (something real world humans started doing ~3000 years ago, easily in a time period that could match RoW roshar) might mess up and make flourine while trying to make *salt*.

Really? They started experimenting with fluorine and they made TONS of it just to start a day? Yeah, I don't see it at all.

And not, that wouldn't happen - intent matters. You won't Soulcast something by accident into a thing you don't even know exists.

24 minutes ago, heliovox said:

I didn't actually think it would set the atmosphere on fire, exactly, but it certainly would look like that, part of the problem with flourine is that it is both a gas and *wildly* flammable, so it would both be catching on fire and moving in all directions really quickly.

I don't know chemistry that much, nor do I know properties of fluorine. But it's not flamable, it's highly reactive elemet that may cause fire or explosion when reacting. On its own it is not flammable: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/npgd0289.html

16 minutes ago, heliovox said:

I almost certainly should have been clearer on this, but there were legitimate scientists that thought the first nuclear bomb would set the atmosphere on fire.

I am very aware of it, not on fire but into a self-sustainable nitrogen fusion, which was deemed impossible even considering the most extreme assumptions.

Spoiler

image.png.b2c88c0045c23cbd743c5e4b100e3b5b.png

Returned · February 14

14 hours ago, heliovox said:

But from a 'justifying why two major powers have legitimate political differences that would drive a cold war type scenario' I could really see this being a thing.

And in a high energy, surgebinding, oath-intensive culture, I think authoritarian control would probably be both more effective and easier to justify than it is in a system where those things are not true.

I certainly don't think authoritarianism is a great, or even necessarily useful reaction to many or most scenarios, but I do think there is an... at least more reasonable circumstance where an authoritarian government could make a reasonable argument in its own favor if it is relatively easy for any random person to just suddenly have a nuke (or worse) when it is possible for a government to have a near perfect 'nuke detector' and also a way of enforcing the nuke bearer to attach itself *to* said government in the form of pretty aggressively binding oaths (that could, for instance, take the nuke away if the oaths are broken).

On Roshar, at least, the number of ways to access this power decrease quickly if you lock people out of the 'oaths for power' system.

I think Honor in particular is sort of a perfect representation of this.

Honor's *promise* is access to unbelievable power *as long as you follow the rules*.

Sounds pretty authoritarian to me.

In the abstract we can justify pretty much anything, and authoritarian governments always make an argument for why they should exist. So do all governments, for that matter, but authoritarian governments are a special case because their authority is ultimately tautological to their claimed justifications (authoritarianism by nature doesn't need to convince anyone of anything).

But my main point is that the only non-arbitrary justification for authoritarian governance advanced in this thread is the assumption that it will be effective in controlling magic users. If we're going to assume effectiveness then it doesn't really matter what else we are describing because the success is baked in from the start, and so there isn't really much to discuss. An open array of anarcho-syndicalist unions focused on mutually assured destruction and individual utilitarianism seems to me like it would have similar goals regarding preventing mass destruction as would an authoritarian government, though very different approaches and problems. But assuming that the logic of wanting the planet where they all live to not blow up is enough to solve the problems and therefore that the specifics of their approach don't matter, then the case is just as strong for that system as for the authoritarians. I'm not suggesting that this is true for you in particular, but in my observation most people presume that a hypothetical authoritarian government will be supremely effective, as in 1984, but that that presumption generally doesn't have much behind it.

I would even go so far as to argue that authoritarian regimes are specifically ineffective in this dimension because we've seen them try and fail at the very task we've set. How successful was Honor in getting people to behave in prescribed ways, and how consequential were departures from those behaviors? And as for the Oaths being reliable in keeping people from engaging in mass destruction, tell that to Natanatan or the Recreance. Even keeping people nominally within boundaries seems like too much to ask, empirically speaking. See Testament or Malata. Perhaps the spontaneous and hard-to-predict nature of individuals developing Surgebinding abilities would be a problem that an authoritarian government are particularly ill-suited to address.

I'll bow out soon as I don't want to distract the thread too much from what I think is your main interest in starting it, which is to discuss the theoretical physics implications of Investiture (specifically Surges) amplifying threats. I just wanted to pipe in about the scale and nature of the threats perhaps not relating so much to specifics about organizing systems to oppose those threats. Organizations can fail for organizational reasons, but when they're made of humans they tend to fail for human reasons-- it's hard for a problem to be its own solution. Even an enlightened authoritarian government seems to me likely to fail at preventing these threats, and an unenlightened one would also fail and would suck quite a bit along the way.

Edited February 14 by Returned

heliovox · February 14

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

I may not fully comprehend the Richter scale, but doing quick google search and using this for reference, a magnitude 11 earthquake (and no, magnitude 11 earthquake is not enough to destroy the entire planet) releases 7.9e+20 J of energy, the Fat Man bomb released 8.8e+13 J of energy, so you actually need 9 million fat mans for that. That's 54 million kilograms of plutonium.

The equation that calculates for the energy released by an earthquake is: Log E = 11.8 + 1.5 M.

Annoyingly, I apparently dropped a term when calculating this, as I wrote it into the equation as Log E = 4.4 + 1.5 M, so your numbers are right.

This makes using plutonium to destroy the planet much harder, so I withdraw that position. Definitely still works on a city size scale, definitely doesn't at a planet size scale.

This also means my anti-matter equations are wrong, I will attempt to fix them below.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

A city that committed a crime? Every single citizen of that city committed the same crime that is punishable by death and destruction of property? No.

People who were otherwise fairly upright in the real world have convinced themselves of such things in the past. It was usually quite tribal, and might not jibe with what the spren thinks, but I don't think it is wildly improbable.

Tecumseh Sherman is the best example of this I can think of. He hated almost all of the actions he took during the civil war, but thought they were necessary to *decrease* the possible number of deaths. That is definitely more of a windrunner motivation than a skybreaker, but the evidence is that Sherman *cared* a lot and was quite broken by the end of the civil war, he probably could have found a spren.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

Radiant orders don't work like that. You can't lie to Truthwatchers, or twist the truth - their entire order is focused on finding the Truth. You don't marginalize one order because you don't like it. Not to mention that every Radiant no matter the order can make their own decision and oppose your type of the government, for various reasons. In the recent #SaytheWords video about Willshapers it is said: "If a king is treating their people cruelly, forcing them to act or live in a certain way, well sometimes Willshapers destroy things too." You won't marginalize them, you'll become a target of Willshapers.

Edgedancers don't just cry over harmed, they ACT! They help them, they work for them, they try to make their living better. Lift does that herself. If you're causing misery to people, Edgedancers won't turn a blind eye to that. What did Lift do when Nale was hunting Radiants in Tashikk? Did she ignore that? Walk past that? No, she tried to stop Nale and his acolytes, she faced him and fought him for Stamp's sake.

Windrunners protect those who cannot protect themselves - which means the citizens of your authoritarian government who exploits and harms its population because they can't protect themselves from that.

Reveal hidden contents

Dan Wells

Sixth Epoch, Year 31, Palahashes 5.6.1.

Truthwatchers.

They call them Truthwatchers, but I think that's only because truth-seekers and discoverers and enthusiastic declarers is too long. But that's really what they do. Truthwatchers want to know the answers to things, and then they go out and find the answers to things, and then they go out and share the answers to things. And if they think that someone, especially someone in power, like a ruler or ardent, is hiding or misrepresenting the truth about things? Hoo boy. They will come down on that person with all the fury of the scholarly axehound. And they will have all of the citations to back themselves up.

One thing that I love about Truthwatchers though, is that even when they argue (which really isn't as often as I'm implying that it is), they're typically very calm and quiet. They do so with an eager politeness that I've never seen anywhere else. They genuinely want to hear what you think about the world, and why you think that way, and what you might think if presented with new evidence, which is a helpful trait to have. Because despite their endless quest for truth (or maybe because of it), no two Truthwatchers on Roshar can agree on what that truth is. Name a basic fundamental fact about the world and every Truthwatcher you talk to will have different strongly held opinion about how it's actually neither basic, nor fundamental, nor even a fact.

This can be frustrating if you let yourself be pulled into a long conversation or debate, but at least they're usually friendly when they do it.

#SayTheWords (Jan. 24, 2024)

I don't think a tyrant would *have* to lie.

Authoritarianism *usually* means abuse, but doesn't always. France-Albert Benet was *probably* actually well intentioned.

This absolutely cuts both ways, Anarchism doesn't automatically descend into chaos (Makhnovschina).

If Dalinar (or possibly Taln, some other stuff would have to happen there) is the autocrat, for example (and it could be someone else, but Dalinar is the most likely, at some point he gets convinced that the only way to keep roshar safe is top down power, and almost all of the orders trust Dalinar, then most of these other problems go away.

Some bad things happen, but the intention that causes those bad things is generally for the good of people. Dalinar isn't treating people cruelly, but sometimes some of Sadeas' soldiers die because they gave their loyalty to a bad master.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

A question worth considering - can you make antimatter with investiture or do you need anti-investiture for that?

I actually think this is likely, and said so at the top. I just think making anti-investiture is also a *little* bit too easy.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

Really? They started experimenting with fluorine and they made TONS of it just to start a day? Yeah, I don't see it at all.

And not, that wouldn't happen - intent matters. You won't Soulcast something by accident into a thing you don't even know exists.

The Jasnah example works for this. She tried to make strawberry jam and made.... something else, because she didn't know what strawberry jam was. Blind soulcasting is possible, it might be harder, but that is what I am talking about.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

I don't know chemistry that much, nor do I know properties of fluorine. But it's not flamable, it's highly reactive elemet that may cause fire or explosion when reacting. On its own it is not flammable: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/npgd0289.html

It is flammable in contact with.... effectively any other substance. Flourine is a strong oxidizer, to the extent that it can rip electrons off oxygen, which is where the word oxidizer comes from. Ripping the electrons off stuff is what sets it on fire. Saying that it is not flammable by itself is saying 'flourine doesn't burst into flame if everything else is flourine'.

1 hour ago, Returned said:

I would even go so far as to argue that authoritarian regimes are specifically ineffective in this dimension because we've seen them try and fail at the very task we've set. How successful was Honor in getting people to behave in prescribed ways, and how significant were departures from those behaviors? And as for the Oaths being reliable in keeping people from engaging in mass destruction, tell that to Natanatan or the Recreance. Even keeping people nominally within boundaries seems like too much to ask, empirically speaking. See Testament or Malata.

I don't want to underweight this at all and very much accept your suggestion that authoritarianism would not fulfill the goals I am describing.

I am very much not saying authoritarianism is good, or even that it necessarily accomplishes its goals.

Possibly the opposite.

I am very much suggesting that some of this stuff could terrify people (what happened to Ashyn is still having effects) and terrified people are much easier to convince to accept authoritarian governance if it makes them feel safe (see, for instance the TSA in the US, that almost everyone involved has described as 'security theatre'.

Updated anti-matter equations:

If I was to make 8000 kg of antimatter, it would react with the surrounding matter, and release 1.44x10^21 Joules of energy. More than enough to crack the earth.

We damp this to account for cosmere protections, and just... make 16,000 kg instead.

((8000 kg + 8000 kg)*9*10^16)) <- for 8000 kg of antimatter and 8000 kg of normal matter.

Edited February 14 by heliovox

Returned · February 14

1 hour ago, heliovox said:

I am very much suggesting that some of this stuff could terrify people (what happened to Ashyn is still having effects) and terrified people are much easier to convince to accept authoritarian governance if it makes them feel safe (see, for instance the TSA in the US, that almost everyone involved has described as 'security theatre'.

Ah, I think I'm getting your meaning now. The dangers of Surgebinding are not a moral or practical argument favoring authoritarianism, but rather a circumstance which would make people more accepting of such a government out of fear and a hope/belief that it would be able to protect them from the potential threat. Or even demand one! On that I definitely agree; people turn towards that type of government over much, much less.

Duxredux · February 15

The governmental philosophy aspects check out I think, particularly after listening to some of the #saythewords videos. As they are written by a contemporary of the Knights Radiant, they may be a representative example of the general sentiment that may be felt by the unoathed observing the Knights Radiant. The Lightweavers and Elsecallers in particular are purported to have no distinct moral boundaries on their progression of Ideals, though by definition you can't have a Knight Radiant go rogue by themselves, their spren must also be in agreement.

The political development of Roshar will be really unusual because you have the historical precedence of the destruction of Ashyn, the dying ravings of Honor, the Recreance, oaths made by Bondsmiths and Shards, and a world at war. Political alliances between Shadesmar and the physical realm don't have to result in the Nahel bond, but there have been not a few kings who have gained access to the Surges. Add in naturally acquired Blade, Plate, and squires and you have things like the development of Shallan's Unseen Court as the wife of a Highprince which makes sense but is a disturbing precedence. Add in Elhokar as king of Alethkar swearing fealty to the king of Urithiru and I suspect we have an arrangement of Knights Radiant in political power that the Heralds and ancient Radiants tried very hard to avoid as the Watchers on the Rim asking for all to come and train at Urithiru. Makes you wonder why the Stormfather sent Dalinar those visions as someone who went on to basically claim divine mandate of authority.

On a related note, with the development of powers and political authority, even if they eventually restore the minds and core personality of the Heralds, there may be significant ramifications that they have lost Jezrien. First his will when he broke in Braize and left the burden to Taln, then his mind when he was lying in a drunken stupor while the Coalition of Monarchs was formed, then his soul. The Herald of Kings who trained political leadership and likely engineered the Epoch Kingdoms is lost to Roshar, and in the back five of SA the remaining Heralds may keenly feel his absence as the political climate develops.

As for power creep, yes, I do think that ridiculously powerful individuals will sway the political climate. We had that one guy on Scadrial who ran for office on the platform that he was a Coppercloud and so couldn't be affected by emotional Allomancy. We have plenty of examples of calamities across the Cosmere. Give ordinary people the powers of divinity without the mind or scope of a deity and then add in politics? Yikes.

Conservation of Energy with investiture and authoritarianism?

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