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For the past few years, Universalis has gone through many different stages, many debates, and lots of developed canon. But through the whole process, we haven't really had a direction. Development has been haphazard and sporadic, though it often causes conflict with the desires of others, and little is accomplished. To combat this issue, I (and several other members) believe that there should be some sort of manifesto, some definitive, written out guidelines which will define the project and provide a point for compromises and resolution.
The only way that we can do this is to get input from everyone involved. We need to decide what the goal of the project is, what people care about, and what they intend to do with their nations, so as to develop an idea for the purpose of Universalis, hopefully to resolve potential conflicts of interest. It's obvious that this planet is for personal nations, and it's also a world-building project. Some people care more about one aspect than the other, but both are important to everyone. Everything your personal nations do is interconnected with the rest of the planet. There will need to be compromises, but that is the goal of this manifesto. What we need to define is the limits of personalization vs collaboration. Because without some form of collaboration and coherence, we might as well each make our own planets.
So, to begin, I thought it would be a great idea to start with some broad, overall questions about your opinions on the Universalis project. This will assist in creating the final "documentation" which anyone will be able to contribute to. Feel free to propose alternative approaches or new important questions.
Respond to any or all of the questions below, and start a discussion:
What, in your personal opinion, is, or should be, the goal of Universalis?: What should Universalis focus on? What direction should we take? Include information similar to what technology we should have, or other nuances that we've never explicitly defined as canon. What should be coherent across the planet, that everyone should agree on (coastlines, climate, elevation, etc)?
What are your personal goals for your nation(s)?: This is where you discuss what is important to you about the project. Is your nation supposed to be a utopia? Why do you think this is important? Did you make the nation with climate, or other aspects in mind?
What is important to you about the project and what you've done so far?: What are you proud of having done and what do you really like about your nations or the project in general?
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What, in your personal opinion, is, or should be, the goal of Universalis?
To create an alternate Earth; to make a world that feels very realistic, just like the nations on Earth, while maintaining a creative aspect to it. World building is not as fun if we can't be creative here and there; you don't know if certain things can or can't happen. Another ultimate goal that imo is overlooked by a large degree is, to create a theme for Universalis. Without a theme, the world feels rather empty. An example of a theme for Earth would be: Global hunger issues, war on terrorism, new information age, space exploration, innovations in technology, and a growing understanding of our universe.
What are your personal goals for your nation(s)?
My main goal for Dotruga is to create a safe, intelligent population with comfortable standards of living. This isn't canon yet, but I would like to establish Dotruga as one of the leaders in Space exploration/innovations. My affinity for astronomy is strong so I would like to represent that through my nation as sort of a pride, idk.
What is important to you about the project and what you've done so far? Aside from personal stuff, I really find it important to create a coherent world that is reasonable and fun to look at. When it comes to realism, being really precise takes a lot of work and knowledge, so we can sacrifice some ambiguity for some quick canon.
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What, in your personal opinion, is, or should be, the goal of Universalis? [...]
I think Universalis should mostly focus on our countries, how they are politically, their history, and all the details such as infrastructure networks, production etc. that people want to describe. Well, some people are also interested in linguistics and climate, and I don't think it hurts the project they focus on that if they want. I just find the design-your-own-country (thinking out all the economic details, planning the cities, the transport systems, thinking up some interesting history etc.) the most interesting part. I think technology equivalent to Earthly around 2030 suits the project well, it leaves some options open to use the imagination a bit about future tech while not going so far that we'll probably have no clue about it. I can kind of sense the climate discussion is inevitable, so my comment on that is I think realism in the project is a good thing, but I think it's too late to push any climate model upon people. For myself I didn't pay that much attention to researching what kind of climate I'd have before drawing Blaist Blaland and now the country's position and shape is a rather hard thing to change (which I'm also not really interested in at this point), so I'm not opting for a perfectly realistic climate. I also think it's unlikely any of us has the knowledge to make a very accurate climate model so while I can only appreciate using your knowledge to design something realistic, I wouldn't want the climate models to be pushed upon people. If you by coherent you simply mean everyone come to agree on how the climate, coastlines, elevation, etc. is, I agree that's a goal, it would be an odd project if someone disputed the coastline of Kallisto and had a different definition of it than vh. But I think vh has the last say in how Kallisto's coastline should be.
What are your personal goals for your nation(s)? [...]
First to Tuto: Remember this is a forum for astronomy software, so most people here probably has some interest in it (including me). :P Not that I have any problem with your nation being around the top of astro research.
My goal for my nations are a bit different:
Blaist Blaland isn't really supposed to be an utopia (some people would say socialism is unrealistic and in that case just consider it a utopia - that's not really the discussion), but a kind of ideal, well-functioning country based on my ideas, with focus on e.g. science. A kind of society I still imagine to be possible in the real world. I'd like to write an interesting history for it with some hopefully humorous stuff buried (social justice wars,...). I made it with a climate in mind that was mainly forests, plains, lakelands, grasslands, and planning for large parts of it to be covered in agriculture, and I've generally tried to shape it a bit to some of my earlier country fiction - e.g. implementing my largest city drawing as capital and basing it on language I made long ago.
Red Rainbow is a bit similar, but totalitarian, oriented towards military, and here the climate isn't as important to me, large parts may be desert, although I've also had ideas for the northeast to be forested and possibly cold due to elevation.
What is important to you about the project and what you've done so far? [...]
I don't know what to pick out specifically, one thing I spent a long time on was the anthem of Blaist Blaland, which was an important thing to me as this could communicate a lot of values and details from your society combined with some music from the country. The city drawing might be a bit cheaty to pick but that's also a thing I think is important, and something I'd like to be a part of the "main" fictive country project I work on. Having spent a lot of time drawing the borders, terrain, regions and some historical areas' borders now, which I'm rather satisfied with the look of (plus some of it being in the anthem video), I also consider these rather important. And in general I guess those are some of the things I like about the project, that you can start working on pretty much any detail about your country when you feel like it. Another day I might write some laws or add in some more details on the economy or draw the major monorail lines connecting all the cities. I like to do stuff like that.
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<FihanoLesteriok> Bla do you want to start figuring out how to write a constitution
<FihanoLesteriok>I kinda want to do that but since I don't anticipate many people participating, abandoning universalis sounds so much easier
I think we should continue in this topic. I never really felt like it was necessary to make a 'constitution' because I think the project worked fine for a long time until the recent climate issues. I feel a bit like it's an attempt to make some formal, broad rules that can then be applied to make my climate invalid or something like that. With that in mind here are some suggestions:
1: We have the final say in decisions about our own countries.
2: As contributors to the project, some of our values are realism, [...].
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we need to settle this silly climate debate once and for all. I propose a switch to a 5-belt climate model (this means speeding up the rotation of Universalis). This will provide a coherent picture of Blaland with everything else as well as making many places that were previously destined to be scorching deserts into forests and even rainforests, while dealing with the tradeoff that some places near the equator will become miserable, sweltering places.
3-belt model:
(http://i.gyazo.com/1bd6c4ab6977629f4966ff82a36dfbac.png)
5-belt model:
(http://i.gyazo.com/b76fd6ac7ce59db5e55b30d13e9499ca.png)
Personally I like the 5-belt model better and would vote for it in a poll.
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i prefer three belt tbh because if i want to do anything with weather things in Solea and the serkr and stuff i understand normal earth weather a lot better than the nuances that would be involved in a 5 belt pattern which would make cyclones and anticyclones act probably quite different and take on different structures and paths.
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more curve and less big loopy paths. the issue with the 5-belt model though is that it may mean that the dry parts are extremely dry compared to earth's fuzzier arid regions
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I don't have a problem with the idea of a 5 belt model as such, but what rotation period would be necessary for that and what would the effects be on for example tidal waves?
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more curve and less big loopy paths. the issue with the 5-belt model though is that it may mean that the dry parts are extremely dry compared to earth's fuzzier arid regions
yes but what is the nature of a cyclone? i don't know for certain, but i feel like frontal storms would merge more into a frontless "cell" like tropical cyclones (similar to the blobby storms on the gas giants) - and if not, they'd have a tendency to act more and look more like those
storms could also be smaller, but all of this is just speculation, i don't know how they would act
they might instead be more interconnected across bands causing the arid regions to instead of being more defined, more fuzzy... though probably not
idk about the storm paths, i don't think there would be much curvature, most things would stay in the band they started with, which would mean cyclones would persist and travel in a roughly straight line , and band-switching, if it occurs, would be... ? i don't even know
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@bla roughly neptunian or uranian rotation speeds, probably a bit longer would be acceptable too
and tides aren't affected by rotation speed at all
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How would this affect Dotrugan climate? I'm assuming it would be more humid in the southern parts judging by the purple bands idk im not a climatologist u boners
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that's exactly what it means
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neptune appears to have 3 cells (assuming a "tropical" band, of course, where the Great Dark Spot is located)
(http://media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/95/4295-004-DCEDDBB3.jpg)
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fiah that seems really fucking fast and also jupiter has a shitload of cells so why would we need a time that short
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well, we can assume that it rounds up to the next odd number of hadley cells per hemisphere as earth's theoretical number of jets should be 2.26, so I assume it safe to only change it enough to get a ratio of about 3.3, spawning five unstable jets, and instability is a blessing in this case
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http://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/2qjye3/atmospheric_circulation_on_planets_different_than/
According to this we'd have to have 3 hour days.
i looked at the paper itself and i determined it's a ratio of about 4 (6 hour days) to get 5 cells, and ratio of 8 (3 hour days) to get 7
idk what that guy did with his table
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Even if we switched to 5 belts, would you still expect me to use your climate models or whatever for determining Blaist Blaland's climate or would you accept what I decide it to be?
I'm not really a fan of the very short days it would mean either. I also wonder how elongated the planet would be at the equator and the effects it would have on geologic activity/history if we consider realism very important (e.g. how did the planet keep such a high rotation speed? Especially if it has a large moon). I just mean, if the 5 belts are there to make some climates more realistic you probably don't want it if it causes a lot of other unrealistic problems but there's a lot of things to think through.
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i'll just make darvincia an enormous ice cap then
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i'll just make darvincia an enormous ice cap then
I'm sure we already discussed this when you set Sande Sitei population to 92 million, etc. Threatening with making something only so that it puts other people off and serves to reinforce some point, that's for sure not going to help solving anything. You see, there's nobody in the project who's really trying to design things just to annoy you. You don't need to try doing that to prove your point.
This is why I don't think we need so extremely well-defined rules and such for the project. I find it odd anyone here would really show so much distrust that they'd think others here would design something just to annoy them. Other than Darvince for the sole sake of trying to enforce a dilemma between his rules or something he makes up because he knows nobody wants it. Could we please stay at a level above this?
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yeah it'll be a taiga then
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i wanna lock the coastlines
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I just think they're terribly ugly and boring, especially when combined with non-straight lines like natural coastlines. It seems inconsistent.
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I just think they're terribly ugly and boring, especially when combined with non-straight lines like natural coastlines. It seems inconsistent.
If you feel like making a point you can just make it instead of assuming something I wrote 3 years ago in an entirely different situation that I may not even agree with anymore will apply to something you don't even bother to elaborate on here.
Fiah already said it's not an important discussion, so why continue it?
(20:13:15)<Valenceta>it is a semantics discussion yes because i'm bored and feel like arguing something
If this place really has to be an argument clinic, here's something:
oh god don't do this we're going to have a five year fight over it for no damn reason
...right?
Here's what I said on irc:
(20:12:22)(20:12:22)<BlaBla44>Isn't it pretty pointless to discuss whether it's 'consistent' that way? If it's not a perfectly realistic world, why does it even matter if realism said a forest should be in a place where we decided there should be a forest? It sounds like a semantics discussion to me. I could see the point if you meant you wanted a perfectly realistic world and it's then inconsistent if someone does something unrealistic, but the other way around, I don't see why it matters
I didn't say it's always pointless to discuss consistency, but that in the example here consistency wasn't really relevant imo. So much for trying to bring up that 3 year old quote.
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oop i forgot what i meant by that oh well
but what I did mean by that was that our main concerns back then were realism and consistency, which didn't seem to have deterioriated over these past years until our levels of knowledge in areas began to diverge and it just sort of all fell apart with that. i agree with the pointlessness of declaring something 'inconsistent' if it happens to line up with what should be there rather than what we want to be there, because we may have no idea if it is realistic or not, and more importantly, we didn't decide to make it realistic. it is, however, inconsistent if there is one person who has been appointed to calculate and evaluate to determine the climates of universalis in the most realistic way they know how while there is one other person who among all those in the world has their climates set in stone (without thinking about realistic consequences) and gets fired up when the person who is making the carefully calculated climates posts something about it which includes the areas where they refuse to compromise or change in
also, why are you concerned if darvincia is an ice cap/tundra? that's only going to affect myself
also fiah get on irc
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if there is one person who has been appointed to calculate and evaluate to determine the climates of universalis in the most realistic way they know how while there is one other person who among all those in the world has their climates set in stone (without thinking about realistic consequences) and gets fired up when the person who is making the carefully calculated climates posts something about it which includes the areas where they refuse to compromise or change in
I never agreed to appoint anyone to do that. Also the thing I'm against isn't someone doing climate sims - it is that you're trying to force me to use your climate sims and I don't agree with that at all. I'd like a certain climate for my country and even if I position it in a place where it gets something close to it, what if you one day find this improvement to the climate sim, and simulate it all over. Then I have to change a lot or accept a climate I don't want. I absolutely don't want this. I don't know why you misrepresent my position to mean I'm against you simulating climate, because I only think it's good if you try to make some realistic climate for your nations. I just don't want to use your climate simulator and I don't think it'll ever become perfect.
also, why are you concerned if darvincia is an ice cap/tundra? that's only going to affect myself
I'm not very concerned with it. I'm just pointing out you're only trashing the discussion every time you say you want an icecap because someone else doesn't want to have the climate you think they should, and when you say your population is 92 million in some city because others had some numbers you thought were too high. You're not really going to achieve anything constructive with that.
And no I don't buy that it's just what you want. Your hypocricy is blatantly obvious from all your statements about wanting people to use a realistic climate. Claiming anything else is plain simply dishonest so don't bother acting.
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i'm not acting i'm just a genuine shitty excuse of a human being
also http://universesandbox.com/forum/index.php/topic,6014.msg149532.html#msg149532 this is where i got the thing that you don't want people to do climate simulations, nue never said he was going to force it on anyone at any point
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also http://universesandbox.com/forum/index.php/topic,6014.msg149532.html#msg149532 this is where i got the thing that you don't want people to do climate simulations, nue never said he was going to force it on anyone at any point
And I never said I didn't want him to do climate sims at any point, I just said his sim didn't fit with my plans to make it clear I wasn't going to use it. The next post basically told me to move the country though...
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guys are you serious this is a fucking collaboration. make a plan, do some editing, instead of like doing nothing and just "blablablablalblabal bich kolokia is an orge swamp"
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my sides
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guys are you serious this is a fucking collaboration. make a plan, do some editing, instead of like doing nothing and just "blablablablalblabal bich kolokia is an orge swamp"
I would probably work more on editing if people didn't threaten with quitting the project or turn their nations into icecaps because they're not satisfied with what I'm making. That has been putting me off lately and I feel like it's necessary to take some time to respond to it.
I could work on e.g. more details about the Social Justice Wars or maybe a transport map or population density map for Blaist Blaland but all that makes little sense if people are demanding it to be moved or have another climate unless I want a lot of work to potentially go to waste. So until the discussions are over and I have the impression people acknowledge what I've made it's very limited what I'm going to work on. I hope you see.
<Tuto>bla i think you should give in a bit
But---I thought you wanted editing instead of discussion? How do you think I should give in a bit concretely? I suppose making a 100 by 100 km square desert won't work.
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My concern is that if I, or someone else, wants to do some sort of climate simulation, or something with the weather, what affect does it have on the nations around you, and an "immersive" world, if some nation in the middle of a desert is a temperate utopia? How can I factor that into my climate and weather, as I am east of you and affected by wet Blaland? And from a collaborative world standpoint, how does that affect the history of the Blagua subcontinent? If there's some gradient, you'll have to agree on it with Hellpotatoe and Darvince, and if they don't agree with you, a climate changing right at the borders seems kind of silly. So you'd probably have to go with starting the gradient inside your borders, giving you a less ideal, significantly smaller area of optimal climate. How would a living human or saguan react to that in the world of Universalis and what implications would it have on the past and present history?
And I never said I didn't want him to do climate sims at any point
Well, you kind of did
well, I didn't put Blaland there back then and didn't expect people to suddenly want to make a climate model to enforce upon everyone some years later. I'd rather move Blaland out or just leave the project than having you decide my country should be a desert but I don't think it's hard to see what a mess it would be to move it and tbh I don't think it's really my problem.
The implication there being "I didn't expect a somewhat realistic, inteconnected, climate model in a community interested in science, and its not my problem that I want to be different"
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My concern is that if I, or someone else, wants to do some sort of climate simulation, or something with the weather, what affect does it have on the nations around you, and an "immersive" world, if some nation in the middle of a desert is a temperate utopia? How can I factor that into my climate and weather, as I am east of you and affected by wet Blaland?
You could do it however you like? You could base your model on Blaland having the wet climate or ignore it and act like it's a desert if you prefer. As long as you don't come and tell me what the climate inside Blaist Blaland is.
And from a collaborative world standpoint, how does that affect the history of the Blagua subcontinent?
I have no idea? Is that really a problem any more than how a desert would affect the history? I'll probably have some problems with the history I've written so far if it's all desert.
If there's some gradient, you'll have to agree on it with Hellpotatoe and Darvince, and if they don't agree with you, a climate changing right at the borders seems kind of silly.
Has Hellpotatoe ever agreed to use your climate thing? Just wondering as I haven't seen it and same with several of the other more inactive people.
There's a sea between me and Darvince, that should give enough of a 'gradient' if necessary, as I only really care about the climate at land. The mountain areas also aren't very important so Hellpotatoe shouldn't be a problem either. The gradient can be entirely inside Blaland if necessary as the climate around the borders isn't very important.
So you'd probably have to go with starting the gradient inside your borders, giving you a less ideal, significantly smaller area of optimal climate.
Well all those words really depend on how big the gradient but depending on the size obviously it's no problem.
How would a living human or saguan react to that in the world of Universalis and what implications would it have on the past and present history?
I think you already asked this above
And I never said I didn't want him to do climate sims at any point
Well, you kind of did
well, I didn't put Blaland there back then and didn't expect people to suddenly want to make a climate model to enforce upon everyone some years later. I'd rather move Blaland out or just leave the project than having you decide my country should be a desert but I don't think it's hard to see what a mess it would be to move it and tbh I don't think it's really my problem.
The implication there being "I didn't expect a somewhat realistic, inteconnected, climate model in a community interested in science, and its not my problem that I want to be different"
That's not what I said. I said I didn't want the climate model enforced upon people, as in if people don't want to adopt it for their countries, their countries won't have the climate the model says.
The science thing is this realism argument all over. I already commented on that.
"It's not my problem I want to be different" well it really does seem like there wasn't any problems until some people decided to do a lot of work on climate and created this problem. I liked the project for as long as I could focus on the economy, polittics, history and for the past few years assumed nobody would complain about the settings I had chosen or now also the lakes/borders I had drawn for the country. Since I don't plan to study climate or geology maybe I should just hire some scientists to design the whole nation for me...
I do wonder how you'd deal with the fact that the climate simulation isn't perfect though. If you find a flaw or make an improvement, suddenly the climates in a lot of areas will change and as you point out, that will affect history etc. That would be really impractical if people have done a lot of work on that (maybe you can see why I don't want to adopt it?).
Interesting point about how people inside Universalis would see Blaland's magical raining climate. Maybe the Blaists will start worshiping a rain god!
Nice one coming from the one who usually likes to tell others not to mock me. I wonder how people in Universalis see your humans who happened to exist there by magic. Because nobody here bothered to study biology, the origin of life and evolution... let's see how far people get into designing their history and human-related technology before a few guys here start to do an evolution simulation or design alien species and demand everybody else to use that... and see how excited the rest are to throw away their work... cheers
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The difference here is that we can create an evolutionary history that is plausible and leads to humans evolving on Universalis. In the current situation Blaland is in we cannot create a climactic situation that is plausible and leads to it getting lots of rain short of playing god and handwaving the problem of rain by magically inducing it.
The same could be said about picking a chain of events throughout billions of years of history on a planet with an entirely different climate/geology history and other factors that just happen to end up forming creatures identical to humans, with their enormous amount of details. Anyone who reads it will immediately know this is only set up so we didn't have to bother thinking about how life might actually evolve in another scenario. It's about as unlikely as saying all the water molecules by their random motion just happen to form more rain over Blaist Blaland. Picking the chain of events leading to humans is no different from picking the chain of events leading the water molecules to rain. Your story just relies on the fact that you find it legitimate to pick the chain of events in evolution, but not for water molecules. It doesn't make it more plausible.
I'm also wondering what the stance is of Matty, Naru and the others who haven't commented. Is it ok to force people to use someone's climate model and have to adapt their history etc. if the climate model is improved?
I feel like I can't really work on many things in the project as long as I don't know if everyone is demanding that I use another climate (and maybe edit the landscape too now with the lakes being an issue as well).
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Your story just relies on the fact that you find it legitimate to pick the chain of events in evolution, but not for water molecules. It doesn't make it more plausible.
Well, if the correct chain of events did occur, the laws of physics do allow for human evolution, apparently. But the laws of physics do not necessarily allow for a complete denial of general climate knowledge in an Earth-like atmosphere. It can probably be assumed "water molecules" act the same way as on Earth. Human evolution and realistic climate are entirely different arguments because we've come to a consensus that humans inhabit Univeralis. Everyone generally agrees on that and accepts it. The climate debate is still open.
I do wonder how you'd deal with the fact that the climate simulation isn't perfect though. If you find a flaw or make an improvement, suddenly the climates in a lot of areas will change and as you point out, that will affect history etc. That would be really impractical if people have done a lot of work on that (maybe you can see why I don't want to adopt it?).
You're going into a science-field major and I think you know well enough that's not how science works in the 21st century. Unless you fully expect that quantum mechanics and Newton's laws of gravity and such are going to be overturned in the next hundred years. If we find or construct a model that follows the general laws and concepts of an Earth-like system for the atmosphere, any updates will likely only refine the initial findings. It shouldn't be expected to completely overturn previous understanding of the Universalian climate. Saelunavvk might have been considered to be a temperate place with 40 inches of rain a year on average, but the change in climatology with new findings might update it to a more accurate 45 or 43.2 inches, well within the year to year range (which could very easily range from 30 to 50 inches or more). So no, I don't think updating the model would be a problem.
You could do it however you like? You could base your model on Blaland having the wet climate or ignore it and act like it's a desert if you prefer. As long as you don't come and tell me what the climate inside Blaist Blaland is.
Has Hellpotatoe ever agreed to use your climate thing? Just wondering as I haven't seen it and same with several of the other more inactive people.
This is not an argument you can just shirk off as your universal right because I'm encroaching upon you. That's not your position; this isn't a religious argument. We both have issues we need to solve because we're at a disagreement. It's not solely my duty to warp my world around your firmly grounded position. It hasn't been decided whether Blaland should be allowed to have its own climate independent from the rest of the world, and we haven't discussed thoroughly the implications it would have on the project. And frankly, threatening to leave the project (http://universesandbox.com/forum/index.php/topic,6014.msg149536.html#msg149536) (as quoted earlier) over such a disagreement is childish, whether you still stand by that point or not.
I can understand where you are coming from in that you don't want the work you've done to be undone, but this is a collaborative project and other people's interests are going to affect both mine and your existing and future work.
As an aside:
There's a sea between me and Darvince
Darvincia proper, yes, but Blaland borders the saguan nations, which are also his.
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As for the climate model I don't really too interested in it but I guess I don't care too much either but I don't want to be restricted by it and I'm not really. But I think we should take a big picture view.
Either we use realistic climate or we don't. Or maybe there's a third option. In any case, just list all our options. For every option, some people will be upset and others will be happy. All we need to do is to figure out a method of approximating the satisfaction of everyone with the result of each option. Then take the max and execute that option.
#utilons
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You said you don't mind the development of human civilization on Universalis paralleling that of Earth because "it's realistic from what we know. Something like it has happened once at the very least." (http://universesandbox.com/forum/index.php/topic,6014.msg144418.html#msg144418)
No - let me show the quote:
universalis already has a sort of setting/storyline which parallels the development of human civilization on earth
I don't mind this because it's realistic from what we know. Something like it has happened once at the very least. We just don't know what the probability of it happening is exactly, but it turned out something like it wasn't totally unrealistic to happen in the universe. If we square that and multiply by 1/10,000,000, it could easily not be the case.
(If that was a comment on the statistics part and not just linked to your reason for not to wanting the change)
Kip says parallels the development of human civilization on Earth - that's not the same as development of human civilization on Universalis! In fact I argued against human civ on Universalis long ago exactly because I think it's implausible but Tuto and others wanted humans and now that discussion is over and I can live with that now.
We are picking a chain of events through thousands of years of history on a planet with an entirely different climate/geology history and other factors that just happen to end up forming societies and ideologies similar (but compared to the number of possibilities, I'd say almost identical) to those on Earth.
What's the difference between the evolution of Earth-like societies and the evolution of humans?
Nothing that's relevant here.
I don't like it that Blaland's current geographic location gives it tons of rain because it's not realistic from what we know. Nothing like that has happened before. There's not a convincing explanation behind it, be it theory or simply pointing to our planet and showing that it can happen.
If you can cherry pick a chain of events leading to humans and similar societies you can also cherry pick random molecular events that happen to form rain. You can't say you need magic for one but not the other. Both are extraordinarily unlikely if you didn't involve choice (and your opinion on where that's legitimate) in the statistics. That was my point with it.
Well, if the correct chain of events did occur, the laws of physics do allow for human evolution, apparently. But the laws of physics do not necessarily allow for a complete denial of general climate knowledge in an Earth-like atmosphere. It can probably be assumed "water molecules" act the same way as on Earth. Human evolution and realistic climate are entirely different arguments because we've come to a consensus that humans inhabit Univeralis. Everyone generally agrees on that and accepts it. The climate debate is still open.
The place where you throw away all the statistics in the evolution analogy that you use to argue against the rain is shown in bold. Neither is more magic than the other.
You're going into a science-field major and I think you know well enough that's not how science works in the 21st century. Unless you fully expect that quantum mechanics and Newton's laws of gravity and such are going to be overturned in the next hundred years. If we find or construct a model that follows the general laws and concepts of an Earth-like system for the atmosphere, any updates will likely only refine the initial findings. It shouldn't be expected to completely overturn previous understanding of the Universalian climate. Saelunavvk might have been considered to be a temperate place with 40 inches of rain a year on average, but the change in climatology with new findings might update it to a more accurate 45 or 43.2 inches, well within the year to year range (which could very easily range from 30 to 50 inches or more). So no, I don't think updating the model would be a problem.
I can expect your models to have some flaws that may turn out to be significant without expecting revolutions in physics. Because of code typos, because you're not a phd meterologist yet (I'm sure you're very good of your age but still) or whatever reasons. I don't have as much confidence in your model as I would have in a lot of other scientific areas.
This is not an argument you can just shirk off as your universal right because I'm encroaching upon you. That's not your position; this isn't a religious argument. We both have issues we need to solve because we're at a disagreement.
Well this irc chat from 4 days ago gave me the impression we weren't at a disagreement anymore
(23:29:45)<Kalassak>the whole coherence and realism thing
(23:29:46)<Valenceta>but they're believable
(23:29:51)<Kalassak>tbh doesn't mean anything to me anymore
(23:30:05)<Valenceta>yeah kalassak so the moment somebody argues the opposite point you totally collapse your side
(23:30:15)<Darvince>and before i'm told i'm a shitty human being i already know that
(23:30:16)<Kalassak>like why should i care that bla's climate is realistic
(23:30:20)<Kalassak>it doesn't affect me
(23:30:29)<stowaway>you can have fiction that has realistic elements
(23:30:29)<Kalassak>just my personal want that the climate of blaland meshes with the prest of the planet
(23:30:31)<Kalassak>that's selfish
It's not solely my duty to warp my world around your firmly grounded position.
So far I've offered to move the continent, I've offered to at least consider 5 belts, I've offered gradients inside my borders, I've also been open to having areas that are more dry than forest in many places, and more like savanna maybe. None of it has been enough for the firm demands to impose a climate model, so I wouldn't throw that rock.
It hasn't been decided whether Blaland should be allowed to have its own climate independent from the rest of the world, and we haven't discussed thoroughly the implications it would have on the project.
I just suggested the consequences: You can basically choose whatever consequences you like in your simulation which you apply to the rest of the world. This is outside my interest.
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The place where you throw away all the statistics in the evolution analogy that you use to argue against the rain is shown in bold. Neither is more magic than the other.
I can expect your models to have some flaws that may turn out to be significant without expecting revolutions in physics.
That's not how the laws of physics work... Generally if something's changed (for example, something that would allow blaland to be wetter) it applies consistently, and not in just one geographical region. All places similar to blaland would also be affected, if we want coherence. This is an issue of incoherence, not the laws of physics being different. It's like you copy pasted the laws of physics in your area, and that area only.
Also, I don't have to be the one making the models. There are other global climate models, developed by Actual ProfessionalsTM, available which we might be able to use and modify.
because you're not a phd meterologist yet
I don't intend to get a PhD at the moment, so that's not relevant, as you like to say.
This is a lot like the economic/population discussion where people used Earthly guidelines to determine their facts because they aren't actual economists and then claiming "unless you're an economist you can't prove me wrong", which is really not ideal and we can work around that as a group. We don't have to be experts, and we don't have to make everything be magical, we can approximate realism.
Well this irc chat from 4 days ago gave me the impression we weren't at a disagreement anymore
I didn't feel like arguing and I felt pretty apathetic about most things then.
This is outside my interest.
So because you, personally, don't care about it, means we should change the way the project is run as a collaborative entity? If it's outside your interest, then you wouldn't care that much about Blaland's climate. Yes, you can be concerned about the climate in your land without being interested in the climate simulation, I get that.
So far I've offered to move the continent, I've offered to at least consider 5 belts, I've offered gradients inside my borders, I've also been open to having areas that are more dry than forest in many places, and more like savanna maybe.
I have been open to moving your land, though no one has taken any initiative to attempt this (I figured you or Fiah might try this, because it's your land, and Fiah is geology man), brushing it off as implausible, so maybe I'll try it later. A savanna solution might work for some regions of Blaland. 5 belts is quite improbable in my opinion.
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Alright this is just a suggestion but what if instead of
"Blaland is ALL desert" and "Blaland is ALL wet
We had like a big river system thing, formed from rain from Blagua. This way Blaland remains a desert but still has a lot of water to sustain its large population, like a bigger Egypt. And the central sea/lake thing in Blaland would probably be like the centre of Blaland in everything.
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That's not how the laws of physics work... Generally if something's changed (for example, something that would allow blaland to be wetter) it applies consistently, and not in just one geographical region. All places similar to blaland would also be affected, if we want coherence. This is an issue of incoherence, not the laws of physics being different. It's like you copy pasted the laws of physics in your area, and that area only.
None of what I said is based on the fundamental laws of physics being actually different. Climate depends on thermodynamics which are laws based on the fact that there are a lot of molecules and therefore applying statistical arguments. On the other hand you use choice when you choose this chain of events where the atmospheric composition over billions of years, along with the continent movements and interactions with all the other species, turn out to just happen to give rise to humans here with all their footprints of their Earthly evolutionary history. If you can choose something like that you can also choose molecular motions that don't at all tend to maximize entropy. In either case you just choose a setting that happens to be so extraordinarily unlikely it's implausible.
Also, I don't have to be the one making the models. There are other global climate models, developed by Actual ProfessionalsTM, available which we might be able to use and modify.
We might yes, but with our limited knowledge I'm not confident in how realistic it is to apply to our planet. And I think those models should be used before demanding others to change their climate at the very least.
I don't intend to get a PhD at the moment, so that's not relevant, as you like to say.
Whether you intend to get a phd isn't actually relevant to what I said. My point is you probably know a lot about climate but in the end I just don't have confidence you can be sure there won't be some big errors in the climate models.
This is a lot like the economic/population discussion where people used Earthly guidelines to determine their facts because they aren't actual economists and then claiming "unless you're an economist you can't prove me wrong", which is really not ideal and we can work around that as a group. We don't have to be experts, and we don't have to make everything be magical, we can approximate realism.
Now you're dwelling back to other issues. The issue with magic I've already responded to, if you like to call my climate magic I'll call your humans magic. I'm perfectly aware you're trying too approximate realism but as I already pointed out, that has serious consequences for all of our history work if some of the approximations turned out to be wrong later and it all has to be changed.
So because you, personally, don't care about it, means we should change the way the project is run as a collaborative entity? If it's outside your interest, then you wouldn't care that much about Blaland's climate. Yes, you can be concerned about the climate in your land without being interested in the climate simulation, I get that.
What?? I'm basically saying I don't care, mostly because I'm so fed up with all the climate obsessions, so you can basically do whatever you want outside Blaist Blaland. How is me basically granting you the freedom to do whatever you like with the climate outside my borders changing the way the project is run? This was a response to your comments about the world outside Blaist Blaland, not Blaland itself. Would you prefer if I bothered to care about it and demanded certain climate for the rest of the world, or said I demand that you take into account my climate in your simulation? It seems like you will be upset no matter what I say.
I have been open to moving your land, though no one has taken any initiative to attempt this (I figured you or Fiah might try this, because it's your land, and Fiah is geology man), brushing it off as implausible, so maybe I'll try it later. A savanna solution might work for some regions of Blaland. 5 belts is quite improbable in my opinion.
I'm still open to moving it and I'll also consider redrawing the borders, if people will stop the mockery and stop making demands and threats. I just think the world will become more boring if it becomes another isolated island civilization and I'm curious what would happen around the borders with the other countries. But proposals to move it and showing the result of the climate sim are welcome. However if I move it and it turns out the climate sim had some errors I really don't think you can expect me to redo a lot of things again.
Alright this is just a suggestion but what if instead of
"Blaland is ALL desert" and "Blaland is ALL wet
We had like a big river system thing, formed from rain from Blagua. This way Blaland remains a desert but still has a lot of water to sustain its large population, like a bigger Egypt. And the central sea/lake thing in Blaland would probably be like the centre of Blaland in everything.
This seems like an interesting idea. But the look of the landscape is rather important to me. I just find deserts very bland and want something more green as a setting for most of the country.
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This seems like an interesting idea. But the look of the landscape is rather important to me. I just find deserts very bland and want something more green as a setting for most of the country.
Deserts (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/LakeEyreSaltCrust.JPG) are (http://www.landscape-photo.net/albums/userpics/10001/Desert-scenery-Near-Moab-Utah.jpg) very (http://withoutbaggage.com/msgs/69/69095/wide_69204_V96.jpg) much (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-umNqM-3I2Y/S-x30CxV4OI/AAAAAAAAJlw/UDBqeaIpQws/s1600/desert+landscape.JPG) not (http://newingtonartleague.org/wp-content/flagallery/finishedpieces/arizona-rainstorm-in-desert.jpg) boring (http://www.namibia-tours-safaris.com/assets/images/the-green-desert-1-lrg.jpg) or (http://www.ghulmil.com/wp-content/uploads/green-desert-plants-hd-wallpaper.jpg) bland (http://icons.wunderground.com/data/wximagenew/p/photoandy/634.jpg) places (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/9c/80/b1/9c80b145ab5fbb59e6ea4ffab0b6b556.jpg) to be (http://www.haunsgowest.com/wp-content/uploads/2004/07/08-Petrified-Forest-National-Park-00749.jpg) or (http://www.georgesteinmetz.com/image_collections/empty-quarter/main/STNMTZ_20020201_02.JPG) travel (http://www.jamesborrell.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IMG_0236edit1-w960-h600.jpg) through (http://www.ducks.org/media/Utah/Utah%20Projects/_images/Marshes%20of%20Great%20Salt%20Lake.jpg).
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Deserts (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/LakeEyreSaltCrust.JPG) are (http://www.landscape-photo.net/albums/userpics/10001/Desert-scenery-Near-Moab-Utah.jpg) very (http://withoutbaggage.com/msgs/69/69095/wide_69204_V96.jpg) much (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-umNqM-3I2Y/S-x30CxV4OI/AAAAAAAAJlw/UDBqeaIpQws/s1600/desert+landscape.JPG) not (http://newingtonartleague.org/wp-content/flagallery/finishedpieces/arizona-rainstorm-in-desert.jpg) boring (http://www.namibia-tours-safaris.com/assets/images/the-green-desert-1-lrg.jpg) or (http://www.ghulmil.com/wp-content/uploads/green-desert-plants-hd-wallpaper.jpg) bland (http://icons.wunderground.com/data/wximagenew/p/photoandy/634.jpg) places (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/9c/80/b1/9c80b145ab5fbb59e6ea4ffab0b6b556.jpg) to be (http://www.haunsgowest.com/wp-content/uploads/2004/07/08-Petrified-Forest-National-Park-00749.jpg) or (http://www.georgesteinmetz.com/image_collections/empty-quarter/main/STNMTZ_20020201_02.JPG) travel (http://www.jamesborrell.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IMG_0236edit1-w960-h600.jpg) through (http://www.ducks.org/media/Utah/Utah%20Projects/_images/Marshes%20of%20Great%20Salt%20Lake.jpg).
That's subjective. I wouldn't want most of that for my country.
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Of course it's subjective, it's whether or not you find something beautiful. I'm saying that deserts are not very bland (which seems to imply that they are all the same), as those images showcase the diversity and possible beauty of desert landscapes. If you went for realism with the landscape, the last image would be what much of Blaland would look like, with more development on top of it.
(http://www.namibia-tours-safaris.com/assets/images/the-green-desert-1-lrg.jpg)
This one in particular, would be what many areas of Blaland, especially along the rivers and near the lakes, would potentially look like. Not counting any oases that would arise due to the underground geology.
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Deserts just don't fit with my plans and the kind of landscape I'd like. There's no reason to turn this into a discussion about whether deserts are beautiful/desireable/whatever or not.
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None of what I said is based on the fundamental laws of physics being actually different. Climate depends on thermodynamics which are laws based on the fact that there are a lot of molecules and therefore applying statistical arguments. On the other hand you use choice when you choose this chain of events where the atmospheric composition over billions of years, along with the continent movements and interactions with all the other species, turn out to just happen to give rise to humans here with all their footprints of their Earthly evolutionary history. If you can choose something like that you can also choose molecular motions that don't at all tend to maximize entropy. In either case you just choose a setting that happens to be so extraordinarily unlikely it's implausible.
Uhhh... no... ? As much as I believe and apply determinism to things, that isn't how that would work. It doesn't work on the same scale. Just because a small change in initial state will effect the weather 2 days, 500 years, etc down the line, doesn't mean it would cause a large area to, over time, accumulate a lot more rain. It would instead average out to be the optimal heat exchange for the existing planet, maybe allowing a desert a lot of rain for... a week or a month. But not enough to actually affect the climate of a location.
The atmosphere doesn't "evolve" like life does, branching out and killing off the bad branches, where it takes generations to take in input like, something being a bad idea actually killing individuals off or some trait being actually beneficial. The atmosphere constantly gets input and is "molded" from the most new parameters (location and temperature and moisture of land and other parcels of air and rotation), which generally stay the same or similar, and reacts extremely quickly to these changing factors, on the order of hours, days, and for climate maybe years or sometimes a few decades.
To demonstrate: you could replace the Earth's atmosphere with an atmosphere with no motion whatsoever, relative to say... the solar system. The Earth's spin and friction between the atmosphere would quickly (I'd say in about two or three days) get the atmospheric motion up to 70 or 80% of its 4-billion-year-old speed on Earth right now. Very rapidly, on the order of hours, things would begin to spin, even before the atmosphere looks like it's going the right speed, due to orography and the Coriolis effect. Surface temperatures would, on the order of hours as well, begin to form thunderstorms and the first low pressure systems... In exactly the same places they would on Earth normally. In a few years, no statistics could determine the difference between a "real" Earth atmosphere and a randomly generated initial state atmosphere (with a similar composition and mass) within realistic parameters. Of course, lows and highs and rainfall would be in different locations (at the same time as a different initial state), but they would all tend toward the same characteristics - their sum - the climate.
In this way, a Universalian atmosphere would very quickly adapt, no matter how it started, to the optimal Universalian atmosphere for the same surface characteristics (elevation, moisture, vegetation, etc). This would mean that past continental factors (which we do not have) really do not have that much effect on the general circulation of Universalis as opposed to say, the evolution of humans. So in fact, the climate of Universalis is more certain, and has less room for "magic" than humans. The speed of rotation and size of the planet already determine that there are three cells per hemisphere and would abide by the general characteristics of an atmosphere with three cells for a given rotational period. Done and done.
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maybe allowing a desert a lot of rain for... a week or a month.
december 10-24 1967 never forget
** THIS IS NOT AN ARGUMENT POST DO NOT REPLY TO IT AS SUCH **
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Uhhh... no... ? As much as I believe and apply determinism to things, that isn't how that would work. It doesn't work on the same scale. Just because a small change in initial state will effect the weather 2 days, 500 years, etc down the line, doesn't mean it would cause a large area to, over time, accumulate a lot more rain. It would instead average out to be the optimal heat exchange for the existing planet, maybe allowing a desert a lot of rain for... a week or a month. But not enough to actually affect the climate of a location. [...]
You missed the point completely. This has zero to do with a small change in initial state. All the details about climate you're describing are really irrelevant here, as they're applications of thermodynamics which use statistical arguments. It assumes the molecules behave the way that's the most probable and throw away a lot of information to describe it in terms of temperature, pressure, etc., but the molecules don't do that perfectly. And if you can cherry pick an extraordinarily unlikely evolutionary situation, you can do the same for molecules. "Done and done."
What are you bringing up determinism here by the way?
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basically what you're telling me is, you can pick a certain initial state (just one, here's the determinism) - which would allow for a continual sustained rain over blaland which completely disregards the actual properties of universalis and general atmospheric dynamics. that's basically life. life in the atmosphere that can sustain itself. like a tropical cyclone is a closed cell of low pressure that can sustain itself given the right input and keep itself from spinning down. except over blaland. in an area tending toward the formation of high pressure systems. since it's a big blob of land. at around 20-30 deg S. and that's how thermodynamics tends to work in an atmosphere.
k
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i think he's saying there exists a initial state where, if you run the equations, weather in blaland will be very anomalous. there's nothing wrong with that. it's not about how themo tends to run -- it's about how it runs in one particular instance
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basically what you're telling me is, you can pick a certain initial state (just one, here's the determinism) - which would allow for a continual sustained rain over blaland
No - no - no...... Just no, I never said that.
For example thermodynamics says if you put two separate gases together, they tend to mix and gain the same temperature, because a well-mixed state with a uniform temperature is far more probable than them staying separate with different temperatures, there are many more possible uniform, mixed states than unmixed states, but the laws of physics don't fundamentally prevent them from staying separate, it's just very unlikely. The same goes for water molecules over Blaist Blaland.
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yes in 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000ogre0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003% of runs that will be true - for maybe a year or so.
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that actually helps to explain your point but-
universalis is not a closed system, so there's this thing called advection that is caused by insolation - which causes parcels of air to move and circulate. the circulation of your non-diffusing water-saturated parcel is dictated by the entire planet's circulation flow which is not beneficial to having it sit above blaland indefinitely
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the universe of universalis is a closed system though so you can still pick an initial state which works
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basically what you're telling me is, you can pick a certain initial state (just one, here's the determinism) - which would allow for a continual sustained rain over blaland
No - no - no...... Just no, I never said that.
For example thermodynamics says if you put two separate gases together, they tend to mix and gain the same temperature, because a well-mixed state with a uniform temperature is far more probable than them staying separate with different temperatures, there are many more possible uniform, mixed states than unmixed states, but the laws of physics don't fundamentally prevent them from staying separate, it's just very unlikely. The same goes for water molecules over Blaist Blaland.
What???
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the universe of universalis is a closed system though so you can still pick an initial state which works
not if we want it in this universe - aka we are straying into complete fantasy now
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think of it like this tuto -- if you flip a hundred coins, some will land heads up and some heads down. very rarely, you'll get all 100 heads and no tails.
now imagine each hundred-flips as a universe. even though in most universes, blaland is a desert, in some, blaland is waterful
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the universe of universalis is a closed system though so you can still pick an initial state which works
not if we want it in this universe - aka we are straying into complete fantasy now
but if you can pick an initial state which generates lifeforms so similar to humans then you can also pick an initial state that generates whatever weather you want. at least i think that's the argument
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yes in some universes if we are dealing with numbers larger than graham's number
humans are vastly, vastly more likely than blaland's climate anomalously being cold and forested for thousands of years, because humans have not only already arisen once - but the factors to create them (a creature with the body structure of an ape, a savanna with harsh competition which favors continual growth of intelligence, language development, hairlessness) are all trivially easy compared to the enormous towers of exponents required to make a wind wall requires for blaland's wet existence
aka we should just move blaland
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so. . . If Blaland can have water over it just because it /must/ exist in some Universe out of the infinite possibilities. . . am I allowed to pick an initial state that ends up with the Aeridani becoming pure desert?
Yes.
Let's also make Kolokia an ogre swamp plzz.
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blablablablalblabal bich kolokia is an orge swamp
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no it is truly a swamp of ogres
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oh so now we're back to making fun of people again instead of arguing. . .
well I had to bring a little fun to this argument. It was too serious
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i feel like we're trashing the thread we should let bla give a sensible reply
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that actually helps to explain your point but-
universalis is not a closed system, so there's this thing called advection that is caused by insolation - which causes parcels of air to move and circulate. the circulation of your non-diffusing water-saturated parcel is dictated by the entire planet's circulation flow which is not beneficial to having it sit above blaland indefinitely
As vh points out again this will be flawed as long as you continue to use determinism based on macroscopic terms which are, at the fundamental level, not determined from the concepts you use. Pressure, temperature, ... can never hold the information necessary to describe the motion of 1023 molecules.
so. . . If Blaland can have water over it just because it /must/ exist in some Universe out of the infinite possibilities. . . am I allowed to pick an initial state that ends up with the Aeridani becoming pure desert?
Is this the icecap thing again? Not that I really care. But remember this came out of the discussion where you called water over Blaland magic and said human life wasn't. Now I showed how it wasn't magic but just very improbable just like the human life. So there's no need to create a new argument.
I like how I even offered to reconsider Blaland's location in the reply but now this was fully ignored.
yes in some universes if we are dealing with numbers larger than graham's number
humans are vastly, vastly more likely than blaland's climate anomalously being cold and forested for thousands of years, because humans have not only already arisen once - but the factors to create them (a creature with the body structure of an ape, a savanna with harsh competition which favors continual growth of intelligence, language development, hairlessness) are all trivially easy compared to the enormous towers of exponents required to make a wind wall requires for blaland's wet existence
Humans are more than just those simple body structures as concepts, they consist of more than 1023 molecules and are the product of interactions with all the other life forms, their body is marked by vestiges from when they were oceanic and every period of their history, the continental plate and climate history of Earth. To recreate all that on our planet I think that too would require somthing like Graham's number - and certainly if we include all the other Earthly life forms.
Anyway... Should we just get on with considering the possibility of moving Blaist Blaland, now that I offered it...
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i would be fine with that
As vh points out again this will be flawed as long as you continue to use determinism based on macroscopic terms which are, at the fundamental level, not determined from the concepts you use. Pressure, temperature, ... can never hold the information necessary to describe the motion of 1023 molecules.
this doesn't make any sense, i'm not using these in a scalar sense, i'm using them in a gridded sense, with whatever resolution you'd like for accuracy. the likelyhood that blaland's weather would act in such a way as you had previously proposed is, quite literally more preposterous than a second human evolution because of the fact that it would require your diffusion to act in the right direction (for optimal wetness) most of the time, for thousands of years, with each iteration stacking further and further exponential improbabilities. it's very possible that your blob of moist air would move out of blaland on the order of weeks, unless the water was diffusing backwards into the newly advected air with >95% of the water preserved and not lost. the only solution would be to capture another blob of moist air (from where?), also stacking exponentially each time this occurs. especially since its effects would range world-wide and would not be a neat gradient. so if you could explain this?
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remember when we actually had sentient ponies
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Yet where do we stop when things become very improbable? Are you going to use the same reasoning to justify the fact that your lakes aren't realistic? Am I going to be allowed to use this argument to justify Aeridani having sentient ponies?
We both know we haven't written any rules for that, but please just admit that your magic-argument was wrong. The difference between the two is you consider it legitimate to cherry pick in the biology statistics but not the climate (and geology ones). I don't see any way we can simply define "where to stop" because there are vast areas where we could always be more realistic and the project just can't contain all of them. Me saying climate isn't inherently less valid than you saying biology. There's nobody who's actively trying to design an as unrealistic nation as possible so it's not necessary to bring in all the sparkly ponies.
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The statistical improbabilities your example entails are huge. Evolving humans in comparison, is easy. (see my above post also i didn't feel like editing it) Once you evolve a sexually reproducing animal, you're probably going to keep producing sexual animals. That's how sexual reproduction works. Once you evolve humans, which only need a certain range of macroscopic conditions, and some random probabilistic dna mutations, it's easy to keep them, because that's how life works. human sexes a human, get another human. as long as conditions stay favorable. The probabilities after a certain trait in a living organism is randomly developed and selected for decrease significantly once it has been introduced into the gene pool.
Weather is not life. It would be constantly trying to equalize, and a "sustainable" wet blaland would require statistical improbabilities indefinitely stacking as long as you want to keep blaland wetter than it would be realistically. Having one <time period>, let's say "generation" of wet blaland does not make the next generation easier.
So yes, they're both improbable. But one is far more improbable than the other. Probabilities for the former act more like 1-1/x (where x > 0) while the latter acts more like x^2 where x = time.
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So yes, they're both improbable. But one is far more improbable than the other.
Humans aren't just some simple blobs defined only by concepts like "they have sexual organs" "they can respirate" etc. You ignore all the traits humans have from their past, when they were aquatic, etc., all the details in the eyes, how the lungs function, the liver, bladder, intestines, how their surfaces fold, the heart, etc. etc., all of this only happened because humans were surrounded by the exact conditions on Earth and all the other continually evolving species on Earth, and its evolving climate and geology. Yes, it's not impossible other conditions could just happen to lead to the exact same outcome while spawning many other Earthly life-forms, but it is cherry picking in its most extreme form. In either case the probabilities are going to be something like Graham's number and you can't just say one is magic and not the other.
You have a species of animal called the Rog. The Rogs can have many colors, such as green (grassland), yellow (desert), etc. The Rogs live in a desert. The Rogs that are yellow are more likely to survive eagles that prey above. But you want the Rogs that are green to dominate the desert, just as you want Blaland to remain a grassland. Even as the various factors (eagles) work against your grassland-coloured Rogs, you still want to cherry-pick a path that can lead to green Rogs dominating the desert.
Humans, on the other hand, were not selected by cherry-picking a specific path that leads them to survive. They were selected because they were the best adapted to surviving. Even if we cherry-picked a path, there is no doubt that that path was the best path to cherry-pick, making it legitimate.
That was the case on Earth. The reason we selected them on Universalis isn't based on anything like an evolution simulation running along with the planetary history though. It's basically because "humans are so much easier so let's not bother with that".
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i do think humans are more likely that this weather anomaly. though i'll make a longer post later
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skirt can probably do some mathemagic with fermi approximations and stuff
Humans aren't just some simple blobs defined only by concepts like "they have sexual organs" "they can respirate" etc. You ignore all the traits humans have from their past, when they were aquatic, etc., all the details in the eyes, how the lungs function, the liver, bladder, intestines, how their surfaces fold, the heart, etc. etc.
I don't ignore these intricacies, just like you used "et cetera" to refrain from listing a complete catalog, I didn't mention them because I figured semantics could get it across that I'm talking about all of the different things that evolved. Evolutionary traits compound. All they need is some "activation energy", that being, the right probabilistic changes to create them. They will resist change much better because they were evolved for a specific environment which will only continue to tweak them. This is fundamentally different from the changes of weather probabilistically not changing for optimum entropy... every single second. They're off by magnitudes, not factors.
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i do think humans are more likely that this weather anomaly. though i'll make a longer post later
I also do but I don't think either is within Graham's number-like order of magnitude, so I don't see how it's really relevant.
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That was the case on Earth. The reason we selected them on Universalis isn't based on anything like an evolution simulation running along with the planetary history though. It's basically because "humans are so much easier so let's not bother with that".
of course ignoring the fact that it is assumed that humans did evolve on Universalis, and that is the case on Universalis.
Ok then yes, humans are for convenience. Everyone can relate to humans, they know a lot about humans. If we tried to come up with a different species, it would either resemble something Earthly (say saguans), or be entirely unrealistic as there's no way we'd simulate a whole 4 billion years of reasonable evolution
and that is why the probabilities are disregarded in that specific case
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I say we stop bickering and move blaland more south to achieve optimal climates.
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I'll introduce a new point then: humans are for convenience. Everyone can relate to humans, they know a lot about humans. If we tried to come up with a different species, it would either resemble something Earthly (say saguans), or be entirely unrealistic as there's no way we'd simulate a whole 4 billion years of reasonable evolution
and that is why the probabilities are disregarded in that specific case
But this whole thing was a response to the magic thing so why introduce even more pointless discussion? I agree humans are more convenient and I don't even want it changed.
They're off by magnitudes, not factors.
I don't think magnitudes are really relevant to numbers on that scale. Neither is realistic at all, it's as simple as that, but neither is magic either.
I acknowledge that it might be different between Universalis and Earth, however the end result is different. The environments of Universalis and Earth are so similar that the end result of having humans is stable, because humans won't constantly be selected against by the environment.
The end result of Blaland's climate is not stable because it's constantly being selected against by the environment, and we have to keep selecting for the climate until infinity or we decide Blaland can revert to its natural state.
I don't really see how that's relevant either, the history of Universalis and Blaland's climate doesn't have to span until infinity and I never gave any specific period on how long it should have a certain climate or whatever, only designed how it was now. It doesn't make the biology case more probable either.
And this will be my last comment on the magic issue. I think neither is realistic and neither is magic. The end.
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no you don't need to constantly select for it. you only need to select for it once.
think of it as finding the coefficients to a million degree polynomial so that it passes through a million given points. each point is different -- the function, or weather, changes over time. but once you select the million coefficients that work, you never need to do it again.
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my question is, exactly what part of blaland is foresty? south part? all of it?
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my question is, exactly what part of blaland is foresty? south part? all of it?
The northern, northwestern and probably far southern parts were planned as forest. Also more scattered forests in the central and western areas, which are more dominated by plains, and the east coast being dominated more by flat grasslands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy0STux2mwQ
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no you don't need to constantly select for it. you only need to select for it once.
You need to constantly select for it, otherwise it will revert itself to a more stable climate, i.e. arid to desert.
no, hence my polynomial analogy
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<Valenceta>osmotischen2 your polynomial analogy states that we can find a way to select for it. Yes we can. We can find a way to select for Blaland's climate. I'm discussing something different. I'm saying that even though we can select for it, we need to make it so it is constantly selected even though the laws of nature dictate it shouldn't be.
<osmotischen2>no my polynomial analogy says we only need to select once
<Valenceta>we do
<osmotischen2>yes
<Valenceta>we need to select for it once
<Valenceta>but
<Valenceta>that means that
<Valenceta>we need to make it so it works against the laws of nature more and it will never stop
<Valenceta>it will always be working against a more stable state
<Valenceta>we can select humans to appear
<Valenceta>only once
<Valenceta>but once we do it doesn't need to work against becoming to a more stable state
<Valenceta>because it is in a stable state
<osmotischen2>well it'll be harder to select the initial state, but it's not like you have to actively work at something
<Valenceta>when you reach the end result
<Darvince>what does bla want southern blaland to look like
<Valenceta>you'll still have to keep working against the environment because otherwise you'll lose your state
<Valenceta>when you reach the end result for humans
<Valenceta>you don't need to keep working against the environment because it already is a stable state
<osmotischen2>well it'll be harder to select the initial state, but it's not like you have to actively work at something
<Valenceta>what do you mean by actively work at something
<Kalassafk>so you're saying you can find an initial state where the air over blaland doesn't move
<osmotischen2>"you'll still have to keep working against the environmen"
<Kalassafk>and the water over blaland doesn't move
<Valenceta>you still have to yes you do osmotischen2
<osmotischen2>hmm that might be a bit more challenging kalassafk
<Valenceta>you don't for humans
<Kalassafk>because that's not waht bla said
<osmotischen2>you don't have to actively work at something
<Kalassafk>yes osmotischen that would be next to impossible
<Darvince>we don't have to put anything where blaland used to be
<Valenceta>osmotischen2 you do have to actively work to keep it at that state
<Kalassafk>it would require changing the rest of the planet
<osmotischen2>imagine solving a polynomial
<Kalassafk>most likely
<osmotischen2>after you've solved it
<osmotischen2>you don't need a combustion engine
<osmotischen2>to keep it solved
<osmotischen2>it's done
<Valenceta>no
<Valenceta>we solve it yes
<Valenceta>but in the process of solving it
<Valenceta>we have to keep working against nature
<Valenceta>we don't have to keep working against nature for humans
<Valenceta>we can solve it
<Valenceta>but the difference is the events that transpire and the process we use
<osmotischen2>yeah that just makes finding the initial state a bit more work
<osmotischen2>there's nothing to it
<Valenceta>so then why can't i just do anything
<Valenceta>the world is desert for 3 minutes
<Valenceta>nobody is affected because i said so
<osmotischen2>holy shit
<osmotischen2>there's a showdown in warband
<osmotischen2>king harlus and king ragnar
<Valenceta>that's a hard to find initial state but we can find it and solve it
<Kalassafk>yes
<osmotischen2>given that i'm on ragnar's side
<Valenceta>universalis explodes.
<osmotischen2>but
<osmotischen2>he hates me
<Valenceta>it coalesces 3 seconds later.
<osmotischen2>so i'm rooting for harlus
<Kalassafk>skirt is thinking about the whole thing
<Valenceta>nobody is affected for some reason
<Kalassafk>not the processes that occur through it
<Valenceta>because i said so consciousness goes back to normal
<Valenceta>and life continues on
<Kalassafk>so of course you cna find an initial state for almost anything
<Valenceta>a hard to find initial state, no?
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<Valenceta>you can find an initial state for anything
<osmotischen2>i don't know who you're talking to
<Kalassafk>not necessarily
<Valenceta>you osmotischen2
<osmotischen2>well
<osmotischen2>there are some equations you can't solve for
<osmotischen2>and
<osmotischen2>some equations you can solve for
<osmotischen2>but have no reason to solve
<Kalassafk>you can't find an initial state where there's a 500 mph wind all around Earth for a hundred years due to only meteorological processes
<osmotischen2>unless you want universalis to explode like you want to
<osmotischen2>in which case
<osmotischen2>have fun
<Valenceta>osmotischen2 well which one can you put the universalis exploding into and why
<osmotischen2>because i'd rather play warband
<osmotischen2>what do you mean which one
<osmotischen2>wh
<osmotischen2>i'm confused
<Valenceta>you said some equations are solvable and some unsovlable
<osmotischen2>oh
<osmotischen2>x+1 = x+2
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blaland's current climate would be dominated by dry climates, desert mostly, yes, but the southern parts are forest in the current position. the east is also grasslands. the only problem is the lakes region, which has enough lakes that plants would have moisture from the ground soil.
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no you don't need to constantly select for it. you only need to select for it once.
think of it as finding the coefficients to a million degree polynomial so that it passes through a million given points. each point is different -- the function, or weather, changes over time. but once you select the million coefficients that work, you never need to do it again.
yes in a total view of it, but to show the probabilities involved, you can't just find an initial state where it happens once, you need to find one that sustains it. this is of course ignoring the fact that you'd have to find an initial state where the air over blaland is not only still or constantly replenished with water vapor, it would require the global circulation to be stable in a way that it would not normally tend to, which would require either a lot of input energy or the perfect, perfect, perfect intial state. if it was still and only required an initial point, you'd have no way to make the water vapor rain. and you'd also have to figure out how the air would never move out of the blaland area faster than it is replenished. i wouldn't know how to prove it but i would lean towards the initial state is not possible, instead requiring a constant energy input in the right places, and this would affect other regions of the planet in ways that i would not know.
blaland's current climate would be dominated by dry climates, desert mostly, yes, but the southern parts are forest in the current position. the east is also grasslands. the only problem is the lakes region, which has enough lakes that plants would have moisture from the ground soil.
yes i'm not sure about the lakes their formation and stuff would be peculiar as would their sustenance but otherwise this is pretty accurate