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Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!

It's launch day for Invisible Sun in the UK today, so without further ado ...

This is a comment thread for Q&A about the Merchant Princes/Empire Games series.

Ask me your questions via the comments below the huge honking cover image (it's a spoiler spacer!) and I'll try to answer them.

(Disclaimer: These books were written over a 19 year period, starting in mid-2002, and I do not remember every last aspect of the process ... or of the world-building, for I last re-read the original series in 2012, and I'm a pantser: there is no gigantic world book or wiki I can consult for details that slipped my memory).

Invisible Sun Cover

783 Comments

1:

Liked your book a lot. An excellent end to the series.

If it isn't too early, I noticed that starting around 50% of the way through the Kindle version, "New York" was often used when "New London" was clearly meant.

2:

I noticed the following little copy-editing glitch: "This looking-glass America resembled the GDR in so many tiny ways that it was felt more familiar than the home time line he’d just left." The word "was" doesn't belong there.

Also, it seems more likely to me that he would not think of it as "the GDR" but as "the DDR", but that is of course arguable.

3:

It ... depends. Remember the original settlement was Dutch, and named New Amsterdam? That predates the arrival of the English monarchy in North America in Time Line 3. The royal palace and facilities on Manhattan Island are referred to as New London, but outlying areas, not so much: and pay attention to whose viewpoint we're using -- if it's Rita's, of course she thinks in terms of "New York" (which is what it is in the time line she hails from).

4:

I have a question from just finishing up my Dark State re-read. There is a quote from Miriam about playing CIV for real in the MITI build up of the Commonwealth. Did you create any tech trees to get them from Steam power to Project Orion in a plausible 15 years?

5:

Yeah, I blame Microsoft goddamn Word (they broke the way change tracking shows insertions/deletions/changes a couple of years ago so you can't easily see what's going on). No, I do not check changes in LibreOffice or Apple Pages: Word is enough of a festering bug-heap as it is that I don't feel like allowing multiple weeks of eyeball-checking to be held hostage to someone else's attempt at being bug-compatible. But sometimes it makes the job of checking copy edits much harder, and as for the page proofs ... don't get me started.

Anyway, too late to fix it now.

6:

No.

But remember, the original plan for Project Orion, circa 1958, had it flying by the 1970s. It's a brute force technology, not a terrifically complicated one: the main resource bottleneck is simply having four or five tons of plutonium to burn just to get into orbit.

7:
> it seems more likely to me that he would not think of it as "the GDR" but as "the DDR"

Look at it this way: Kurt probably does think of it as die DDR (perhaps die ehemalige DDR if he's feeling particularly sentimental), but the English-speaking narrator who is relating his thoughts to us does not.

8:

Finally got a chance to dive in last night and loving it so far. I was a Laundry fan for a long while but Tor gave away the first Merchant Princes omnibus about the time this new trilogy started and I was hooked (parallel universes and magic portals are a weakness...speaking of which, that made the house in the last New Management book so wonderful too, I've dreamed about it a few times).

No real questions, just praise. Hoping for happy, or at least satisfying endings, for my favorite characters (Kurt especially, I find I dearly love).

Ok, one question...Elizabeth Hanover, at large in "modern" Berlin...she seems to be familiar with the concept of the kilometer, but there was no French Revolution in her timeline? Or was it just severely quashed?

9:

Well that was a day happily wasted invested in reading. Thanks!

Two burning questions:

  • Did Angie's hair change color every scene she was in? At first I thought it was a bug, but it was so consistent that I'm now wondering if it's an easter egg.
  • B. Is there a surreptitious Star Trek: The Next Generation reference to a famous episode in there? While I was reading I kept thinking "We are Locusts of Borg. Resistance is Futile!"

    I'm also in awe of how, on their very first space mission (on an Orion, no less), the Commonwealth astronauts were able to do improvise spacewalks to fix things, without rehearsing. They advanced quickly! I'm also impressed that someone with a surname of Wu could be a worldwalking astronaut in the Commonwealth. How does that worldwalking family thing work again? I obviously missed a turn somewhere.

    10:

    On a non-spoiler note, at the moment, Safari on my iPhone is refusing to open this site, claiming that the certificate expired 196 days ago and it could have been hacked. Presumably the problem's in the phone, because I'm not getting error messages on my laptop. Thoughts on how to fix it from the commentariat?

    11:

    she seems to be familiar with the concept of the kilometer

    ... Not so much: what she's familiar with is the concept of the distance to the destination on the sign.

    12:

    Kurt probably does think of it as die DDR (perhaps die ehemalige DDR if he's feeling particularly sentimental)

    I doubt that. Kurt has been living in an English-speaking nation and speaking English for many years now, so he probably thinks in English, mostly. However, when he knew the DDR it was "the DDR" to everyone he knew. GDR would just be a weird neologism that he almost never heard. (Even in the USA essentially no one, outside of a few govt officials, spoke of "the GDR" -- it was "East Germany").

    Even I, a native English speaker, think of that former nation mostly as "the DDR" (even though I pronounce the letters in my head as they are pronounced in English), because I lived in Germany (the BRD) in 1984 and it was "the DDR" to everyone I spoke to.

    13:

    Three cheers for a sane, competent POTUS! And boo for underlings who think that destabilising the government of a nuclear power is how to avoid a nuclear war.

    Random question: what did our timeline's Bruce Schneier think about the Empire Games afterword?

    14:

    The hair colour changes are a continuity error that didn't get picked up in edits.

    I have never watched ST:TNG, so there is no conscious reference there.

    Bear in mind that a lot of deets on how to do space walking/EVA has been published over the decades, and the Commonwealth has been stealthily buying Russian-made space suits to model their own on. In particular the "rehearse it in a swimming pool" trick was developed by Buzz Aldrin in 1966 for Gemini XII: part of why developments seem to take so long is because NASA (and Roscosmos) moved at a snail's pace after the 1970s. As it is, Chinese taikonauts have also conducted space walks: if you've got a viable space suit design and understand the basics it's apparently manageable.

    The Wu family showed up in "The Hidden Family", i.e. right back in the early days of the original series: I suddenly realized I'd lost track of them in the new trilogy so decided to pull at least one of them in.

    15:

    Should be fixed: a broken intermediate SSL certificate was at fault.

    16:

    what did our timeline's Bruce Schneier think about the Empire Games afterword?

    I did obtain permission first! (Not being totally daft, as I happen to know that Bruce knows my editors, too.)

    17:

    Well that makes sense! Also, bowing out of this thread because spoilers. Looking forward to reading all the comments as soon as I devour the book.

    18:

    While re-reading the previous books in the series, I noticed that there was a Supreme Court Justice Bork, which was a chilling detail.

    19:

    I was gonna ask where to start if I had not been caught up on this series but then thought to look back in the recent blog posts, and this one tells me where:

    Combined, the entire sequence runs to roughly a million words, making it my second longest work (after the Laundry Files/New Management series): the best entrypoint to the universe is the first omnibus edition (an edited re-issue of the first two books—they were originally a single novel that got cut in two by editorial command, and the omnibus reassembles them): The Bloodline Feud. Alternatively, you can jump straight into the second trilogy with Empire Games—it bears roughly the same relationship to the original books that Star Trek:TNG bears to the original Star Trek.

    Thanks, Past Charlie! :)

    Guess I should see if Tubby & Coo's can hook me up with Empire Games, Dark State, and Invisible Sun, since they are in my neighborhood. God I wish they'd re-open for browsing, they were such a good shop before the pandemic.

    20:

    General Ecker: I find your attempts to find an explanation for everything consistently make it look worse, Mr. Stross!

    ;)

    Great conclusion, though I am slightly disappointed Sonia Gomez didn't find a way to get herself shoved out of an airlock or something similar.

    21:

    Yeah, well, I still want Smith extradited to the Commonwealth, and hung for genocide and crimes against humanity. (Vivesection?)

    22:

    And NASA's budget keeps getting cut, because the GOP wants everything outsourced.

    23:

    T&C are happy to take orders and do kerbside drop-off, but Candice isn't comfortable hosting browsing -- she says the shop is only 600 square feet.

    24:

    It's not obvious (given how Tor paginated and bound it), but Invisible Sun runs to 150,000 words, and Empire Games and Dark State between them were only 210,000 words. If it had run any longer it'd have ended up needing to be turned into two books, and I was totally over it in 2017-2019 (due to all the Shit Happening that is explained in the afterword).

    25:

    Smith didn't give the order for the bombing at the end of the first series: that came down from the White-House-in-exile, i.e. President Rumsfeld. Who (word of god) is dead by the start of the new series (he'd have been 87, and as has been noted, being President tends to age people).

    26:

    True... but the vivisection? And then there's the one question no one, and since Smith was in charge AFAIK, he's responsible for never asking: can everyone in the Gruinmarket world-walk?

    27:

    Thanks for the reminder on the Wu family. I totally lost track of them obviously.

    The hair colour changes are a continuity error that didn't get picked up in edits.

    Let's call it an undocumented feature. Her hair alternates between blue, green, and (once) blue and green. Since IIRC it's a perfect alternation (different color every scene), why not dub it an easter egg for those paying attention?

    Going forward...you've got an interesting magical system here. By this I mean that the Subcellular handwavium that allows worldwalking also, per your explanation, automatically either generates or captures strange matter. Also, that strange matter does strange things with normal matter and probability. That looks like a system that, used in other contexts, would generate Anathem-like magic, via precise control of quantum decoherence and/or smaller-scale worldline splits. Just a thought.

    28:

    Angie's hair: gee, Charlie, why didn't you mention that in timeline 2, they've developed hair coloring that changes color, going through a rotation that lasts hours (as opposed to color-changing LEDs)?

    29:

    No way that would be legal in Panopticon US.

    30:

    In case you didn't know / want it fixed at least in the Kindle edition: page 267 / kindle loc 5218, the chapter heading "JUGGERNAUT, LOW EARTH ORBIT, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020" is incorrect. That chapter starts in TL3 and jaunts to TL1. None of it occurs in TL2.

    I think humanity doesn't have much hope of surviving the Hive's next attack.

    31:

    Just finished and very much enjoyed the book!

    No doubt too late to fix, but there are a few continuity errors. When Kurt first meets Miriam and they're talking, there's a passage "A cold flush of sweat chilled the small of his back. It had been decades since anyone addressed Kurt by that rank...". But Miriam hasn't in fact used his rank yet, and doesn't do so for a few more paragraphs. (A cut and paste error, I presume).

    Later in the story an airplane is taken from time line two to time line three. But of course a direct jaunt like that isn't possible, so there must have been a brief stop-over in time line one. That one's not fatal, there are probably multiple world-walkers on the plane, but it's odd that the double jaunt from two to one then to three is not mentioned, given how much detail is otherwise given on that particular transition.

    32:

    Overall, I really liked the book, but I did miss the absence of an epilogue to give the characters some closer. In particular, I'd been hoping for a British/French reaction perspective to Liz's speech (and the flyby).

    33:

    "But Miriam hasn't in fact used his rank yet, and doesn't do so for a few more paragraphs."

    I thought so too at first, but she in fact does several paragraphs before: "Perhaps we could discuss this over tea or coffee, Lieutenant".

    It's just that there's a bit of an unexpected gap between her saying that and his reaction.

    34:

    Ah, thank you dmd! I had missed that Miriam used the rank earlier, while Rita was still present.

    35:

    Enjoyed the book.

    One small inconsistency is present, I think. Somewhere in the first part of the book Miriam says:

    “They’re a planetary hegemonic power with a very aggressive foreign policy, a tendency to project their own worst intentions onto others, and a system that makes it really difficult to back down from a fight. Any leader who shows weakness hemorrhages support with the electorate, and the foreign affairs hierarchy is structured to systematically filter out doves and promote hawks”

    OTOH later in the book the president (who is not Hillary Clinton, but Iraq War veteran) is unusually level headed compared to the rest of the high level bureaucrats and politicians. Obviously, we needed a miracle to save both worlds... And sometimes humanity manages to walk away from the abyss (mid 1980s?). Still, her reactions, while very welcome, looked a bit out of place.

    Of course, Miriam could be jaded and wrong.

    36:

    I ended up ordering from Big River U.S. and U.K. - I bought the three omnibus editions as well as all three of the Empire Games trilogy.

    I think I already have most of them, but things are kind of a mess around here and I can't get too them (too much clutter, but discussing that will have to wait until after 300).

    I like the idea of the re-edited versions for Merchant Princes, and I went ahead and bought them all in the same format. I ordered "Invisible Sun" & "Dark State" from the U.K. and found the others through Big River marketplace sellers here in the U.S.

    Shipping & handling for the two U.K. books is twice the cost of all six books plus U.S. shipping for the other four.

    But hell ... it's only money and I'd only end up wasting it buying food or paying bills.

    37:

    As I began to read Invisible Sun, I also copyedited it in my head—that’s one idea of fun—and I had a few small problems I was sure you’d want to know about right away.

    • In the profile of Kurt Douglas, would it be better to say that East Germany reunited with the West? The term reunified has different connotations to me (a 68-year-old American technologist with a PhD in CS).
    • You later say that Angie Hagen is a childhood friend. Of whom?
    • You say that Patrick O’Neill is Rita’s supervisor? At what? Would “supervisor in the Unit” be better?
    • You list Dr. Julie Straker as a “Colleague” of Rita’s. Should this title be in lower case?
    • You call the Dauphin an “Heir” but Princess Elizabeth Hanover is merely an “heir”. Is this is on purpose?
    • You call Major Hulius Hjorth Brilliana’s brother-in-law before listing Brilliana. I found this confusing. Other, similar forward references also occur.
    • You describe both Elena Hjorth and Brilliana Hjorth as Huw’s wifes. If this is correct, perhaps it could be phrased less confusingly.
    • Is the sentence ending “black-uniformed wasps …” lacking a necessary period at the end? (Or is this just British style, like the space before the ellipsis?)
    • You refer to “corpuscular weapons”. I really wonder whether time line 3 would use that term from Latin, not Greek; I’d think that even the modern concept of atoms might have come over from time line 2. Then again, it’s your book.
    • Would Elizabeth recognize the word “battery”? Might time line 3 not have developed its own term over the years? And would she quickly understand that a “booster battery” and a “phone charger” are the same thing?

    And so on and so on and so on. I would have been a great copyeditor in just the right time line—but as I said above, it’s your book, not mine. Would you like more questions like these?

    38:

    Just being annoying, but an interesting short story might revolve around refurbishing the CSS Juggernaut for her new role as a permanent spaceborne deterrent. Fortunately, the series has an unreliable narrator, because a single-shot space battleship as a nuclear deterrent against the US (let alone the Hive) is maybe problematic? That being the case, statements about abandoning the ship somewhere are obviously fallacious. The Commonwealth space program is going to have a lot of fun figuring out how to keep the beast working. And therein lies a story, perhaps.

    39:

    Rita makes a definitely-improved Great Lorenzo to Elizabeth's John Joseph Bonforte. Just sayin'.

    40:

    Of course Elizabeth would recognize "battery". They have cars, and planes, and electricity in the French Empire.

    41:

    I was amused to find that a large part of the book takes place in the parts of Berlin I'm familiar with from living there a few years ago. (Saturn megastore ftw!)

    My inner aviation fanboy amused himself by trying to identify the aircraft in the air piracy scene. The airliner is only called an Airbus in the text, but the interior layout is described in enough detail to identify it as an A330. The escorting fighters are obviously not real planes, but most Commonwealth designs seem to be based on historical planes from our world via industrial espionage; the description sounds very much like an F-106 clone. I was hoping the Commonwealth might have put Arrows or F-108s into service, but neither of those is visibly area-ruled.

    42:

    The armament of Juggernaut is described as "Fifty kiloton nuke-pumped X-ray lasers, with dirtied-up eighty kiloton EMP mines as a whisky chaser." Plus the 200 megaton SLEDGEHAMMER bomb.

    I read a book on SDI lasers when I was a teenager, but I am a little bit fuzzy on what this means. I would assume that the gun fires the X-ray laser module a reasonable distance from the ship before it detonates, because only the rear is sufficiently shielded. At such distance, the bomb explodes and somehow that energy is focused into a laser, pointed at an Alien target? How does that work? I'd assume most of the energy has to be wasted.

    In any case, the mental scene I should be picturing is many bombs not terribly far from the ship, detonating and firing lasers*, in order to foil any possible interception of what must be ages for a bomb to deorbit to target?

    *Off the visible spectrum, though if you made the movie they wouldn't be

    43:

    My copy arrived this afternoon from the Book Suppository (now a tentacle of $EVIL_RIVER, unfortunately)

    It's a great read. I will have to re-read it in context now, of course :-)

    A copy-reading glitch I found on page 14 of the paperback - it refers to "Cesium 131" remaining from the fallout of the US nuking the Gruinmarket - this isotope does not exist. - Iodine 131 has a half-life of about 8 days - Cesium 137 has a half-life of 30 years, so I think you meant Cesium 137

    44:

    Carefully not reading the comments until I've finished the book.

    Apart from a few typos, I've spotted one minor point. When Angie is flying to Germany, it says "crossed five time zones". But in August Boston is on UTC-4 and Germany is on UTC+2, so six zones.

    45:

    I rather enjoyed it. Thanks for bringing the series to an explosive end.

    Some very small Germarginalia:

    • The Bundespolizei, Colonel Smith is liasing with, is not the german equivalent to the FBI but rather more of a transport and border police. The investigatory equivalent would be the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA - Federal Criminal Police).
    • In practice Smith would be working with the Polizei Berlin with the BKA in a coordinating role. The Allied military governours set some obligations on the young west german republic, including more limited federal police institutions and the prohibition of the federal police commanding state police. The idea was to prohibit a more Gestapo-like overwhelming police force. The prohibition of combining police and intelligence service is still part of german constitutional law.
    • The Bundespolizei in its previous existence as Bundesgrenzschutz doesn't have military ranks since the 70s, when it was the Bundesgrenzschutz. Major Schenk would possible be Polizeirat Schenk.
    • While Elizabeth Hanover sees a green striped car, the majority of Germany's police forces switched from a green/white scheme to a blue/silver silver over a decade ago. The bavarian police is one of the last holdouts, I think.

    On the other hand everything could be different in timeline two vs timeline zero (= us) and of course Col. Smith could be an unreliably narrator.

    The latter info dumps made me thinking about the earlier clan. Henryk Lofstrom and his great-grandson Angmar – did world-walking skip two generations there? – are rather interesting. In the early 18th century world-walking has far less of an economic advantage that in a world of information and drug smuggling. Still keeping the proto-clan together and starting to weaving a braid of cousin marriage is rather more complex under these circumstances. Should you ever be tempted to write those standalone novels in twenty years time, the past of the Clan, the early startup days, is sometimes more interesting than the future.

    46:

    OTOH later in the book the president (who is not Hillary Clinton, but Iraq War veteran) is unusually level headed compared to the rest of the high level bureaucrats and politicians.

    Well, yes.

    The whole point of the book is that huge hegemonic systems are nevertheless prone to the invisible influence of individuals or small groups moving through them beneath the surface, warping everything out of the usual patterns. After the shit-show of politics in Time Line 2 during the first series, it was about time they caught a break: not every leading politician is a malevolent clown or a kleptocrat.

    (Also, by the time of the final draft, in early 2020 -- with COVID19 already arriving and Trump still in office and deep in denial -- I figured the last thing my readers would enjoy would be a bracing dose of "things can only get worse".)

    47:

    No, I don't want more questions like those, because the book is now effectively frozen in perpetuity. The time for those questions was six months before publication (from one of the copy editors or proofreaders involved).

    48:

    It's worth noting that a single all-up Juggernaut launch takes 2-3 years' total plutonium production for the Commonwealth, never mind any actual weapons it's carrying. And they're locked in a cold war with the French Empire -- although the FE look likely to go down hard within the next 20 years in time line 3 unless they figure out how to modernize, and they've got powerful structural reasons not to (loss of relative status for the ruling elite, mainly: lack of an educated middle class for another thing).

    Longer term I'm thinking the Commonwealth may be rolling out fission power on a scale only seen in France in the 1970s in our history -- they have a climate change problem and they're still barely getting started on environmental remediation and efficiency improvements. But I've barely even thought about what the picture might look like circa 2070, the earliest time I'd consider writing a standalone novel in this setting.

    49:

    "Battery" in the sense of an electrical cell dates to 1748, per Merriam-Webster. Time line 3 diverged from our own a little earlier, but not significantly in North America (where Ben Franklin was experimenting with electrical cells) until the mid-1750s. So it's reasonable to expect the term to be in widespread use in TL3.

    50:

    I read a book on SDI lasers when I was a teenager, but I am a little bit fuzzy on what this means.

    See wikipedia: Casaba-Howitzer. This was an actual weapon design that was planned as the basis of an armament for Project Orion in the 1960s.

    (Note: if it's on wikipedia today, the odds are high that MITI's spies would have known about it some years earlier in time line 3.)

    51:

    Dammit, yes, Cesium-137 ...

    52:

    At such distance, the bomb explodes and somehow that energy is focused into a laser, pointed at an Alien target? How does that work? I'd assume most of the energy has to be wasted.

    Pretty much the same way that current day pulsed lasers work. At least, "slow" nanosecond pulsed lasers; massively-mode-locked femtosecond and attosecond lasers need not apply

    Taking the example of a "classic" pulsed Nd:YAG laser, you have the laser medium (a crystal of neodynium doped yttrium-aluminium garnet), and an energy source (a high voltage flash bulb).

    You short-circuit a capacitor across the flash bulb generating a short duration, very intense burst of broad-spectrum light. You probably have some reflectors to focus as much of the liught into the crystal as possible.

    That broad-spectrum light excites a bunch of energetic modes within the crystal and, being a crystal, those high order modes decay rapidly and non-radiatively down to one (or several) lowest-order, highly-excited modes. Those LOHE modes are (slightly) longer lived, allowing energy to "pool" there very, very briefly. More importantly, they can only lose energy by emitting radiation (typically at 1064nm for a Nd:YAG, but there are several other, lower probability, emission bands). Some photons emit spontaneously, because short lifetime, and they can trigger stimulated emission, and you get a run-away pulse of laser light. Depending on the geometry of the edmium and surrounding cavity, you get a preferential direction and... there is a laser beam.

    Result: with a very short time offset, you convert a bunch of broad-spectrum energy into an intense laser beam. You lose a bunch of energy as heat in the process, but in exchange, you get:

    • massively increased intensity (even if you lose 99% of the energy, which is a fairly typicaly efficiency ratio for a laser, you concentrate the remaining 1% of the energy into millionths of a percent of the area)
    • Coherence: probably not very relevant for a weapon
    • The wavelength of your choice: probably not that important to a weapon, but I could see some value in it.

    A bomb-pumped laser has essentially the same components, and works in essentially the same way - just with rather more exotic materials, and with a rather more exotic level of power.

    • Instead of a capacitor and flashlight, you have a nuclear bomb. Same principle - emit a very intense burst of energy - but you only get to use it once, and you have to be a lot more careful in testing
    • Instead of an Nd:YAG crystal, or other solidstate or semiconductor medium, you have something tuned to the emission psectrum of the energy source. Nd:YAG absorbs UV and visible radiation to emit IR radiation. A nuclear bomb emits, oh, lots of stuff, but probably tuned to emit a lot of broad-spectrum gamma and x-rays. I have no idea what the appropriate medium would be - that kind of thing tends to be highly classified, but it's "only" a question of calculating energy level diagrams for weird and wonderful materials.
    • By carefully designing the bomb (see the link to the Casava howitzer) to be a shaped-charge, you can preferentially direct the energy of the bomb towards your gain medium, to improve efficiency. You can also use X-ray, gamma-ray and neutron reflectors to help even more, just not for very long.
    • The only element that I'm not sure would exist is a cavity around your gain medium - I'm not sure how the relative timescales between (excitation resulting in intense X-ray laser beam) and (nuclear explosion reducing your entire laser apparatus into plasma) compare. Maybe it's not worth having much of a cavity, in which case you waste a bunch of energy out of the "back" of your medium; maybe it is. Even if it isn't, carefully choosing the geometry of the gain medium will still get you an enormous improvement in the divergence of the resulting x-ray burst.

    The point, ultimately, is not really about a laser being a special device - it's about being able to focus as much of the energy of your bomb on your target as possible. We saw that during the cold war - as missles got more accurate, bomb yields decreased, because you couldd eliver the same "effective" energy to the target without expending as much plutonium (or big, expensive missiles) in the process.

    In space, targetting a spaceship (that, unlike a city, will probably try and dodge), you might not want to, or be able to, deliver the bomb close enough. But if you can generate an extremely high intensity, low divergence beam that travels at the speed of light in the correct direction, you don't have to get it closer. Just far enough away from you.

    53:

    I'd like to ask some questions about how things work out after the story ends. Obviously there isn't enough here to make a book, but I'm curious about how things worked out in the longer term.

    What did Elizabeth Hanover do with her life? I recall when she was discussing the terms of her defection with Major Hjorth she specifically asked about whether she would be allowed to stand for public office. Did she, and if so how did it go?

    Was democracy restored in the United States in Timeline 2? It was Sir Adam's dying wish / order that the Commonwealth attempt to do this.

    Did the Commonwealth manage to remain a functioning democracy? Did their constitutional settlement function as designed? Or did they discover a different set of emergent bugs?

    54:

    ISTR Stephen King saying in an afterword to The Stand he'd get fans writing to him about what the characters in various books were doing after the narrative ended. "As if they drop me the occasional postcard."

    What happens after the end of The Tempest? Pride and Prejudice? That's what fan fiction is for.

    ~

    IRL, Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, one-time Tsar of Bulgaria (1943-46) became Prime Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria (2001-05). So sure, Elizabeth Hanover becomes a politician when she can meet whatever age requirements the Commonwealth has for elected office.

    I too am interested in the fate of the French Empire. I'd think that a multi-ethnic polity as large as the FE would be constantly creaking at the seams. And when/if it does implode, its aftereffects would be horrible - like the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire brought tariffs and protectionism (and economic depression) to a region that had free trade of goods and people before 1914. (See also Brexit).

    55:

    What happens after the end of The Tempest? Pride and Prejudice? That's what fan fiction is for.

    The question is not entirely without precedent. Shaw penned this description of what happened after the end of Pygmalion.

    56:

    I'd like to ask some questions about how things work out after the story ends.

    Make up your own answers, because in each case, my answer is, "I don't know". The story stop where it needs to, having reached an end: if I want to know what happens next, I need to write another book.

    57:

    Since Erasmus is now the First Man, I'd say that democracy won.

    The question I had was whether they turned down or demobbed the Guard, as no longer needed.

    58:

    And for those who want to write Fanfiction set in 2070, I've got some thoughts:

    One is that the solution to climate change is to export it, as I suspect both the US and Commonwealth will figure out. Export it to other timelines, that is.

    If there are all these empty timelines nearby...well, you set out an exploration flight to see exactly how unpopulated the timeline is. Meanwhile, you set up colonies in alt-Pennsylvania and similar locations. Pennsylvania, if it's untapped, had reasonably good supplies of oil, coal, and iron. So if you're bootstrapping a technological civilization, the Pennsylvania area's a good place to claim first. Other places where the oil industry hit gushers are good too (Los Angeles, Texas...). Pennsylvania's good because it's not just oil, it's also iron, also coal, and also farmland and near access to the ocean (well, that's New Jersey, but you can't have everything).

    Now if the US and the Commonwealth are expanding away from each other, there's no particular reason to go to war, although I'm sure some authoritarian asswipes will try it anyway. But set up standard protocols, set up colonial armies to keep the other side from sniping colonies, and there's little reason to fight. Because there's another problem...

    ...And that problem is how and why all those adjacent timelines got emptied. There are several non-exclusive possibilities:

    If humans never evolved there, the wildlife will be interesting, to the tune of mammoths, lions, relatively large bears (grizzlies are medium-sized), sabertooths, and so forth. So strong explorers need bigger guns to protect their husbands. This is actually the best-case scenario.

    If humans never made it to North America...same interesting wildlife, but Eurasian surprises await.

    If humans did make it to North America, so that the wildlife is the same as in timelines 2 and 3, then what made them disappear. Here's where it gets a bit messy.

    One possibility, given our history of disease, is that a coronavirus, pox virus or something even less pleasant wiped humans off the globe. If that's the case, it's probably not a good idea to handle a rodent or bat on a world where humans formerly dwelt. And there's a spillover disaster story waiting here to be written.

    Another possibility is that another worldwalking civilization killed them off. If so, is the others' colony still present on another continent? Or were they making some sort of empty buffer worlds (why?) as a border/barrier between them and the hoppers? Or another paratime empire? And again, there are stories waiting to be written here.

    Another is global nuclear war. But that would be at most a century in the past, so there would still be scars. Trees in the most radioactive areas would be just starting to decay, nothing surviving that couldn't live underground, that sort of thing. A world where even New Zealand bought it would be pretty badly scorched.

    Thing is, if there's any relationship between timeline adjacency and shared history, then empty worlds are bizarre, especially if they're empty and not trashed.*

    Were I setting a story in Family Business 2070, that's what I might start thinking about.

    *Note here, I'm avoiding all the undeniably squicky politics of wiping out the Indians and Mesoamericans again, and again, and again. That's a plot point that could be ignored in 2001 at lot more easily than it can be ignored now. So I'm assuming, for example, that timeline 12, where the Juggernaut was maneuvering, really wasn't occupied, so nuking that Venezuela wasn't another pointless imperialist genocide. For instance.

    59:

    Export it? Great - dump out excess heat and CO2 and methane in the timeline that's in the middle of an ice age.

    60:

    Unfortunately, I think it's easier to worldwalk with the pieces of an oil rig strapped to a hovercraft than with a megaton of CO2. But maybe worldwalk a CO airship to crash next to a glacier? (/sarcasm)

    61:

    As for colonizing additional timelines:

    With who?

    Both the ~USA and Commonwealth have presumably gone through the demographic transition, so their populations are growing by immigration. Other countries are following. No idea about the lands of the French Empire.

    Now the ~USA could go to the governments of Niger, Uganda, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and the like (TFRs 6.68, 6.26, 5.47, 5.42, respectively) and say: We'll take your excess population! For the ~USA they would presumably go to the new territories being opened up (which would, in the fullness of time, become new states in the Union).

    However, if the racial politics of the ~USA are anything like our USA, this might not be viewed as a welcome solution.

    Countries with majority white (or at least semi-acceptibly off-white, like Japan, Korea, etc) all have TFRs below replacement. So not a lot of immigrants from there.

    Of course, you could go to Time Line 1 - there are presumably LOTS of horribly poor white people in their Europe, who would be happy to GTFO of whatever feudal hell-hole they're stuck in to go to somewhere that they can own land and the rule of law is respected.

    Problem is, these guys aren't Christian. Still, some missionary work later & Bob's your uncle.

    62:

    Good point. However, birth rate slowdowns are temporary, not permanent. Late classical Rome, for example, was offering rewards for women to have more kids. Same with, erm, Nazi Germany, IIRC?

    The three criteria for a slowdown generally are purported to be: --Most children survive to adulthood (no lack of heirs) --Children are expensive to raise --It takes a long time for them to reach productive maturity

    There's also the climate change/nuclear war negative, which is thoughtful people NOT having kids because they are afraid that the kids will die young due to things they can't control.

    This doesn't stop some people from having lots of kids, but it cuts down on average. If a kid costs a family hundreds of thousands of dollars and takes 25 years to leave the house, that's a big burden. Want four of them? Most couples won't.

    Those conditions all change on a frontier: --Survival to adulthood is problematic (and the surviving ones will be your social safety net). --Children are relatively cheap. And uneducated, but cheap. --They start tending the livestock early on and earn their keep that way.

    So have a lot of kids and pray a lot. I'll note that this is distinctly suboptimal for women, too, because they get drafted into the more dangerous part of the system (childbirth without adequate care). But that's the classical argument.

    I suspect that, if alternate timelines opened up in our world, quite a lot of people would bug out for the new frontier. Some fields might even see labor shortages.

    The other thing is that I don't think it will just be good little workers setting up New Venango on each uninhabited timeline they find, although I'm sure whole industries will develop to do just this. I'm equally sure other industries will develop to transport people across continents to stake claims to all the important mineral rights (Sierra Nevada gold and silver, Michigan iron, Welsh and Chinese coal, ad nauseum).

    Finally, it's worth remembering that people argued against industrializing on coal and oil back in the 19th Century, because they'd run out. Those people were of course argued down, and here we are. If there are infinite parallel earths, many of them uninhabited, I'm quite sure that any argument to not exploit their resources will be thrown out the window. Indeed, with the Hoppers sitting one timeline away, I suspect there will be a much stronger push to sprawl America and the Commonwealth across as many timelines as possible, to make sure they can't be wiped out. Because nothing feeds capitalism like unending growth, and why conserve bison or passenger pigeons in this timeline if the world next door has flocks every bit as big?

    Note that this is definitely a devil's advocate argument, and I think the proper response to it is a civilization-killing pandemic unleashed by unrestrained greed. But I'm a bit judgemental about such things.

    63:

    But in the ~USA's Territory of New Pennsylvania (for example), I don't think that people would accept this as the Wild West. One of the first buildings to go in would be a hospital. Plus, would the fine people of New PA really want to have their kids semi-literate workers with grade 6 educations?

    Kids would leave in droves to get educations rather than work as non-mechanized farmers or in crappy, unsafe (ie: non-automated) steel mills.

    64:

    Another thought occurred to me - the airplane that gets hijacked late in the novel:

    The pilot scowled at her. "And if we don't want to go there?" "Good luck landing at Caracas International – Caracas doesn't exist in this time line."

    I have the feeling that Control was telling a fib - Caracas was founded in 1567 and is today home to 2.2 million people. I can't imagine that Caracas would be deserted in ~2020.

    The plane comes in for a landing. The pilots see a big (albeit different-looking) city where Caracas should be.

    "What's that city, then?"

    "Oh, that's Santiago de León." (Santiago de León de Caracas is Caracas's official name OTL).

    65:

    Depends. A lot of kids signed up to get shot at in Afghanistan or Iraq recently.

    Here's the thing: we're both biased because we're both educated and we both obviously enjoyed it. We're not average.

    A lot of kids hate school, and hate that not getting through college dooms them to substandard careers. If the equivalent of drilling wells in a new wilderness gets them title to a square mile of land (one section), and if they're at all clever about it, they already know that the land they're homesteading is good farmland, also good for becoming a town later on? They'll jump at it.

    Then you can look at school now. To get a bachelor's degree in the US, which is the basic ticket to a basic job with the possibility of some promotion, a student racks up on average $36,000 in student debt. And the jobs they can get with that are in the $30-50,000 range mostly, and homes are mostly around $500,000 and up, which is why multigenerational housing will become the norm again. Want to step onto that treadmill? With the extra sauce of an alien invasion, another nuclear war, or climate change? (per the book, not our reality)

    Compare that with a frontier? A lot of kids will make that calculation and take their chances on another world.

    Since I had a genealogist in the family, I know my history a bit. A surprisingly large number of relatives on my mother's side went through Venango, either during its iron period or during its oil period. Given a choice between being conscripted for the Kaiser's army, dealing with a marginal Shropshire farm, or working in a US mill, they all chose the US. They worked their asses off and often ended up with a farm. Their kids got basic educations and became teachers and nurses. Their grandkids became engineers and doctors. A few generations later and its weirdos like me.

    I suspect that, were that frontier open again, something similar would happen.

    The interesting thing is that if you're colonizing a parallel earth, if it's sufficiently similar to the homeworld, you don't have to make the same mistakes again. A lot of Pennsylvania farmland has reverted to forest because it sucked as farmland. Knowing this, I suspect that there would be a rush on the good farmland, because why suffer when you can be a little clever and work off existing knowledge?

    66:

    H @ 58 Underpopulated timeline with coal & Iron? Try Britain?

    67:

    Of course! Jolly good of you to volunteer the alt-British Isles as an outpost of the American Paratime Empire (APE).

    To be blunt, no part of the globe is safe from this kind of looting. The point of Venango County is that it hosted America's first oil well, in 1859. Couple that with nearby iron and coal, and it's a really good spot for a first colony. There's infrastructure on the developed worldline to feed in, and readily exploited resources on the undeveloped side to build stuff.

    The problem is, almost anyone who's paying attention can figure this out. So in a worldwalking conflict, you can expect anyone who finds an "unsettled" world to pop a well-stealthed surveillance thingamabob out over western Pennsylvania to take a very good look at the oil fields out there, before they do much of anything else.

    Any place in the world where resources are concentrated like this will get a similar level of attention and perhaps conflict.

    68:

    So I'm seeing a lot of ideas for colonizing adjacent timelines, but I'm not seeing a whole lot of ideas for mitigating climate change in the inhabited timelines. A few things:

    • Any air travel can surely go through somewhere else
    • Alternate timelines take the silly idea of "put all the industry in space" and make it more plausible: any industry such as steelmaking that needs to be coal, coke, or oil fired could be done Over There and moved back over by the LCAC-load.
    • What it can't do is move electric power from Over There, I don't think world walking giant batteries back and forth would be remotely practical. What it CAN do however is assuage any worry about nuclear waste from nuclear power.
    69:

    Is there any "Word of Glod" on what actually became of Mike Fleming (and did he ever turn up in any of the earlier drafts)? Smith says that the DHS/FTO didn't get him, and has been known to tell the truth - on purpose, even, sometimes - but is talking to an enemy agent and known contact of Fleming's at the time, so would presumably say that unless there was a really good reason not to. Equally, I'm sure the DPR would have welcomed Fleming with reasonably open arms for what he could tell them, so long as they were sure he wasn't being run against them. And if he had gone over, there's no way he would have been mentioned in front of Rita or anyone not absolutely implicitly trusted. And of course, his own plan was to vanish completely and start a new life as someone else - presumably, since he has a solid idea what's coming, somewhere entirely out of the USA's reach. Although I guess the Commonwealth would qualify on that front if he could get in touch with them again and decided the USA had become a regime he couldn't support.

    Oh, and aside - re-reading the earlier books in preparation, I was delighted to rediscover the scene where some US "intelligence" clown accuses Paulie of spying for the DDR. I'd forgotten about it in the intervening years, and it's simultaneously depressingly belivable and utterly hilarious.

    70:

    Those things all help to avoid making things worse than they already are, but I get the impression that timelines 2 and 3 have both already emitted substantially more CO2 (and probably other GHGs) than we have. And we're in serious trouble going forward, even if magic tech allowed us to stop all emissions today. Also, while a switch to nuclear power generation radically reduces the problem, it still leaves you filling the atmosphere with steam and heat (no-one's built a reactor that's more than about 35% efficient, so for every GW of electricity you generate, you're dumping at least 2GW of heat into the environment. Which is also where the energy you transmit down the wires will ultimately end up, of course). The heat output is sufficiently trivial relative to natural fluctation in the planetary insolation that you can probably just ignore it. How well the extra water vapour plays with global warming, particularly in a timeline where climate change is already visibly happening, I'm less certain. At best it would merely slow down recovery a bit, but at worst it might sustain bad-news feedback loops, making climate stabilisation/reversion much harder to achieve. Even that worst case is a massive improvement over business-as-usual coal or oil burning, of course.

    Para-time transport probably does make some form of carbon capture setup practical, though, in a way that most of the real-world schemes I've seen proposed[1] just aren't. If you have (functionally) unlimited electricity and access to a dumping-ground timeline, you can just freeze atmospheric CO2 in 50-tonne blocks, transport it to the other side, and leave it there. If you care a bit more about the "landfill" timeline, you could have another, even bigger, nuclear-powered freezer on that side, to keep the stuff solid - or a chemical plant that turns it into something you can use. (Massive mostly-plastic space-habitats, perhaps? :)

    [1]"We'll pump vast quantities of high-pressure CO2 and methane into disused coal mines as long term storage"

    71:

    If we're going to go to that ultimate strange attractor, the real world...

    The problem with using paratime manufacturing is that it doesn't scale fast enough and it doesn't deal with key GHG problems.

    Where I live (e.g. I've got some numbers) about half of GHGs are from cars and trucks, the next tranche down is from concrete manufacturing (around 20%--I'm not looking this up), and the next tranche is agriculture. None of these are really helped by doing them Somewhere Else, just because they're distributed, bulky, and high entropy.

    On a personal level, the most GHG producing things you can do are raising a kid (mostly because you're stuck taking on two or more humans' worth of GHGs, I think). Beyond that, flying, taking a cruise, and driving are the most emissive activities most people deal with. While you can get some of these to happen elsewhere for a few people, they again don't scale. For example, building and servicing a cruise ship in an uninhabited world is cost-prohibitive.

    Now, could we make an argument for water-use, and the answer is maybe. Food is embodied water. Wheat, for example, takes an ungodly amount of water, because you're watering a plant for months to get a tiny percentage of its body as food. So could growing crops on an alternate world work? Again, no, because shipping wheat is still too bulky.

    What you could conceivably do is harvest the big wild animal herds and ship the meat through, although I think we're still at the limit of what a worldwalker would be willing to do. How many hovercraft-fulls of bison meat could they ship? Not enough to kill worldwalkers driving the transport. But that's kind of where it might work.

    That's why I focused on colonization. It's a contemptible strategy, systematically looting world after world. But if there is an effectively infinite supply of worlds, it's doable. The Forerunner-level slime-weasels who operate this way just have to found colonies on average faster than they trash worlds. Given the US went from sort of sustainable to definitely screwed in about 500 years, and most of the screwing happened in the last 100 years, I'm guessing 500-1000 years is how long a colonized timeline would last until it was used up and discarded. It's probably on the same order for the Hoppers dropping a black hole in.

    Anyway, the ultimate aim of this is to help people writing Fan Fiction of the What Happened Next variety. So if you want Merchant Princes 2070, get those trans-frontier pot gardens going on timeline 35, and talk about how renegade worldwalkers are resurrecting the lifestyle of the Gruinmarkt because they're sick of being lifetime conscripts in Commonwealth attempts to run away from the US worldlines. Or something. Hell, write a story that has Tech bros hunting Drop Bears (aka marsupial lions) in alt-Primeval Australia who get set upon by a flock of horny adolescent male mihirungs who think they're just the right shape for object play*. That is, if you think mihirungs belong on the duck side of the anserimorph family tree.

    *To quote one researcher, if biologists counted sex toys as tools, the number of tool-using animals would at least double if not triple.

    72:

    Steam and heat are not meaningful problems at any plausible level of energy use, not even 12 billion people at first world levels would do it. CO2 emissions can move the needle on the global heat levels because they trap solar heat, and they accumulate. Steam rains back down in very short order and waste heat is utterly irrelevant to anything but local micro-climate. Wrong scale entirely.

    73:

    I think in Timeline 3 rampant global warming has made much of Central America unfeasible to inhabit unless you can afford constant AC.

    74:

    Late classical Rome, for example, was offering rewards for women to have more kids. Same with, erm, Nazi Germany, IIRC?

    Australia, right now IIRC. Definitely a few years ago with the "Have one for Australia" campaign. Baby bonus has now been rolled into the parental leave system, but for a while it was a $900 cash payment.

    https://www.centrelink.gov.au/onlineclaim/help/bby_inc_est_help.htm

    75:
    • The new-model world-walkers don't get headaches from world-walking. That suggests that the USA biotech is unusually sophisticated, even in that timeline's 2020, or that they got lucky in their engineering, or that the prions weren't in that majority subset of the population (or in that timeline). There's a mention of nanotech Q-machines in Deep State, so some analysis was obvious done. Anyway, just noted, since biotech is on an exponential phase both in our timeline and in the alt-USA. (And brains are interesting, and quite heterogeneous even within a species(/genus), and plastic.)
    • The space-dreadnought was well-drawn. Solved the launch-siting problem neatly, too.

    Re Atropos @ 52 , thanks. Some Atomic Rockets links for those tempted to be curious about JUGGERNAUT (http site for those who care): http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#boomboom http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns2.php#id--Project_Orion http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#casaba "Front Towards Enemy" http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Nukes_In_Space--Nuclear_Shaped_Charges

    76:

    I've just finished Invisible Sun. Just one complaint, it's too short!

    77:

    The ~USA lends itself to a particularly colonial mode: the prison-industrial system (private prisons in particular) will fall on reliable paratime tech with shrieks of glee. There are plenty of towns where the main employer is the prison. By shoving the prison itself into an adjacent time-line, the prison owners can save a lot of money on security (the only thing that needs securing is the paratime transfer box: prisoners who escape find themselves in an uninhabited wasteland, which most prisoners will be ill-suited to survive in), guards can commute cheaply, and out of sight means out of mind: think prison plantations and unpoliced brutality towards the legal slave labour because there's no uncontrolled communication with the ~USA.

    The Commonwealth has many faults, but being led by a party cadre who mostly spent time in the King-Emperor's camps up north, and who have a play book documenting why "replicating the old regime's structures of oppression generally leads to the failure of the revolution in 2-3 generations' time" may to some extent protect them against replicating that particular mistake.

    78:

    A huge difference with historic frontier expansion is that the ~USA is presumably in a position to build cheap reusable space launchers -- I don't know if SpaceX exists in that time line, but SpaceX demonstrates it's possible in our time line, so ...

    Probably the first bit of infrastructure to go in when opening up a new time line for active colonization and exploitation will be a cluster of satellites that serve triple-duty: navigation (cf. GPS), earth resources/meteorology tracking cameras, and communications relays (cf. Starlink/Iridium). Note that you can use communications satellites for positioning; it's early days yet, but it has been demonstrated. I don't expect an early cluster to be anything like as big as Starlink: it's only really needed to provide limited bandwidth comms over a single sub-continental area. And I'd also note that such satellites can be mass-produced quite cheaply, given a suitable launch system: Starlink sats apparently cost $250K each, comparable to a luxury car or a mil-spec Humvee (not the consumer-spec Hummer).

    Anyway: throw a couple of hundred million bucks of hardware at the sky and you've got overwatch, weather forecasts, monitoring for stuff like forest fires, phone service, and navigation all taken care of, for less than the cost of a single hospital.

    What would the Wild West have looked like with mobile phone service and weather forecasting and army outposts with helicopter transport? Quite different, I suspect ...

    79:

    I can't imagine that Caracas would be deserted in ~2020.

    Bear in mind it got rolled over by invading armies from the northern continent in the 19th century, per the history of Time Line 3. An imperial invasion of a Catholic province by an aggressive Protestant empire. Not good: see also the 30 years' war.

    In addition, Time Line 3 has a serious climate change problem due to a burgeoning population burning too damn much coal and wood in the 20th century (they developed late, and haven't begun to cut back on the runaway energy release in the way our own civilization has done since roughly 1973). "Black flag" wet bulb temperatures combined with HVAC not being a thing are not conducive to a city thriving.

    80:

    You mention Elon Musk offering to use conventional rockets to build a Juggernaut counter weapon so it appears he's doing something space based. There's also a mention of an Orion (capsule, not loud boom type) docked at the ISS though so COTS either didn't happen or the contract awards (2006) went to different suppliers. SpaceX was established in 2002 in our timeline so just before the 2003 split, but the COTS contract let them skip the proposed Falcon 5 and go straight to the 9.

    81:

    I knew you referenced TL3 having global warming Issues of some sort but to the point where you have areas like Caracas in the commonwealth and I assume a bunch of african cities in France's west african colonies being either mostly or entirely abandoned due to black flag weather? That's an unpleasant surprise.

    82:

    It was strongly implied in one of the early Maracaibo scenes where they say the temperatures going to hit 40c and unsurvivable without AC.

    I just finished Invisible Sun and enjoyed it a lot - a fitting finale to the series.

    I particularly liked how even nearly all the villains were still humanly relatable - including Smith and Scranton toward the end. The only out and out loon was the Commonwealth Guard general.

    I found the Forerunner Info dumps a little jarring at first but the Afterword explained why well.

    Part of me would like to have seen what the 4th Chunk featuring the Hive would have been, but the completist is happy with the current end point.

    Thank you Charlie!

    83:

    Fair point. I just assumed a one off thing that showed they had those issues there in some form or another, but knew what black flag weather was due to learning about it from TL2. Between that and the "commonwealth was making all personal vehicles electrical" line from either empire games/dark state, I assumed they were taking it more seriously than we seem to be OTL so the OTL 1970s France-style nuclear problem Charlie mentioned upthread made a ton of sense.

    Of course that's just the Commonwealth taking it seriously if the French don't... Well yeah, that world's potentially in for a really bad time.

    84:

    What would the Wild West have looked like with mobile phone service and weather forecasting and army outposts with helicopter transport? Quite different, I suspect ...

    "Custer's Last Jump" by Andrew J. Offutt -- alt-hist with paratroops from the 7th Airborne Cavalry's zeppelins getting shot down over Greasy Grass by ex-Confederacy biplane fighters flown by Native American pilots. AKA "They Died With Their 'Chutes On."

    85:

    Hoo boy. I can just imagine creating an entire space rocketry infrastructure as the very first thing your colony does on an uninhabited Earth. Fuel infrastructure, assembly infrastructure...Yeah. Tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, sitting in the primeval forest. Why does this sound off?

    Possibly it sounds off because drones are cheaper and tougher at first, and the limiting factor is the supply of worldwalkers willing to bust their brains carrying shit between worlds. Hell, if you want really cheap, you can get a huge amount of basic stuff done with weather balloons and aerostat antennas.

    But the uber-fun stuff is why the world's uninhabited. Three possibilities: 1. Assuming worlds in paratime tend to cluster by shared histories, uninhabited worlds near timelines 2 and 3 probably experienced nuclear war in the 20th century. Colonizing these worlds would be interesting, but we're sort of in On The Beach territory, both in novel terms and in practical terms (as in, nuclear war wiping out every last human. Really? Who launched what to make that happen?). Depending on when the war happened, there are lots of resources lying around. Which is good. But there's a lot of stuff missing (wild foods, for example), and that's bad.

  • Humans went extinct. The most likely candidate here is some nasty spillover virus. Airborne AIDS, perhaps. If this is the case, watch out for whatever the reservoir species is and stay far, far away from those animals.

  • Humans never evolved, because the hominid line went extinct in Africa. This is a subtype of 2, really. If I was colonizing a world where humans never evolved, I'd be sending veterinary virologists to do careful surveys pretty much everywhere, and Africa would be last on my list of continents to colonize.

  • Anyway, vastly different worlds. With apologies to the Native Americans, it's reasonably likely that, without humans, there would be a lot of really big kitties, plus-sized bears and dogs, and other megafauna everywhere in the Americas. Settling the Wild West would be slightly more safe than settling the Serengeti. Maybe. On the one hand, the animals are bigger. On the other, they're naive about the inherent nastiness that is modern humanity, unlike African animals that know full well to get out of the way. And once we've dealt with the megafauna, there's the mesofauna to consider, in this case locusts and passenger pigeons (perhaps on the latter, but since Africa hosts queleas, why not?). So not the easiest place to have a little house on the prairie if you want to get reliable crops.

    The really bad news for America the Unsettled would be if the "naive" animals learn that ex-office bros colonizing from a thoroughly civilized America are easier to catch and kill than even deer. And they teach their young how to hunt humans. Could be a messy situation, if ammo and backup are both limited, and the animals are learning as rapidly as the humans.

    And of course, there's endemic malaria and yellow fever, among other diseases. That's one reason why the Southerners started buying slaves from Africa. They survived longer in the newly colonized American South. That happy experience gets repeated.

    And finally, there's the Native American bootstrap effect. We tend to think of the Americas as untouched wilderness with scenic Indians. It's more like 10,000 post-glacial years of humans doing stuff to make sure they didn't starve, mostly without good crops. The colonists benefited enormously from this, both in terms of an altered landscape (no big mean kitties) and in terms of crops and knowledge from the Indians they lived with for centuries. I suspect that, without humans, the Americas would be a lot more pleasant for elephants, bears, and beavers than for humans.

    86:

    I can just imagine creating an entire space rocketry infrastructure as the very first thing your colony does on an uninhabited Earth. Fuel infrastructure, assembly infrastructure

    No need: if you finished "Invisible Sun" you'd see that one of the game-changer technologies in play is the ability to launch payloads in one time line and have them appear overhead in another. So: launch the satellite cluster from Pad 39A or Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral, recover the payload fairings and Falcon 9 first stage ... and the upper stage and cargo appear in the destination time line.

    (2) Humans went extinct -- we seem to have gone through a genetic bottleneck about 70K years ago, with a breeding population down to a couple of thousand, max: what if our survival is the unlikely outcome, rather than vice versa? (Postulated cause: a supervolcano eruption followed by a sharp cooling.)

    One possible stand-alone I have considered writing: no humans, so the predator/prey arms race mediated by theory of mind continues in the absence of language. We end up with an ecosystem where bear traps are literally pit traps dug by bears, with crude spikes and camouflage: where elephants, raccoons, and non-human primates are crude tool-users: and where some of the cats hunt in prides, emphasis on "hunt" (with tactical diversions). When human world-walkers find their way to this TL, they think everything's going to be fine at first ...

    87:

    Actually I agree about the satellites. As I was walking away from the computer, I remembered that the USSF is also launching satellites via a Pegasus system (slung under a modified passenger jet). So there are multiple ways to get a satellite into orbit in another timeline.

    The Toba theory, with the genetic bottleneck 50,000-100,000 years ago, may be a distraction. The problem with it is that there were also Neanderthals, Denisovans, Hobbits, Luzon hominids, and who knows what else also present on Earth. It was just our ancestors who were having a bad time. If only our ancestors had gone extinct, there would still be humans on Earth. Just not us. So if there are no humans, something we don't have on our world happened.

    As for nonhuman intelligence, I'd suggest something there's already evidence for: avian intelligence. Specifically, I'd look at hunting teams composed of either ravens and bears, or ravens and wolves (or ravens, bears, and wolves). There's already some decent evidence (See Bernd Heinrich) that they did (and do) this. ravens scavenge predators' kills, so they help the big predators find food so they can scavenge it. They work with humans too (including my mother, but that's another story. Feed ravens consistently and you become an ally). So when you've got a wolf pack tailing you, with ravens guiding them to your location, and tattling on you when you try to turn the tables and hunt the pack...

    Anyway, a world where the scrublands are made by and for bears (e.g. trails are all bear-sized tunnels), the savannas are made by and for elephants, and every stream is an ever-changing series of beaver dams, is actually not the easiest world for moderns to traverse. Add in swarms of critters (raccoons, crows, ravens, passenger pigeons, locusts, elephants) devastating crops, malaria and other insect-borne pathogens infecting colonists, and it becomes a really unpleasant experience. While I agree that it would be more fun to have tool-using bears, just having the "dumb animals" get the best of the uber-tech humans by being animals makes for a fairly dark and scary story.

    88:

    Questions from the beginning and the end of the saga:

    (1) What exactly is the thing early in the original MP stories that committed you to the existence of a senior US figure in league with the Clan? I've read it 3-4 times and never quite been sure I've worked it out.

    (2) Why did the ~US attack TL4 with ICBMs (and risk the Hive having some unanticipated magic-tech antiballistic missile device) rather than ARMBANDing the bombs over from TL2 Maryland?

    (3) Do you have a settled view on who the Invisible Sun narrator is? They don't seem to be author-omniscient (they say that we don't know what happened on the USS Maine because it's classified) but they know way more about the Big Picture than any of the viewpoint characters.

    89:

    What happened with Nel's possibly mangled copy of the TL3 engram?

    90:

    Meanwhile, back on timeline Zero ( Us ) ... I came across this quote form, of all people Isaac Asimov from the "Foundation" series: Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in theFoundationUSA. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law: no Change. Despotism! They know one rule: force. Maldistribution! They know one desire: to hold what is theirs.

    Yes, it's the Republican Party, folks

    91:

    Great ending to the series, thank you! The locusts/Forerunners war makes sense as a backdrop for the whole series.

    92:

    Got to disagree with you on that, Greg.

    The Republicans are rather worse than no change. As you note, they want a government that is by, for, and about them alone. Possibly it's because they face irrelevancy if they don't get it.

    Anyway, for those who admire(d) aristocracies, this is how they work. One of the great, under-examined threads of history seems to be the eternal struggle between bottom-up, democratic governance, and top-down, authoritarian governance. Recent propaganda about the end of history aside, I'm wondering if it's ever really ceased over the last few thousand years.

    93:

    I really like the idea of doing the Russian revolution right. The Commonwealth seems to be that.

    The beginning of the Soviet Union was not that terrible after the civil war ended. New economic policy until the death of Lenin. And other things. A great deal of new art and scientific research started during that period. Including significant studies on human development and education.

    Things went bad after the nomination of Stalin as the secular Grand Ajatollah (using the terms from OGH).

    I read the Commonwealth as being the Soviet Union done right. With a significant vibe from the Iranian revolution (1979, but with a secular twist.

    Very plausible. Especially with the hindsight provided by the world-walkers who had knowledge on the political development in other timelines.

    Brilliant. I strongly appreciate.

    94:

    What exactly is the thing early in the original MP stories that committed you to the existence of a senior US figure in league with the Clan?

    I can't remember. (You're asking me about a thought process I didn't document back in 2003.)

    Why did the ~US attack TL4 with ICBMs ... rather than ARMBANDing the bombs over from TL2 Maryland?

    That's what they actually did. (Using SLBMs, too, flying a ballistic path from the Pacific Ocean, thereby obscuring their point of origin.)

    Do you have a settled view on who the Invisible Sun narrator is?

    Nope.

    95:

    Since I like sharing bad ideas, here's another one, on the theme of how you get a world with no humans in it.

    Humans and chimps started separating at the tail end of the Miocene around 8 million years ago, and per the geneticists, they stopped sharing genes around 4 million years ago (kink runs deep in our line). The Miocene is the period when the Earth was heading toward ices ages (via the Pliocene and then the icy Pleistocene), but it was hotter than we are now. But the Miocene is when grasses, savannas, and plains took over. A lot of animals that had previously lived in forest and scrub developed plains forms.

    Sorry to drag this up, but this is where the argument I had with EC took place, about the origin of human bipedality in the grasslands instead of with that aquatic ape theory (if labrador retrievers can swim better than humans, what's the point of talking about wading in evolutionary terms). The best answer, apparently, is that bipedality allows you, (in the evolutionary eternal tense) to carry stuff and also to see out over the tall grass. You may be a bit slower than as a quadruped (or not, per Google), but if you get enough of a head start, it doesn't matter so much.

    Anyway, our bipedal ancestors came out of the late Miocene and Pliocene. So if you want to posit a set of timelines with no hominids, one simple way is to divert human evolution in this period.

    I'd suggest two possible ways to do this. 1. Aquatic ape theory: human ancestors, instead of becoming bipedal weirdos, become shore-foraging quadrupedal aquatic apes, quadrupedal just like every other semi-aquatic primate from reed lemurs to orangutans. They never learn to make fire, at most make simple tools, and perhaps never leave Africa. Call this the nandi ape, maybe?

    B. The plains ape. Our ancestors, instead of going bipedal, become the ape equivalent of baboons, going for high speed quadrupedality instead of bipedality. Again, little tool diversification, no fires. However, combining chimp-like cultural diversity with being able to gallop over 30 mph, combined with leonine canines (especially on the males) might make for a formidable plains omnivore. The simian equivalent of a hyena or a coyote, perhaps.

    Could those wolf-apes (or even the nandi-apes) make it to the New World? I don't know, but therein lies a story. What is killing the goats, out on that lonely paratime frontier farm?

    All this does is point to one of the oddities of Miocene ape evolution, that various apes (not just humans) seemed to have experimented with bipedal-adjacent postures. However, most other large mammal clades did not. If apes simply evolved like every other large plains mammal in the Miocene, humans would not have evolved. But a clever omnivore might have showed up instead.

    96:

    I have one question. Before Juggernaut arrives overhead one of the antagonists makes a statement/assumption around the limited transfer capacity of Worldwalkers compared to what they can do with Armband.

    Was that a genuinely held USA belief or just a narrow minded assumption by one character in the heat of the moment?

    97:

    What happened with Nel's possibly mangled copy of the TL3 engram?

    They don't use it -- it's too risky.

    98:

    Was that a genuinely held USA belief or just a narrow minded assumption by one character in the heat of the moment?

    Before their drones discovered time line 3 via overflights (early in "Empire Games"), the ~USA had zero evidence of world-walkers being able to carry substantial loads, based on observation/interrogation/torture of captured clan couriers.

    (Some of the Clan had previously known about using electrostatically isolated wheelbarrows, but this was a closely-guarded secret of those families who knew about it -- for competitive advantage over their rival families -- and was lost during the civil war that killed off roughly 50% of the world-walkers over a generation or two.)

    Discovering a time line with nuclear-tipped SAMs, jet fighters, and search radar was a horrible shock to the ~USA -- previously all they'd encountered were empty time lines 70%, paleolithic time lines 30%, and a single mediaeval-tech time line. Adding "oh, and the Clan fled there, and they've figured out how to transfer kiloton-level payloads between time lines" would turn it into a sum-of-all-fears multiple-worst-cases scenario. Which, in real life, almost never happens ...

    99:

    my personal theory is that bipedality evolved to optimize throwing. A rain of rocks makes predating on the early ancestor bands really unfeasible, which is a huge selective advantage and once you are heading down that path, "Being a better rockthrower" selects pretty hard for most of the traits that differentiates us from the rest of the primates.

    Excepting the loss of fur. I really cannot come up with a plausible story for how that happened.

    100:

    I think the "Senior Politician" part was an accident (assuming my memory is working), that the Clan had a rule: "Never involve politicians in the operation", and got Cheney because he had (at that point) retired from politics. When he went back into politics he became a problem that they failed to deal with (and as the Clan could blow his career out of the water by simple leaking his money laundering activities they were a threat to him that he needed to eliminate). I may be completely wrong, of course.

    I do really like Invisible Sun (though having read an earlier draft it's a little confusing at times), and I think you owe me about 5 hours sleep (for the initial read and subsequent re-read that led directly to an "oh God o'clock" bedtime). On the other hand, I owe you several beers.

    Favourite lines? Too many to count, but "Juggernaut was no more designed for a first strike than those fancy Tridents..." plus the concept of SLEDGEHAMMER being a scaled up Tsar Bomba with added secret sauce - certainly a deterrent providing they know you've got it.

    (The bit about the DHS adding the knotwork display to the in-flight video and how it would have failed very badly was a nice gotcha, too.)

    Very nicely done, and I shall now re-read it more slowly and carefully. :-)>

    101:

    “ Why did the ~US attack TL4 with ICBMs ... rather than ARMBANDing the bombs over from TL2 Maryland?

    That's what they actually did. (Using SLBMs, too, flying a ballistic path from the Pacific Ocean, thereby obscuring their point of origin.)”

    My was presumption there were 2 things,

    1 to show the Commonwealth they had Worldwalking nukes (pretty much says so in the text) 2 Against an unknown enemy en mass you’re going to need a relatively speedy and stealthy approach and that’s what the MIRV’s were, compared to a dude with a backpack nuke anyway.

    Interesting question - is it possible to Jaunt a submarine? It would have been a lot cheaper to jaunt the sub over 2 timelines than 8 ICBM’s in terms of Armband units at least.

    102:

    @74: Romania under Ceaucescu (sp?) is another example: women were supposed to have five (I think) children.

    103:

    @101: no, you can't jaunt a submarine unless you lift it into dry dock and put rubber pads under it. The rest of the time, tt's connected to ground via a large amount of conducting fluid!

    104:

    Charlie: another nit-pick.

    You comment late on in the book that Berlin has two transport systems because of the East/West split. That isn't the case.

    There's currently the U-bahn, which is like the London Underground or the Glasgow subway, and the S-bahn, which is like the London Overground or the various commuter lines in Glasgow.

    (The following is from memory because I can't be bothered to dig out the relevant books.)

    Around the time of the Berlin Wall, the U-bahn lines fell into three classes. Some were entirely in one half of Berlin or the other. Some went across the border once and got split at that point. Two of them started and ended in the West but had a section in the East. All the stations in those sections were closed: trains didn't stop and DDR guards were stationed on the platforms. There was one exception: a station that became a border post. So you had two separate U-bahn systems. After reunification the stations got reopened and, over time, the lines were reconnected. It's now all one system.

    The S-bahn was more like a main-line railway (just as in the UK or Paris) and got handed over to the East German railways (DR as opposed to DB). They ran it through both halves. At some point border controls were added with trains being stopped and searched at them. Some trains that went East-West-East became non-stop on the middle bit. Westerners started to boycott the services. At some point in (I think) the 1980s the lines in West Berlin got handed over to the West's authorities. After reunification DR was merged into DB and the S-bahn is all one system.

    So, yes, there are two systems in Berlin. But that's true in many other places. The reason for two systems is nothing to do with the split into FDR and DDR.

    105:

    Trident vs. SLBM

    The point was that they needed a synchronised attack by multiple warheads (the equivalent of TOT (Time On Target) salvo in artillery) in order to inflict maximum damage in minimum time and clear the path for Juggernaut. You can do that with ICBMs, which are unaffected by surface weather conditions (especially MIRVs), but not with cruise missiles (single warhead, launched one at a time), and it definitely wouldn't be safe to try it on your own timeline, just in case something went wrong and the opposition got a lead back to the home timeline or something went off prematurely.

    Besides: the Trident system was loaded with warheads specifically intended for cross-time deployment, they just needed to switch the target from the Clan to the Hive which would be a different set of target parameters for both the inertial guidance system and ARMBAND. (Safety features such as "do not arm the warhead if you still detect GPS or similar 'friendly' signals after ARMBAND activation" would be extremely sensible and certain to be included.)

    106:

    I’m not convinced that’s true though. Modern submarines are covered in anechoic tiles (think rubber) and use propulsors rather than screws - so what actually’s not insulated?

    Don’t forget a worldwalker can jaunt with just their foot wear isolating them.

    Which begs another question for Charlie - what’s the mass limit that requires complete isolation from ground with a hovercraft or similar?

    107:

    I think you meant Trident is a SLBM right? Or did you mean SLCM?

    I wasn’t thinking of cruise missiles as an option but it’s a valid point.

    108:

    You could translate "Wiedervereinigung" either way, but "reunification" is a fairly conventional term for the process in English-language German history (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reunification - both terms are used there).

    109:

    For SLBM read SLCM in the first line. Oops!

    Chris.

    110:

    This was excellent fun, thank you. I think the only question I have is: how much did you cackle gleefully at the point when you realized that you had a great excuse to write a para-time Project Orion battlecruiser attack?

    111:

    I finished reading the UK Kindle edition yesterday. Very good. I picked up a large number of basic editing errors (more than usual- COVID maybe?). I include enough text to search for the problems.

    side-order of mus cle: two troopers << space in middle of muscle. that it was felt more << either was more or felt more but not both I have news some information to pass on, from the Party Secretariat. lest our enemies to trick us into attacking They’ve offering us asylum in return getting to get across Knowing if it was still active, much small emitters

    112:

    I think the electrical isolation issue is actually a red herring in this case. We know you can't jaunt into a timeline where your location is occupied by a solid, and it seems reasonable to assume the same is true of bulk liquid.

    (Even if you decide that there's some mechanism by which air/gas rapidly evacuates the about-to-be-occupied space, the fact that water is ~800 times as dense as air will make it vastly more difficult to disperse the molecules fast enough, and the pressure trying to refill the hole will be similarly greater.)

    113:

    Well, jaunting is magical anyway, so we'd only make OGH more grumpy if we pointed out all the ways it could go horribly wrong.

    Speaking of horribly wrong, what does happen when a jaunty submarine displaces that much incompressable deep water very suddenly? That could be exciting!

    For instance, would it be wise to jaunt on a volcanic island, or did lava flow the same way in every timeline? Any place that's highly affected by random events (landslides, wind moving dunes in the Sahara) makes for an interesting landing, potentially.

    Or we can go into the unholy joy that is the Earth spinning ever so slightly faster or slower because of ice melting or forming on high Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, or dams moving enough weight a bit further away from the center of the Earth and slowing the spin by 10-8. It's hopefully not going to make delta Vs big enough for people to get swatted by moving trees jaunting from Timeline 3 (hot) to Timeline 4 (ice age) or vice versa, but you add up a thousand years of slightly altered spin rates, and it's amazing that travelers can come into the same space more or less.

    But why spoil the story. It's fun to play politics when for once it's not our own.

    114:

    Clive Feather Berlin Liniennetz ( Map ) And the "complicated" station was Freidrichstraβe - right smack in the middle. And, of course, the U-bahn, like the UndergrounD is still of two sorts: Grosse Profil ( The later ones ) & Kleine Profil ( The earlier ones )

    115:

    On possible futures for the Merchant Princes 'verse:

    US and Commonwealth scientists are going to try engineering the nanotech organelles into other life-forms: a mouse that can jaunt would be a much cheaper and less ethically questionable source of neurones for ARMBAND than cell lines forcibly taken from captured world-walkers. Or perhaps they can figure out how to hack the organelles to reproduce and operate outside of a cell, in which case they can be mass-produced cheaply.

    What happens when everybody has an ARMBAND (probably worn as an actual arm band)?

    Also, while the physics behind jaunting is going to remain obscure, at least for a while, the wet-phase self-replicating nanotech it is built on is probably something scientists can figure out. If they can take it apart and hack it, the US and Commonwealth could probably use it to bootstrap their own nanotech Diamond Age.

    The future international politics also look interesting. Once formal recognition and embassies are set up between the US and the Commonwealth, other TL2 nations are going to want in. At the end of Dark Sun it seems that only the USA and Commonwealth have world-walker capability. I'm sure that every other country in TL2 regards that as a Very Bad Thing. Geopolitics in TL2 must be getting very interesting, although hopefully the news of an alien invasion in TL4 will focus minds on mutual survival. There is nothing like a dangerous alien Them to turn us into a strong unified Us, and the Swarm is definitely dangerous and alien. There was also a mention of a black hole seeded into TL4 Earth at the end of Dark Sun; presumably in a century or ten TL2 is going to have a black hole right next door. Urk.

    In the meantime, what happens when China starts trading with the Commonwealth? The US might prefer not to sell plans for advanced microelectronic fabs to the Commonwealth, but the Chinese might have less compunction, especially if they get the services of world-walkers in return. There is an interesting asymetrical trade war setting up there: the US provides ARMBAND to selected allies, while opponents of the US do deals to hire world-walkers from the Commonwealth, until they can get their hands on US cell-lines and start building their own ARMBANDs.

    On the maximum size you can jaunt with: presumably you could jaunt an entire planet as long as there wasn't a planetary mass already in the way. Hopefully you can't jaunt a planet over the top of a neigbouring black hole. On the other hand maybe there is some physical limit less than that: handwave speed of light resonance standing wave quantum noise threshold.

    116:

    Good point. My brain has just solved for it by wanting submarines to breech like a whale prior to jaunting.

    And would ARMBAND for a sub be an orange inflatable with speedo written on it?

    But it does beg the question at what point does gas density become too high to jaunt? Gas giant atmosphere levels or decompression chamber levels?

    117:

    Cross timeline trade is complicated by most of the Commonwealth territory being congruent with USA allies, and most high tech TL2 countries being covered by the French Empire in TL3 including China. I believe Japan is nearest Commonwealth Ally with the requisite tech presuming TL2 Japan is not too closely welded to the USA. Although the text may have implied it fell to the French at some point.

    Of course Merchant Princes 2025 covering a cross timeline proxy war battle for the Spratleys is an option….

    It’s also worth noting that the Dragons Teeth blood pressure fixes allow the US to out compete the Commonwealth in a jaunt enabled trade war even without mass production of Armband and is a much better use of spoilt brats than conscription. Getting parity on that has got to be a major priority - to the point where the doctors who know what the crispr fix are probably locked up in a luxury cell for the USA’s protection.

    118:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur#Excalibur provides some theory on an x-ray laser weapon. One presumes the energy would come from a directional fission device, similar to the pulse units of Orion itself, a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)#/media/File:Orion_pulse_unit.png

    119:

    Thank you for mentioning CUSTER'S LAST JUMP, an excellent story; however, it was written by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley. https://www.sfsite.com/06b/cj154.htm http://www.uchronia.net/label/utlecuster.html

    120:

    So TL2 China, once it gets hold of ARMBAND, goes to TL3 French Empire and offers jet fighters and MANPADS that can beat anything that the Commonwealth "own dog food" policy can field, at least for a few years. And since it's possible to extract cell lines from world walkers, any DRAGONS TEETH kids had better be very wary. The prospect of one of them getting arrested for drug smuggling as a way to get a fresh world walking brain must be exercising minds in the US Government.

    121:

    how much did you cackle gleefully at the point when you realized that you had a great excuse to write a para-time Project Orion battlecruiser attack?

    If you re-read "Empire Games", you might have noticed the structure of the first half of the book: a series of scenes establishing Rita and bringing her to the attention of the DHS, then we cut over to the Commonwealth and a series of scenes that hopefully had any readers who ploughed straight in from "The Trade of Queens" going WTF?!? approximately once every two pages.

    The Commonwealth had 17 years of centrally controlled state-of-emergency planning on a war footing, combined with paratime espionage, and the First Man's private secretary was involved with the head world walker, so about 15 years of MITI doing the sort of technology transfer that works, with a road map.

    So ... scale up all the things, and where possible try to avoid get stuck in local optima.

    Project Orion is an obvious win if you aren't locked in an Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty regime, and have access to heavy-lift machinery for moving stuff to other time lines.

    A subtext that isn't explored: as of 2020 the Commonwealth has a strategic nuclear deterrent aimed at the USA, should the USA ever discover them. Older strategic bombers (think Convair B-36 equivalents) have been replaced by ICBMs in the role of deterrent vs. the French Empire. But by putting a pair of world-walkers inside each aircraft in a bomb wing, they can be turned into effective subsonic stealth bombers for taking out US cities: cities don't move around, so they can fly to their approximate locations in a time line adjacent to TL2, jaunt to TL2 with their bomb bays already open, drop a multimegaton H-bomb (a city-buster), then jaunt out again before it detonates and before any fighters, or even SAMs, can reach them.

    This would allow the Commonwealth to threaten the ~USA with a retalliatory second strike (but not a counter-force strike, so not a credible first strike) in order to sustain MAD. However, it sucks up a lot of world-walkers for the entire duration of the alert period. Juggernaut obviously requires fewer world walkers than 30-120 heavy bombers, and has other uses. So it's a much better use of the critical bottleneck resource, which is world-walkers rather than plutonium.

    (So then I went back to looking at the USAF proposals for what to do with Orion, circa 1962, which were so barking mad that Kennedy cancelled it.)

    Your real question should be "when did I realize I'd need an alien invasion" and the answer is ... about the time I finished "The Family Trade"/"The Hidden Family" (in their original single-book first draft form). Paratime stuff turns the Fermi paradox into an acute problem, so I needed an answer -- it just took a very long time to arrive on-stage. And a hat-tip to Greg Bear's "Aeon" and "Eternity"; if you've read them, consider the Hive as an echo of the Jart ...

    122:

    a mouse that can jaunt would be a much cheaper and less ethically questionable source of neurones for ARMBAND than cell lines forcibly taken from captured world-walkers

    A jaunting mouse would be a terrifying pest problem! Capable of escaping from most traps, for starters, very resilient against local food famines, almost impossible to exterminate ...

    Meanwhile, we have stem cell cultures. Why bother?

    What happens when everybody has an ARMBAND (probably worn as an actual arm band)?

    That's a boring question. More likely: take a human population without the prion infection, or cured of the prion infection, and infect with the un-borked version of the organelle. What does a civilization of world-walkers as effective as Rita look like after a couple of generations?

    Here's a hint: imagine cities where vehicle highways and parking lots do not need to physically obstruct pedestrian access to buildings because the roads and parking lots are all in adjacent time lines. Imagine lots of "small" houses that don't need fire escapes because they're colocated with identical buildings one time line away -- fire can't spread between time lines, and a 100 square metre chunk of land is sufficient space for a two story high McMansion that actually provides 2000 square metres to its inhabitants. (Indeed, the fire break effect -- and also noise insulation -- has huge implications for stuff like hotels, hospitals, offices ...)

    123:

    wanting submarines to breech like a whale prior to jaunting

    Use a floating dry dock or shiplift. Insulated props. Ideally a mobile one, can't remember the name but there are semi-submersible ships designed to transport other ships or oil drilling platforms. Haul the sub out over deep waters, then make sure the crew are strapped down and all the hatches sealed before it jaunts off the deck (and promptly drops 5-10 metres).

    Coming back again of course requires a floating dry dock in the other time line ...

    124:

    It’s also worth noting that the Dragons Teeth blood pressure fixes allow the US to out compete the Commonwealth in a jaunt enabled trade war even without mass production of Armband and is a much better use of spoilt brats than conscription.

    Yes, but:

    a) The Commonwealth isn't that far behind the ~USA: another 20 years max and they'll be at ~USA:2020 levels (more likely at actual parity). So the Commonwealth world-walkers will probably be "fixed" like Rita within a generation.

    b) There's no direct reason for geopolitical rivalry and every reason for the ~USA and Commonwealth to form a -- cautious -- defensive alliance in the face of the Hive. At least once the Commonwealth has decisively neutralized the French Empire (which is looking inevitable at this point: the technological and economic lead the Commonwealth has built up is being augmented by a social capital lead as well, with widespread higher education and women in the workforce). Giving the CRISPR fix to the Commonwealth (while retaining a monopoly on ARMBAND) may be tactically advantageous for the ~USA: it gets the Commonwealth to focus on worldwalkers rather than scalable, replicable world-walking machinery. In other words it looks like they're doing them a favour, but it's actually a distraction.

    125:

    "there are semi-submersible ships designed to transport other ships or oil drilling platforms"

    E.g., the Mighty Servants.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mighty_Servant_1

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mighty_Servant_2

    126:

    I will note that the sudden widespread adoption of paratime technology totally upsets any number of geopolitical applecarts. In particular, TL2 China is going to be at odds with TL3's French Empire because the French Empire is a colonial occupier of the Middle Kingdom (for starters). Every power with ARMBAND tech is instantly going to focus first on securing their nearest parallels, both to oppose infiltration and because they're logistically-speaking easy picking. Some powers are at a disadvantage due to lack of natural resources (e.g. France: no coal and oil -- but they know exactly where the brown coal drift mines should be dug in Germany). Others ... any version of North America has oil seeps on the surface, not to mention oil, coal, rare earths, uranium. Why go making trouble overseas when everything you need is an eyeblink away from home?

    127:

    "A jaunting mouse would be a terrifying pest problem!"

    If the mouse needed a particular knotwork pattern to jaunt, be sure that all instances and records of that pattern are irretrievably destroyed. IIRC, the knots can be generated from some special polynomials, so pick a polynomial with a sufficiently large number of coefficients that they can't be guessed. Basically a cryptology problem.

    128:

    Thanks! That's exactly what I was thinking of.

    129:

    They're mice: evolution is prolific, they breed like the proverbial -- and mutate: sooner or later there'll be a sport that jaunts when exposed to a common naturally-occurring pattern (eg. a common leaf shape) or even just a neurochemical trigger ("EEEK! A Cat! Flee!").

    130:

    I'd suggest that maybe mice are going to have trouble jaunting?

    Turns out if you google "mouse vision," mice became the new hotness as vision models about a decade ago. But here's the money quote "No one denies that mice see poorly; Niell estimates that they have the equivalent of 20/2,000 human vision (which would qualify them as legally blind). The general rule of thumb is that mouse eyesight is about as good as what humans see in their far-off peripheral vision."

    Here's the source, from 2013: https://www.nature.com/articles/502156a

    So whether they can see and focus on an engram well enough to trigger the jaunt? That's one problem. Getting them to jaunt back to take care of their pups is another.

    The third and fourth problems turn out to be that vision research in our timeline is well behind where it would need to be to build an ARMBAND if I understand it right, and the question of "how many human neurons does it take to process an engram sufficiently" is...fascinating because different neurons see vertical line, horizontal lines, etc.

    I'd suggest the simplest answer is that mice can't see well enough to jaunt. Jaunting requires structural complexities on the neural and ocular levels (ahem!) found in Old World Monkeys at least, and possibly in parrots and corvids. And attempts to get budgies to jaunt got fouled up on the fact that their neurons work very differently than mammalian ones do.

    131:

    Moving away from the magitech stuff, I've got a more basic question:

    How does a paratime state work, anyway? What's the social contract?

    The problem for any state is convincing people inside and outside it that the state's existence is worth more to them than its non-existence. Things like a monopoly on violence only work if the monopoly helps more than it hurts. Things like property rights and laws have to be enforceable in a predictable manner, and so forth. With states in our world, border controls at least can deter people from running away if they don't like the deal. It's not clear whether any border control is even possible in paratime.

    All that becomes a lot more tricky when people can jaunt, especially when everyone can jaunt. How do you keep desperate people from experimenting with randomly generated engrams until they find a way out?

    And how would justice work? Imprisoning a criminal would be tricky at best. Put them in a hole? Sure, and then give them long enough to see if there's an engram that leads to some place that's not underground, for example. And capturing a crook in paratime would be a real mess.

    So how does a state work across timelines?

    Now let's a priori rule out panopticons as a universal fix. Alternate timelines offer an infinity of workarounds, so panopticons are at best limited and temporary spaces that require huge resources to maintain. They're vaguely analogous to walled medieval villages or castles in this regard. You're safer from certain kinds of violence inside the walls, but there's a lot of sewage in there and the walled community isn't sustainable without gates to the outside and a lot of traffic in and out. Worse, like the walled medieval villages, they're vulnerable to outside sieges.

    One essential question in this is the relationship the paratime state has with the non-state people outside it. This whole story universe is built around deserters, after all. We've got plenty of examples throughout history of states dealing with nomads and barbarians outside their borders as an integral part of how the states worked. I suspect that a paratime state, rather than trying to seal the borders and keep everyone on the Approved Timelines, would have a whole untidy mess of systems and mechanisms for dealing with deserters, barbarians, and "amphibious" people who have multiple identities, some inside the system, some outside.

    132:

    It depends critically on what the trigger is, exactly. If it requires anything even close to the level of pattern recognition found in the great apes, I agree that I can't see it evolving in mice. It needs just too many steps, some of which involve drastic changes and are seriously expensive, both developmentally and energetically. And most evolution requires incremental steps, EACH of which must be beneficial in itself over its predecessor. I think they would have ceased to be mice as we know them some time before.

    Whether the same is true for what I understand parrot and corvid pattern recognition to be like is less clear. Yes, it would require much better eyesight, but it is unclear how much more, and it is doubtful that it would be good enough for an engram. It's also unclear how expensive it is. While vision is better-understood than hearing, most of the research I have seen into that sort of area has concentrated on either colour vision or really simple pattern matching.

    Aside: I have recently had a really clear reminder of just HOW energetically expensive amodal perception of the level required for understanding speech in noise can be for hearing. It would be death in short order for an animal the size of a rat, let alone a mouse. How relevant that is is unclear, but the costs of this sort of thing should not be assumed to be low.

    133:

    "The Long Earth" series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter tried to deal with a paratime state. If you've not read any of them it starts with the release of te design for an easy to assemble potato powered device that lets anyone who builds one jump one world over, the direction depending on which way you flip the switch. The starting USA claims all sideways versions of its territory and keeps reasonable control over nearby instances but the further out people go, the looser control becomes.

    One twist, any metallic iron stays behind when you Step so itinerant blacksmiths who can start from ore are welcome visitors in settlements.

    134:

    How does a paratime state work, anyway? What's the social contract?

    Forget the social contract: that's an Enlightenment concept, and the modern nation-state predates the enlightenment by most of a century. We're really talking about the Post-Wesphalian state, i.e. postdating the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the 30 years war, and which more or less defined a nation-state as a political union with a geographical boundary that it is able to defend.

    This covers just about any recognizable state that can raise an army or navy and keep other governments from invading its territory.

    So we have two key questions: what is "territory" (in paratime), and what are the determinants of defensibility?

    "Territory" is superficially obvious -- it's the core time line(s) and those peripheral ones that are directly or indirectly accessible and claimed by the polity, either administratively or in terms of its citizens freely moving between them. Probably the best analogy would be a marcher state or a continental system expanding into a depopulated hinterland (hint: the US frontier would be an example, only without the prior occupants to slaughter and displace).

    Defensibility is a bit harder, and is probably a function of social cohesion. Colonists on a frontier might like to imagine they're free from government and taxes, but they probably aren't self-sufficient because self-sufficiency imposes huge cost burdens that ultimately end up causing small settlements to assume the burdens of the state while missing out on many of the benefits. For example, cattle ranchers might want to be autonomous, but who are they going to sell their beef to, and for payment in what currency? If they're afraid of predators or rustlers, who are they going to buy ammunition and guns from? And so on.

    Invasion by rival/neighbouring powers is ... well, your geographical neighbours (e.g. Siberia/China) might not want to muscle in on each other's core territory in the prime time line, but what happens in the very sparsely settled penumbra of uninhabited versions in neighbouring time lines? Yes, you can send an armoured brigade to occupy the same (only vacant) land as Beijing in time line 666, but projecting and supplying it will cost you a lot (in logistics) and it's not going to do more than annoy Beijing's government -- unless you try to send it to occupy the inhabited Beijing of time line 2, in which case you can expect a free exchange of smart bombs. And then China will do the same back at your uninhabited counterparts of Vladivostok. That sort of geopolitical griefing is going to end in tears. So most likely the temporal hinterlands are going to remain demilitarized by tacit consent, unless one nation senses weakness in a neighbour.

    135:

    not the CONCEPT of battery, but the word. Frex in Italian we use also "pila" for "battery", literally "pile", because Volta built his first battery piling up zinc and copper disks with acid drenched fabric between each couple of disks. Volta built his battery in 1800, it's after the TL POD and things may have gone differently, maybe developing a liquid electrolyte cell first. Maybe that TL developed batteries in a different way and gave them a different name.

    136:

    How does the Hive store information? Could humans access and decode it?

    on a different subject: The titles of the last three chapters are really funny ( I got the references...) and the "early days of a better nation" in Elizabeth's renunciation speech...Ken McLeod, right?

    137:

    Smart bombs? Who needs those?

    Here's an example. Let's assume everyone in Los Angeles can jaunt. If I wanted to shut the city down, I'd go to maybe five freeway overpasses at 3 pm and unroll big banners with some random engrams on them. Jaunting from a moving car would hurt a bit, and 3 pm in LA is not quite gridlock.

    Only a few drivers would jaunt and crash, but the reason I picked LA is that it takes about 3-5 accidents on critical freeways to gridlock the entire freeway system, such that it can take 5 hours to get 20 miles (speaking from experience). And I'm pretty sure there are analogous crashable systems in every major city on the planet.

    The banners? Assembled as a high school prank. Or perhaps by freedom fighters. Or Nazis. This is just one example. Can any homeowner be sure that a burglar can't jaunt in and get their valuables? How about municipal records offices? Is any record of any business transaction safe if someone can jaunt past a lock and take or destroy them all?

    The point here isn't about nation-states, it's about the social contract, which is the notion that I can trust my government sufficiently that I won't run away from it. Refugees and migrants are threats to states because, especially when they flood in, they break the basic contract that the state insures predictable rights to life and property. If a paratime state can't keep anyone from getting murdered, raped, or pillaged, not by a state actor, but by everyone from teenagers out for lulz to organized looters, then how is the state going to maintain a system that keeps everybody fed, watered, and not rebelling or leaving? That's the essence of the social contract, and it's fundamental to the existence of any state, going all the way back to the beginning.

    State are emergent solutions to problems brought on by high densities of people. So far as we know, from the one example of primary state development actually observed (Hawai'i), rulers take over when inter-family and inter-clan conflicts over who gets what resource become so cumbersome to deal with (multiple generations of feuding over who owns some farm, basically) that an authoritarian ruler can come in, impose a new class system of peasants making stuff and rulers making rules, and it works better than the old way did because there's less conflict, at least at first. That's what I'm talking about with a social contract: the peasants are willing to put up with the rulers if it means they don't spend most of their days arguing with other peasants over things like property rights.

    The problem with paratime is that, especially when everybody can jaunt, controlling any boundary of space or morals can become truly problematic. We might have Primaria, the only Paratime Empire on an otherwise empty Earth, but if anyone can jaunt to neighboring worlds and back, and thereby steal food or valuables, kill and rape without getting caught, and destroy any document (or person) who can say who owns what...how long is Primaria going to last? And even if only a few people can jaunt, how are they kept under control?

    This is not a counsel of despair, but a question: how does a paratime state work?

    138:

    IIRC Ken took "early days of a better nation" from Alasdair Gray.

    139:

    Jaunting is not involuntary. That is: if you see an engram you can feel what it is but you can look away or, with some effort, ignore it (like trying not to sneeze). (This is a key mistake DHS makes by flashing up engrams in the in-flight safety videos on airliners: firstly it doesn't do what they think it does, secondly, if it did work, it'd result in a bunch of unexpected airliner disappearances.)

    Prisons still work for world walkers (there are multiple ways to make them escape-proof). Stealing food/valuables via neighbouring worlds was addressed right at the start of the series (with doppelgangered buildings), a solution that can be improved on. More to the point, you're also expressing a variant on "elite panic" as your governing theory here -- most people do not live in a perpetual Hobbesian realm of the war of all against all, where the only thing keeping them in check is the threat of state retribution. Most of us refrain from stealing because stealing is wrong, not because it's impossible. Yes, world-walking makes enforcement a little bit harder -- but imagine how a cop from 1821 would have imagined the problems of policing in 2021 if you told them about automobile ownership and pricing ("costs as much as a suit of clothes, enables anyone over about the age of 16 to travel anywhere at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour and carry up to a ton of stolen goods!").

    140:

    According to Wikipedia, he got it from Dennis Lee.

    This may be wrong, as this article credits Dennis Leigh (although that may be spelling differences, as there aren't that many Canadian authors named Lee/Leigh):

    https://www.heraldscotland.com/default_content/12766591.work-live-early-days-better-nation/

    141:

    Most of us refrain from stealing because stealing is wrong, not because it's impossible.

    I had a colleague who was a fundamentalist Christian, and believed that atheists had no reason not to rape and murder, because they didn't fear hell. I told him I was uneasy that the only reason he didn't murder me was his belief in punishment by an invisible sky fairy.

    142:

    Yep: a common social disconnect is that multiple groups can't credit one another's bona fides because they rely on conflicting axiom systems (which in some cases block empathy for the other group).

    143:

    Charlie.... might like to imagine they're free from government and taxes, but they probably aren't self-sufficient because self-sufficiency imposes huge cost burdens that ultimately end up causing small settlements to assume the burdens of the state while missing out on many of the benefits. BREXIT strikes again!

    Correction: most people - outside the USA - do not live in a perpetual Hobbesian realm of the war of all against all, where the only thing keeping them in check is the threat of state retribution.

    Rbt Prior That particular dark fantasy is depressingly common amongst USA-ians It's why even a Trumpist will "trust" a muslim over an atheist, because of Big Sky Fairy

    144:

    That particular dark fantasy is depressingly common amongst USA-ians It's why even a Trumpist will "trust" a muslim over an atheist, because of Big Sky Fairy

    Oddly enough, my colleague, who was scathing about Islam, was best buds with the most devout Muslim on staff.

    145:

    Okay, so jaunting is voluntary, which is why it took so long for Rita to copy out that engram for Nel (probably wrong name, but...). That's a minor detail.

    I think the difference is that you're assuming there's only a few alternate timelines. I'm assuming that, since it's a quantum phenomenon, there are an infinity of possible timelines, most of which are inaccessible (too similar to ours, so you can't jaunt into yourself unless you're Scott Bakula) and most of the rest of which are undiscovered. Presumably finite engram size further limits the number of accessible timelines. Regardless, I'd still bet that, in a world with engrams, jaunty teenagers and other psychonauts are going to be doodling engrams out in the woods and hoping to trip out, especially if they have the engram that gets them home again.

    Society trains us to respect the property rights and bodily integrity of others. No hitting, no biting, no stealing are lessons any kid has to learn. It's not a genetic part of human nature. Rules and norms get taught as a necessary part of our cultural inheritance, and they survive because they work better than the alternatives, same as with alleles of genes. I'm not arguing Hobbes because Hobbes knew nothing about genes and memes, and he assumed, based on his experiences in England and as a refugee, that humans have an essential brutish nature. But I am arguing that when some civilized behaviors are maladaptive, people possessing them are at a disadvantage. That's a problem, because it looks like civilized behaviors can be maladaptive when it's possible to jaunt.

    For example, look at the behavior of the original clan, when they only had two engrams to play with. They had no compunctions about committing truly abhorrent acts, up to and including nuclear war. Perhaps power corrupts in paratime?

    Open that up to everyone having both the power and access to dozens or hundreds of other possible worlds, and then what? That's purportedly what the Forerunners have. What's the social contract that keeps a paratime state (which by definition has a monopoly on the use of violence) intact enough to do the job of providing goods, services, and protection to as many people as it can, the chief of these being norms, rules, and property rights?

    Note this isn't a weaseling way to attack the series. It's a designers' question for those who want to play with it. I don't think it's impossible, I just think it needs to be thought out. In this, it follows the question of how to get an Earth uninhabited by humans.

    146:

    What was the switch in TL2 that led to removable phone batteries being standard? In our timeline, upscale teens would all have iPhones with non removable batteries.

    147:

    So whether they can see and focus on an engram well enough to trigger the jaunt?

    Question: why is vision the only sense that works for engrams? Is there something unique about the visual cortex? Or would a species that relies more on other senses have the equivalent patterns in terms of scent/sound/sonar/whatever?

    (If vision is the only sense that works for engrams, then my nasty mind says that a way of permanently disabling a worldwalker is to blind them.)

    148:

    There's only a few timelines they've got engrams for right now with neither side being incentized to do that much expansion.

    The Clan didn't really have much reason to go a-wandering given medical risks of too much Jaunting before they ended up refugees in The Commonwealth and once they got in the commonwealth, the same applied plus being focused on their mission of stealing technology which didn't leave time for exploring.

    The United States has ARMBAND and it's worldwalkers lack the hypertension problem, but with access to a bunch of empty/paleolithic worlds has no reason to expand rapidly since each world would be good for US exploitation for quite a long time.

    This was the status quo before running into the bugs. Considerations of survival might make expansion more popular...

    149:

    Can I just point out that when I talked about putting the nanosomes in mice, I wasn't thinking of letting the mice jaunt, it was to provide a less ethically dubious source of ARMBAND material

    150:

    Well yes, even taking away worldwalkers' glasses may be sufficient to stop them from jaunting.

    I think the short answer is that if you want to convey a bunch of information to a human fast, vision is the best system. Olfaction and proprioception might be complex enough, but they seem to be even more idiosyncratic than things like color perception. So, for example, yoga poses might have enough information to trigger a jaunt, but going from positioning to feeling to instructing the magitech to do the jaunt would be really tricky. Hearing is a linear sense for most people, so it's not clear whether a person reciting a spell (effectively) builds up enough information in their heads to trigger the jaunting magitech. Hearing soundscapes is possible (everything from Tuvan throatsinging to symphonies), and this is a version of multidimensional sound, but I suspect that it would be easier for sperm whales to jaunt this way than for humans (they're better at precision sound reproduction than we are).

    Remember, the engrams are a coding system for instructions, the eyes are the intermediate, and the self-assembling ultra-cool magitech is what causes the jaunt.

    151:

    "Society trains us to respect the property rights and bodily integrity of others. No hitting, no biting, no stealing are lessons any kid has to learn"

    These things work because they tend to perpetuate themselves better than the alternatives. Most people approximately obey the speed limit (they all tend to cheat to the same degree) even when there's negligible chance of being caught; the overall rate of crimes tend to be more correlated with social distress than anything else.

    So in a Everyone Can Jaunt scenario, people are still going to live in cities because cities are generally fun, but real estate prices should crash permanently when it becomes obvious that you can build your theme park / museum complex / heavy industry / office park / university campus anywhere that you can coordinate with other people to build infrastructure to support it. Zoning laws will be interesting -- every forward-thinking city is going to designate a TL for annoying industries, a different one for light residential, quite possibly a TL for nightlife and adult-oriented businesses. New traffic laws are going to be concerned with the places you're allowed to make jaunts in vehicles and under what conditions you can avoid traffic jams. (At five seconds reflection, I think that driving on the shoulder of a divided highway would be a much more drastic offense, since that's where you go to stop and jaunt in an emergency.)

    Store-and-forward network gateways are going to be interesting. You won't get voice or video calls across TLs, but you can have chat and email and social networks. There are going to be a lot of second-system effects, where people who complain about the way we do things here because of inertia will see the opportunity to do things right dammit... with the inevitable conflicts.

    Bester solved the same-world teleport jaunt with mazes and not inviting people to your home, or only to a locked parlor. For cross-TL jaunting, most people will be content to rely on the same principle as the lock on the front door of a house: it sends the signal that this is a private place, but you can certainly get in by smashing a window or breaking down the door. Security systems will be less concerned with borders and more concerned with detection and response -- computer vision to detect "not a person (or pet) who lives here, didn't come in through the front door". We could probably do that with current technology now for spaces where we expect only 2-20ish people to be authorized.

    152:

    You could certainly stop me by removing my glasses unless I could hold it really close (6 dioptres myopia!)

    Olfaction and proprioception are very poor at receiving complex information, because they operate by selecting a small number of signals out of a messy situation. Very different from vision.

    153:

    if you want to convey a bunch of information to a human fast, vision is the best system

    Sure. But what of other species? Would your hypothetical jaunting mice be using some form of scent engram?

    154:

    I would bet that dogs or bears would in preference to vision. But hearing is probably a better contender, even in humans, and quite a lot of SF (and even traditional, centuries old) fantasy has used music in similar ways to where OGH uses engrams. Music and magic have been associated since time immemorial, and being transported by music is an ancient meme.

    155:

    My first thoughts on Everyone Can Jaunt designing is:

    --Clutter is a good defense against jaunting, and --If I believe my own handwaving, each world is occupied for 500-1000 years while being looted, and then the majority of the population moves onto the colonies to repeat this ad nauseum.

    Combining the two: --Just as a physical defense, complex, messy environments are good. This includes small rooms, lots of junk, small floors, curved spaces, fractal patterning of alleys, cube farms, and the rest) make an environment that's hard to jaunt into. This is because anything, from a wall to a desk to a bed, might be in the way. Jaunting into Charlie's apartment would be far harder than going into a modernist house, for example.
    --Messiness scales up, so messy cities are harder to invade or jaunt into than cleanly gridded cities, and curved lines are harder to jaunt around than straight lines, and so forth. --On the other hand, rulers and bureaucracies generally need simplicity to govern. It's easier to census and tax people who live at addresses in a gridded city, for example.
    --This suggests that good paratime governance may benefit from (require???) a fundamental asymmetry: that it's easier for the paratime government to get necessary information than for its opponents to get the same information. The gridded streets are an example: it's not hard for someone overflying a gridded city to get a good map, almost as good as the one the city government has. Alleys under shades or underground cities are entirely different levels of problem for an attacker to map, especially remotely. So in some circumstances, I'd expect the latter to be favored.

    As for the age thing, how long does it take to loot a world and set off climate change? My best guess is 500-1000 years. While that's deep time in American terms, some Europeans are probably cringing at how fast that is. But basically, I'm talking about going from beach-head colonies to good mines to good towns and cities, then regional connectivity, opening up new colonial worlds, maxing out population and exploiting progressively worse levels of resources (going from hunting mammoths to bison to rabbits), then letting the world go fallow as people move on to other developing and developed colonial worlds in the network. The only reason to make things more durable is if an opponent gets detected and slows colonization in a particular direction.

    In terms of world-building, unfortunately this favors slums and tenements in cities. People are on the move, so the only reason to invest in durability is paratime defense (for example, Hoppers turn up one jaunt away, and some sort of paratime blocking is in order). Otherwise, they mostly have to discourage paratime prowlers from breaking in.

    There's actually a style of city-building, reported more from the Middle East or Medieval European cities. Immigrants are given empty land to build on. They build a slum there, but as they become more prosperous, they upgrade the buildings of their slum, and ultimately it becomes densely built, confusing for outsiders to navigate. This is the kind of development that would discourage low-level paratime attacks like burglary and assault, since outsiders wouldn't know where the safe spaces inside are. Supplying infrastructure like water, power, and sewage to a developing slum can be hard, but it can be done, at least to some degree.

    That's my first take.

    One other, possibly interesting question, is what happens on Earths that have been left to fallow after being looted. Obviously they look like the world we're heading into now. But the difference is that billions of people made a mess and moved on. Is that a bad thing, or a good thing? Is it better to be a queen of ruins, or a peon on the forward edge of progress?

    156:

    I thought the TL2 USA had a lot of engrams. Don't I recall Rita paging through lots of options on her wrist tattoo?

    And what was that "dispose of her" timeline?

    157:

    That provides the glorious idea that whales are not endangered in this timeline due to hunting; they're just going somewhere else.

    Damn. I wish.

    Also, there's a story seed... Diver sees it happen.

    158:

    As Charlie said upthread the timelines known so far consisted of 70% empty of humans/hominids, 30% paleolithic, The ruins of the Gruinmarkt, Timeline 4/the hoppers' closest nest and BLACK RAIN/TL3/The Commonwealth.

    So those options for her wrist tattoo don't lead to interesting places, mostly. Well, interesting if you're into big game hunting maybe.

    159:

    First, I'd like to thank OGH for such a well thought ending for the series. I was so looking forward to it... that I ended up owning two copies in my Kobo! (Had bought a pre-order for the US launch a long time ago, then forgot all about it, and bought the UK on the 28th!)

    As to questions, I'm sorry if the answer is obviously 2, but how many timelines are adjacent to each other? I mean, how many knots can be reached departing from timeline 3, for instance? And why?

    160:

    Regarding exactly that discussion, there's an excellent book by Umberto Eco: Belief or Non-Belief?, ISBN-10: ‎ 0826480993, ISBN-13: ‎978-0826480996, with a correspondence exchange between him and the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Maria Martini.

    161:

    Well, now that Capclave, which was the first in-person con we've been to since 2018 is over (vaccination cards required to register, and masks mandatory, except in the con suite (eating and drinking)....

    Colonization. Right. Have lots of kids... nope. People do not think the same way as they did a century ago. Go ahead, ask any woman if they could, would they have 10 kids. (Answer: fuck, no).

    In my future universe, humans only colonized about 4k light years of the galaxy. Large colonies have tens of millions of people, so, no, we're not going to Conquer the Galaxy. Consider that the estimate is that around 1810? 1820? we had about 1B people. If you live on a planet being terraformed (and I'm assuming you start in one area - on a peninsula, or an Australia or UK, and spread. But you've got a huge world (worlds are really, really big things, y'know). And we have industrial agriculture, so you don't need 10 kids as labor to run the farm. And mostly, they're not going to die before they can have kids of their own.

    You're assuming that colonizing would mean what it did a century and more ago, and I strongly disagree.

    And, since we know where we've fucked up the world, most of it wouldn't be repeated.

    Oh, and most folks do not want to be Dan'l Boone ("I move, if I can see my neighbor's chimney smoke"). Most people enjoy the benefits of civilization.

    Think more of roughing it, camping out in a big park...for a vacation.

    162:

    Jaunting stem cells.

    And no one here seems to be thinking that either TL2 or 3 will, within 20 years, have machines to jaunt, no biological stuff needed.

    Hop in your flying jaunting car, and you're off for a vacation.

    163:

    Which leads to the question of why these three worlds with human developed this far. That's a metaquestion that is looking for an answer.

    164:

    It isn't just for them, alone. The wackos who make it up now actually believe in government they call "smaller", but really mean "doesn't do anything for anyone but us, and it's the stick to put everyone else in their place, which is to do what we tell them, period."

    165:

    Double McMansion? Hell, I want a double tiny thing that I have now - they'd be enough room.

    And about the parking lot, sorry, you'll have to negotiate with me, as I have the rights to that. Back in the sixties my mother wrote a short story, and I think I have a copy somewhere to prove it, of using time to park, and the story was a car showing up in Francis? Roger? Bacon's workshop....

    166:

    Which leads to a few questions: 1. how did the bugs find the Forerunner worlds, other than by exploration? 2. Just how many worlds were there... and how do we know there aren't still some around? 3. You'd think that with so many more worlds (being there first) the forerunners couldn't have won the war eventually? 4. We do have the parts of the destroyed one. The bugs ain't the only ones who can make engineered diseases.

    167:
  • One or both sides ran on the other.
  • Infinite worlds imo. Of course "infinite" doesn't mean the US and Commonwealth have engrams for them yet. The Forerunners or their successors are probably out there somewhere.
  • Sure, they won elsewhere. Problem is the nearest cluster of prosperous, near-singularity level utopian worlds is probably a million or two jaunts away from earth. On the upside, the closest organized set of bug swarm worlds as opposed to the occasional rare worlds which have some hidden and waiting in case humans try building industry on a world is probably equally far.
  • Yeah. If the bugs run into humanity again sometime in 50-100 years, the US-Commonwealth alliance will probably be more able to fight on "fair" terms instead of having to resort to getting "creative".
  • 168:

    The first part of my big, multi-book order from Big River arrived today; "The Bloodline Feud". It's a nice, hefty U.K. style trade paperback. I'll probably get started on it tomorrow evening after I finish my current book (a re-read of one of Glen Cook's Black Company series).

    According to my email confirmations the rest of the series + the new series will arrive over the next three weeks or so. Hopefully IN ORDER so that I'm finishing up "Dark State" just as "Invisible Sun" arrives.

    169:

    A question for the mathematicians in the crowd: how well do knots code "infinity?" Does a knot have to be infinitely big to encode an infinite number of digits (or codes for timelines), or does complexity scale as a power function of knot size such that infinity fits on a wrist? I suspect knots don't scale fast enough, but it would be fun to know. If that's the case, then the engrams only work in some subset of all timelines, and Forerunners may be relatively nearby.

    Another fun question is whether timelines within engram search space share a common history (other than being "Earth") or whether they're a random assortment of possible histories. My guess is the latter, in which case things can get excessively weird, the more so if the assortment of searchable timelines changes over time because the timelines move relative to each other in paratime.

    170:

    Personally I headcanon "knots" as just being representation of somem sort of "useful" part of a fractal -- the clan and the US/commonwealth call them knots because that's what they looked like.

    171:

    We'll have to wait for God to Give Word about what a knot is (and I won't be surprised if there is no Word of God on this, since our imaginations are so much better when there's no decoherence).

    Anyway, I figured it was some quantum superposition of celtic knots and mathematical knot theory. Celtic knots are literally more eyecatching, and there are some generated by machine. With them, it's the shape of the loops, more than which strand crosses on top, that catches my eyes. So that's fractal-ish.

    Knot theory is about how closed loops knot, and the information seems to be largely coded in how the strand crosses itself. Probably there's some version of knot theory that grows into large numbers, but I'm not sure if it translates into eye candy.

    I'd guess the engrams are some superposition of these two ideas. And perhaps it's a good idea to leave it unresolved?

    172:

    Fair enough.

    In terms of "stories I probably won't write because of focused on other stuff", I have wondered recently about doing an AU that crosses over with turtledove's worldwar/colonization.

    The premise is that on a few worlds, corrosponding roughly to TLs 1/2/3/4 of Empire Games, you have some Race emperor delaying the mission several decades by insisting the Colonization Fleet be sent at the same time as the conquest fleet. Therefore, the two fleets arrive those worlds in 2020, roughly in the middle of what would have been Empire Games.

    You basically have alien invasions on three worlds. TL1 being late-medieval falls to the Race relatively quickly, TL2 sees a human victory within a relatively short time because >roughly 80s to 2000s military >a probably significantly more militarized 2020 than OTL. TL3 likely sees some sort of stalemate(details below) within a year, as both Humans and Race wouldn't want a total nukeout -- it's the human's world and the lizards want somewhere to colonize.

    Things One of the conquest fleet's males needing to use the lavatory at an inconvenient time delays the launch of the Race fleet in the version of Home corrosponding to TL4's earth a year. So yeah after the invasions of TLs 2/3 get beaten off by the US/China and Commonwealth respectively(if it doesn't just lead to France collapsing and it being a Commonwealth-lizard cold war now or Commonwealth-France-Lizard(probably lots of asia/the middle east/africa as Race territory three-way cold war) you end up with a situation with some not very bright Race officer waking up the locust hive on TL4, leading to a more over the top version of the scene with JUGGERNAUT.

    173:

    A working knot can be displayed on a small screen, say 500 pixels each way. Therefore there are at most 2 to the power 250000 different knots. That's a big number, but it is NOT infinity. The same argument applies no matter how big your screen is.

    However, if you map on to Pratchett's multiverse, you only need two knots (one for each direction) to reach an infinite number of worlds. So a finite number of knots doesn't mean a finite number of worlds.

    174:

    Mobile phones had removable batteries as late as 2015-ish, outside of Apple; the trend towards integral batteries spread as USB charger ports became universal (meaning it was easy to find top-up power) and battery life grew better.

    But TL2 diverged from our own some time ago. Small changes at first (in the 1970s/80s, for example, with Dck Chn*y being involved with the Clan) then snowballing visibly after June 2003 (nuclear attack on the US government). So their smartphone ecosystem evolved differently, with different names for things. Some convergence is obvious by "Invisible Sun" -- the Major's phone that Elizabeth steals is a recognizable multitouch smartphone with face recognition and PIN unlocking -- but these are fairly obvious extrapolations from the semiconductor industry. (I was on much more tenuous grounds actually giving cellphone operators familiar names, but didn't want to be overly confusing to local readers or overly vague for everyone else.)

    Anyway: convergence on USB charging was mandated by an EU directive in 2009 and took some years to arrive, but seems to have led to standardization and subsequently the widespread availability of USB booster batteries and the shift of non-Apple vendors towards phones with non-removable batteries. So I'm going with the EU not issuing that directive, or not getting it to stick until much later, along with other unspecified differences in phone design philosophy.)

    175:

    (If vision is the only sense that works for engrams, then my nasty mind says that a way of permanently disabling a worldwalker is to blind them.)

    Yes: Miriam is explicitly threatened with this in "The Clan Corporate", if memory serves.

    176:

    We don't know where ARMBAND material currently comes from, but it's pretty obviously not harvested from human brains 17 years after the ~USA made a serious and determined attempt to nuke all the tissue donors.

    I'm going with stem cell tissue cultures as a first step, and research ongoing into mechanisms less dependent on squishy wetware if possible (attempts to excite nanosomes directly using some sort of semiconductor trigger are inevitable).

    There's no obvious "controversy" about human stem cell cultures other than the usual yammering by American religious fundamentalists -- and the fact that the DHS researchers drove a bulldozer through the Nuremberg Protocols and should have been tried for crimes against humanity. But it's certainly something that the DPR might want to throw some money at the usual Balkan troll farms to foster a perception of if they want to slow down US expansion ...

    177:

    At five seconds reflection, I think that driving on the shoulder of a divided highway would be a much more drastic offense, since that's where you go to stop and jaunt in an emergency.

    You're still thinking about driving.

    A jaunt-based society is going to live in much denser, walkable cities because it can build "sideways" rather than up and out in the usual three dimensions: a building needs to be no larger than its largest room, plus access. So it's practical to have a streetcar alternate, with central/downtown high speed rail terminals in yet another time line (the ultimate in grade separated railway crossings!). So the cost of driving trams or railways right to wherever they need to go will drop to the price of construction -- no need for eminent domain, no need to plan for intersections, no need for tunneling 90% of the time.

    Put it another way: yes, there'll be suburban sprawl, but it'll be into low-occupancy parallels, so that everyone gets their own gigantic back garden (edging on wilderness) even in the centre of town. Meanwhile, you can live in your suburban ranch utopia but your commute to the city centre is "walk out of the front door onto busy city street, wait five minutes at the tram stop, two stops and you're there." (Short wait because dense urban cores mean very high density transit, too: instead of buses or trams being hourly or a handful a day, they're every few minutes because their route is a loop of only about ten miles.)

    With cars mostly unnecessary for work/home commuting, we're probably going to see fewer big box stores/giant supermarkets (no WalMart) but more small suburban supermarkets near public transport stops. And possibly City Car Club schemes operating in the road-zoned time lines. Actual ownership of automobiles may be more of a luxury/status symbol: ordinary people can get by fine with a bicycle (you can pick it up and jaunt with it, and it's much safer to ride in a time line zoned to exclude automobiles and trucks).

    We may well see homes develop with "communications rooms" in alternates where high bandwidth fibre has been laid (again: dense urban cores). Otherwise, smartphones are going to rely on massive caching and on-board storage capacity. Internet architecture will evolve very differently if there is absolutely no comms available in some rooms!

    178:

    And what was that "dispose of her" timeline?

    Dangling plot thread: it is implied that DHS figured out a way to derive a knotwork topology for the time line with the black hole in it. (How this happens is unspecified.) Obviously, if you give Rita an engram for that time line, labelled "this is your emergency rendezvous: go here in event of receiving this signal", then when you give her the signal, if she's dumb enough to use it she comes out in vacuum in free fall above a planetary mass black hole and can't get back (she's falling, so the other side is blocked because it's underground).

    After the swarm are understood this option is off the table. But there may exist other alternates where the atmosphere is anoxic or where there's been a runaway greenhouse resulting in a "cool Venus" (only 200-300 celsius!).

    This is why the Commonwealth switched to exploring new time lines using airships, was investing in space suit technology, and was very keen on moving to exploration from orbit.

    179:

    I'm sorry if the answer is obviously 2, but how many timelines are adjacent to each other? I mean, how many knots can be reached departing from timeline 3, for instance? And why?

    The answer to both questions is: I don't know: many.

    180:

    A working knot can be displayed on a small screen, say 500 pixels each way. Therefore there are at most 2 to the power 250000 different knots.

    Its more complicated than that; 2^250000 is a very conservative upper bound.

    The engram is not just a bit pattern; it has to be a knot that follows certain topological rules. That way the nanosomes can recognise it as an encoded jaunt rather than just another piece of scenery. (By analogy, a QR code has certain areas fixed so that your phone can pick it out; if all the rules aren't complied with then your phone won't recognise it as a QR code). So merely displaying a random 500x500 pixel matrix won't work.

    We don't know what those rules are, but in addition to the low resolution screen we also know that the Clan knotwork fits nicely into a small locket. It probably only encodes perhaps 10 or 20 bits of information, which puts the number of possible codes in the thousands to perhaps a few million.

    On possibility is that larger knots could also work. However the fovea (the bit of the retina that you are focusing these words on) is quite small, and eye resolution drops significantly outside that. If the knot gets so big and complex that you have to scan the details with your eye over time then the mechanism probably doesn't work. This suggests that the Clan knot is probably about as big as it can get, especially if you want the system to work for older people who have poorer vision.

    As you say, of course this isn't related to the number of possible timelines out there.

    181:

    But it's certainly something that the DPR might want to throw some money at the usual Balkan troll farms to foster a perception of if they want to slow down US expansion ...

    Which reminds me of another question that's been bothering me: what is the state of public dissent in the ~USA?

    At one point Kurt (IIRC) points out the general lack of protest movements and demonstration marches, which suggests that they are being actively suppressed, even though the ~USA seems to have no lack of big ideological divides (c/f the recent march in our USA about abortion rights). Colonel Smith boasts about "full infowar dominance" over social media. But the Wolf Orchestra hides, in part, amongst cryptopunks and tinfoil hat enthusiasts, and the President complains about "flat earthers and anti-vaxxers", suggesting that Facebook is being allowed to propagate crazy conspiracy theories.

    182:

    Yes, 10-20 bits of information: that's on the order of a thousand to a million useful knots. But knots effectively encode a "chess move" across an infinite board, and you can execute a sequence of different moves -- you're not limited to repeating the same move time and again.

    The jaunt mechanism was probably developed by a civilization with a deep understanding of paratime travel, but serves as a minimal autonomous mobility gizmo for individuals. If anything, it's too good: peoples who are accustomed to this capability are trapped in a local minimum with no incentive to try and improve on it.

    If anything, being crippled by the prion disease forced the Clan to innovate and develop new ways of using jaunting when it was a constrained resource. Imagine, for example, a hunter-gatherer society with this ability. Beyond the basic tech for creating persistent knotworks (maybe making vellum and ink?) what do they need? If there's a food shortage in one time line due to a climate fluctuation, they can just move to the next one over (which probably has similar, hence familiar, geography). Bump up against another tribe who seem unfriendly? Go around them. Population pressure is a non-issue, so the main force that promoted the development of agriculture in our time line is be absent.

    183:

    Our USA is crazycakes over national security, so by extrapolation, the ~USA is similar.

    I seem to recall reading that something like 6-9 million US civilians hold security clearances for classified material. The US Intelligence Community is a clearinghouse that publicly lists 19 member agencies -- it's a separate intel agency simply to keep all the other intel agencies aware of one another's activities. This is getting into GDR territory -- allegedly, 10% of East Germany's population were listed as Stasi informants -- but it's actually less efficiently run, with internal empires vying against each other or operating at cross purposes (just look at the fiasco on January 6th for an example).

    "Full infowar dominance" over social media gets you absolutely zip if the organization trying to infiltrate you is actually a Church, members learn opsec tactics in Bible class ("over-eager evangelizing may repel your targets, so here's how you take a softly-softly approach and sneak the Good Word up on them"), 98% of them aren't involved anyway, they don't realize what they're doing is illegal (they think they're evangelizing the unbelievers/doing the Lord's work) so they can't fail a polygraph interview, and the President insists they're decent God-fearing Americans and tells you to stop monitoring them. Oh, and there are three of them in your reporting chain -- your boss's boss is one: also, so are two of your subordinates, including the administrative assistant who reads the reports on infiltration and prepares the daily digest you rely on.

    184:

    "And what was that "dispose of her" timeline?

    Dangling plot thread: it is implied that DHS figured out a way to derive a knotwork topology for the time line with the black hole in it. (How this happens is unspecified.) Obviously, if you give Rita an engram for that time line, labelled "this is your emergency rendezvous: go here in event of receiving this signal", then when you give her the signal, if she's dumb enough to use it she comes out in vacuum in free fall above a planetary mass black hole and can't get back (she's falling, so the other side is blocked because it's underground)."

    IIRC Rita bookmarked the engram for the black hole on her implant when she was taken to see it, which would indicate thay have the tech to record engrams and that would be how they got it. I was expecting her to get an instruction to jaunt to that engram and that be what convinced her the DHS were her enemies since she would see that it would be fatal.

    185:

    Yes, any container has to be infinitely big to encode an infinite number of objects, and knots are no exception. I recommend NOT diving down the rabbit hole of infinities - most non-mathematicians merely get themselves totally confused. They're not hard, but you have to use ways of thinking most people are not used to.

    What OGH and Paul said in #182 and #180 is the key; by being able to use a sequence, you end up with an unbounded number of states, which is what many people think of as the same as infinite (it isn't). But it's all you need in this context.

    186:

    Not only did Rita bookmark the blackhole timeline, she explicitly noted while flipping through her bookmarks later that she had two identical engrams. IIRC, she was then interrupted before she could check which two they were - so yes, I also expected that to be her clue that her bosses regarded her as somewhere between expendable and actively undesirable.

    Related to the engrams-as-chess-moves analogy, I'm reminded of a question I meant to ask OGH: to what extent (if any) are engram-enabled journeys commutative?

    By which I mean: we know that engram A moves you between TL1 and TL2, and engram B moves you between TL1 and TL3. When Huw's team use engram B in TL2, that provides travel to/from TL4. If you then use engram A in TL4, does that transfer you to TL3? I'd expect this to be one of the first things that MITI tested, once they got a proper research program up, because the question of whether there's only one easy two-step path from the ~USA to the Commonwealth, or at least two and potentially thousands, is of obvious direct concern to both the ex-clan and the NAC government.

    187:

    Ops, you beat me to the point of her noticing that she already had the black hole engram.

    That's why I asked about the number of engrams working in each time line: if the "chess board" is multidimensional (that means, "adjacent" can be 4, 8, 16, etc.), that brings a lot of exciting possibilities!

    188:

    Given the defensive strategy that the Forerunners adopted - scorched-earth destruction of boundaries leading to Hive-dominated versions - a branching tree model seems to be more likely - given any two destinations n hops apart, there is only one route between them (or at least, to the degree that there are m > 1 routes between them, the number of possible moves at each stage through navigating that route is such that the probability of correctly finding the 2nd through mth routes are essentially zero, even for the essentially god-like level of technological superiority demonstrated by a late stage Hive).

    Of course, the Forerunners might have just picked a bad strategy. I don't recall if the Invisible Sun narrator actually, definitively, stated whether they still existed somewhere, and given OGH's history with unreliable narrators...

    189:

    Both the Forerunners and the Swarm are too widespread, and on too vast a scale, to exterminate easily. While hominins emerged on multiple time lines in parallel, and are prone to interbreeding, we can reasonably say that no part of the Forerunner clade is significantly older than H. Erectus; but that's still around 2 million years. The Hive, meanwhile, may be much older (having radiated across interstellar distances at much slower than light speeds).

    The Forerunners are technologically inferior, less numerous overall, and in a "vulnerable" position, while still existing on a scale that dwarfs anything resembling a galactic empire in SF.

    190:

    "Invisible Sun" plopped through my letter-slot about an hour back ....

    191:

    Oh, I agree it's a very conservative upper bound. I was just trying to show you couldn't have an infinite number of knots without confusing the non-mathematicians.

    You've worked through this much better; I agree that we're probably looking at a dozen or two bits at most.

    192:

    I maybe misremembering but didn’t Huw come across an airless TL that wasn’t the Hive TL in Merchant Princes?

    The Hive TL strikes me as a crappy elimination TL as it requires Rita to be in TL4 unless there’s also a direct access Knot for it.

    193:

    One problem for a early phase Jaunt based civilisation could possibly be the availability and generation of Engrams. Neither the Commonwealth or the USA have done more than scratch the surface of available TL’s which suggests to me that perhaps generation of new Engrams is non-trivial, and therefore the Government can limit their spread and either take advantage of or deliberately generate Engram scarcity. Then scarcity enables Governmental control.

    194:

    A jaunt-based society is going to live in much denser, walkable cities because it can build "sideways" rather than up and out in the usual three dimensions: a building needs to be no larger than its largest room, plus access.

    But what about your cats? I'm starting with the absurd example, because I think it's worth thinking about the struggles of having rooms on multiple timelines.

    Cats are an easy in: unless you're going to have jaunting cats (probably a very bad idea), they're confined to whatever room you leave them in. As is any pet.

    Now that we've eased in, let's get serious: what about the children? Unless children can jaunt at birth (hah!), you're setting up a house where mom can't monitor baby unless she's on the same timeline. I'm not sure how many mothers would stand for that. And two year-olds and teens, left alone on their own timelines? I do not think so.

    But it gets worse. Multi timeline towns need to build multiple copies of infrastructure. Since I get involved in infrastructure battles regularly, I can tell you that even getting the infrastructure right in one timeline is sometimes a decades' long nightmare. So let's multiply that problem across timelines. Instead of infrastructure being the political equivalent of malaria and LSD, with relapses and flashbacks every year, let's call it the equivalent of (malaria*LSD)^N, where N is the number of timelines you're dealing with infrastructure needs on. And do remember, each timeline is in a different state of development. Some is howling wilderness with mammoths, some had a nuclear war in the 1950s, some had a hereditary monarch who thought development was diabolical and wanted none of it.

    Then there's the problem that builders have to build to at least sub-meter accuracy in three dimensions. This can be problematic. In places where they built fast (San Diego, for example), getting a house with level floors is considered good in some developments. Asking a bunch of construction workers to build to centimeter accuracy is expensive.

    And there are disasters. Say you're on a 20th floor condo that's stretched across three timelines, and your main exit gets destroyed in an earthquake or by shoddy construction collapsing. How are you getting out? That's an extreme example, and I'm sure we can multiply that to the 1/nth degree, down to daily misery. I mean, what happens when a kid's climbing on a TV cabinet, the cabinet flips forward and pins the kid, and mom can't jaunt to get to the kid because the cabinet's fallen in a place that blocks her jaunt. Or the prank of a kid dragging a sofa into the right spot to keep mom from getting out of the bathroom for six hours, while the kid eats all the candy.

    Then there's the politics. Are timelines politically independent or not? And if they are not, what if they want to be? Suppose, perhaps, that one timeline gets tasked with hosting most of the loos for a town. Suppose they get sick of being "urinetown" and decide to make a bid for more independence? So you get stuck with a situation where, politically, your front door is in Edinburgh, your loo is in Derry, and your kitchen is in London. Do you want to worry about the loo and the kitchen having Troubles while you're at work? And how would you know, until you came in and found you couldn't use either of them?

    Anyway, this is a source of endless amusement: getting that queen-sized bed into the bedroom with multiple jaunts? That will be fun, coordinating jaunts among your friends so that no one gets stuck with all the weight and a back injury. Fridge into the kitchen via two jaunts? Easy-peasy. Having your toddler disappear outside while you're on a phone call in another timeline? Quite normal.

    195:

    I seem to recall reading that something like 6-9 million US civilians hold security clearances for classified material.

    That may be true, but I don't think it has the significance that you think... "security clearance" doesn't mean "member of the State Security Apparatus". It's merely a document access control mechanism. Add up "everyone who has joined the US Army / Navy / Air Force / Coastguard / Marine Corps", throw in every civilian employee of DoD / every other three-letter organisation (including the cleaners, secretaries, janitors); and you're well into seven figures.

    By way of example, everyone joining UK Armed Forces pretty much since the late 1960s and the end of mass conscription[1], has gone through a security check designed to weed out those who wanted cheap training in firearms and explosives; and signed the Official Secrets Act. Congratulations, you now "hold a security clearance". Add in everyone who worked for a "List X" civilian firm doing defence-related work, and that's an awful lot of people.

    This used to be known as "Negative Vetting", i.e. if nothing showed up on your records, you were good to go; and carried an upper classification limit of "SECRET". Anything more than that (namely, lots of people working with cryptographic equipment, source intelligence, sensitive technologies, a job in the Diplomatic Corps) required what used to be called "Positive Vetting", where you filled in forms with a lot more detail about family and friends, and someone would come and chat to them [2]. Rather expensive process, but still rather a lot of people.

    These days, I think it's called "Security Check" and "Developed Vetting", but it's largely the same process.

    [1] Note to y'all; there wasn't AIUI a "Draft Number" in the UK - everyone went forward for assessment, pretty much everyone served (unless medically disqualified). One British Olympic shooting medallist had a genetic defect that means he's 4'11" in height. When his Board asked "which unit did he want to join?" he claimed to have answered "The Coldstream Guards!" (they have a minimum height restriction). He described the assessment board as trying very hard to let him down gently, and announcing that "they didn't feel that he had the physique to cope with the current service weapon" (the No.4 rifle, aka 0.303 Lee-Enfield). He thought it best not to mention that he was the current County Champion with a Lee-Enfield, and thus managed to avoid a couple of years in uniform...

    [2] Note that AIUI in the UK, it's a non-judgemental / pragmatic solution - if you tell your Vetting Officer about your current BDSM hobby, infidelity, or student years of recreational drug use, you're fine, because no-one should now be able to blackmail you by threatening loss of employment. I don't know whether (but I suspect that) the USA has a slightly more puritanical approach to such matters...

    196:

    In terms of para-time living, we've seen societies without widespread ability to jaunt, and with only about 20 years of serious investigation of the technology. Their ARMBAND drones are expensive now, but I can imagine a consumer version before not too long that can flit continually between several nearby timelines, and where replacing the stem cells is no more troublesome than replacing the batteries in a smoke detector, or having a Roomba charge itself overnight.

    Along the lines of "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station full of tapes hurtling down the highway", I'd also propose not underestimating the bandwidth of such a drone, when it comes to shuttling data between timelines. That would go a long way to reducing the everyday difficulty of knowing what's on the other side of a jaunt, among other things.

    197:

    And do remember, each timeline is in a different state of development. Some is howling wilderness with mammoths, some had a nuclear war in the 1950s, some had a hereditary monarch who thought development was diabolical and wanted none of it

    No they're not: you're wilfully misunderstanding the scenario -- they're all unpopulated, there is zero point in trying to expand sideways into occupied time lines. Nor is there any call for multi-story condos, when you can simply build sideways: have a common lobby area/entrance and place each dwelling in another time line opening off it. (Emergency escape? Trapdoor in ceiling or window plus roll-up ladder, and a designated clear area for jaunting a few metres away.)

    Again, these are not independent time lines, they're time lines occupied by a multi-timeline nation state. All part of the same notional territory.

    198:

    However, in places like the DDR, the vast majority of people at least partly working for the security system did NOT have a security clearance. The army of occasional informers (both on the books and casual ones) included a large chunk of the workforce; I do not know how many there are in the USA, but wouldn't be surprised at millions, possibly many millions.

    It's pretty bad in the UK, especially with some of the fascist laws we have under the guise of anti-terrorism legislation, as occasional published abuses demonstrate. Remember that anyone required (or 'encouraged') to report suspicions becomes a potential casual informer, and a LOT of people in the UK are in such a position. I have heard that the USA is a little better.

    199:

    "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station full of tapes hurtling down the highway" I know it was just a typo, but now my brain is stuck with the image of a small rural railway station that has escaped its foundations and is hurtling down the M3... Somewhere an ancient episode of “The Goodies” is waving a little flag to get some attention.

    200:

    So your idea of developing a city is:

    a) start with five or so worlds, all uninhabited (presumably howling wilderness where megafaunal extinctions have not occurred, so lions, bears, and mammoths oh my). b) grid out precisely the same city on all five worlds, having chopped up a different forest on each to make space (so lots and lots of precision construction on a raw frontier) c) lay out living rooms on one timeline, kitchens on another, work rooms on a third, bedrooms on a fourth, and bathrooms on a fifth, all taking up the same footprint but with different infrastructures. By definition, each world has the capability for all infrastructures, but only a few are developed on each.

    And the benefit of this is you get about 500% more density, but lose light-speed communications. You also have all of one infrastructure getting wiped out in a disaster. And little toddlers can now get snatched on any world, not just the one that's got the front door. And if you're aging like me and need to get your glasses on to jaunt to go to the bathroom at night, that's quite the production. Not a good system for the disabled in general.

    I'd point out that there's a simpler solution with the same density bonus. If you want to settle five different worlds at once, make each world a separate neighborhood. Each gets their own infrastructure suite for safety through redundancy, you don't have to build in quintuplicate each time someone needs a new home, and when a neighborhood gets wiped out by a disaster (raging herds of mastodons, perhaps), the survivors can camp out in an intact neighborhood until they're sorted. As an added bonus, the inhabitants can grow old or deal with disabilities without having to jaunt to the bathroom.

    201:

    The original was most likely a bicycle basket full of tapes, which was the original high-speed link between central and west Cambridge, and predated Usenet by a decade or so. Yes, it was a standard joke, even then. The multi-world solution is a backpack full of whatever storage medium is relevant - one full of USB sticks would be a mid-boggling size of data packet!

    202:

    "Gigantic back yards" - and I suppose you're going to have to give the lawn service the knot that gets them to that back yard, because you don't want to mow half an acre or more. Oh, and they have to have a way to get their riding mowers into that back yard (even if I wanted to pay a service, I'd have to rip out fencing).

    203:

    I'm assuming (did I read that early on?) that the ability to jaunt comes in puberty, so no issues with the toddlers, or five year olds playing hide and seek and avoid bath and bed time.

    204:

    Um, not all security clearances are equal, and I'm not sure that you're not mixing them.

    For example, for the ten years I was a contractor at the NIH, I (presumably, they don't tell you) had a POT clearance (position of trust). Which does not get me secret, top, or middle, but only maybe bottom secrets, or maybe KMart Blue light secrets.

    But it was a clearance.

    205:

    Lose lightspeed communications.

    Let's think about that: it presumably involves a lot less energy to move information from one timeline to another than a human-sized mass. Seems to me that, with enough research, you might be able to quantum-entangle between next-door universes....

    206:

    I've gotten two thirds through and am flummoxed by the part where Rita jaunts to TL3 after the coup, trying to get at Miriam's office in the government center. Descriptions of the overturned file cabinets, barricaded desks and pictures hanging askew remind me of scenes from the real world Capitol building after Trump's mob trashed it. Can't help wondering if this part wasn't written with those news clips in mind after January 6, otherwise it seems eerily prescient. Although coincidences do happen; a month or so ago I used the word "juggernaut" for the first time ever, in a blog post about pricey real estate propping up financial mega monsters. And talk about coincidences, the story even has another officious flunky named Keith! Dang I'm gonna miss this series!

    207:

    @195 Heteromeles:

    Suppose they get sick of being "urinetown"

    Why would they get sick of having all the shit jobs? /s

    @196: Alex G

    I can imagine a consumer version

    At least in the ~USA, I imagine that this would be anathema in excelsis, given suicide bombers with dirty bombs. Plus it would make it really easy for school shooters to get away with their crimes (The USA obviously tolerates school shooters, since it happens all the time. TPTB don't appreciate having them get away.)

    208:

    I'm assuming (did I read that early on?) that the ability to jaunt comes in puberty, so no issues with the toddlers, or five year olds playing hide and seek and avoid bath and bed time.

    I'm assuming that kids can't jaunt either, and that's the problem with a house sprawled across multiple timelines. Getting a child to the bathroom requires jaunting with them until puberty, for example.

    The safety issue is that, since you can't phone across timelines (or anything else), if you're in electronic communication with someone, you're stuck in that timeline for the duration of the communication. If your child is getting in trouble on another timeline, you have no way of knowing, and you can't jaunt over and check without interrupting the call. That compares with having the entire house on one timeline and using your ears or whatever to keep track of the kid.

    Also, having the house on one timeline simplifies sanitation enormously for children, elders, the disabled, the inebriated, etc.

    209:
    a backpack full of whatever storage medium is relevant

    Predictably, Randall Munroe has conducted multiple thought experiments into the bandwidth and/or value of [container] full of [storage medium]. He calculated that 64GB micro-SD cards have a density of roughly 160TB/kilogram; larger capacities have since become available.

    210:

    And teenagers getting away from parents for, ahh, private meetings.

    211:

    (The USA obviously tolerates school shooters, since it happens all the time. TPTB don't appreciate having them get away.)

    Use them to allow the victims to get away. Make a wearable device that activates automatically when detecting a nearby gun shot.

    Hell, put them in cars. Who needs seat belts when you have the ultimate ejection seat? It ejects you into a different dimension.

    212:

    Hell, put them in cars. Who needs seat belts when you have the ultimate ejection seat? It ejects you into a different dimension.

    It certainly looks like momentum is conserved when jaunting, given how fast the surface of the Earth normally rotates and how fast the Earth moves through space. So a jaunt-ejector would be rather...interesting in operation. How much of the car comes with the person? Or maybe collision avoidance by jaunting to an undeveloped world? Erm, that doesn't sound right, somehow. Maybe with hovercrafts as normal transportation it would.

    While I'm being snotty, there is something to be said for this with aircraft, especially helicopters. Jaunting someone free of a flailing copter might well save their life, especially if the rest of the copter didn't come with them.

    213:

    Can't help wondering if this part wasn't written with those news clips in mind after January 6

    Nope, it was finished in early 2020, well before the US election. (COVID19 disrupted Tor's production logistics so badly it added an extra 6 month delay to the book, which was due out at the beginning of 2021.)

    This sort of thing always happens during a coup.

    214:

    I think you're still thinking in terms of contemporary US zoning laws. You need to un-think that stuff: a truly paratime capable society is one where the value of land has depreciated nearly all the way to zero. Bandwidth is an issue, but the rest ...?

    Lawn mowing services are a side-effect of HOAs, which are an esthetic constraint to prevent house prices locally being degraded by annoying neighbours. Except all your neighbour's gardens exist in different worlds, so why bother? You only need to mow the lawn if you want to.

    Losing lightspeed communications ... do you remember growing up in a world without cellphones? Where there was one phone per household, in one room? Welp, this is going back to that, except it looks reasonably affordable to have a store-and-forward data shuttle arrangement for a city-scale time line. Email still works, voice calls maybe not so much. Which is still vastly better than the pre-telephone Wild West/American frontier, which is the logical point of comparison for this settlement pattern.

    Jaunting: relies on engrams. So you have a "bathroom door" with an engram for the bathroom hidden behind a blind that is just out of reach of a toddler. Kid's old enough to grab the cord, kid's old enough to go to the bathroom unsupervised. And so on.

    (Okay, so "bathroom is in another time line" is maybe pushing things a bit too far. But I see no reason to back off from "you have a gigantic back yard all of your own with no neighbours, as long as you can jaunt to it", and "cars all stay in the cars time line, where we put the roads".)

    215:

    You do need to mow, otherwise it will grow over your house. (Read up, for example, on kudzu, the vine that ate the South.)

    But...email works, but not texts! Oh, noes, that would be horrible... they'd all have to go back to writing whole sentences, and as for texting while driving....

    216:

    Nope, I'm thinking in terms of geometry, specifically (X,Y,Z,P). Moving in direction P doesn't change your X,Y,Z coordinates. So if you want something that's dense and walkable, you've got to put the doorways close to each other. The critical part is that it doesn't matter how many P coordinates the building spans, it still needs the same X,Y,Z at every P or jaunting is worthless.

    So no, you don't get huge backyards and walkability unless you're positing that everyone gets a world to themselves and don't mind gardening with a world full of inquisitive herbivores. I also didn't see anywhere where you said what the minimum age for jaunting was, but I don't think it's infancy (you want 2 year-olds jaunting freely among infinite worlds? I don't). In any case, the toilet on another timeline is just a good example of the chaos of spreading a house across timelines. A community where every building spans timelines would be a nightmare for the very young, the very old, the very disabled or the very neurodiverse, so far as I can tell. Is it too much to be annoyed with the thought of waking up, putting on glasses, and turning on a light just to read an engram to use a toilet? Or to be hungover and need to jaunt multiple times?

    Another problem you may not appreciate is how much earth gets moved when homes get built, and I'm freaking surrounded by that now. The natural world is not flat. If you want homes aligned in paratime, you've got to move a lot of earth and align the grading in three dimensions. That takes sophisticated surveying, with or without good GPS satellites. You're right, with a large number of worlds undeveloped land isn't very valuable. However, on every world, flat land with utilities is extremely valuable, and that has to be manufactured. That's going to be your critical constraint.

    And if undeveloped land is that cheap, why bother with all the aligning? It's cheaper to throw up dozens of buildings in a single timeline. If they don't align across timelines, that's known as privacy, not a problem.

    This is not to say that multi-timeline buildings don't make sense for some functions. They do. They're just not appropriate for the houses of normal people. Buildings that need security, such as mansions, banks, or forts, would be appropriate to incorporate multiple timelines. But for Bob Jones, staggering home after a long day and a mandatory karaoke night, having to jaunt three times to get ready for bed would really suck, especially if he didn't want to wake his husband.

    217:

    Is it too much to be annoyed with the thought of waking up, putting on glasses, and turning on a light just to read an engram to use a toilet?

    Not to mention the arguments with your partner, who was woken up by the light…

    I rather like the idea of a large back yard, but if on a relatively undeveloped world that would come with its own problems. Anyone who lives in bear country knows about that!

    I'm not seeing the multi-timeline house either. Communities dispersed across timelines, maybe, especially with ARMBAND-style gadgets that do the jaunting — but to be required to do multiple jaunts just to get around a house? Seems unnecessarily complicated. (Imagine having to jaunt to every room of the house to tell your spouse dinner was ready, rather than just calling out, for example.)

    218:

    how much earth gets moved when homes get built, and I'm freaking surrounded by that now. The natural world is not flat

    This is what would kill the multi-location-home idea, I think. You'd either need really, really closely parallel worlds, right down to the human population because they dramatically affect the landscape, or you'd be moving a lot of material.

    My assumption was that adjacent universes would have the same ground level, plus or minus 100 metres. Which is annoying if you're on the low side "ow jaunt failed" but perilous if you're on the high side "ooops, the building is a metre to the left".

    People make beavers look like nothing when it comes to modifying landscapes they don't actually inhabit. A simple example is Australia, because dams at one end of the country (the headwaters of the Murray-Darling basin) dramatically affect things a couple of thousand kilometres away (does the Mighty Murray River flow to the sea, or not).

    Over even 100 years that means some bits of the country get a layer of silt a few times, and other bits don't. So you have a few thousand square kilometres that are 1cm-1m higher than others. Oh, and the effect also reaches Aotearoa, which is downwind of the dust and smoke and whatever that blows off Australia.

    That dust also causes ocean fertilisation events that suck CO2 out of the air. So if some mean bugger burnt big chunks of Australia that's going to lower CO2 all over the planet, because the ocean sucks up the CO2 from the fires, then the forest grows back. Meanwhile one timeline over the giant koalas are frolicking happily in the savanna, pulling down saplings and eating them and thus maintaining the savanna. All this is possibly maybe we think ish. It might work out differently, depending on whether antelope walk to South America or not.

    219:

    Just thinking about living across worlds in the "my house" sense is making me curious. Let's take the easy mode: everyone is an able-bodied adult who can jaunt easily as often as they like. There's no wheelchairs, let alone blind people or children. Also, for simplicity, no NIMBYs and no criminals.

    I have a house (a very very very fine house). The main rooms are in universe A with lovely views and forests and wildebeasts and what have you. Scenic and delightful.

    My toilet, pantry, vehicles, storage closets etc are in universe B because who wants to deal with all that. Obviously this one has the utilities connected, so there's power and water and sewage and internet and a letterbox and a drone landing point and all the modern conveniences. Which means a road, because putting pipes and cables and shit in place, and keeping them working, requires big trucks and diggers and what have you. Not to mention the concrete mixer or whatever that brings the materials to pour the slab my house sits on. Or brings the rocks to lay the foundation, or whatever.

    And also brings the surveyors and CNC floor leveller that make sure my house in B is compatible with my house in A, right down the to millimetre. Oh, and the machinery that continually adjusts for small relative movements, probably via a little ball at each corner that continually jaunts between A and B, making sure the alignment is exactly right. A tiny tremor in the earth, or even a large truck parked in my driveway, could otherwise cause a few mm difference in floor level resulting in an unfortunate accident.

    Now, obviously the house in A has none of this stuff. There's nowhere for the pipes and cables and whatnot to go. And construction will have involved first levelling a surface by hand (hand tools, whatever I can carry through) that matches the surface on the other side. There's an input pad, a couple of centimetres lower than the matching surface on the other side, and a return pad a couple of centimetres higher. That way my crew of building professionals can drive a concrete truck through, pour the slab, then drive it back. etc, for everything else the house builders use.

    It can be solar powered, it can have satellite internet, it can have rainwater tanks and septic, all the off-grid stuff. But it can't connect to anything local, because the whole point is that there is nothing local. I don't want to be looking out my picture windows at a "scenic" apartment block, motorway, or even power pylon.

    The house levelling system can also be used for (slow) communication. Either by jaunting uSD cards back and forth instead of locator balls, or even by having black balls and white balls if you really want. But it's unlikely to be great for phone calls.

    But scale... I think this is going to want to be ex-urban sprawl as the low end of acceptable density. I don't think anyone's idea of "scenic" includes the aforementioned wildebeast passing through the property with 10,000 of its close friends. That would just be rude. So I'm going to have neighbours, within a days walk, and I'm probably going to want to be on speaking terms with them. Or at least "please don't shoot towards my house" terms.

    220:

    Day to day life. Let's think about happy Moz waking up in bed in A. Gets out of bed, heads for the toilet. Which is in B, obviously, where the sewer system is.

    Jaunts to B at the "bedroom door" which is probably a closet with an engram on the wall, but whatever. Has a pee. Eats breakfast, reads internet, thinks about work.

    Hmm. Work. Probably in B, because that's where the jobs are. The people. The internet. Whatever.

    Imagine Moz's job requires some kind of physical meeting. So. Moz drives to work. Of course he fucking drives, because 90% of the population live sprawled out across 5 worlds and there is fuck all except closet space in B. Ahem. Moz drives to the railway station and commutes to his office. Well, the ... "elevator block" for his office, then walks into a commuting closet and jaunts to the actual office. Blah blah we will not think too closely about how physical density of people makes things work.

    Moz works, and at the end of the working day decides to hang out with some friends and play in the woods. Go mountain biking. Take recreational drugs. Whatever.

    So we get back on the train and whistle off to wherever it is, then jaunt over to the #MaxFunRecreationSite of choice.

    Then later, after the recreational drugs have been consumed and much fun has been had, happy Moz jaunts back to the trains and goes home. Well, to the local train station, then the car, then... hmm. Whatever, magic self-driving car takes Moz home.

    Moz gets home, crawls inside, jaunts over to the bedroom and sleeps.

    Trouble is, now we have a world where all the current roads, trains, planes, whatever are needed to move stuff round, but they're doing it for N worlds worth of people. You can split them, sure, and conceivably even do alternating grids (world X has north-south roads and rails, world Y has east-west ones), but that doesn't work for sewers (probably) and definitely not for information (internet!) I see a lot of concrete being used. And also a lot of really hairy planning, possibly involving giant self-levelling platforms that move whole trains from world X (offset by 6 coordinates) to world Y.

    Think especially about those sewer treatment plants, and the nutrient balance issues caused by eating in world A and shitting in world B. Somewhere there is a big fucking pipe sending those nutrients back, or sewer world is going to run out of oxygen after the oceans full of sewage go anoxic. With five worlds worth of sewage that shouldn't take long. And switching sewer outfall worlds just delays the inevitable nutrient depletion in the scenic worlds.

    I can't help think that it's going to resolve out in a much simpler way, especially after the first few times something blows up by accident. Or by deliberate, since we have morons running round with nukes.

    The idea that one morning I wake up and jaunt through to a radioactive hellscape, or even a power cut, does not fill me with joy. I want to know as certainly as possible that breakfast exists and is accessible. I can pee on the lawn if I have to, but I don't want lawn for breakfast. And I definitely do not want wildebeast-disiplining tools to be somewhere over there that I can get to once they restore electricity.

    221:

    I'll admit you can do a really cool showoff mansion, with a bungalow on a sea-cliff supported by infrastructure on a timeline where that erosion didn't make that sea-cliff. But that's for showing off, not for Bob Jones the commuter dude.

    For Bob Jones, having a cabin on a cool frontier world within easy walking distance would probably be adequate. I agree with Charlie's analysis of cheap land values on undeveloped worlds, but I'd suggest that dachas and cabins might be a better way to take advantage of such land. That way, when the wave of development hits that part of the woods, you sell the property to someone who's adding infrastructure, make a little bit of money, and invest it in another cabin somewhere else. Or retire there as the living becomes easier.

    I'd also point out that I'm constantly surprised by the amount of sheer randomness that is solidified as terrain. Erosive features have a lot of randomness. Volcanoes have a lot of randomness. Earthquakes are certainly very random. Isostatic rebound depends on when the ice melted. River delta shapes depend on upstream storms. And so forth, as Moz pointed out.

    The upshot (as on La Palma at the moment) is that there are probably locations in every timeline that you're just going to have to walk to, places you can't jaunt to. These include caves, canyons and such where it's hard to find parallels, majestic crags that have eroded away elsewhere, beach-side homes on ice age worlds where the water level is 100 meters lower than on any other nearby world. These places are going to be in high demand, because they're relatively safe from jaunty types. That doesn't mean they can't be robbed, but if someone wants privacy or security, they'll pay a premium for such a location.

    222:

    It's all very well Bob from accounts having their dacha in the country, but first Bob also needs an apartment in the city so they can commute to their job at the concrete plant. Or sawmill, chip foundry, insurance company or whatever. More likely a parasite research facility (large mammal division), since we're going to be running round aggressively collecting those from anywhere and everywhere.

    The other thing is, if everyone suddenly wants a second dwelling somewhere that's not just an infrastructure problem (go to subway stop x, climb 3.2m above ground level and look at knot 234), it's where do the building materials come from. You know how timber prices shot up when covid meant everyone rich stayed home and a chunk of them decided to do home renovations?

    That's not because there's a lack of trees, that's a lack of sawmill capacity and all the other things that get you from tree to floorboards. So this magic world of multiworlds and suddenly we want twice as many houses... the construction industry will be playing "name your price. Now double it. Hahahaha" because anyone who thinks a dacha in the country can be built by any monkey who has a Swiss army knife and some willpower is going down to the woods today but not getting a nice surprise. Teddy bears picnic and all.

    223:

    There's a whole lot of bootstrapping going to be happening in society, at the same time as a whole lot of people are going to be unavailable. Like covid, but much, much worse. If only 10% of the population vanish I think we'd be lucky. Except this time it's not the old and the infirm being taken out, it's the fit and adventurous. Sure, many will be your US-style survivalists for whom their adventure of a lifetime lasts mere hours, but a whole lot will be the people who either have useful skills (carpenters, for example) or are key workers. Plus, obviously, the "work or starve" sub-humans from around the world who decide that actually, they'd rather than "work or starve" out from under the post-capitalist overlords they currently slave for.

    I read and watch a bit of the "rugged survivalist" stuff just incidentally, and youtube channels like "primitive technology" are huge fun. Some bloke with a job in the city buys a bit of land and builds stuff. The primitivists go into the gritty details, everyone else just buys whatever they need and lugs it out into the wilderness. Then spends months or years commuting as they buy or hire tools and specialists to actually finish building their cabin in the woods.

    I see a lot of people going wild with cheap tents and other survival gear, then the survivors coming right on back when they discover how much fun camping in a park actually isn't. Those who camp in less park-like places being less likely to return...

    224:

    When I was last involved in such things, the UK had three main clearance levels: CT, SC, and DV, with DV being the highest. I had an SC clearance and I definitely knew some things which the powers-that-be would not want made public.

    (My SC meant I could be a witness in the trial of Wang Yam - q.v.)

    225:

    Way Off-Topic Some of us have to use Windoze - like "the boss" has to for working from home ....

    Windows 11 now released as a free upgrade from 10

    Any opinions? Presumably make sure you do a full back-up, before implementing ... [ It looks as though one will have to change in the next 3.5 years, anyway, as MS are saying Win10 will be "dead" after 2025. ]

    226:

    On the world where everybody jaunts:

    Everyone here seems to be missing the security angle. Heteromolese mentioned it, and dsrtao said in reply:

    These things [social conventions like not stealing] work because they tend to perpetuate themselves better than the alternatives. Most people approximately obey the speed limit (they all tend to cheat to the same degree) even when there's negligible chance of being caught; the overall rate of crimes tend to be more correlated with social distress than anything else.

    Sorry, but I think that is way optimistic.

    A quote from a cop: 15% of people will never steal anything. Another 15% will steal anything not nailed down. The battle is for the hearts and minds of the other 70%.

    Those of us who live in stable societies with functioning criminal justice systems and low crime rates tend to take this state of affairs for granted. But not everyone does. There are people who routinely steal, but they don't get away with it in the long term. Yes, the burglary clear-up rate in the UK is around 20%, but that simply means that if you commit 10 burglaries then your probability of getting caught at least once is around 90%. Being a professional burglar, or even a part-time burglar, means that you are going to spend some time in prison. That is enough to keep the middle 70% honest, which in turn lets the police focus on the bottom 15%.

    Trouble starts when that bottom 15% are seen to get away with it with impunity on a routine basis. Once that happens, the middle 70% start to follow along and the problem snowballs.

    So how do you keep your valuable property safe in para-time? The Clan did it by doppleganging its facilities, but once infinite para-time opened up that became impossible. (And don't forget that for some offenders "your valuables" includes "your children").

    227:

    Um, not all security clearances are equal, and I'm not sure that you're not mixing them. As far as it goes, Martin's description is accurate for the UK For an official description see here. For example, for the ten years I was a contractor at the NIH, I (presumably, they don't tell you) had a POT clearance (position of trust).

    There's one obvious difference: under the UK system you would know, if only because of the appropriate coloured stripe (or absence of one) on your ID card.

    228:

    This is what would kill the multi-location-home idea,

    Willing suspension of disbelief! There's no way the planet Earth in a parallel universe is in the same phase of the orbit, or indeed that anything at all in the Solar System is at same spot. Or that the Solar System is in the same spot in the Galaxy. These systems of N-bodies (where N=gazillion) are long-term chaotic and will diverge by light years. You just have to ignore it.

    229:

    One of the problems is lazy journalism. I recall a story in the Grauniad a few years about the release of "Secret Papers", but when you looked at the header and footer of the document pages it was marked "Restricted" which was two levels down from Secret and only barely above the contents of the menu of the Home Office HQ.

    Sometimes Secret!=secret.

    For reference, a policeman once told me that the vast majority of officers were not cleared for Secret, which was kind of shocking given their position of trust. I had assumed a basic check had been done on all of them.

    Years ago, about 1983 I think, I was asked to provide a reference for someone for their clearance. A tweed coated ex-military guy turned up and asked whether "Mr Harris had displayed any, shall we say, non-heterosexual tendencies" and seemed very disappointed that I just knew him as a bit of a nerd who enjoyed amateur dramatics and drawing steam trains.

    230:

    Paul CORRECTION Trouble starts when that bottom 15% 1.5% (note) are seen to get away with it with impunity on a routine basis. "1.5%" ?? - Our current governing party. How long before it really all falls apart if this goes on? It was a large part of the failure mode of the Soviet Union, after all ....

    231:

    Actually, 'restricted' is (or, at least, used to be) rather below menu level! It was on documents handed out to schoolboys for CCF with, of course, no vetting procedure. I saw some openly for sale in a second-hand bookshop. Also, I was told when working in such an environment that an unstamped document was deemed to have 'secret' classification. It also required a ridiculously high clearance to declassify anything, so most 'secret' documents are now public knowledge or of no interest other than historical.

    My time in that lunacy was rather before any of the posters here, but I have seen evidence since that little has changed except for the details of the bureaucracy.

    232:

    Remember that anyone required (or 'encouraged') to report suspicions becomes a potential casual informer, and a LOT of people in the UK are in such a position.

    So, real-world moral dilemma for the day... One of firstborn's student flatmates is from Hong Kong, and while not an activist, is sympathetic to the yellow umbrellas. In conversation last weekend, she described being surrounded by some (male) fellow students who were more sympathetic to the PRC view, and who AIUI were trying to intimidate her because of her opinions.

    Now, is this all part and parcel of normal student debate? Have the young lads been encouraged in such behaviour by agencies of the PRC, or are they just gobby entitled Nomenklatura?

    If their behaviour continued or worsened (to the extent of causing her suspicion that this was politically directed, not just personal difference or misogyny), and she talked to the authorities; would that be "reporting harassment" or would it be "becoming a casual informer"?

    233:

    Maybe a reason the knotwork engrams can only encode a limited number of timelines was actually a feature? The Forerunners created the in-brain jaunting tech from their already existing tech. What if the version used by the Clan was a proprietary version of a QR code for people who live in a particular para-time country/state? "Want to live somewhere where your front door opens onto a city street, and your back door opens into a wilderness? Choose ParaCo's(R) Engram(TM) implants! Using simple and attractive knotwork designs, you will be able to easily and quickly jaunt to different parts of your house! Implanted into your DNA so that it's passed on to your kids for free!" This 'proprietary QR code' would only need a few thousand combinations, just enough to ensure neighbours didn't have to share a set, so a few million combinations is a typical tech company compromise. Maybe there was versions made by other companies/entities which used QR codes, or sonar etc. as the address input method? More likely you select your destination on your phone/computer, hold it up to your skin and the Jaunt-mechanism is directly activated. The original designs would have allowed travel between several 'close' timelines which were all part of the same polity, until the Clan's descendant(s) decided to run away from the Hive by using the Engram tech in a way which it's manufacturer probably didn't recommend.

    So the ~USA and Commonwealth are running around using what they think of as super-advanced tech, but they're using the equivalent of the barcode system that Panasonic used for programming VHS recorders (http://www.champagnecomedy.com/panasonic-barcodes-saving-your-saturdays/).

    234:

    That is wilful misrepresentation, even assuming the facts are as you claim.

    The specific fascist law I was referring to (and there are many, especially from the Blair era) requires many people (of whom I was one) to report ANY suspicious activity, with a definition chosen by the government, OR BE TREATED AS CRIMINALS. Even ignoring the bigots, many people did so under the DDR and some do in the UK just because they are afraid someone else will report suspicions and they will be then arrested or lose their jobs for NOT reporting suspicions.

    And I should point out that such offences as claiming that showing too deep interest in computer security, too much interest in energetic chemistry, or supporting an officially disapproved of organisation (and, no, I don't mean the PRC or Russia here) on the basis of international law and ethics, count as suspicious activities under UK terrorism laws.

    There have been cases like a PhD student being kept under arrest for years for the crime of taking a book out of the library that he had been recommended to read by his supervisor. And a lot more.

    235:

    Also, I was told when working in such an environment that an unstamped document was deemed to have 'secret' classification

    I suspect that there was an implicit caveat in that statement - i.e. only under certain circumstances, not "every single unstamped document" - and it may have been enthusiasm on the part of the individual concerned, rather than official policy as set down in the relevant JSP. For instance, in our List X firm, production software was to be treated as NATO SECRET by default; it certainly made us reticent about using printouts. Fortunately I never had to worry about PV / DV, I didn't work with any of the really sensitive stuff.

    ...SECRET documents are individually numbered by copy, page totals included (i.e. "Page 3 of 25"), and blank pages marked as such (i.e. "This page intentionally blank") - and somewhere there's a custodian who is responsible for making sure that each one is locked up each night. For a few years, that was me (rather like "you're organising the Lab Christmas Party this year", or "would you mind being the Football Pools organiser, the old one's leaving?", it was something that happened if you didn't move out of the way quickly enough); I was very happy when I managed to hand over that particular responsibility...

    Surprising things are when you discover that typewriter ribbons are classified according to the documents they're used to type, because you can recover the character sequence from them :) [Note to the young'uns - this was the 1980s, i.e. before ubiquitous laser printers]

    236:

    It was intended as a gently relevant observation, not criticism. Please go easy on the "wilful misrepresentation!" trigger, it seems rather a strong response. And yes, firstborn's flatmate described the incident briefly, last weekend, just as described (applying all caveats about hearsay/unreliable witnesses). Why not start from the position that the post was written in good faith?

    Anyway, "PhD student being kept under arrest for years for the crime of taking a book out of the library that he had been recommended to read by his supervisor" - that sounds like a good example, where/when did that happen?

    PS Don't worry, I view a lot of legislation with extreme suspicion - including Blair's attempt at 90-day detention without trial, Johnson's ham-handed efforts to criminalise whistleblowing, any UK politician's wet dream of ID cards, and most abuses of anti-terrorism legislation as a convenient sledgehammer by incompetent or lazy policing. On the other hand, I acknowledge the necessity for anti-terrorism legislation under very limited circumstances, having lived alongside a terrorist threat for several years.

    237:

    Nope. It was every document. Also, I said 'deemed to be' - which was for the purposes of not taking them out of the secure area, and reducing the defence if they were given to enemy agents. Also, as I said it was a long time before your experience, under a previous system, and the rules were almost certainly somewhat different.

    238:

    I wonder if your stance is equally cynical in the other direction. While a police officer certainly has some insight into the world of crime, they also deal with it overwhelmingly, skewing their observations about society as a whole. They're opinion's also likely to be skewed by how they view their role as a 'cop' and how enthusiastic they are about it - we're all aware there's a strong faction within the police keen to over-represent the risks of the job as justification for their own brutalities.

    And don't forget, in a para-time society lots of the pressures driving people towards crime will be absent or different. The price of property would plummet, resources may be more available, jobs plentiful, especially in eg. construction. Less people pushed to extremes.

    Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's spin on the idea saw para-time societies as having the potential for the marriage of hunter gathering and urban life. You can't sustain a city on one world by foraging, but if you have access to an infinity of worlds on foot outside your front door...para-time societies may tend towards post-scarcity.

    239:

    Charlie Stross @ 183: I seem to recall reading that something like 6-9 million US civilians hold security clearances for classified material.

    A lot of them are probably like I was. They have the clearances, but neither need, nor have access to classified material. Most clearances are just in case you ever have need to know.

    I had a secret clearance because my MOS was Nuclear, Biological & Chemical Warfare Operations and I would have needed "classified" information (mainly weather forecasts) to perform my duties in the case of World War 3.

    But since we never fought WW3, I never needed to USE my security clearance.

    OTOH, a lot of stuff is classified to keep your own people from finding out what you're up to, so even people with clearances AND with need to know can be kept in the dark.

    240:

    Martin That sort of behaviour needs reporting to our security services, as ( at a very low level ) it's "Interfering with legitimate UK politics, by/from a foreign source/government" - & EC ... was it "explosives" cough or "political", as a matter of interest?

    241:

    No, by a NON-AUTHORISED foreign source. Sources from two countries are allowed to interfere with our politics with immunity.

    The case I mentioned was explosives, because that is what his PhD was on! The matter stank of bigotry and possibly political pressure, because his supervisor stood up for him but his VC didn't - and, later, because the supervisor continued to support him, the supervisor was discriminated against by his university. It's not the only such case, either.

    And then there are the people detained indefinitely without charge, ones convicted without being allowed to defend themselves, the equivalent to censorship, and so on. So far, all extrajudicial executions in Great Britain (sic) thast I know of have been unofficial. None of this was done during the IRA era, except in Northern Ireland, when it was demonstrably counter-productive.

    242:

    Chrisj @ 186: Related to the engrams-as-chess-moves analogy, I'm reminded of a question I meant to ask OGH: to what extent (if any) are engram-enabled journeys commutative?

    By which I mean: we know that engram A moves you between TL1 and TL2, and engram B moves you between TL1 and TL3. When Huw's team use engram B in TL2, that provides travel to/from TL4. If you then use engram A in TL4, does that transfer you to TL3? I'd expect this to be one of the first things that MITI tested, once they got a proper research program up, because the question of whether there's only one easy two-step path from the ~USA to the Commonwealth, or at least two and potentially thousands, is of obvious direct concern to both the ex-clan and the NAC government.

    I started reading "The Bloodline Feud" this morning & I just got to the part where Miriam looks at her mother's locket for the first time. She hasn't made her first world walking move yet.

    The locket had two "engrams", call them A and A'. A takes you from TL1 to TL2; A' brings you back to TL1 from TL2.1

    But what happens if you use engram A on TL2? If there's no mass to block you, might you end up on TL??.

    I don't remember who mentioned chess moves, but that's the way I think of the engrams; like the knight - you've got an engram for two up & one right, another for two up & one left, one up & two right or one up & two left ... and another set of engrams for two back & one left ... to allow you to reverse course.

    So, engram A only takes you to TL2 if you're starting from TL1. Use it anywhere else (like from TL3) and you're off exploring on your own.

    In chess, the knight's moves are restricted. He can't move to a square occupied by a piece from his own side ... that's a mass that blocks you from that particular Time Line.

    If memory serves, engram B was the engram that led from TL2 Gruinmarkt to TL3 Commonwealth, but used from TL1 ~USA it took Huw's team to TL4 the dome with the door into the black hole once they got far enough south that the glacier in TL4 wasn't blocking them.

    1 That's probably reversed since it was originally Iris's locket and she came from TL2. A takes you from TL2 to TL1 and A' takes you back to TL2

    One pill makes you larger, and
    one pill makes you small
    and the ones that mother gives you ...

    243:

    Charlie Stross @ 197:

    And do remember, each timeline is in a different state of development. Some is howling wilderness with mammoths, some had a nuclear war in the 1950s, some had a hereditary monarch who thought development was diabolical and wanted none of it

    No they're not: you're wilfully misunderstanding the scenario -- they're all unpopulated, there is zero point in trying to expand sideways into occupied time lines. Nor is there any call for multi-story condos, when you can simply build sideways: have a common lobby area/entrance and place each dwelling in another time line opening off it. (Emergency escape? Trapdoor in ceiling or window plus roll-up ladder, and a designated clear area for jaunting a few metres away.)

    You have to go exploring to find the unoccupied time lines and you're likely to discover those other "developed" time lines along the way. Wouldn't you need some kind of relationship with the "developed" time lines, even if it's just having spies living covertly among them to keep an eye on them in case they discover world walking.

    Long term illegals like Kurt? ... alternate Margaret Meads or Louis Leakeys?

    244:

    David Wallace: "What exactly is the thing early in the original MP stories that committed you to the existence of a senior US figure in league with the Clan?"

    Charlie: I can't remember. (You're asking me about a thought process I didn't document back in 2003.)

    That leads back into what happened to Mike Fleming. I can't remember in which book in the first trilogy that it happened, but Mike was listening to surveillance audio of senior Clan members. They were discussing a major contact, currently in charge of a major (among other things) logistics megacorp, who had been in politics, and had unexpectedly gotten back in.

    This is a description of Dick Cheney, and Mike clearly thought that him having heard it was extremely dangerous.

    245:

    "(The bit about the DHS adding the knotwork display to the in-flight video and how it would have failed very badly was a nice gotcha, too.)"

    Why? It would have gotten some people, which would have given DHS some information (trace the contacts of the suddenly missing passengers).

    Eventually, it would have failed, once word was circulating, or if the worldwalkers had great reflexes.

    However, it would have killed some people whom the US government hated and feared, and the word circulating might have taken a long time if the survivors were a scattered group, rather than a collected group.

    246:

    Greg Tingey @ 225: Way Off-Topic
    Some of us have to use Windoze - like "the boss" has to for working from home ....

    Windows 11 now released as a free upgrade from 10

    Any opinions?
    Presumably make sure you do a full back-up, before implementing ...
    [ It looks as though one will have to change in the next 3.5 years, anyway, as MS are saying Win10 will be "dead" after 2025. ]

    Windows 10 was also a "free upgrade" from Windows 7. It was also a total disaster for me. I'm still running Windows 7.

    I'll try to minimize this to the short version of the RANT!:
    I had three computers when I finally gave in to Micro$oft's NAG, NAG, NAG...
    Computer 1 - my laptop. "Windows 10 cannot be installed on this computer because the manufacturer will not provide a driver for the video (embedded NVIDEA graphics)
    Computer 2 - this computer. Cortana WOULD NOT SHUT UP, no matter what I did; it wouldn't let me run the software I use, trying to substitute one of it's "applets" every time I tried to open a program. I have a lot of spread sheets and I prefer to use Open Office AND Firefox AND Thunderbird AND AVG Antivirus AND Winamp/Audacity/MPC-HC/VLC Media player ... the list of programs it tried to force me to quit using goes on.
    And besides that fucking Cortana, it was sluggish as hell. Did I mention Cortana would not STFU!!!
    Computer 3 - my Photoshop WORK computer. First install failed at first boot. Second install made it to first boot, but performance was intolerable. Move the mouse and it was SEVERAL MINUTES before the pointer on screen would move. Same same trying to use arrow keys & keyboard shortcuts. Couldn't get through setup, so I couldn't revert.
    But I had made a recovery disk and made a backup on a USB hard-drive. The recovery would not recognize the backup. I ended up having to do a clean install from the DVD (CD-ROM?); then it gave me a hassle over verifying the product key since it was already registered.

    All told, the "upgrade" wasted 96 hours from start to finish.

    Although a bunch of that was leaving the computer grinding away when I went to bed & it still being grinding away when I got up the next morning.

    Fuck Windoze 11. Hold off as long as you can from "upgrading". Unless your hardware is only a couple years old you're going to have to replace your computer to install it anyway.

    247:

    Why? It would have gotten some people,

    If it worked it would have lost entire airliners (taken with the world-walker when they jaunted -- except jaunting isn't involuntary, so that wouldn't have happened). So (a) it was an ineffective plan, and (b) if it had worked it would have caused immense collateral damage, equivalent to shooting down airliners in flight. At which point there's a huge scandal and the US government has to either stop doing it, or crater public confidence in the airline industry. And meanwhile the Clan just drive cross-country or charter bizjets or something.

    248:

    Simple fact of this fiction is they're not going to build multi-timeline houses. The list of things which can go wrong/expensive/inconvenient/hard-to-get-right is too long. What they might do is use a single timeline for a particular industry, thus avoiding resource bottlenecks, or perhaps keep the military on a particular timeline and on-call for other timelines. The smart thing to do is use one timeline for rescues; have a problem, go to timeline 911. You'd also have places which are zoned for transfers and other places where transfers would be illegal/impossible.

    I don't think you'd need immigration control - available land is essentially infinite, but you'd certainly need biological controls, because viral/bacterial mutation is also essentially infinite; you can't have a world-walking civilization without much better immune systems than humans currently have; imagine a Trump-style response to COVID-19 with infinite worlds for the virus to mutate. World-walking will be super-carefully controlled until we have nano-based injectable immune systems.

    249:

    Those are very good points. The trick is that the ability to jaunt with large masses was not know.

    And after the nuking of Washington, DC, the Cheney government would have gone ahead, killed some people on US airliners, and told the world to shove it. They'd already killed millions and made sure the world knew it.

    And considering Cheney's judgement after 9/11, I shudder to think what he would have done after 7/16.

    250:

    By 'killing some people' I mean that they'd have implemented it, under the assumption that some individuals would be killed, and that they'd be happy with that.

    I wonder what they'd have done after several airplanes disappeared.

    251:

    Oh, leading back a bit: When Smith made his comment about 'info war dominance over social media', he could have been ignorantly boasting.

    He could also mean 'we keep the truly undesirable stuff pushed into the fringe and fail to see the allegedly undesirable stuff we support'.

    Remember that in the end DHS is a right-wing police organization, so that they'll tend to support/fail to suppress right-wing radical politics.

    252:

    I know jaunting is supposed to be voluntary...

    That said, you just know that in a society with universal jaunting, the equivalent of jaunting rickrolls, anonymous knots ("Don't you want to try it? It'll be fun..." No peer pressure at all) and similar bullshit (engrams in bathroom stalls?) will be ubiquitous and really annoying. Heck, teenagers' bedrooms will probably be located on the ground floor by law, just to keep them from breaking their stupid necks when they experiment with worldwalking. Ditto with anyone suffering from dementia or terminal cluelessness.

    Crime and punishment will have to be different, unless there's a reasonable way to dose prisoners to keep them from jaunting. House them all in very deep holes? And doing things to permanently remove jaunting ability (like blinding someone) will probably be even more horrific than it is here. But the use of blinding sprays will be ubiquitous in self defense, because it might keep someone from following you while you jaunt.

    On the transport side, I expect hovercraft to be ubiquitous, especially for transport trucks, law enforcement, and military. There may even be a class divide between those who drive hovers (and can jaunt while driving) and those who are stuck with wheeled vehicles that can't normally jaunt. This may also lead to some fun: imagine low-riders with enough hydraulic power to go airborne. This leads to crazy car stunts (people with low riders...or driving a la Bullitt) who take pride in their ability to a) get their car airborne while driving, and b) jaunt while the wheels are off the ground. Imagine a car chase between these crazies and law enforcement in jaunting hovercraft....

    253:

    And two more sets of stupid stunts:

    --Jaunting while airborne on a bike. Any bike. Or a skateboard for extra lulz. With a car, you can have someone driving and someone jaunting. On a bike you're all alone.

    --Hijacking. We've already seen nabbing the plane, but when the pilot can jaunt too, that's counterproductive (although it would make for an interesting duel. How many times can the pilot pull the plane out of a jaunt-induced dive? Sort of like two people playing chicken with one vehicle). And there's also the DB Cooper maneuver: commit a crime, get in a plane, bail out, jaunt before you pull the parachute.

    254:

    Barry @ 244:

    David Wallace: "What exactly is the thing early in the original MP stories that committed you to the existence of a senior US figure in league with the Clan?"
    Charlie: I can't remember. (You're asking me about a thought process I didn't document back in 2003.)

    That leads back into what happened to Mike Fleming. I can't remember in which book in the first trilogy that it happened, but Mike was listening to surveillance audio of senior Clan members. They were discussing a major contact, currently in charge of a major (among other things) logistics megacorp, who had been in politics, and had unexpectedly gotten back in.

    This is a description of Dick Cheney, and Mike clearly thought that him having heard it was extremely dangerous.

    At the time (2002-2003) there was a lot of discussion in the media and elsewhere of Cheney's role in a number of questionable activities.

    Cheney had been George HW Bush's Secretary of Defense when the decision was taken to privatize many of the DoD's logistics functions & outsource them to contractors - most notably Halliburton/KBR which employed Cheney as CEO during the Clinton Presidency when the prior administration's outsourcing policies were implemented.

    Also during the Clinton Presidency, Cheney (and Rumsfeld) were active in the Project For The New American Century whose white paper "Rebuilding America's Defenses" advocated invading Iraq to take their oil as a prelude to invading Iran (and taking THEIR oil) because that would guarantee U.S. world dominance. The most controversial part of that white paper was the assertion:

    "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

    After 9/11 there were significant questions whether the George W. Bush Administration had invited the 9/11 attack for just that purpose and it was clear they were using the attack to justify a war with Iraq rather than pursuing questions about Saudi involvement in financially supporting al Qaeda & the hijackers.

    There were also questions regarding Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force and its relationship to ENRON - particularly ENRON's role in the 2000-2001 California electricity crisis and ENRON's subsequent accounting collapse during their accounting scandals.

    Not to mention how much of the Bush2 administration's diplomacy with the Taliban regarding the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline was based on ENRON needing a cheap fuel source for its Indian Dabhol Power Plant project and what role that diplomacy might have played in the Taliban's decision to let bin Laden and al Qaeda off their leash?

    Cheney being a villain in real life and his villainy being much in the news at the time, I think he was a natural choice to be the villain in ~USA.

    For the record I believe Cheney is venal enough that he DID line his own pockets at taxpayer expense after he left the DOD in 1993. I believe he did try to shield ENRON with his Energy Task Force, and I do think Bush2's support for the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline was motivated by trying to stave off ENRON's financial collapse.

    I don't know how much of a role Bush2's diplomacy played in Taliban decision making and I think PURE FUCKIN' INCOMPETENCE is completely adequate to explain Bush2's failures both before and after 9/11, but they did take advantage of 9/11 to foment an unnecessary and unjustified war with Iraq just like Cheney & Rumsfeld had advocated while at PNAC.

    255:

    Barry @ 250: By 'killing some people' I mean that they'd have implemented it, under the assumption that some individuals would be killed, and that they'd be happy with that.

    I wonder what they'd have done after several airplanes disappeared.

    Linked the Clan to al Qaeda and blamed the international terrorist organization.

    256:

    I just finished the book. Great ending to an awesome series. I kept thinking everything was going to end badly, I seem to have come to expect that from this series. In particular when at around 84% (according to Kindle) Miriam says "I think everything's going to be all right now". I mean, yes, all looked good at that point, but there was still a lot of book to go, so I really expected way more nukes on timelines two and three.

    Anyway, I am very curious about the world in timeline three. Why are superstates able to hold on for so long without fragmenting? What territories do the French hold? I understand that the British, later Commonwealth, hold all of the Americas plus Australia, and the French have Europe, plus at least some of Asian Russia, plus (going by one of your comments here) China. What about the rest of the world? Is there a third player in that world, or even minor local independent states? What's the flag of the Commonwealth look like? It's mentioned it's red and gold, I think a cross is there somewhere, but I don't think an exact description is given. What does the Commonwealth government and economy look like? Smith calls them communists and Kurt explicitly compares them with the GDR, but Smith feels very unreliable in his fanaticism, and Kurt seems to be making an aesthetic comparison, tinted by nostalgia, not a deeper analysis. We do know that the government structure is modeled after the Islamic Republic of Iran (it's explicitly mentioned in earlier books), but I'm curious as to how many innovations the Commonwealth introduced.

    Thanks!

    257:

    JBS We managed to "Not install" Cortana, I think, or suppressed it immediately. I have never seen it on this new(ish) machine .... Fortunately: (1) We've already decided not to cough "upgrade" until Madam's work are using it & their IT department have signed-off on it. (2) We will, of course, do a full back-up of everything, anyway, before starting on the grind (3) This machine is less than a year old.

    258:

    As a data point on the number of US citizens with security clearances, I'm probably a reasonable example of the distinction between someone in intelligence and someone with a clearance. I've spent the last quarter century working in operational cyber security in the power utility industry, sometimes directly with utilities and sometimes with consultants or vendors working in the space. I held a secret clearance from 2007-2011 or so, and I'll probably get it reinstated over the next few months, as I'm now working for a utility again and in-person briefings are starting to be a thing again as we give up on beating COVID. Those clearances are intended, broadly, for me to be allowed to receive threat identification material from Federal agencies periodically.

    259:

    Now, wait a minute. I, my late wife, and my current SO have all happily gone camping in parks, and enjoyed ourselves.

    260:
  • Not a good idea.
  • How old's your computer? It won't work, or will be unusable on older systems.
  • I run Linux. I NEVER install/update to x.0, I always wait for x.0.1, where the worst of the bugs they missed are fixed.
  • 261:

    I suppose Harvard and Yale (and Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne, etc.) exist in TL3 as well as in TL2. I wonder which one, if any, would Liz Hannover attend. I see the benefit for the commonwealth to have her enroll in TL2 (majoring in International relations? Political Sciences?) and use her predictable rise to celebrity status (A true American princess!) as a subtle propaganda tool in the USA and Europe.

    262:

    "stable societies with functioning criminal justice systems" - I see, so you're not talking about the US.

    Most burglaries aren't reported (unless insurance is involved), because everyone who isn't rich knows perfectly well the cops have a 10% chance of finding what was stolen, and that's only if they found it while working on something else.

    263:

    "...Before ubiquitous laser printers"... that would be before they added the digital watermarking in yellow to color laser printers, right?

    264:

    Of course they are. That is, McMansions and real mansions will have multi-timeline views, and privacy....

    For the other 90%, you're right.

    265:

    "I expect hovercraft to be ubiquitous"

    "... before the ubiquitous signs of 1996, 'no wheeled vehicles allowed' on the high-speed highways." AC Clarke, Profiles of the Future.

    266:

    I am not keen on it, because there are too many people and too much damn development. Now, camping in the 'wild' is something I love to do - and the wilder the better :-)

    267:

    Smith calls them commies, not communists, because it's easier to say than "people from the Commonwealth".

    (signed) Philadelphian ex-pat, from the Commonwealth of PA.

    268:

    On page 64 (according to Kindle), Smith says: "They're a polity from another time line that calls itself the New American Commonwealth, Major. They're a Communist superpower with nuclear weapons and world-walkers."

    269:

    Which isn't really what they are... but the reactionaries in the US have been utterly miserable, not having commies to kick around anymore.

    270:

    Also, Smith is trying to push the Major's buttons. Ineffectually, as it turns out, because Smith isn't great at thinking himself into the headspace of someone from another culture (as witness his crappy engagement with the Clan in the first series -- even though he was less bad at it than his then-boss).

    271:

    Only 10% of burglaries may lead to an arrest, but most burglaries net sweet FA for the burglar, so burglars are often repeat offenders: the upshot is that if you're burgled and report it, sooner or later the cops may want your testimony to add to a laundry list of charges (when your burglar finally got unlucky on another job). So there's that.

    If you want crime to pay, buy a $5000 suit and a $500 haircut and invent an incomprehensible financial instrument to sell to gullible investors.

    272:

    happily gone camping in parks, and enjoyed ourselves.

    My point was that going camping is a holiday, not a life. Once you have to start hunting and gathering and building hospitals it stops being camping.

    It's also generally fun to the extent that there's infrastructure there, even if you ignore roads since you're jaunting. Toilets, for example. Although as people here keep saying, you just jaunt into another timeline, shit on the ground, then jaunt back. Carefully, obviously, since someone else may have done the same thing before you.

    Oddly OGH never really mentioned that bit. It's all very well stepping through to a new world then landing with a thump, but somehow no-one ever made a muffled thump by landing in a pile of poo.

    273:

    What you don't seem to be able to understand is that there are a fair number of people who would actively LIKE to be frontiersmen, NOT just urbanites playing at it for short periods and relying on imported technology. There may be very few nowadays who are the real thing (I don't claim to be or have been, though I come a hell of a lot closer than most people who claim to be), but there are quite a few of us who LIKE that lifestyle. All right, I am past it, as I am 73 and my health has not held up well enough, but that doesn't change my tastes.

    Hospitals? I have known quite a few people who had no access to such things, and they weren't exactly easy to get at even for me in my childhood. Also, I can assure you that pit toilets, and even just digging a hole and covering the issue, work perfectly well in sufficiently unpopulated areas.

    274:

    Oddly enough, IIRC, my late ex, when she was in the service, the only time she parachuted, that was exactly what she landed in.

    275:

    And I'm sure you mean mastodon poo, since he keeps making a big thing of uninhabited timelines and all.

    Speaking of mastodon poo of the intellectual persuasion, I've been wondering...

    ...Why are most worlds uninhabited? Since we're talking about some version of the quantum many worlds theory (well, sort of), a naive person like myself would expect worlds with shared histories to be closer to each other than worlds that had diverged further back. So either engrams jaunt you a very long distance in paratime, and are marvellously good at getting you accurately back to the same timeline you left (or are they?). Or...

    ...Or there's some force in paratime that randomizes what timelines are next to, so that if you jaunt to the world next door, you have a 70% chance of it being uninhabited, so that you land in the mastodon poo. How would paratime randomize the relative positions of timelines?

    Maybe it just happens, but that's kind of boring. So what if there's a mechanism that deranges the positions of timelines, such that timelines get pulled away from each other and sent in weird directions. What would that force be.

    Well, since I know nothing about quantum mechanics, the obvious mechanisms have a handwave towards decoherence and entanglement. Here's what I was thinking.

    One feature of the many worlds theory (the real one, not the mastodon poo I'm busily egesting) is that worlds split instead of superpositions collapsing. While the split is instantaneous, information about the split propagates at the speed of light. My guess is that quantum decoherence largely gobbles up most world splits before they get out of the atom, and the result is classical physics under most circumstances.

    Returning to the paratime multiverse of mastodon poo, let's assume that rarely splits happen on larger scales, up to and including world timelines. Now on the interstellar scale, something like decoherence can still happen. The reason is that photon density (the amount of light and hence information transferred) falls off as 1/d^2. At interstellar distances, almost all photons interact with dust or whatever, and there's not much interaction between planets in different stellar systems. This is akin to decoherence. So far as other stars and planets are concerned, what's going on in different paratimes of Earth is largely irrelevant. Mastodons or coalburners on Earth don't influence how the planet rotates, what kind of light comes off it, or anything else. This is the background: Earth splitting in paratime doesn't really affect the rest of the universe, because the interactions with other stellar systems are unperturbed by most timelines.

    But under some circumstances, star systems do interact. One way this happens is when a species goes interstellar and physically moves between stars. Then the histories of the separate star systems are linked by a shared history. Another way they are linked is when a species does something that is easy to see on interstellar scales. Now if you're thinking of the Hoppers traveling among stars and turning planets into black holes, you've got it. Those are readily observable on an interstellar scale. If you're in a universe where Earth was turned into a black hole, you may well notice, especially if said hole starts siphoning off solar mass.

    That means that Earths colonized by Hoppers act differently in paratime than do uninhabited Earths or Earths inhabited only by humans. Furthermore, human timelines that interact with the Hopper timelines start having their history influenced by the Hoppers, so they get changed too.

    Now what changes? One possibility is that Hopper-influenced timelines get yanked around in paratime by interacting differently with the universe at large. Another possibility is that Hopper-influenced timelines branch differently (either more or less) than do normal timelines. If there are fewer branches, then this creates a void into which other random timelines can intrude. If there are more branches, then the extra branches intrude into paratime spaces that they wouldn't otherwise be near.

    The test of this isn't that there are more uninhabited timelines, it's that the timelines that are near your timeline change over time on a scale of decades to centuries.

    Anyway, this is all mastodon poo, shoveled out because I waxed sarcastic on OGH's housing designs, and it's only fair that I float something big and gassy for others to wax sarcastic on.

    276:

    Just finished it! It was a satisfying end to a long journey.

    Now on to the latest of Seanan McGuire's Patreon stories.

    277:

    there are a fair number of people who would actively LIKE to be frontiersmen,

    I believe I may have mentioned those people. But since I did that in the context of "losing these people from mainstream society would be a problem" you perhaps chose to ignore it.

    I suspect there would be a combination, with a bunch of people disappearing to live happily ever after in the wilderness (as we have now, but more so, since wilderness here and now tends to be the less desirable bits). But I think they'd be a minority of the 'go off exploring' people. They definitely would be a vanishingly small minority of the first wave of explorers, unless government acted to restrict them.

    Think of all the lovely people who go off camping round the UK now, and how covid increased their numbers but did not seem to increase the number of sensible ones.

    278:

    So if the worldwalking is in arbitrarily large steps, what happened in timelines 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5? Are they also having worldwalkers influencing their timelines?

    279:

    It's funny, somehow Jaunting between the surfaces of different Earth's seems emotionally reasonable, but once one starts to imagine deep space exploration vessels Jaunting different intuitions start to leach into my peripheral vision.

    How would registration be maintained over thousands of years of butterfly effect divergences between universes?

    How does one maintain exact spatial registration between different realities, especially in deep space?

    What are the relativistic implications of Jaunting? Starts to sound like a Scalzi Infinite Improbability FTL drive.

    Maybe take the SG1 solution, in that FTL is possible provided that there is a certain amount of contact between different multiverses (e.g. once per tv season (which was a brilliant in joke btw)).

    280:

    One of the earlier books established that momentum is conserved, but not energy. Viz, things that jaunt keep their speed but velocity, gravitational potential etc are open. So it's easy to jump from Earth to the place where Earth would be, or where there's a black hole now (with similar but not equal mass), and still be in orbit around the sun but not around the black hole. Which is exciting in itself, but opens a bunch of possibilities.

    You could, for example, jaunt in to the black hole instead of Earth universe, make a grazing orbit at a suitable distance from the event horizon, then slingshot out and when you're outside the next-Earth-over atmosphere jaunt there. Keeping your speed, but with exciting changes to kinetic and potential energy.

    I got a bit lost reading that bit of the book, because it didn't really make sense, so I may have this all about face and in fact the "same height" is actually "same gravitational potential energy" or maybe it's all just magic and none of the physics even pretends to hold up.

    281:

    I think the more interesting question is what about a Jaunt in deep space? What is your momentum? Relative to what?

    282:

    I assume it's quantised in some fashion, so it makes more sense to use whole numbers. But it may actually be a real-number infinity rather than an integer-infinity, or indeed some other infinite.

    It's even possible that there's some form of chess bishop movement going on where never the twain shall meet. But there's no reason I can see that there would only be one pair of mutually inaccessible worlds, it could easily be the case that the smallest possible jump is some (large) multiple of the gap between universes. Viz, if the gap is normalised to one, but jaunts have to be a multiple of ten, there will be 10 sets of mutually inaccessible universes.

    283:

    Even more fun: any jaunt can be attempted, but ones to universes with sufficiently different physical constants fail. So it might be impossible to jump from A to B, but possible to jump from A to C to B. Whether it would be possible for anything to survive doing so is left as an exercise for the student.

    284:

    Also the hovercraft cargo transport thing some books back was kind of irritating...there are much easier ways to provide electrical insulation if that's all you need (hello quartz rods). And even if you absolutely had to provide an air cushion you could always have externally powered fans blowing up the skirt from below rather than the on-board diesel engines I seem to recall.

    But the multiversal hovercraft IFV's redeemed that in this book. Rule of Cool.

    285:

    I have mentioned this before. but it needs repeating. The reason that fiction uses countable infinities are: 1) Most intelligent people can grasp the concept, without getting TOO confused. 2) The consequences of even a measurable non-countable infinity are more complicated than you think; almost all SF stories that have used one have made a complete mess of it, and none have done better than adequately. 3) You simply do NOT want to get into the morass of non-measurable or higher-order infinities, even if you are a mathematician. Explaining the issues to laymen (and I count as one) is damn near impossible.

    286:

    Also note the common use of the word "uncountable" to mean "a lot". An uncountable number of people will read the word in this way.

    287:

    Yes. The original (and usual) meaning is "too numerous to be counted" (OED) - and that means in practice, not theory.

    288:

    Finished the book last night and enjoyed it! Thanks for a satisfying conclusion to the series.

    As a point of criticism, the book could have been improved by having someone proof-read the German words and sentences. Many of them contain multiple errors in spelling, capitalization, and syntax. And it's not just the ones spoken by Liz or Angie (which would be explained by their less-than-fluent German), but also the ones spoken by the actual German characters.

    On the other hand, the funniest joke in the book is also on Germany, and it reads like this: "Brandenburg Airport had opened on schedule in 2012…" I laughed really hard at that.

    And of course I quite liked the portrait of my home country as a beacon of freedom and democracy compared to the ~USA.

    289:

    ...Why are most worlds uninhabited?

    Why are you picking at the scenery?

    We just happen to be following a story set in time lines adjacent to the great uninhabited firebreak sheaf of TLs which were evacuated or depopulated to begin with in the face of the Hive invasion. The real freakiness is that there are any inhabited TLs in this zone at all.

    290:

    To introduce a topic not yet touched, I'm wondering about Adrian Holmes. Is it only me, or was he making a heel-face-turn in this book?

    From what I remember from the previous books (which may not be accurate, because I didn't re-read them now) he was set up as the Stalin-character to Adam Burroughs' Lenin. But in this book he explicitly renounces being the Stalin—which also means that he is willing to accept Miriam's historical analysis of failed revolutions in TL 2 and learn from it. He seems genuinely concerned with preserving the revolution and its ideals.

    So, does he in the end come to the understanding that in fact Miriam and the Clan are not his (and the revolution's) enemies? Is there actually an honest reconciliation between him and the Burgesons? Or at least, has he finally come to trust that Miriam and the Clan have the same goals as himself?

    It is not clear from the announcement ceremony at the end of the book whether the Council made a unanimous decision (which would mean that Holmes himself also voted for Erasmus), or whether Holmes was simply outvoted by a majority. But it seems clear that it would be impossible for him henceforth to work from the underlying assumption that the First Man is an enemy of the state. So it seems necessary for him to let go of his suspicions against the Burgesons.

    There is of course another possibility: given that Erasmus is 55 years old and not in the best health (tuberculosis), Holmes may view him as an interim choice, until the dust from the current crisis has settled. And in a decade or so there will still be time to make his own move…

    291:

    So, does he in the end come to the understanding that in fact Miriam and the Clan are not his (and the revolution's) enemies? Is there actually an honest reconciliation between him and the Burgesons?

    There's a concept in democratic politics called the "loyal opposition" -- they disagree on the objectives of the government, but not on the existence of government. (This seems to have been forgotten by one major party in the USA right now, as it has in Russia, Hungary, and all autocracies everywhere; it's in question in the UK too.)

    Holmes disagrees with the Burgesons about a lot of things but not about the sanctity of the Commonwealth's basic law/constitution, and once he realized the Burgesons weren't plotting a coup d'etat he was willing to work with them. The Commonwealth Guard got a bit over-enthusiastic, and if their coup had succeeded he'd have gotten the Robespierre treatment from them.

    292:

    @275 Heteromeles:

    would expect worlds with shared histories to be closer to each other than worlds that had diverged further back

    Fred Pohl came up with this explanation in his book The Coming of the Quantum Cats. Paraphrasing from memory (since it's been 20+ years since I read it):

    "Imagine that parallel worlds are like beads on a necklace that's been twisted into an enormous tangle. You get two beads that are on the string directly adjacent to your bead. They are very similar to your own world. Then you have a bunch of beads that are also adjacent to your bead, but they can be very far from where your bead is on the string. That's why a few of the worlds we can access are similar to ours, but also why so many are so very different."

    One of the characters is surprised that in one of the universes, Ronald Reagan is president, rather than Nancy Reagan (who was POTUS in the character's own universe). Also: "Why is it that Nancy Reagan, a real fireater, is in charge of a US where the military is so small, but Jerry Brown, a total wimp, is POTUS in a US with a huge military?"

    I remember the book as being entertaining, but I picked it up as a remainder, and I only read it once. So YMMV.

    293:

    "German words and sentences"

    In the linguistic pickiness department, there's one case in which an ~American uses the plural form of a verb with a collective noun. That's kind of a שִׁבֹּ֜לֶת / סִבֹּ֗לֶת thing that distinguishes British from American English: SAE uses the singular form.

    294:

    Also: "Why is it that Nancy Reagan, a real fireater, is in charge of a US where the military is so small, but Jerry Brown, a total wimp, is POTUS in a US with a huge military?"

    Because as president you go to war with the military your predecessor built (or didn't build.)

    295:

    We just happen to be following a story set in time lines adjacent to the great uninhabited firebreak sheaf of TLs which were evacuated or depopulated to begin with in the face of the Hive invasion. The real freakiness is that there are any inhabited TLs in this zone at all.

    You're asking why an ecologist like myself noticed how critical the scenery was to the story, and how bizarre it is?

    So how does one depopulate a timeline? Nuke it? And when people can jaunt across infinity, how many are going to evacuate in the direction you tell them to, and how many will take their chances, because they don't trust your authorities to help them and they think they can run faster than you or the invaders can?

    The other issue is that the setting timelines diverged centuries before the story. It's not a case of President Al Gore negotiating with Presidents Bob Dole and George HW Bush about how to deal with the invasion in the Jerry Brown presidency, it's the Gruinmarkt, Our World(ish), the Commonwealth, and the Dome/Hive combo banging into each other. And furthermore, these worlds are surrounded by many uninhabited worlds with no humans at all, so it's okay for the Juggernaut to trash two of them for takeoff and maneuver.

    At multiple scales, you have worlds with vastly dissimilar histories adjacent to each other. Since other paratime stories (Piper, Pohl) generally assume that adjacent timelines are more similar to each other than ones far away, this begs for an explanation.

    One set of explanations is that when timelines diverge, they diverge in such a way that similar timelines don't end up next to each other. For example, one might say that the universe is 11 dimensional, as some theorists have posited, that we live in four dimensions, and paratime branches occupy the other seven. When timelines split, they diverge at wide angles in multiple dimensions. Thus timelines that end up next to each other don't commonly share recent histories. And it turns out that most timelines of Earth don't have humans in them, either, which propels critical parts of the book. Mechanical, but it requires no more work, only suspension of disbelief*.

    Another set of explanations is that some force, internal or external, is distorting the cladistic tree* of diverging timelines in a way that brings some dissimilar branches close to each other. The obvious force here is the Hive, not because it's forcing humans to evacuate timelines, but because it's bent its set of history branches into a part of the tree where humans never evolved, and the distortion has also pulled in some other stray branches, like the Gruinmarkt and the Commonwealth. This one's interesting, because there's a force distorting the world tree, and those effects should be noticeable at some scale. Perhaps there's another story here.

    Perhaps the only way you get diverging timelines in paratime is if they diverge at high angles. Low angle divergences tend to merge back with each other, leaving a plethora of disappeared socks and other minor paradoxes.
    *
    Cladistic trees map shared histories using evidence, generally from organisms. When wildly dissimilar organisms pop up on adjacent branches of a cladistic tree, that's usually a sign that something is wrong and it needs to be paid attention to.

    296:

    With regard to LibreOffice, it does one neat trick you might like: If you put a regular expression into the "Find and Replace" box, you can search for multiple words at once. For example, when trying to root out the passive voice, I use the regex “\b(?:was|were|by|\w*ing)\b” and simultaneously search for "was," "were," "by" and any word ending with "ing."

    297:

    Now that I've finished the series, the thing that strikes me about books in the Merchant Princes World in general is how deadly serious they are. This is a sharp contrast with books in the World of The Laundry Files, which are always playful and often outright funny.

    Obviously, in the specific case of Invisible Sun one suspects that the series of tragedies that struck OGH during writing might have something to do with this. But I notice that Dead Lies Dreaming is as playful as any Laundry Files book. I am curious to see what the tone of Escape from Yokai Land will be like.

    298:

    I'm a big kaiju fan, so I'm really looking forward to Escape from Yokai Land!

    299:

    My take is one that may or may not irritate quantum theorists: that something must create a timeline split. Otherwise, minor stuff, like killing that fly or not killing it, or even where that dust mote lands, would creating ludicrous numbers of parallels.

    Something seriously energetic must create them, and even then, I would assume some re-merge, if they're not too dissimilar (think no object where you're trying to jaunt to).

    300:

    I was wondering that as well, but re my previous cmt, perhaps some people didn't want to leave, or were infected with the prion disease, and couldn't... and that's enough to generate a timeline split.

    There you go - these were recently opened worlds to the Forerunners, and the disease was brought in....

    301:

    TB - and this is to Charlie, also. Dunno about untreated... but my mother had TB as a young woman. Spent a winter in the Pocono Mts, in a sanitarium (screened porches, hot bricks under the blankets at night), and was in remission the rest of her life - she died at 72, and I never heard her coughing from aftereffects.

    302:

    I'm a big kaiju fan, so I'm really looking forward to Escape from Yokai Land!

    Looking forward to the Hello Kitty Kaiju!

    303:
    My take is one that may or may not irritate quantum theorists: that something must *create* a timeline split. Otherwise, minor stuff, like killing that fly or not killing it, or even where that dust mote lands, would creating ludicrous numbers of parallels.

    If we are going with the MWI, new worlds are created continuously as entangled quantum systems interact. There is no threshold event for creating a new world. The number of alternative worlds is, almost certainly at least C, the infinity of the continuum, which may be ℵ-1, depending on how you feel about the Axiom of Choice and the Continuum Hypothesis. Anyway, it's a big (uncountable) infinity.

    If you're writing fiction and uncountably infinite worlds are inconvenient plot-wise, you may certainly imagine new physics to edit out the undesirables.

    304:

    I think the book explicitly mentions that an observer from another TL can be the source that creates a new timeline. So you a refugee(s) from the Forerunners jaunting (perhaps from TL4) into TL1 around 300 BC and causing the split with TL2. Then you have the patriarch of the clan jaunting into TL2 in the 1700s and causing the split into TL3. Probably the jaunting of Miriam into TL3 has created a new split, yet uncontacted, where the revolution took the much more sinister turn it was about to take if it weren't by the clan help. So there's actually only one originally inhabited TL in the fire break with at least two, maybe more, additional TLs branching from it.

    305:

    Ok... but do they remerge? What would prevent this from happening almost immediately - isn't there a conservation of energy here?

    306:

    I would think that the mere act of jaunting wouldn't cause a split. Otherwise, two people who jaunt, separately to tl2 would not be in the same TL2, one would be in TL 2.1, and the other TL 2.2, and if they actually saw each other, then person 2 would actually be P-n or P-(n+1).

    As my previous comment, I think this is making it far too easy to create new worldlines, and conservation laws would prevent it.

    307:

    In one of the three books in The Gods Themselves trilogy, one of Isaac Asimov's physicists explicitly proposes the existence of uncountably infinite universes. I think it's Contend in Vain..., but I'm not sure of that.

    308:

    Ok... but do they remerge?

    No they never remerge.

    What would prevent this from happening almost immediately

    "This" referring to what?

    isn't there a conservation of energy here?

    Yes, energy is conserved at each branch (in the sense that each branch world has the same energy as the world from which it emerged) and within each world.

    309:

    With the Many Worlds Interpretation, you've still got to deal with decoherence. That's the problem of quantum actions running into other cruft and becoming irrelevant. The MWI is about quantum states, instead of being in superposition and collapsing, splitting and forming separate universes. The problem is that the universe split propagates out at light speed. My guess is that most of the time, the split interacts with other particles and the whole mess decoheres into classical physics, where energy is conserved.

    310:

    If I might use the > 300 rule, I was delighted to see this:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02696-z

    Colour me better: fixing figures for colour blindness

    Having the typical north-west European male red-green color deficiency, I've been driven to distraction on a zillion occasions by graphs that encode stuff with colors that I can't see. Use colors by all means for those that can see them, but give the rest of us a break with different shapes and such. Rather than all round dots of different colors, make the red ones round and the blue ones square and the green ones asterisks.

    311:

    I'll point out that there are a bunch of possible (and each totally bullshit) answers to this.

    One is that timeline splits are splits of four dimensional timelines in something like an 11-dimensional paratime. The angle of the split may be random, but timelines that are too similar and too close to parallel re-merge by jaunting/decohering together into a lower energy collective energy state. Or something. In this paratime, splits are random, and timelines end up adjacent to each other because random forking events put them close enough. This has the virtue of at least matching the Merchant Prince Universe.

    Or the angle of divergence could be a function of how much energy got emitted in the splitting event, which correlates with things like long-term consequences and how far away the split interacts with other objects in the universe (remember the whole light speed, photon-based limit). In this case, only a few things split timelines: volcanoes (the majority) large asteroid strikes (the minority), and nuclear war (humans!). Or all the stuff the Hive does (Hoppers!). Volcanoes really do change things, and they really are pretty random in time and somewhat random in space. So this paratime would have lots and lots of uninhabited worlds, each of which has a unique volcanic/etc. history that carromed it through paratime into strange neighborhoods. The problem with this idea is that it implies there should be a Gruinmarkt out there that wasn't bombed by the US, a TL5 that's not a black hole, a TL4 that's not in an Ice Age, and so forth. And launching Juggernaut would have caused a split on their launch-world, if not on maneuver-worlds. So maybe not, except in fanfic?

    And there's the separate idea that anything that can entangle a timeline with timelines on other worlds yanks that timeline around. The only point here is that it allows for parallel timelines to proliferate, but also allows some timelines to get yanked sideways out of their normal paratime into some other part of paratime that's foreign to their history. This has the advantage that it centers certain kinds of acts as important to timeline history. So instead of jaunters being at the mercy of an uncaring multiverse that splits randomly, they can make it even more uncaring by literally hitching their timelines to stars. Or hitching their timelines to those that have already hitched their timelines to stars. This might make literary sense, and it might well match the Merchant Prince World.

    The only grumble I have about OGH's answer is that having the ability to clear a world of humans without nuclear war just strains my imagination. It's sort of like invading to create democracy in Iraq. The sentence parses, but it turns out it's easier for a so-called Great Power to pound a place into dust than to do large-scale politics from a world away. Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but perhaps the simplest way to get a non-human world may be to posit that worlds that proximity in paratime has nothing to do with the amount of shared history between timelines. This has the storytelling advantage that literally anything could be on the next timeline, although likely it's not going to have humans.

    312:

    OK, here's a thought.

    If you have an infinite number of TLs, then anything is possible - including other works of SF?

    If you can have Cthulhu-Lovecraftian crossovers why not Capt. Kirk? How about a TL after the failed Martian invasion of HG Wells' WotW?

    Lots of opportunity for good, clean crossover fun.

    Or law suit triggering copywrite infringement.

    313:
    perhaps the simplest way to get a non-human world may be to posit that worlds that proximity in paratime has nothing to do with the amount of shared history between timelines

    …and it has the virtue that it's what the Merchant Prince World actually has posited all along. The whole idea that proximity in paratime equals shared history is just a conjecture of yours, after all.

    314:

    Now that we are past 300 comments:

    WTF is going on in Britain?

    No petrol, no milk, grocery stores empty, fruit rotting in the field, and natgas prices climbing 40% in one day.

    Is this just a localized effect of Brexit or the first signs of a general unraveling of civilization (along with the collapse of Evergrande taking 1/3 of the Chinese economy with it)?

    315:

    At least the price hike of natural gas isn't confined to the UK only. We have it on the continent as well. Some sort of Covid after-effect? Or an after-effect of the recent shipping backlogs?

    There are certainly people on this blog who will have an opinion (and possibly even an analysis backing up that opinion) about this.

    316:

    Yes. A Brexit update would be nice.

    317:

    …and it has the virtue that it's what the Merchant Prince World actually has posited all along. The whole idea that proximity in paratime equals shared history is just a conjecture of yours, after all.

    Problem is that H. Beam Piper's Paratime books and Pohl's Coming of the Quantum Cats both run on the notion that proximity in Paratime does equal shared history. Furthermore, if timelines branch in some higher space, why shouldn't daughter timelines be in close proximity?

    318:

    Laugh for the morning: It’s not called a Zeppelin unless it comes from the Zeppelin region of Germany, otherwise it’s just a sparkling airship.

    https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/a-quick-note-on-airships/

    (has more thoughts, but the lead in is funny)

    320:

    Yes, I've been using regular expressions for nigh upon 30 years at this point.

    Microsoft Word also has regexps, but its atoms are almost completely unlike any other regular expression system anyone anywhere else invented, and it's buried deep in a bunch of teeny nested sub-menus, and it's lacking key features.

    (Whereas Scrivener, my novel writing software of choice, has full-blown pcre(1) baked into it, which is about the most powerful implementation I know of.)

    321:

    Consider experiments with particle accelerators. Most particles last very tiny fractions of a second, except when there are large energies involved, and even then most decay immediately.

    I'm picturing the same with timelines - they decay rapidly (you put that here, no, there, decay to there) in very small time periods, unless there are large energies involved.

    322:

    "WTF is going on in Britain?

    No petrol, no milk, grocery stores empty, fruit rotting in the field, and natgas prices climbing 40% in one day."

    Brexit, of course.

    Or, for Tories, the Savage Attack of the EU Dictatorship on All that is Good and Glorious in this World.

    323:

    So that we can get onto Brexit or something else, I think we can reconcile our positions:

    Let's assume that when timelines branch, they branch perpendicularly to each other. That way (barring some bizarre chronometric transformation), the two daughter timelines run perpendicular to each other. A person on one daughter timeline could only see the other as having no/all time passing instantaneously.

    Therefore you cannot jaunt to the sibling timeline on the other side of a bifurcation, because there's no way to match times. The only timelines you can jaunt to are those where the time dimensions are more-or-less in parallel. These came from somewhen else.

    We also need to add in a clause that, once timelines have interacted via jaunters, they branch in parallel, so that you don't lose contact with part of another time tree just because one or the other side has bifurcated away from you.

    And the reason it's called paratime? It has three spatial dimensions and some much larger number of unidirectional temporal dimensions. In each of these temporal dimensions, time only increases, so time travel is not allowed and there's no way to do a bunch of jaunts and come back before you left. The number of temporal dimensions is high enough to allow timelines to branch as much as is needed for the story.

    324:

    ActionService @ 284: Also the hovercraft cargo transport thing some books back was kind of irritating...there are much easier ways to provide electrical insulation if that's all you need (hello quartz rods). And even if you absolutely had to provide an air cushion you could always have externally powered fans blowing up the skirt from below rather than the on-board diesel engines I seem to recall.

    Like an air hockey table or the Disneyland Flying Saucers ride back in the 60s ... but you'd need to have the blowers on both the "TL of departure" and on the "TL of arrival". With a diesel powered hover-craft (even if it is full of eels) all you need is clear spaces on both Time Lines.

    Parking lots on either side would suffice.

    325:

    Agreed. I thought people were more clever about using color. Thanks for the article.

    The only thing I'm grumpy about (as a botanist) is them ragging on plant science papers for being insensitive about using pictures that have red and green in them. While I'm unforgiving about graph colors (they should be visible for everyone, of course), I seriously hope they're not saying that pictures of plants should be recolored to make them easier for RG colorblind people to see. Sometimes a green leaf should be green.

    326:

    Microsoft is slightly notorious for every bit of software inventing the wheel from scratch. Word and Excel (used to?) have independent half-arse regex processing and it bugs me a lot. Not to the point where I'll use PowerShell to load documents and search them that way, but close. What I actually do use use LibreOffice to load and search, then edit in MS-Word (because my day job use MS-Word for management-originated documentation. We also have a wiki, for geek-originated documentation. And three different issue tracking systems just because).

    327:

    JReynolds @ 292: @275 Heteromeles:

    would expect worlds with shared histories to be closer to each other than worlds that had diverged further back

    Fred Pohl came up with this explanation in his book The Coming of the Quantum Cats. Paraphrasing from memory (since it's been 20+ years since I read it):

    "Imagine that parallel worlds are like beads on a necklace that's been twisted into an enormous tangle. You get two beads that are on the string directly adjacent to your bead. They are very similar to your own world. Then you have a bunch of beads that are also adjacent to your bead, but they can be very far from where your bead is on the string. That's why a few of the worlds we can access are similar to ours, but also why so many are so very different."

    Yeah, I like that one.

    Update: My copy of Invisible Sun is due here by 22 Oct.

    328:

    I'm just annoyed that UV and IR is often left out of the pictures altogether. That seems rude. I don't care that most people can't see the colours, they should put them in for those who can.

    I often read New Scientist in bed of an evening, using the red LED light over my bed. That does really weird stuff to the colour pictures because it's almost completely monochromatic. And very, very occasionally the UV insect light will make something fluoresce enough that I notice it (mostly it's white sheets that glow thanks to washing powders that wash whiter than white)

    329:

    Tb: some people have little damage anc recover well with good but simple care. This is a story about someone who had worse trouble and absent to poor care.

    330:

    I'm picturing the same with timelines - they decay rapidly (you put that here, no, there, decay to there) in very small time periods, unless there are large energies involved.

    That makes perfect sense.

    Though there is a near infinity of parallel universes most of them are popping into and out of existence like virtual particles.

    For example, there is a parallel universe whose only difference is that you had pancakes instead of waffles for breakfast this morning.

    It popped into existence and quickly disappeared merging seamlessly back into the prime time line.

    Which is the prime timeline? The one you happen to be in, of course.

    However, some universes have major changes (the Axis win WW2, the South wins the Civil War, Napoleon wins at Waterloo, various incarnations of Spiderman, etc. - all the main AltHist tropes) that allow them to achieve "escape velocity" from the prime and become permanent parallel universes.

    So while there is a near infinity of universes popping in and out of existence, there is only a relative handful of true and permanent parallel universes.

    331:

    @326 - “Microsoft is slightly notorious for every bit of software inventing the wheel from scratch.” Hah! Way back when I was engineering manager for the commercial Smalltalk vendor, customers were loudly clamouring for ‘proper OS widgets like Word uses’. Funny thing was that Word didn’t use any of the official Windows widgets or related apis. Excel didn’t use the same widgets. We tried, oh how we tried, but the ‘real’ widgets basically didn’t work. I don’t think anything much has changed, but I haven’t used windows for more than a few minutes since 1996.

    332:

    Consider a sperm race: Why so many sperm cells? (2015, K. Reynaud, Z. Schuss, N. Rouach, D. Holcman) [1] A key limiting step in fertility is the search for the oocyte by spermatozoa. Initially, there are tens of millions of sperm cells, but a single one will make it to the oocyte. This may be one of the most severe selection processes designed by evolution, whose role is yet to be understood. Why is it that such a huge redundancy is required and what does that mean for the search process?

    There is Brownian motion involved. That means that any out-of-position molecule will quickly propagate changes to the other molecules in the fluids involved to alter such motion relative to other [nearby(/entangled?) timelines]. (Different spermatozoon wins the race, or there are no winners.) Or, if one prefers, atomic decay with random cellular damage from the decay products (alpha, beta, gamma). (Or look at ventricular fibrillation.) Or weather, and wind gusts, lightning strikes.

    We should be focusing our attention on the futures of this timeline.

    [1] I'm unwilling to try to determine whether this reply to that paper is entirely serious, because parts of it are Art, intentional or not: Why so many sperm cells? Not only a possible means of mitigating the hazards inherent to human reproduction but also an indicator of an exaptation (Peter W. Barlow, 2016) Testes characterized by the Golden Ratio, especially if large (i.e., exaptive) and hence more eye-catching, might, together with other body parameters,48,49 therefore be preferred by females – and, as Short put it,44 become ‘the engine if desire’ – thereby rendering males with large TTV as desirable mates. (There's more!!! :-)

    333:

    Duffy @ 314: Now that we are past 300 comments:

    WTF is going on in Britain?

    No petrol, no milk, grocery stores empty, fruit rotting in the field, and natgas prices climbing 40% in one day.

    Is this just a localized effect of Brexit or the first signs of a general unraveling of civilization (along with the collapse of Evergrande taking 1/3 of the Chinese economy with it)?

    I saw a comment somewhere, maybe a letter to the editor of the Guardian, that said it was an amalgamation of the government's handling of Covid & Brexit ...

    "Boris coxit up!"

    334:

    Moz @ 318: Laugh for the morning: It’s not called a Zeppelin unless it comes from the Zeppelin region of Germany, otherwise it’s just a sparkling airship.

    https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/a-quick-note-on-airships/

    (has more thoughts, but the lead in is funny)

    Interesting article, but there doesn't appear to be a Zeppelin region of Germany?

    335:

    Exploring?

    So, what have TL 2 & TL 3 found our there? Was it the Hoppers that sterilized (?) (Impoverished eco system anyways) TL 4 (Unclear).

    The text implies both major TL (2/3) have exploratory programs, author cites 70% no hominids, 30% paleolithic. Been watching a lot of YouTube videos about human evolution recently, surely modest programs of study and colonization have been initiated from both TL. Anyone have any cool megafauna (Mammoth, Mastodon, Sabre Tooth Cats?) in their National zoo? Does TL 3 HAVE a national Zoo? Did Someone go see if you can find some variant elephant species in North Africa (Hannibal/Rome and the extinct African forest elephant) and Syria? (Recent Slingshot article? The Assyrians did in the last of those).

    Co-operative study of neolithic hominids (Neanderthal?) would be an excellent non-threatening joint program for TL 2/3. With modest colonization to provide groceries and support? Pick an Island- Crete? Cyprus? Sardinia? as a base. Madagascar!!! (Thinking as I type...

    Interesting topic for fan fiction?

    336:

    Have anyone here read City by Clifford Simak?

    337: 326 - I'm not sure I entirely agree. Mickeyshaft certainly do remake the shell visuals of their control paradigm from scratch every generation or two. They do this to create at least an illusion of progress in the eyes of the accountants and lawyers who write the cheques for $"new_version" of $software (for this purpose, a "new version" of Windoze is software).

    Whether or not there is actually any real progress in the underlying kernel is a quite different matter. As an illustration of this, I'm using Windoze 10 but do so more or less interchangeably with Windoze 7, and they both have the same implementation of a "command prompt", which hasn't actually changed noticeably (to me anyway) since A Mess DOS 6.0.

    331 - Why does this not surprise me? ;-)
    339:

    A Brexit update would be nice.

    A brexit update would be depressing as fuck so I'm not going there (for my own mental health).

    TLDR is, the pro-Brexit faction labelled every concern that things might not go smoothly as "Project Fear" and promised that it wouldn't be like that, honest. Turns out that Project Fear weren't just right, the worst parts of Project Fear were right, it just took several months longer to become apparent than most of us expected -- COVID19 concealed a lot of the damage and could be blamed for shortages, supply chain issues, etc. at first.

    Only now is the true magnitude of the economic damage becoming clear, and it's pretty grim: supermarket shelves that resemble those of East Germany, pigs being slaughtered and burned because there aren't enough abattoir workers (and they can't be exported to the EU for meat packing any more), fishing industry devastated, queues on every petrol station forecourt with fuel for sale because there aren't enough tanker drivers, restaurants closed because the staff all shrugged and went home to the EU because obviously they weren't wanted here ...

    The Brexit fantasies of a return to the halcyon days of the 1950s missed out the bit about food rationing lasting until late 1953.

    340:

    I often read New Scientist in bed of an evening

    BTW, earlier this year New Scientist were bought by the Daily Mail group. You know, the folks who were all "Hurrah for that nice Mister Hitler!" until September 1939, and are generally all in with any group to the right of Genghis Khan. (I'm pretty sure they approve of the Australian Liberal Party.) They're also pretty good at confusing politically-motivated lies with news coverage.

    While it's possible that NS might be a sign of DMG hedging their bets on climate change coverage, more likely you can expect a marked deterioration in their editorial quality over the next year or so.

    Me, I cancelled my subscription the instant I heard about the takeover.

    341:

    WTF's in the water in places where a "Conservative" party decides their optimum will be the Nation's? These jokers look to be Tories & Republicans first, British & American second (On a good day). In a more ideal world, a conservative expressing their inner fascist should be as much of a faux pas as breaking wind in a closed elevator car.

    342:

    There is a potential very ranty blog post updating my circa-2013 look at the way white supremacism (let's call a Nazi a fucking Nazi from now on, okay?) intersects with Christian dominionism and climate change denialism -- and about the lethal prospect of them deciding that climate change is real, so let's weaponize it and use it to murder billions of not-like-us subhumans.

    It really needs a mind map/spider diagram to sketch in all the links, but it's not so much a conspiracy theory as simply that people who are attracted to one set of beliefs about the world adopt related policies, and the Nazi right feel threatened by loss of status/demographic shortfall.

    However it comes to me that I've been borderline depressed for the past five years and doing a deep dive into this sewage -- not to mention fielding the drive-by comments from Nazi-adjacent turds -- will be bad for my mental health.

    343:

    Bitter amusement is a poor substitute for happiness, but there's a hell of a lot of it available. That the self esteem of a handful of the wealthy depends on the relative misery of billions is appalling, and militant "Fundagelicals" implies schism in the future when the heresy becomes impossible to ignore. There will be stories to tell the young if we make it to the other side of this.

    344:

    I've just finished the book (UK trade paperback), and read the whole thread, and I'm surprised that no one else seems to have noticed that Liz hides her old bag in a trash can in a mall restroom (page 182), and then the police find it in her hotel room trash can (page 233) and get excited over gunpowder residue...

    Sorry Charlie.

    345:

    * facepalm *

    All I can say is, fifty pages is about a day of proofreading time, so I presumably passed over it and had forgotten by the next day's session.

    346:

    However it comes to me that I've been borderline depressed for the past five years and doing a deep dive into this sewage -- not to mention fielding the drive-by comments from Nazi-adjacent turds -- will be bad for my mental health.

    Agreed, strongly!

    I find myself hoping for more meditations along the lines of the Wolf Orchestra. You know, how to fight the power with old age and treachery, because youth and enthusiasm is just too callow to get the job done? Maybe call it Older Brother, if Cory Doctorow isn't working on that right now.

    In an amusing non-sequitur, I was reading something about the island of Ikaria in the Aegean. It's one of the so-called Blue Zone places, where people live inordinately long times. Turns out, back in Roman times, it was a source of high-grade wine, because the local wine yeast tolerates about 2% more alcohol than standard yeasts do. And they still use ancient amphorae to ferment wine, because the old jugs are buried up to the rim and easier to hide from the tax assessors because of that. Later on, the Byzantines used the island as a dumping ground for malcontents, and their descendants are still there. And Ikarians purportedly tend to be more active in the evening, into the night, because the island got hit by pirates a lot, so they had to do much of their work when raiders weren't active. Or something. And they're fairly poor, but they get by with a lot of work, a bit of cleverness, conviviality, and making the best of what they have.

    Somehow, I'm getting a glimmer of an idea about what the good life might actually look like, at least if you want to live a long time with fewer lifestyle diseases. And I don't think it corporatizes all that well, although people are trying.

    347:

    WTF's in the water in places where a "Conservative" party decides their optimum will be the Nation's? These jokers look to be Tories & Republicans first, British & American second (On a good day).

    I suspect, as many others have said, the truth is that much of the post-WW2 era was the exception and not the normal - and we are merely returning to the (unfortunate) normal.

    The only real difference is where on the slope various countries/regions are - mainland Europe looks reasonable but only because we are comparing it to the US or UK - if one looks closely they are heading in the same direction.

    348:

    I suspect, as many others have said, the truth is that much of the post-WW2 era was the exception and not the normal - and we are merely returning to the (unfortunate) normal.

    I suspect that one reason the post-WW2 era was flatter than the norm is that the USSR presented a worldview where the average worker wasn't exploited so TPTB felt they needed to show the average Western worker that they weren't being exploited in order to nip Communism in the bud. Also, WW2 had given fascism a bad name.

    The collapse of the USSR removed the spectre of Communism from elite calculations, while time has erased the automatic rejection of fascism*.

    I fear you are right. We are certainly heading back into Gilded Age inequities. Can't even console ourselves that the uber-wealthy will suffer with the rest in the coming climate collapse — they can buy their way to a private haven in New Zealand (or wherever).

    *When I was a kid, no one debated if you could punch a Nazi or not. They were a Nazi, so punchable, end of discussion.

    349:

    I think Neanderthals count as Paleolithic or perhaps mesolithic, but that's okay, your point on exploration is spot on. As is your point about megafauna. I'd also point out that paleo- and mesolithic tech systems didn't disappear until very recently. They're the stuff you can make by banging together the rocks at hand, as opposed to the finely crafted points you get by trading for obsidian and other top-line materials from hundreds of kilometers away. More modern paleolithic tools get derided as "women's knives" and are made and discarded (sort of like plastic cutlery), rather than coddled. In other words, they're good technology for those on the bleeding edge of the ever-expanding paratime frontier.

    If what Campbell called The Great Hunt (a world with megafauna) is just a jaunt away, of course there will be mammoths and ground sloths in zoos. Jaunting with the buggers will be a test of logistics. I'll admit that I was thinking about how something like a fraternity initiation in such a system might involve a group of pledges going out, hunting an elephant-equivalent, butchering it, bringing it all back to the frat house (including the bones) and making barbecue for the house for a week or two, or at least until the sorority sisters start getting repelled by the smell of the bones and the hide tanning. Oops, veered into sarcasm there.

    On one side of the coin, there's the fun of the eternal frontier, exploration and adventure backed by default expansionism. On the other, there's a certain level of wretched excess driven by the notion that there are no limits, thanks to the jaunt. Unfortunately, you can't unlink the two, since they're both aspects of how frontiers work.

    350:

    If it's broken badly enough, their money becomes ornamental. A "New deal" style of compromise would be in their best long term interest, but they may find long term inconceivable.

    351:

    I suspect that one reason the post-WW2 era was flatter than the norm is that the USSR presented a worldview where the average worker wasn't exploited so TPTB felt they needed to show the average Western worker that they weren't being exploited in order to nip Communism in the bud.

    Was communism and the threat of the USSR a factor? I would guess yes, but there were also other factors like the rise of unions. But I suspect it was a lot more than just that - at least for the US.

    The post-WW2 era in the US really was the result of the Great Depression and the resulting New Deal by Roosevelt.

    So the right leader at the right time to take advantage of circumstances.

    The problem of course is despite the last 40 years there is still enough of the New Deal (both in law, and in government responses) that despite major economic shocks - crash of 2008, Covid-19 - people have not been as desperate as those at the bottom were in the Great Depression.

    Or, to put it another way, we are better at hiding it and papering over it.

    Thus no groundswell of political support to reverse the last 40 years (yet at least).

    Now add in that we have truly national media with concentrated ownership which makes it a lot easier to manipulate much of the public into taking out their anger in unproductive (at least if the goal is to improve their lives) ways.

    I fear you are right. We are certainly heading back into Gilded Age inequities. Can't even console ourselves that the uber-wealthy will suffer with the rest in the coming climate collapse — they can buy their way to a private haven in New Zealand (or wherever).

    Well, they at least think they can...

    352:

    Communism provided an ideological push for more equality. The economic factor, at least for North America and Australia, was that we were places with lots of coal and oil that hadn't been trashed by WW2, unlike Europe and Asia. Everyone has since rebuilt since WW2, and the aging infrastructure that North Americans (and Australians?) didn't bother to invest in is now breaking down.

    In general, I think we're rearguing Piketty's thesis that inequality naturally grows in any quasi-stable system, both through luck and exploitation, and that the natural fix is some combination of redistribution and revolution.

    What's different is that I don't think we're going back to a Gilded Age. We're in a Gilded Age, and our ultra-rich dwarf the old tycoons. The question is how it ends, because I don't think communism 2.0 is going to work this time either.

    The problem is that we're at the end of an industrial era driven by the industrializing conquering the non-industrialized and resource-stripping as we went. We're pretty much through those resources, and we're pretty much through oil and coal. So what comes next?

    The predictable, short-term things that come next include rising authoritarianism, which shows up when more democratic governments get weak just like flies lay eggs in road kill, and for much the same reason. I don't think the ultra-rich will save themselves by moving to New Zealand, because New Zealand doesn't have the resource base to support ultra-rich people. To clarify, the tycoons might save their genes, but they won't save their power or culture by moving to New Zealand. And the latter two probably matter more to them than does their effing, backstabbing, family. In other words, I expect them to try looting the world and retreating to their secret lairs. I just don't expect it to work all that well, because you need a huge resource base to support a life of wretched excess, and loot always runs out sooner more than later.

    What will come next, in the long term (e.g. likely after all of us are dead) depends on whether civilizations can adapt to the constant crises of climate change. The last time we faced something like this was during the Little Ice Age, when the Renaissance/Medieval system and its contemporaries largely broke down, and new systems, like the Enlightenment, grew as governments learned how to deal with the constant crises the weather and greedy authoritarians were forcing on them.

    Our descendants will have to learn to get by with less and deal with more chaos. That's pretty much a given. If they can learn to live in ways where no one gets rich but everyone gets by, that might be the best outcome anyone could hope for. And it's certainly better than hoping we all die because we're irredeemably evil.

    353:

    < blockquote>When I was a kid, no one debated if you could punch a Nazi or not. They were a Nazi, so punchable, end of discussion.

    When I was a kid (60s USA), no one debated if you could punch a Commie or not. They were a Commie, so punchable, end of discussion.

    354:

    FIFTY PAGES A DAY?

    And I was told on Sunday, 23 May, to "drop everything" and go over the copyeditor's copy, to publish in 27 May.[1][2]

  • I'd never used track changes before, so there are typos of page 1....
  • True, they slid other publication dates of other books around, so they could get back from mid-June to the original date they'd told me, so I could have a book launch on 28 May, the first day of this year's virtual Balticon.
  • 355:

    There has been long support for bringing back the New Deal, and the last seven or eight years, there has, in fact, been a groundswell (Bernie, AOC, etc). The problem is GOP gerrymandering in the US, along with voter suppression laws.

    356:

    Please. I read this, and I picture some "terrorists" getting control of one nuke, and taking out Davos during the conference.

    357:

    Rbt Prior Solzenhitysin pointed out that such was not actually the case in the CCCP, with bitter remarks about what Lenin had said & actual practice ....

    H We're in a Gilded Age YES We will look back on approx 1953 - 2008, possibly as late as 2019 - as a Golden Age, which will not be repeated. Marcus Aurelius has died & it's likely to be downhill from here, unless some of the young do something about it.

    358:

    Solzenhitysin pointed out that such was not actually the case in the CCCP, with bitter remarks about what Lenin had said & actual practice ....

    Yes, but was that widely known when the New Deal was being implemented?

    359:

    Please. I read this, and I picture some "terrorists" getting control of one nuke, and taking out Davos during the conference.

    To the local Five Eyes franchisee: No Julie, I do not advocate terrorism, nor does he. Sorry about the paperwork.

    I'll simply repeat my favorite quote from my favorite bigot, HL Mencken: "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong."

    And I'll refer you to your local coverage of the Pandora Papers, from your morning serving of schadenfreude americano with a slice of cherry pie.

    360:

    There has been long support for bringing back the New Deal,

    Not really.

    Yes, a lot of New Deal like stuff is popular in polling, but that doesn't translate into voter support - many/most of those who claim support for New Deal policies then vote against those policies at primary/election time.

    As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.

    and the last seven or eight years, there has, in fact, been a groundswell (Bernie, AOC, etc).

    Again, not really.

    AOC and Bernie both get a lot of press, and Bernie was popular enough as a Presidential Candidate (and a social media meme)

    But neither are popular outside of their districts when it comes to people actually voting for them(*) - and neither of them (nor the others in their small group of progressives) have had success in getting progressive candidates through primaries. Note that the Tea Party, and now Trump, are far more successful in controlling primary voting than AOC/Bernie/progressives are on the other side.

    When/if the day comes when Democrats in primaries are afraid of the progressives in primary contests, then there will be evidence of a groundswell of support.

    The problem is GOP gerrymandering in the US, along with voter suppression laws.

    Is gerrymandering a problem in the US? Absolutely.

    But the bigger problem on the progressive side is that it is a convenient excuse, something to blame, rather than actual analysis.

    Progressives losing primaries isn't the result of GOP gerrymandering.

    Losing Senate races isn't GOP gerrymandering (though voter suppression can play a part).

    No, if progressives actually want to win they need to be honest with themselves as to what is working and what isn't working, so they know what they need to change/improve.

    Blaming the GOP is simply a way of avoiding that truth.

    361:

    And I'll refer you to your local coverage of the Pandora Papers,

    Yep, 5 years after the Panama Papers and nothing has changed regardless of what governments have been in power.

    362:

    Um, wrong. Bernie got millions of votes when he was running against Hillary. Last year - the problem was his age.

    And people outside their districts don't have the right to vote for someone.

    But a lot of progressive got elected... and look at the bills they're trying to get through the GOP.

    You think gerrymandering and voter suppression isn't a problem? Look at Texas, or Georgia.

    And right now, the GOP is in panic mode, because if they start losing, it's all over. In one redistricting case a few months ago, the GOP defense literally said that if x happened, they'd never be able to win again (as if they had a right to).

    363:

    The problem is that there are things people want. There are also things people fear. The fear (conditioned responses, really) is stronger than the want.

    364:

    I was told on Sunday, 23 May, to "drop everything" and go over the copyeditor's copy, to publish in 27 May

    Copy-edits are not page proofs, and it sounds like your publisher was (a) pulling dumb-ass stunts and (b) skimping on production. Copy-edits with change-tracking can indeed be zipped through rapidly if the CE isn't a lunatic; proper typeset page proofs in PDF for paper publication ... not so much.

    I assume they were trying to hit an ebook release deadline for Balticon, not freeze it for paper printing and shipping: the latter takes a lot longer (a month from printing to bookstore release throughout the USA, per all the big publishers I've worked with -- there are warehouses and railroads in the way).

    365:

    In the UK, that had nothing to do with it. It was because the country had come through an existential crisis, where we had had to work together, and there was a common belief in society as a whole and that we needed to rebuild.

    366:

    Please. I read this, and I picture some "terrorists" getting control of one nuke, and taking out Davos during the conference.

    That would be an awful, bad, terrible, no-good thing to happen. Seriously.

    Never mind that 95% of the folks at each Davos conference are ordinary working stiffs -- the caterers, cleaning crews, bodyguards, drivers, and so on -- and they're less than 10% of the population of the island during the event.

    But consider: if you were to give the Klept a nuclear haircut at Davos, what would happen?

    Well, you'd trigger a global anti-terrorist witch hunt for starters, with the definition of "witch" starting at anyone remotely critical of global capitalism and the oil and tobacco industries. And then ... you just clear-cut an entire ecosystem, which opens up every niche in it to colonization by insurgents. Who in this case will include people like their predecessors only worse. Less restrained, more brutal, because terrified of terrorism.

    If you think I'm kidding, google the origins of the term "Stolypin necktie". If you want to evict the klept you need to include a non-violent exit option for them, otherwise they will have no reason not to fight to the death, and it is more likely to be your death than theirs.

    367:

    Right... but you're published by one of the majors. Ring of Fire Press is a small press - they sell ebooks (via Baen), and trade paper through Amazon. They don't get put in bookstores (which was why I was ecstatic at Capclave this past weekend, when I could hand Sally (Larry Smith's widow, bookseller) a dozen paper copies, and she'll take them to more cons than I make.

    The copy editor was good - it was them moving release dates around, and when the copy editor was available.

    And as I said, I'd never done that before, I know better, now.

    Unless, of course, you've got an agent I could query for the next novel or two....

    368:

    New Scientist were bought by the Daily Mail group... might be a sign of DMG hedging their bets on climate change

    Wouldn't count on it. The NS editor, Grahame Lawson, has published a couple of notes in the magazine to the effect "I realise climate change is a real problem and we must stop recreational flying ASAP, but I'm flying to Greece with my family regardless. We're buying indulgences even though I have previously written about indulgences not being an effective solution" blah blah etc.

    He's a pre hate mail employee.

    My issue is that I don't really have a good alternative pop sci source. Anyone got suggestions? I'd be happy with RSS feeds, what I'm really after is breadth of coverage.

    369:

    That would be an awful, bad, terrible, no-good thing to happen. Seriously.

    Anyone who wants to change things needs to copy the Tea Party / Trump playbooks.

    Or the Brexit playbook.

    You need the politicians more afraid of the voters than those who normally are pulling the strings.

    Without Brexit a Conservative politician who says "f* business" doesn't become PM and win a big majority.

    Without the Tea Party and later Trump, the Republican politicians would be more beholden to big business.

    You want progressive issues to become important again, and to be passed into law - then get the voters onboard so that the politicians implement those issues or face defeat.

    370:

    Um, wrong. Bernie got millions of votes when he was running against Hillary. Last year - the problem was his age.

    Um, doubtful - you don't not vote for a 79 year old candidate based on age but turnaround and vote for the 77 year old one - particularly when the 77 year old one had people commenting in his mental abilities diminishing.

    But that entirely misses the point that I did say for Bernie his popularity as a Presidential candidate.

    And people outside their districts don't have the right to vote for someone.

    I never said that they did - what I did say is that the progressive wing is repeatedly failing at getting progressive candidates through the primary process - because regardless of what voters may claim when it comes time to vote they don't support progressive.

    AOC, while obviously popular in her district, isn't all that popular outside of it - which is a reflection on the lack of support for progressive policies at voting time among the larger US population.

    But a lot of progressive got elected...

    Is Pelosi afraid of progressive voters? nope.

    Is Schumer afraid of progressive voters? nope.

    On the other side McConnell and McCarthy are afraid of Trump voters, as are pretty much all Republican incumbents/candidates.

    So who actually has power?

    On the right, it is Trump and his base.

    On the left, it is the mainstream Democratic Party.

    If progressives want to change things, they have to change this dynamic - they have to get Democrats afraid of pissing them as voters off.

    That isn't happening.

    and look at the bills they're trying to get through the GOP.

    Are the progressives going to get these bills passed? I hope so, but my prediction is not in any meaningful way because they don't have the support within the Democratic Party

    You think gerrymandering and voter suppression isn't a problem? Look at Texas, or Georgia.

    Did you even read what I posted? You know, where I said:

    "Is gerrymandering a problem in the US? Absolutely."

    How, from that statement, do you twist it into that I don't think gerrymandering is a problem?

    My point, is that while it is a problem, it isn't the biggest problem for progressives (who can't get their candidates through the Democratic primary process) or even arguably the Democrats:

    • whose problem at the moment is the Senate - and that isn't gerrymandered.

    • and in 3 years the Presidential election, which also isn't gerrymandered.

    My point is progressives blaming their failures on GOP gerrymandering is convenient for the progressives - because they don't have to look at the real reasons behind their current failures.

    Now, if progressives ever get to the point where the dominate the Democratic Party then they can complain about the GOP gerrymandering.

    371:

    whose problem at the moment is the Senate - and that isn't gerrymandered

    Well, arguably it has been:

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/05/08/how-republicans-gerrymandered-the-senate/

    And the problem with the Senate (or at least one of the problems with the Senate) for Democrats seems to be that small Republican states count as much as large Democratic ones.

    372:

    phys.org is a good feed, and has some useful subcategories.

    I too let my New Scientist subscription lapse due to the vile nature of the purchaser. (A 20+ year subscription; sort of hurt, but New Scientist has always been a bit flaky and I could not tolerate an additional layer of right wing editorial influence.)

    373:

    supermarket shelves that resemble those of East Germany,

    Perhaps a slight exaggeration? Given that I spent three years of my childhood in 1970s Bulgaria, and I was in our local Tesco's supermarket this evening (only seven or eight miles south of Charlie)...

    Yes, the stock levels are lower than normal; there are some gaps in the shelves, but it's more like "what does the store look like at lunchtime on Christmas Eve" than the full-on three-queue-system wasteland beloved of Eastern Europe... The staples are all there, the goods are nearly all there, it's mostly just the choice between different brands.

    As for the petrol queues, it looked perfectly normal as I drove past the forecourt. Granted, that may be the effect of living less than thirty miles from one of the larger fuel processing plants in the UK...

    374:

    Wrong. On many counts.

    The progressives are making inroads - are you saying they're failing, because they don't win all?

    https://www.npr.org/2020/09/04/908524877/how-progressive-democrats-fared-this-primary-season-and-what-it-means

    The left and center had issues about Bernie's age. The right don't give a shit.

    And the bills - you mean, like the voting rights bill? like the infrastructure bill? Seem to me that on the Senate side, we've got Manchin and Sinema... and everyone else is mostly on board. In the House - these bills are getting voted on.

    And I strongly disagree with you: I don't want party leaders afraid of the voters, I want them anxious and wanting to please them.

    375:

    Auricoma @ 336: Have anyone here read City by Clifford Simak?

    Didn't remember it, but I looked it up & recognized the plot exposition from the Wikipedia article, so I'm pretty sure I have read it. But it was a long, long, loooong time ago. Probably found it in the library at my elementary school as a child.

    Thinking about it makes me kind of sad because I think dogs without people would be just as bad off as people would be if we ever lost our dogs. There is some question as to just who "domesticated" whom?

    376:

    Charlie Stross @ 345: * facepalm *

    All I can say is, fifty pages is about a day of proofreading time, so I presumably passed over it and had forgotten by the next day's session.

    I have books that have gone through multiple editions ("printings"?). Is that something you might correct in the file the publisher uses to print the book so that future printings have it corrected? Or is the text "set in stone" (so to speak) at this point?

    Just wondering how that stuff works.

    377:

    Robert Prior @ 358:

    Solzenhitysin pointed out that such was not actually the case in the CCCP, with bitter remarks about what Lenin had said & actual practice ....

    Yes, but was that widely known when the New Deal was being implemented?

    It was. But many people did accept Soviet propaganda at face value in the 1930s ... just like many people accepted Nazi & Fascist propaganda at face value ... or accepted Jim Crow, Aimee Semple McPherson or Spiritualism ...

    Or QAnon today.

    378:
    I have books that have gone through multiple editions ("printings"?). Is that something you might correct in the file the publisher uses to print the book so that future printings have it corrected? Or is the text "set in stone" (so to speak) at this point?

    Such changes do occur, even without a formal "new edition", though I don't know the mechanism. For instance, one fairly famous one occurred in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Fans pointed out shortly after it was published that the ghosts of Harry's mother and father, which were supposed to appear in the reverse order of their death, appeared in the wrong order. In subsequent versions that error as corrected. If you have a book on your Kindle, Amazon can sneak in and change the book without asking your permission, which is a little disturbing for something that you in principle "own".

    379:

    Heteromeles @ 359: And I'll refer you to your local coverage of the Pandora Papers, from your morning serving of schadenfreude americano with a slice of cherry pie.

    I don't know why, but there has been a surprising scarcity of big name wealthy Americans in the news I've seen about those "Pandora Papers" (U.S.A. Americans - I think some SOUTH Americans showed up, but no names that really stood out for me???).

    This go round seems to be mostly comprised of east Europeans along with a smattering of Africans & Asians. Perhaps instead of that Caffè Americano, a Turkish Coffee, a Maté or a Phitti Hui would be more in order?

    Although ... South Dakota appears to have become a "tax haven", but I don't think the money is hidden there so much as the "trusts" used to hide the money offshore are incorporated there (like Delaware used to be). I don't think the Dakota, Lakota or Nakota have a traditional coffee flavored drink.

    380:

    mdlve @ 360:

    There has been long support for bringing back the New Deal,

    Not really.

    I rarely agree with Whitroth on anything, but I don't think you know what you're talking about.

    381:

    Make it three people who want parts of the New Deal brought back, and I'd point out elements of the New Deal, not the whole thing. FDR threw the pantry at the wall to see what stuck, and a bunch of stuff got lost to history. Some more of it is currently irrelevant. And the racism that made it pass and helped bring it down needs to be exorcised, of course.

    Anyway, I think you can see what the Republicans are afraid of in California, where the democrats have basically taken over at the state level. While I agree that this leaves the Republicans under-represented, the biggest thing the Republicans have done is to run that stupid-ass recall and rack up some of the lowest vaccination rates in the US. Most of California by area is actually Republican dominated, and some of the local leader are somewhat clued in (as in the Republican supervisors of San Diego County, who are into keeping their jobs). Unfortunately, and I mean this sincerely, a bunch of the Republican leaders have gone into full authoritarian wingnut-hood, and it's not particularly helping them or their constituents.

    My ideal is that I'd like to see multiple parties catching each others' mistakes and making for compromises that fix problems, more than split babies. Having one side running on nihilistic bad faith just makes for a drag on everything.

    382:

    phys.org is a good feed, and has some useful subcategories.

    Thanks for the suggestion, am checking it out.

    383:

    15%? 1.5%? Both nicely bracket a recent meta-analysis which suggests 4.5% of gen pop are psychopathic. https://boingboing.net/2021/08/05/psychopaths-make-up-4-5-of-the-adult-population-according-to-a-new-meta-analysis.html

    384: 378 - IIRC e-book "texts" are legally software, and subject to an "End User Licence Agreement" (EULA), under which you never actually own them, simply hold a licence that you have access to the file. 381 - Given a 2 party system, and the parties typically splitting the electorate 52/48 or so, I'd suggest that any party that has more than a 4% lead in $chamber is over-represented. 383 - Surely not? If our mean (no words to suggest otherwise in your link) is 4.5%, then either 1.5% or 15% (or possibly both) are outside 3SD of that mean.
    385:

    On a slightly more optimistic note, it looks like someone has finally come up with a commercially viable flow battery using reasonably non-toxic chemistry.

    https://www.powerengineeringint.com/smart-grid-td/energy-storage/sb-energy-orders-2gwh-of-iron-flow-long-duration-storage-systems/

    Flow batteries have two electrolytes separated by a membrane. The neat thing is that the electrolytes are stored in tanks, which can be as big as you like. The membrane part is where the electricity happens, but that only needs to scale with the current being supplied. So this is ideal for grid-scale storage.

    The tricky bits have been toxic chemistry (a previous favourite has been vanadium) and finding a membrane that stops the two different electrolytes from mixing. The iron-salt battery uses the same chemistry on both sides, so diffusion through the membrane merely discharges the battery rather than spoiling the electrolytes.

    You can even make a lab demonstrator yourself: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468067219300318

    386:

    I have books that have gone through multiple editions ("printings"?). Is that something you might correct in the file the publisher uses to print the book so that future printings have it corrected? Or is the text "set in stone" (so to speak) at this point?

    The publishers don't typeset the books any more (not since the 1990s); it's outsourced to independent typesetting outfits. Which means to get anything changed requires a change list and a purchase order to be processed through the guts of a multinational (although TBF it is a multinational set up for that particular workflow). Upshot is, they don't like to do it unless it actually threatens to jeopardize sales (because it's a significant expense).

    Some bugs got squished in the audiobook edition, because the audio folks took the final typeset proofs then asked for correx -- they have their own editorial process. Those bugs are being back-propagated and will probably get sorted out in the ebook at some future point, most likely when they re-flow the typeset files to a new paper size for the trade paperback in a year's time.

    Note that if you report a typo or bug in an ebook to Amazon it will not get fixed, because there's no mechanism in place at Amazon to report it to the publisher: all that happens is that if enough people do that, Amazon will yank the ebook from publication. Then nobody at the publisher will notice until the next payment statement comes up zeroes (a month or three later). So Don't Do That. (If it really bugs you, shout at me instead. I don't promise to get it fixed, but you'll feel better and make my day worse.)

    387:

    Paul IF that is correct then our energy problems, if not "solved" are enormously relived/alleviated ... Next question: What "NIH" excuses will be used for it to NOT be installed here, as fast as possible?

    [ Parallel example: The Germans solved all the operational-&-safety problems of Tram/Train operation, over 10 years back. Here, the authorities are still dragging their feet, re-inventing the wheel & burrowing for excuses ... ]

    388:

    15%? 1.5%? Both nicely bracket a recent meta-analysis which suggests 4.5% of gen pop are psychopathic.

    The percentage doesn't matter. What matters is that bad behaviour is contagious among the majority of the population. Once you have an uncontrolled epidemic of antisocial behaviour the iron laws of exponential growth mean that any non-zero reservoir population will infect everyone else in a short time.

    389:
    The percentage doesn't matter. What matters is that bad behaviour is contagious among the majority of the population. Once you have an uncontrolled epidemic of antisocial behaviour the iron laws of exponential growth mean that any non-zero reservoir population will infect everyone else in a short time.

    It's an interesting idea. The key word in what you write is "uncontrolled". In the real world exponential growth always runs into some sort of limit. In this case it is obvious that the exponential growth of the psychopath population must end before it hits 100%. My bet would be that the limit is far below that. Once they're common enough that virtually everyone can expect to deal with a psychopath fairly frequently, defensive mechanisms become advantageous, even somewhat costly defensive mechanisms.

    I wouldn't be surprised if 5% is the equilibrium level.

    390:

    Even in the USA essentially no one, outside of a few govt officials, spoke of "the GDR" -- it was "East Germany")

    You and I apparently read and listened to different news sources. To me it was about 50/50 East Germany or GDR. They were interchangeable with GDR being used in most non casual news stories.

    391:

    Next question: What "NIH" excuses will be used for [iron-salt flow batteries] to NOT be installed here, as fast as possible?

    If you mean "here in the UK" (can't recall if you have said where you live) then I can't think of any. The privatised power system means that anyone who can handle the basic technical assurance of connecting up to the National Grid is free to have a go at making money from it. The only other headache would be planning permission. The particular product I linked to is nicely containerised, so it can go in pretty much any industrial estate with a good electricity supply, and the non-toxic chemistry means that there is a whole load of planning and safety stuff you don't need to go through. So if the numbers add up I would anticipate seeing it rolled out pretty fast.

    A quick Google found a Government consultation looking at the market for this. It looks like people asked to lend money for such schemes want to have more confidence in the market returns, and the market doesn't currently value such facilities very highly (presumably because until recently you could always turn up a gas turbine when the wind died, so any solution had to be cheaper than that). So its quite possible that some subsidies will be on offer to get things moving, and I suspect that the current gas shortage will lead to some focussed attention on the subject.

    Here, the authorities are still dragging their feet [over integrated tram/train]

    In my experience such things are less about NIH and more about organisational distance, best measured by the Lowest Common Manager. If you have two bits of an organisation that are close to each other on the org chart then they have no problem talking to one another, and any necessary investment or budgetary adjustment can be taken up to their common management relatively easily. But for trams and trains the Lowest Common Manager is the prime-minister, so they can't reach a productive agreement. Somewhere along the line the Tram people will need the Train people to do something, and the Train people will say (with genuine regret) "Sorry, our charter/franchise/budget/whatever doesn't permit us to do that". And until the city council and the Department of Transport can get a revised set of rules written, nothing will continue to happen. The fact that in the UK city councils barely have the power to blow their own noses doesn't help, and neither does the current bias towards the South East in government funding rules.

    Its the same problem with "bed blocking" between the NHS and the social care system. Social care is done by county councils, but the NHS is Whitehall. Again, the LCM is the Prime Minister, so no solution can be found until it becomes such a big issue that it gets on to the Cabinet agenda.

    This isn't just handwaving theory. Microsoft did a study on the reliability of its software. From Table 4 we observe that organizational structure metrics are significantly better predictors for identifying failure-prone binaries in terms of precision, and recall compared to models built using code churn, code complexity, code coverage, code dependencies and pre-release defect measures.

    (Conways Law is related but different).

    392:

    ... Again, the LCM is the Prime Minister, so no solution can be found until it becomes such a big issue that it gets on to the Cabinet agenda.

    And it doesn't help that the current Prime Minister is a lazy asshole who failed upwards into the spot and relies on bluster and bullshit instead of facts, and that he appointed a cabinet of toadies and yes-men on the basis of their ideological support for Brexit rather than any actual vestige of ability. Some of them are not incompetent, especially if effectiveness is compatible with lining their own pockets, but overall they're absolutely terrible (comparable to the bunch of corrupt seat-warmers Donald Trump appointed).

    Which means there's nobody energetic and competent to keep nudging the PM to do the right thing, and the PM himself is a firm believer in kicking cans down the road rather than actually getting off his ass and doing anything productive.

    393:

    Have one for Australia

    Learn something new every day. [eye roll]

    394:

    I wouldn't be surprised if 5% is the equilibrium level.

    No, you are misunderstanding.

    There is some small fraction of the population (the original quote was 15%, but I'm happy to agree it is probably less) who will always steal anything not nailed down. They are the sociopaths who think only of themselves and see other people as mere things who don't matter beyond the obstacles and opportunities they present. These people can only be controlled by fear of punishment.

    The vast majority of the population, on the other hand, tend to deal with worrying or ambiguous situations by looking around and seeing what everyone else is doing. If they see the sociopaths routinely getting away with theft, then they will follow along and steal, salving their consciences with the mantra that "everybody else is doing it". Thus the situation is bi-stable: you can have a situation where most people are honest, leaving the police to focus on the psychopathic minority. Or you can have a situation where everyone is on the take, law enforcement is ineffective because you can't arrest everybody, and so there is no benefit to being honest.

    (You and I, of course, are in the third group who would never steal anything under any circumstances. End sarcasm).

    Getting back to the original point; in a world where physical security is non-existent and thieves are undetectable the sociopaths will steal, and the majority will see that theft is normal and follow suit.

    395:

    “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

    He was cribbing from a much older source.

    396:

    No, I am not actually misunderstanding. I merely disagree with your premises. In particular, I do not believe the following is true:

    The vast majority of the population, on the other hand, tend to deal with worrying or ambiguous situations by looking around and seeing what everyone else is doing. If they see the sociopaths routinely getting away with theft, then they will follow along and steal, salving their consciences with the mantra that "everybody else is doing it".

    I think that different people will react in different ways. It's a thing people do -- they are different from each other. Any prediction of the form "everyone confronted with this situation will do X" can be dismissed out of hand.

    in a world where physical security is non-existent and thieves are undetectable the sociopaths will steal

    You perhaps did not internalize my point that "defensive mechanisms become advantageous, even somewhat costly defensive mechanisms." If we are in a world "where physical security is non-existent and thieves are undetectable", that can be changed.

    397:

    I'd like to caution that the fear that "everyone is secretly primed and waiting to become a depraved thief and/or killer if anything happens to cause social conventions to wobble even briefly" is a classic expression of Elite Panic, which is not based in reality (but becomes a self-perpetuating prophecy as, in event of disruption or disaster, self-defined elites go on a rampage to suppress the out-groups they're most afraid of, who they fear are about to start looting/raping/murdering them).

    398:

    We all tend to carry around various shibboleths that have been issued by the tribes we belong to. But don't see how they are in conflict with our day to day life.

    399:

    I think that different people will react in different ways. It's a thing people do -- they are different from each other. Any prediction of the form "everyone confronted with this situation will do X" can be dismissed out of hand.

    Its a sliding scale, yes. Some people are more unhappy about theft than others. Some people have no problem stealing a bag of crisps from a big department store, but would not do the same thing in the corrner shop. People would be far more likely to loot computers from an anonymous office block than some schoolchild's bedroom. But that is like saying that epidemics can't happen because different people have different resistances to disease. Dosage matters as much as immunity.

    If we are in a world "where physical security is non-existent and thieves are undetectable", that can be changed.

    Great, now we're back to world-building. How do you provide security for domestic dwellings, offices etc in a world where everyone can jaunt?

    The only thing I can think of is to build structures on stilts so that it becomes infeasible to get a sufficiently large cherry picker into an adjacent timeline. Putting mandatory government cameras on cherry pickers would probably be a good idea too.

    Of course, once the ~USA gets the physics sorted out they may be able to create some kind of jaunt-detection unit which sounds the alarm when an unauthorised jaunt is detected, and turns on the jaunt-suppression field to stop them getting away. Given that the forerunners developed the technology for jaunting first and then put it into the nanosomes its likely they had that stuff. The ~USA and the Commonwealth are coming at it backwards, so until they get the physics sorted out its going to be interesting.

    400:

    but I suspect that it would be easier for sperm whales to jaunt this way than for humans (they're better at precision sound reproduction than we are).

    Isn't it more a case of seeing something and ignore the visuals around it? Which to me is absurdly easier to do with vision than such with sounds.

    401:

    outside of Apple; the trend towards integral batteries spread as USB charger ports became universal

    Added to that the number of people who cared was/is a small subset of the total market. Vocal but small. And every time you remove a mechanical connection or thing that has to move you reduce the maintenance and likelihood of breakage.

    402:

    the fear that "everyone is secretly primed and waiting to become a depraved thief and/or killer if anything happens to cause social conventions to wobble even briefly" is a classic expression of Elite Panic,

    That's the straw man version. The reality is considerably more nuanced, and I'm happy to agree that contagion isn't the only factor in crime.

    Its a much slower effect than you suggest. Merely moving into a high or low crime area doesn't affect criminality in the short term. It is much more likely to affect the criminality of their children, because peer pressure and that is when people are more malleable. So this isn't a sudden zombie apocalypse of ragged criminals shuffling towards you mumbling "give me your phone", its a multi-decade slide in which pretty much everyone participates.

    And anyone who thinks that its only the "lower classes" who are vulnerable to criminal contagion hasn't been paying attention. This is human nature and it happens everywhere. Crucially, the people who are doing it don't think of it as a crime; its just how things are done around here. Phone scamming is an actual industry, and it doesn't have a problem with recruitment; "how else am I going to get any money?"

    Take a look at this video about 12 minutes in. That is a mother teaching her son to steal. The son comments how good stealing feels. Yep, that's an infection, right there.

    Nobody (with the exception of a few actual psychopaths) wants to live in such a society, or to be a depraved thief and/or killer. And in the "everybody jaunts" world that probably wouldn't happen anyway. What you would probably wind up with is a kind of informal communism where everybody just assumes that anything useful is there for the taking, because that is how everyone else behaves, and isn't property theft anyway? Of course that means you can't have anything nice because if you do someone will just walk off with it and not even think of it as theft.

    When I mentioned children in an earlier post I had this in mind. Obviously much less common than petty larceny, but a much bigger impact on the victims.

    403:

    (including the cleaners, secretaries, janitors); and you're well into seven figures.

    I got one in college so I could swing a weed scythe inside the fence of a nuclear fuel processing plant.

    My father worked there and they recruited sons (not daughters back then) of employees for summer work as the clearances were much easier to get for us.

    404:

    I don't know whether (but I suspect that) the USA has a slightly more puritanical approach to such matters...

    I believe the "dial" is adjusted at times depending on how well (or not) recruiting targets are being met.

    405:

    he multi-world solution is a backpack full of whatever storage medium is relevant

    It may be apocryphal but there is a story that Peter Jackson was walking home one night with the most recent edit of LotR on an iPod in his pocket. A friend suggested that he might want to make a backup.

    And as someone who does tech forarchitects and designers I can totally buy this story.

    406:

    I imagine the commonwealth's taxation policy probably would weird out leftists in TL2 quite a bit. After all, they did learn from policy mistakes of TL2's past or present...

    Given the need for rapid industrial modernization, combined with wanting efficiency I imagine they'd go a different route than the income/consumption tax model. I imagine the most likely is a land value tax plus other taxes on economic rents in order to raise the revenue for things like a basic income/national healthcare/free education/other services The Commonwealth government provides along with funding industrial modernization. The other reason for land value tax/taxing economic rents would be to nip asset bubbles in the bud plus address issues like people getting to the point where income tax becomes meaningless or buying exemptions from income tax. Surveillance state needs probably means they have some sort of low VAT/flat income tax too, not so much for revenue but as a reason to monitor financial transactions to prevent other worldwalkers from trying the Clan's old tricks again or organized crime.

    Essentially you'd see a highly redistributive/socialist but rather light on bureaucracy or other intermediaries/middleman model for economic policy. This, I imagine would feel pretty weird to the people from the US who end up taking asylum in The Commonwealth at the end of Invisible Sun.

    407:

    Lawn mowing services are a side-effect of HOAs, which are an esthetic constraint to prevent house prices locally being degraded by annoying neighbours.

    Nope. Or are you being sarcastic?

    With my father's generation (WWII vets) it was about a desire to show others you could keep a nice house. After the dregs of the depression they grew up in. HOA's were a fall out of THAT.

    408:

    not for Bob Jones the commuter dude

    Interesting choice of a common name. In the southeast and many evangelical circles this name has MEANING. :)

    409:

    Any opinions?

    As a consultant I tell my clients to let the pioneers find the fun. You can spot them easy enough in the US. They have the arrows in their backs.

    410:

    Surprising things are when you discover that typewriter ribbons are classified according to the documents they're used to type, because you can recover the character sequence from them :) [Note to the young'uns - this was the 1980s, i.e. before ubiquitous laser printers]

    Most people today stare at you blankly when you tell them the office copier likely has the last 1000 pages copied stored in it. And most small businesses and many large ones don't do anything to wipe the internal drives all copiers have these days.

    411:

    They're opinion's also likely to be skewed by how they view their role as a 'cop' and how enthusiastic they are about it - we're all aware there's a strong faction within the police keen to over-represent the risks of the job as justification for their own brutalities.

    You need to find some cops (retired or not) and makes some friends. You'll find out (in the US) they closely mirror the society they are immersed in. Most are good, a few are bad, and fewer still are terrible.

    Says he who just spend the last 2 days with my retired cop brother in law in law. Ex army, retired cop from small town, can't stand Trump that he is.

    412:

    So far the only good reason I've seen to want Windows 11 is that they've massively streamlined installation of WSL and added support for WSLg -- Windows Subsystem for Linux with graphical app support. Which is great, if you want to run a Linux desktop like Gnome or KDE on top of your Windows.

    ... Yeah, right.

    You might be better off with QuickEmu, which lets you configure virtual machines for Linux, macOS and Windows, including Windows 11, and run them atop Linux and Qemu. Stick it on top of a Framework laptop and you've got something that's powerful, physically repairable, and open enough to run applications and servers from all three OSs.

    (Unfortunately my preferred model -- if I was buying a new laptop right now, which I ain't -- is the pro version, which retails for US $2000, presumably plus import duty and VAT and shipping. And then a week of tinkering to ensure everything was running on top of it -- because I'd want it set up to run Linux and both macOS and Windows VMs -- and even then, it'll have a much suckier battery life than a Macbook Air, which is showing signs of satisfactorily running Linux on bare metal and Windows within the next year. (Ahem: it already runs them inside a VM, with some caveats about hardware acceleration. I'm talking about no-compromise performance here.))

    413:

    Um, "iron law"? Really? So, all of us in the US are now believers in QANON?

    414:

    Yes. And to a lot of people who gets hurt matters.

    For example, back in the seventies, when long distance was EXPENSIVE, every year Ma Bell would come out with a new algorithm for their long-distance calling card numbers, based on a phone number (which almost no one except business had). Within three months, the algorithm would have been cracked/stolen (I'd see it in the Yipster Times (the Yippie newspaper), and a lot of us made occasional calls to people. Most of us would charge it to, say, the White House (202-456-1111, or Coca Cola. It was considered really scum to charge it to an individual.

    415:

    Unless, for security, they've turned off the internal hard drive.

    Why, yes, I was directed to do that on all the networked printers when I was at the NIH, for our division.

    416:

    not for Bob Jones the commuter dude...Interesting choice of a common name. In the southeast and many evangelical circles this name has MEANING. :)

    Does it really? Fancy that....

    417:

    No, if progressives actually want to win they need to be honest with themselves as to what is working and what isn't working, so they know what they need to change/improve.

    The better "cold bloody truth" analysis' I've seen all come down to: R's are out to WIN. D's are out to promote policies to make things better.

    In other words the D's spend weeks analyzing the rules of a game before it is to be played and the R's just bribe the refs.

    418:

    Seem to me that on the Senate side, we've got Manchin and Sinema... and everyone else is mostly on board.

    Actually those 2 make it easy for the rest of the Senate D's to keep their heads down and not commit to anything.

    419:

    It's simpler than that: the democrats want to lead a working government, while the republicans mostly subscribe to the idea that government is a problem that should be destroyed and pillaged. In other words, they're anarchists who believe that might makes right.

    The problem progressives have is that they're actually trying to find workable fixes to enormously complicated problems. That's not as easy to rally people around as "Lock her up." Politicians for centuries have known that more people go for beer and solidarity than go for actually keeping things running. That's why those who are interested in keeping things running end up running things. It's sort of a process of attrition of those who can't deal.

    420:

    It's actually not apocryphal, it's in the DVD for one of the LOTRs. They were using iPods to move chunks of the movie around London during post-production. Remember this was over 20 years ago, and the lines just weren't good enough for piping DVDs worth of data.

    Anyway, one of them (Jackson?) actually had to evade a would-be mugger, because he had an almost-complete copy of the movie in an iPod in his pocket, and some guy started after him to take it.

    I wonder now what the break-point is for when a sneakernet is faster than 5G. That threshold has to be a lot higher now. That said, if you're doing something pedestrian like trying to keep track of your toddler who's in another timeline, I don't think any storage capacity is enough for the parents, especially if it moves by jaunting occasionally.

    421:

    Paul Just because you - or I "can't think of nay" - doesn't mean that some nitpicking arsehole won't INVENT one - totally spurious, but off we go, down a dead-end rabbit-hole!

    Charlie @ 392 Even BoZo, my get a kick, very soon: THIS - might just might get attention - there are millions of votes to lose if/when he screws that up.

    @ 397 beat me to it ... However, I don't think it is "just" Elite Panic - it seems to be a peculiarly-US thing, pushed by decades of "R" lying propaganda.

    422:

    I've been trying to avoid commenting on the 10-80-10 rule and its variants (15-70-15?). It's one of those sucking internet rabbit holes that you can dive down, trying to find the research...and it's not clear that there is any research to back it up.

    So far as I can tell, there are multiple versions of it out there: the cop's 10-80-10 "rule" that 10% of people always do the right thing, 10% are always crooks, and the rest are persuadable. There's FEMA teaching first responders that in an emergency 10% will lead, 80% will follow, and 10% will panic and/or autodarwinate.

    While I won't go so far as to say this is nothing but elite panic, it certainly can go there.

    As a heuristic it may be better than nothing for beat cops, sometimes. But other times it's worse, as it can leave them writing off someone as in the bottom 10% for daring to disagree with them.

    People using it also generally assume (without good evidence) that a) there is a top 10% and b) they're in it, and c) the percentages never change depending on the situation.

    I'd love to see whether there's some work. There does seem to be some work saying that, in many situations, a small minority within any given group generally does a vast majority of that groups work (something that apparently applies to both nonprofits and termite colonies). But that kind of pareto rule doesn't necessarily expand to encompass an equivalent fraction to the "doers" who are the problem creators. In my nonprofit experience, the doers and the problem-creators are often the same people in varying situations.

    423:

    High definition raw 8K video is huge, but so is modern storage: I have a couple of 1Tb micro-SD cards kicking around, and a 4Tb SSD the size of about half a dozen stacked business cards, and that's a consumer item -- 8Tb SSDs are a thing (if you're a movie studio).

    I expect storage to outstrip bandwidth for large file transfers for quite some years to come.

    424:

    Yeah, I think we've about mined this out, so I'm not going to comment further.

    425:

    As a heuristic it may be better than nothing for beat cops, sometimes.

    My copy in law in law would talk about frequent flyers. It may be that 10% of the people he (and other cops) dealt with were such.

    On a side gun use note. He was a copy for 20 to 25 years. He told me yesterday that the only on duty use he had with his gun was to kill off deer that had been hit by cars.

    426:

    Lawn mowers, and lawns in general, are a distorted artifact of how the wealthy used to display opulence.

    Until relatively recently in most of the world (<100 years) owning land that could grow things and NOT growing food was a grand display of wealth and opulence.

    Thus we had the manor houses with vast, immaculate lawns on which to play croquet or hold picnics while the surrounding peasantry would use every square inch of viable land they had any rights to for food production - in order to avoid hunger and ideally get some surplus.

    Fast forward a few decades and people who were not aristos were somewhat able to feed themselves without working the land from dawn to dusk every day, and could afford a small patch of lawn-bling for their own.

    Status seeking apes will seek status, often without being aware of how they are doing it. Net result, we have yet another massive ecological disaster with minimal actual benefit because millions or billions of individuals want their own piece of unproductive land to look good and impress the neighbours.

    Many of us, myself included, see lawns and lawn maintenance as a giant pain, and are slowly or quickly replacing it with plants that actually contribute to the food supply and/or local ecology. Most people just have lawns because their neighbours do as well.

    [[ Fixed html - note that typing in an actual < will make the parser assume you're starting a tag. Use &lt; instead - mod ]]

    427:

    Weird, the key chunk of my comment in the last post somehow vanished. Maybe some html foulup?

    'Until relatively recently in most of the world (~100 years) a grass, manicured lawn was a display of conspicuous opulence. Using viable land to grown something that was not food was a clear sign that you had money and power.

    428:

    Sorry Paul, while I agree that this is mined out...

    Yes, David, I think there is such a thing as a frequent flyer. I also think there's such a thing as a heroic cop who's also bent (cf one former New York Mayor turned Trump thrall). What I don't think is that there's a simple rule quantifying both.

    One reason I don't think that is that I've jaunted down the 10-80-10 rabbit hole a bit, trying to find whose work it's based on. It would be so cool if it was true! There's no Wikipedia page, just a bunch of pop psych/trainer types hawking their wares, at least as far as I explored. There's some gesturing to the pareto principle (80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes) for obvious reasons, but it doesn't seem to go further than that.

    I'd just suggest that 80-20 is possibly more relevant, but that you can't infer just what the 20% will actually do a priori. Is the blaze that burns down a city an unmitigated catastrophe or the first step in needed urban renewal?

    429:

    What I don't think is that there's a simple rule quantifying both.

    If you want to get him animated use phrases like "all cops" or "everyone" or ...

    Yesterday we had an interesting discussion on the area of promoted to incompetence. And discovered in the small breakfast area of the hotel we were at had about a dozen 3 star Army generals plus one 2 star. And two of them were women. Which made the group of us a big agog. And led to the discussion of how idiots can get promoted in the US military. 2 of the 4 at the table were veterans (officers) and 2 were Army brats.

    430:

    Many of us, myself included, see lawns and lawn maintenance as a giant pain, and are slowly or quickly replacing it with plants that actually contribute to the food supply and/or local ecology. Most people just have lawns because their neighbours do as well.

    They can be very handy when raising kids. Or owning pets. I can't imagine something I'd not rather do than walk a dog so it can pee and poop multiple times per day. (Well a few things but still...)

    431:

    Lawns do indeed have their uses. But as the biggest irrigated crop by far in the US? (https://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-continental-u-s/) That's ridiculous, especially in areas where water's in increasingly short supply.

    So I'd suggest cutting way back on the irrigated lawn space. Turning parts of the lawn into meadow is an old-but-good trick. Just add clovers, dandelions, mints etc (e.g. edible and multipurpose weeds), mow it less, and see what starts showing up. Also useful is just ripping it out a chunk at a time and reintroducing vegetable beds, native plants, or whatever.

    I'm in a warm area, but one thing I've cheerfully discovered is that sweet potato vines make a rather pretty--and useful--ground cover, in place of ivy and ivy-like plants.

    432:

    I have a lawn that I never water. If it goes brown, so be it. And while I've very sparingly used some herbicides in very tiny amounts directly on a few crazy plants I don't do anything like what folks call maintaining a yard. I have an ivy that is driving me nuts but so far it is being attack via digging up the roots. I'm beginning to think the rabbits and/or chipmunks are spreading it.

    What I DO do is mow it with a 20" push mower. Battery driven. When my doc tells me I should join a gym I tell him I walk about 1/5 of an acre every time I push the mower around.

    Golf course fairway looking it is not.

    And it gives my kids 3 60+ pound dogs a place to run "free". They treat it like Disneyland.

    No HOA anywhere in sight. Not that some of my neighbors don't wish for one. Next door to my 1850sf house is a 5400sf "manor" with the perfect lawn that the guys in the trucks/trailers show up and handle.

    433:

    Re: the actual book/series

    In the "promised" 2070 sequel, can we expect to see "paratime-space submarine" attacks on Hive warfleets ala the Climber squadron attacks in "Passage at Arms"?

    434:

    I don't water my lawn. It's really tedious, esp in hot/humid weather, to take care of. We have an 8'x12' garden, and I'm not sure we could maintain much more.

    Oh, and there are county ordinances about letting it turn into weed/forest city.

    And since there's less and less snow, it's more and more mowing - 17" push electric corded mower, and why join a gym has been my argument for decades: pay to join a gym, drive to the gym, and either get a riding mower ($$$) or pay a lawn service.

    Or mow the sucker myself... gee, hard choice.

    435:

    Lawns are occasionally useful when raising kids, but in my limited experience the benefit is not outweighed by the cost. Access to outdoor green space is essential in child rearing - ideally somewhat unsupervised.

    My unscientific opinion is that a lawn as playspace is a knock-on function of the 'fear of everything' that seems to infect a lot of parents nowadays. Keeping the kids on a nice, safe, flat, supervised lawn protects them from random dangers and also helps to ensure they learn nothing of the world.

    My kids used the lawn on occasion to kick a ball around, but both are/were fairly free range, and so they tended to merely pass over the lawn on their way to more interesting places. Which includes almost everywhere. Granted, I don't live in a big city.

    I am fairly sure I've spent more time in the past decade mowing and maintaining the lawn than my kids have spent playing on it. Over the last few years I've been slowly displacing lawn for fruiting bushes, low maintenance food producers like rhubarb and strawberries, and our actual ever expanding garden plot. Within 5 years the last blade of grass will be a memory.

    436:

    Hell, no!

    (a) nothing is "promised", and (b) there is no way in hell I'd go anywhere near to the existing plot threads or preoccupations of the series. Quite possibly any further works in the series won't even make use of the Commonwealth or ~USA as settings or background.

    And I'm especially not interested in writing an interminable humans v. aliens MilSF series of a type John W. Campbell would have recognized.

    437:

    Here's my burner pitch (Creative Commons v. 4.0 do with it what you want):

    Paratime meets geoengineering.

    Let's assume that paratime civilizations migrate towards their frontier worlds and leave climate-changed, simpler worlds behind them (code phrase for mass extinction in process, stromatolites growing on dead reefs, and so forth).

    Some bright bulb figures out a scam: he'll rehabilitate an old, climate changed homeworld by recreating the mammoth steppes on it. If you follow the link, you'll find it surmised that mammoth steppes suck down carbon and have been proposed on our world as a GHG cure. Or something.

    The scam is to take lots of money, and move lots of mammoths and other megafauna from a frontier world (no humans there, the megafauna are quite naive, friendly, and getting massacred by developers) through multiple jaunts, to the old homeworld where they'll be moved to Tibet and let loose on ranchlands.

    Bright Bulb thinks he'll get a bunch of seed money from bleeding hearts, burn some of it on a proof of concept, and squirrel the rest in paratimed offworld financial management systems (like South Dakota crossed with City of London, but in paratime and therefore ultrasleazy and cool). Then he'll disappear and show up as the cut-out beneficiary of said wealth.

    Problem is, his plot succeeds too well, a la the Producers. People want to revive the homeworld, even though their grandparents gleefully trashed it. Patriotism! Then they want to add the whole ecosystem, with hyenas, bears, lions, sabertooths, hantavirus, black flies... And big, naive predators start getting loose in transit, as do the flies. Divers alarums and gross body humor time.

    Meanwhile, the B plot is a history student cleaning up on some aspect of the insurance market, because this is a scam that many people have tried to pull before, and it always goes haywire. If padding is needed, iterate the people taking advantage recursively of geoengineering failures as much as needed.

    Suitable for short story, RPG, random eyerolls...

    Thanks Charlie. Now that I've unloaded that, I can go back to the presentation I'm working on. This put the cat to sleep so he's not bothering me anymore.

    438:

    Charlie Stross @ 386: Note that if you report a typo or bug in an ebook to Amazon it will not get fixed, because there's no mechanism in place at Amazon to report it to the publisher: all that happens is that if enough people do that, Amazon will yank the ebook from publication. Then nobody at the publisher will notice until the next payment statement comes up zeroes (a month or three later). So Don't Do That. (If it really bugs you, shout at me instead. I don't promise to get it fixed, but you'll feel better and make my day worse.)

    If I did find a continuity error or something like that I would pass it along to you here. Not to make your day worse, but so you would know about it and could deal with it however works best for you.

    I'm not bothered by it. I was just wondering how it works if you sell enough that they have to make a second print run. Could you fix it if you wanted to? Or is it not worth the trouble?

    I hope you DO sell enough that they have to make another print run.

    439:

    Heteromeles @ 428: Sorry Paul, while I agree that this is mined out...

    Yes, David, I think there is such a thing as a frequent flyer. I also think there's such a thing as a heroic cop who's also bent (cf one former New York Mayor turned Trump thrall). What I don't think is that there's a simple rule quantifying both.

    FWIW, I think there's ample evidence he was bent long before he became "enthralled"; he was bent before he became mayor.

    Game recognizes game.

    440:

    Re: 'Once they're common enough that virtually everyone can expect to deal with a psychopath fairly frequently, defensive mechanisms become advantageous, even somewhat costly defensive mechanisms.

    I wouldn't be surprised if 5% is the equilibrium level.'

    My impression is that one of the big problems with dealing with psychos/sociopaths is their unpredictable behavior, i.e., their motivations (usu. self-centered) stay pretty constant/predictable but what they'll do next to attain their goal is not. This makes coming up with timely defense mechanisms a challenge.

    Emotional contagion whether positive or negative feelings/behavior is real. We're designed that way - it's what makes humans 'social'. Historically we've been able to sorta contain this via physical distance and the relatively small number of people we could easily interact with. The Internet, esp. social media, has changed this. Hopefully the FB-centered hearing will help more people realize this.

    Brain mapping -

    This is probably the most upbeat and exciting science story I read in the past few weeks: it's the neuro equivalent to the Human Genome Project. (Will be interesting to see how this impacts SF/F storytelling. Ditto statisticians and AI designers.)

    Here's the background article:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02661-w

    'How the world’s biggest brain maps could transform neuroscience

    Scientists around the world are working together to catalogue and map cells in the brain. What have these huge projects revealed about how it works?'

    And here's the (unpaywalled) first paper of this project:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03950-0

    441:

    I do hope that Xi Jinping is not hoping for a Short, victorious war??

    442:

    I was just wondering how it works if you sell enough that they have to make a second print run. Could you fix it if you wanted to? Or is it not worth the trouble?

    I gather that "Invisible Sun" is already back-ordered for reprint in the UK (which is good). But no, reprinting is common, frequent, and a pushbutton job with no room for re-typesetting the text.

    443:

    The human genome project was bedevilled by obvious, predicted false assumptions, and it took decafdes for people to reorient it sanely. Whether the same will be true here is less clear,

    In partiular, once they have mapped the 'normal' brain and its 'normal' variation, they will need to study the outliers. The auditory system is likely to being extremely heterogeneous - this has already been observed at an overview level, as it hads been for several other known variations.

    Don't hold your breath ....

    444:

    This is probably the most upbeat and exciting science story I read in the past few weeks: it's the neuro equivalent to the Human Genome Project.

    Unfortunately there's also a theory -- now with strong supporting evidence -- that neurons are not simple logic gates but are actually computationally complex and maintain internal states: they're more akin to CPUs in their own right. So this is like creating a map of the internet without actually identifying or indexing the contents of the computers connected to it: it's useful but not sufficient, and the real job is orders of magnitude harder.

    445:

    The big news is this: We're all outliers. Any idea of a "normal" brain should be shit-canned at once as an invitation to much political and social ugliness. The sole exception I'm prepared to make is a method for diagnosing a sociopathic brain.

    446:
    Unfortunately there's also a theory -- now with strong supporting evidence -- that neurons are not simple logic gates but are actually computationally complex and maintain internal states: they're more akin to CPUs in their own right.

    It's not just the neurons that are stateful, individual synapses -- that is the points at which one axion (output connection point) connects to a dendrite (input connection point) on the receiving neuron -- are stateful. This is something we've known for a long, long time, at least at the molecular mechanics level. My source (Seth Grant, verbal communication, right at the start of HBP) says that the processing molecule weighs circa 1.5 Mega-Daltons.

    The other point is that the dendritic tree (tree of in-fanning input connections) is decidedly non-linear; multiple input signals at the same time colliding in the tree reinforce the signal strength at the receiving neuron's soma (centre, where the spikes are generated).

    The point of Brain Mapping is to try to link features -- perhaps down to individual clumps of neurons -- in each of our brains to corresponding features in someone else's brain, at least that was Andrew Davison's view within HBP (He was/is the leader of the HBP Connectomics activity).

    All of which makes neuromorphics -- engineering appropriate electronics to perform brain-like processing -- either a fool's errand or a massive speculative gamble that you'll model the key features.

    I'm glad I've retired.

    447:

    The tragedy of our generation(s) is that we were born a century too late to blaze the trail, and a century too early to benefit from the painstaking labour of the army of stamp collectors it will take to turn the trail into a properly paved highway.

    448:
    They are the sociopaths who think only of themselves and see other people as mere things who don't matter beyond the obstacles and opportunities they present. These people can only be controlled by fear of punishment.

    Late to this particular party, but there was an article in The Atlantic ("When Your Child is a Psychopath") that makes for interesting reading.

    The problem with raising psychopaths is that they do indeed think differently. One of the big differences is that the notions of punishment or "How would you feel if other people did that to you?" are meaningless to them.

    What they do react to is rewards - immediate and obviously tied to their behaviour. If you can bring yourself to raise your child this way, then you can have a person who is more likely to do the right thing - not because they fear punishment (they don't) but because they are aware of the reward.

    449:

    "it's useful but not sufficient, and the real job is orders of magnitude harder."

    Just to be slightly cheerful, while the real job is going to take many decades to centuries to get through, it appears that we're on a path to get it done, and that it's doable. I.e., it's going to require a lot of time, work, ingenuity and money, but no new physics or basic revisions in our understanding of physical reality.

    As far as we know now. And if science-doing civilization holds together.

    450:

    That's what wax claimed about the genome; those of us who knew about complex systems knew the claims were bollocks. We THINK we are now, FINALLY, on a path that will lead somewhere, but we don't know how many bogs, traps and so on we will encounter, and we CERTAINLY don't know how far we will be able to get. AS with the genome, even partial progress may well be beneficial, but we won;t know how much until we get there.

    451:

    Charlie Stross @ 442:

    I was just wondering how it works if you sell enough that they have to make a second print run. Could you fix it if you wanted to? Or is it not worth the trouble?

    I gather that "Invisible Sun" is already back-ordered for reprint in the UK (which is good). But no, reprinting is common, frequent, and a pushbutton job with no room for re-typesetting the text.

    Ok. Thanks.

    452:

    I think it would be really cool to have better working models of brains in general.

    That said, since I studied ecology, which follows the woodpecker model of smashing your brain against hard and complex substrates to unearth little goodies within...

    The problem with complexity (and this is per Taleb's Black Swan, where he makes the point about economics too) is that it's easier to explain than to predict. Ecology certainly falls into this morass: we can come up with testable explanations for what we observe, and use a wide variety of methods to determine which model is the most plausible. Do such models help us predict what will happen? Much less frequently. But people normally mistake explanatory power for predictive power, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

    I suspect the same is true for neuroscience. While I think better understandings of neural systems at multiple levels will be quite useful and will hopefully lead to better outcomes for a variety of diseases, I'd be surprised if we get to the point where even a complex AI can read read minds better than humans normally do through heuristic methods.

    There's a key sticking point here, again from ecology. The difficulties in that field feel like they follow a sigmoid curve: stuff is trivially easy for a certain stretch, then, as you add details, difficulty increases and eventually the curve goes vertical. That's where more-or-less everyone gets stuck, and it's far below some hypothetical level of predictive understanding for most questions of interest (for instance: how many species will die off in the coming extinction event?)

    Predicting human or other behavior from neuroscience may hit a similar wall. I'll go out on that wall and predict that models may end up being about as good as experienced human observers. But failure to become superhuman won't be for lack of trying, it's that the complexity of the problems increases so rapidly beyond the human level that resources simply aren't available to do much better.

    Being wrong is part of the prediction game, of course, and I think it's a worthwhile risk to take. But it's worth thinking about the differences between the possibility of getting perfect knowledge differ between theory and practice.

    453:

    All of that is largely true, but there is a hell of a lot more known about complex systems than you imply - and it applies to ALL systems above a certain level of complexity. One of the main reasons that prediction is hard is that precise prediction is provably impossible, and another is that explanatory models should NOT be assumed to describe what is actually happening, let alone to be useful in prediction.

    A classic example is pseudo-cycles, as with sunspots. Many systems create apparent cycles that last for a while and then change or disappear.

    454:

    I got the book on Friday - pre-ordered from the Bookdepository, and while they are doing things well (like I think shipping somehow to the EU and then putting my address on it and sending it to me from Germany, so no customs) it still took two weeks for the book to get to me. Sigh.

    Anyway, it was in my opinion a good conclusion to the story. I noticed many of the same things that have been addressed earlier in the thread, and I have nothing to add to most of them.

    The discussion about how the timeline hopping has been an interesting read. I said earlier here that it might be fun to play a tabletop roleplaying game in this world (or worlds...) so this kind of talk is nice for that idea, too. (Though I'll probably get around to it perhaps in the 2050s.)

    The Orion drive was fun to read about. I've known about it since I was a kid, and while I understand why it's kind of a no-no in our world, it was fun to read about it. The nuclear pumped x-ray lasers were a normal thing in the 'Traveller: The New Era' TTTPG from the early Nineties, so it was fun seeing those, too.

    I also liked the infodump parts - they made the situation more clear to us, if not the human protagonists.

    Thanks for the book, Charlie! It was a fun read.

    455:

    I recall reading a piece that featured alternate timelines where accessing those that were similar required much much more energy than those that were dissimilar ... or perhaps as has been noted previously, if a jaunt requires something akin to a "knight's move" then there is a minimum distance that can be taken, which also might preclude getting access to similar timelines ...

    456:

    Of course.

    The ecologists aren't much into computational complexity, but they have generated some fun notions, like "expensively proving the bloody obvious." For someone like me, this involves throwing thousands of dollars at soil chemistry tests to demonstrate that the problem is, in fact, soil salinity, when the salt crusts are visible.

    And this gets at the chemicals-up view of neuroscience. I agree that it can be really important, and I've been the beneficiary of some discoveries. But I suspect that, when the Big Data dust settles, we may well be stuck with being able to explain Johnny's psychopathy without being able to do a thing about it, because the critical interventions needed to be made before the problem was visible. This is almost certainly true for Parkinsons and Alzheimers too.

    The one thing I'd suggest, more for fun than anything else, is that when it comes to using mirror neurons to model others' behavior, humans may be in the optimal range. This wild-assed guess (which I won't dignify as a hypothesis) assumes that a) there's an advantage to modeling the behavior of others, to correctly guess what they will do, and b) there's a cost to modeling that increases non-linearly due to the complexity of the problem.

    What this means, of course, is diminishing returns. I'd just suggest that humans may hang out right around the maximum they can afford metabolically. Brains are expensive, and if situations are so complex that guessing an answer is as effective as thinking it out, then some dude who just guesses at what might work can do almost as well as someone who spends all his time grinding out the slightly better answer. If this happens to be the case (and note it's pure speculation), then computer models of human behavior may be interesting exercises, but less useful than what we can already do with much less effort.

    457:

    I recall reading a piece that featured alternate timelines where accessing those that were similar required much much more energy than those that were dissimilar ... or perhaps as has been noted previously, if a jaunt requires something akin to a "knight's move" then there is a minimum distance that can be taken, which also might preclude getting access to similar timelines ...

    There are certainly all sorts of ways to do it, depending on your goal.

    The stuff I proposed above was a) for fun, b) to get conversations started, and c) to point out how a weird detail (wild worlds sitting next to settled ones) could be useful, provided there was a reason it happened that was worth exploring.

    It's sort of like having a story where people fly between places. You could just say they flew, but how they fly may change the story. Depending on whether they flew through levitation, on dragonback, in a hot air balloon, an airship, a plane, a semiballistic, or by farting hard enough to achieve liftoff, you get a different story.

    As for the knight's move, another kink is precision and accuracy, especially if you have to move a long distance. Do you get the timeline you're aiming for, or one nearby. And can you get home again? This is sort of where the TV shows Sliders and Quantum Leap went, with people lost in alternate realities, using tech to try to get home.

    Another thing that's even less considered is the role of human action in generating alternate timelines. In fiction this is taken as normal, as character agency appears to matter, and it's why everyone goes out to kill Hitler or whoever. But one could argue equally that natural disasters are where timelines diverge, and that what happens to famous people aren't the causes of historical divergence, but mere markers for divergences. For example, if the timelines where Hitler and Stalin died all featured a massive eruption of the Phlegraean Fields, that might be the author dropping a hint that Hitler and Stalin were irrelevant to the world, and that history was made by whether a volcano erupted or not, and who died of starvation after the eruption. .

    458:

    I'm a little less than half way through The Bloodline Feud and my impression of Miriam is a good bit different this time around.

    She comes across as reckless with poor impulse control.

    I'm sitting here reading while I wait for one of the drives in my new computer to format.

    I'm NOT AT ALL HAPPY WITH WINDOZE10 already ... It was too hard to find Disk Management so I could configure my disks. It only came with a 1TB SSD & I have about 3TB of files on THIS computer which the new computer is replacing, so I added 2 4TB spinny disks.

    One of the disks did not complete formatting using "Quick Format", which is why I'm formatting it the old fashion way. It doesn't give me any kind of progress indication.

    How long does it take to format a 4TB drive doing it the old fashion way?

    Had to hook this old box up again because the new computer wouldn't recognize one of the USB sticks I put configuration data on. I copied the stick onto a backup drive and I'll use that to move things over.

    459:

    I think you are jumping to conclusions, at best, though your assumptions are obviously correct. Firstly, there are a lot of us who do NOT do such modelling automatically, and that seems to give us other advantages. It's clearly not that simple.

    Despite all of the bullshit, nobody really knows why human brains expanded the way they did, whether and how much cognition has changed since they did (or even in historical times), or whether we are in an even remotely stable position. There is also minimal and conflicting evidence on whether social and genetic groupings (to avoid using the simple four-letter word) differ in this respect and, if so, why.

    460:

    It was too hard to find Disk Management so I could configure my disks.

    I get tired of things moving around also. Mac and Windows.

    On Win 10, search for things in the search bar then pin them to start. Then resize the icons to small. After a bit of hunt and peck things WILL get smother.

    And yes, I've had to use Google to find things where my memory of the name of some system utility was not correct or it had changed.

    461:

    "Despite all of the bullshit, nobody really knows why human brains expanded the way they did, whether and how much cognition has changed since they did (or even in historical times), or whether we are in an even remotely stable position. "

    Absolutely true on all counts. And it's obviously an enormously important question to which, I hope, the various related disciplines are paying great attention.

    462:

    We can already answer a lot of that. Indeed, we have to, to make any sense of the data.

    Why brains expanded: Most likely, because using fire to cook food freed up a bunch of nutrients. (This is Wrangham's theory. It's controversial, mostly because academics get street cred by arguing more than by going along). The idea is that digesting food, especially things like wood, takes energy. Brains take energy. In a normal animal, there's a competition between brains and gut for the energy budget of the animal. Humans cheat, because we use fire to "digest" wood, releasing energy that's otherwise totally inaccessible to us to process food that would otherwise be less accessible to us into forms that we can digest. Because we can cook, we can get by with wimpy-ass digestive tracts (jaws to anus), and put the energy that would otherwise go there into our brains. Wrangham points out that this leaves anatomical traits that show when fire started mattering evolutionarily (Homo habilis, more or less). Other academics won't be persuaded until they find a fossilized kitchen, so a few of them work hard at making this theory controversial.

    Cognition changed over hominid evolution. Of course it did. How it changed is the hard part. There are two factors here. One is that brain structure is the result of both genes and lived experience. The other is that human numbers increased enormously, and this affected both culture and genes, but not in identical ways.

    A football player has a different brain than does a theoretical physicist, yet (assuming complementary sexes) they can have a kid. They probably both have genes that would have made them reasonably good hunter-gatherers had they been born 120,000 years ago, yet they do not have hunter-gatherer brains now and would likely be incompetent in that lifestyle, because they were not born into that kind of culture.

    So even if the genes that are expressed in our brains underwent no change, living in civilization and going from millions to billions of people across the planet has meant a tremendous diversification in brain structures, due to a diversification of lifestyles. The difficult question is how to quantify that diversification and its effects on fitness.

    As for genes, civilization has also changed genes: simply having orders of magnitude more people on this planet likely means there are more rare alleles out there. Most of these are likely invisible, some are crippling, and possibly a few (like lactose tolerance and possibly ApoE4) have become more widespread at the moment, but were rare in our evolutionary past. Again, how do you quantify diversification and relative fitness from that?

    And I don't think anyone thinks we're in a stable configuration, although again, changing diversities is hard to quantify.

    463:

    Getting back to that finale, with kicking a black hole through a paratime gate...

    I'm just glad we're firmly in Rule of Cool territory, so we don't have to comment on the presumed paraphysics of the situation and can just thrill to the epic blow-off at the end of the show.

    464:

    David L @ 460:

    It was too hard to find Disk Management so I could configure my disks.

    On Win 10, search for things in the search bar then pin them to start. Then resize the icons to small. After a bit of hunt and peck things WILL get smother.

    Been doing that more or less. First problem is it brings up the Edge browser and the information it gives you is not always correct. It says "go here & right click to select Run as Administrator".

    But it ain't where it tells you to look for it. And then once you do find where it's hidden, when you right click it doesn't do anything. There's no right-click menu at all.

    I'm not pinning anything to the task bar until I know it works.

    And yes, I've had to use Google to find things where my memory of the name of some system utility was not correct or it had changed.

    The disk just would not format. I've got a RMA from Seagate, but meanwhile I've put a second disk in there and that's not going swell either.

    First of all Shut Down from the start menu doesn't do anything. I finally had to resort to a hard power off on the power supply.

    I've got a new disk in there, but Disk Management doesn't seem to be working. The only way I was able to get it to run at all was to open a command prompt (Run as Administrator) and get to Computer Management through Control Panel. It appears to be stuck "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service".

    So, now I'm not really sure the problem was with the hard disk.

    Today is a Federal Holiday in the U.S. and Newegg & the manufacturer BOTH HAVE NO TECH SUPPORT because of the holiday.

    I'm upset about it, but I find there are not enough vile, filthy words in the English language for me to be able to express my displeasure ... and besides y'all aren't the ones I want to take my frustrations out on.

    PS: My speaker system isn't working, but that may be a blessing in disguise because at least I don't have to listen to Cortana's bullshit yet.

    Just got a popup "NVIDIA Control Panel is not foundClick hereto install NVIDIA Control Panel from Micro$oft store." It's got an nvidia graphics card. The whole reason I bought a new computer is because the graphics card in THIS computer is failing & I couldn't find an affordable replacement.

    465:

    To add to the paratime BS theories gallery, here's another idea: what's the simplest clock?

    Quanta Magazine had an article on that (it's three entangled atoms that pass around photons). This leads to the question: what is a clock. And, per the physicists who are trying to make the simplest possible clock, "A clock is a flow-meter for entropy." They're trying to figure out what the smallest possible tick of a clock is, in search of whether time, as a dimension, is quantized, down at the level of fundamental clock ticks.

    An issue the article doesn't address is that nagging connection between time and entropy. So I'll throw out a loopy, stupid idea: time isn't the fundamental dimension of duration. Entropy is, and time is the direction of increasing entropy. Second, the diversification of entropic states, caused by many worlds-style branching of timelines is what makes paratime. So rather than having timelines diversify in an p-dimensional space of paratime dimensions, perhaps the number of entropic duration dimensions (aka paratime) increases in what we perceive as the arrow of time. Perhaps this is what's causing the dark energy effect?

    Again, for those who don't get it, this isn't even bullshit, it's just stringing words together in syntactically correct order. Here my proposal is that both time and paratime are more closely tied to entropy than to a physical temporal dimension. Rather than paratime having, say, three physical dimensions and 8 temporal dimensions, that the dimensionality of paratime increases over "time" since a beginning, which presumably is the Big Bang, where there were no dimensions at all. Time as we experience is an emergent effect of entropy increasing within our 4-dimensional local space, while dark energy is an emergent effect of entropy increasing within paratime as the many worlds cause many more worlds to branch off from them.

    And how to jaunt from one branch of a growing tree to another branch of a growing tree is left as an exercise for the reader, but it presumably involves something very, very strange. Paratime squirrels caching nuts, perhaps?

    466:

    JBS I, too have found that "clues"in Edge are, simply, lies. OTOH, opening things in Chrome + Google tends to give better answers. Odd, that.

    H "Smallest possible tick of a clock" ?? One Chronon? The Planck Time? Would a paratime squirrel be called Ratatosk?

    467: 464 - Unless your sysadmin bans you from doing so, most of the issues with (blunt) Edge can be resolved by using it to download Chrome, then making Chrome your default browser.

    Oh and Start -> Power -> Shut down does exactly that on my machine, provided you've run updates first anyway. If it want to update stuff the sequence is ... Shut down -> Update -> power off.

    465 - A Sundial, provided you know what angle to set the gnomen at, for time of day. A suitably calibrated water clock for duration.

    468:

    Unless your sysadmin bans you from doing so, most of the issues with (blunt) Edge can be resolved by using it to download Chrome, then making Chrome your default browser.

    I'm just going to complain here that recently the W10 Twitter client was made to be an Edge process (so it's basically running Edge with its own UI). This in itself would not be that annoying (I like to run the Twitter client separately from my browsers), but now it doesn't acknowledge the OS default browser, but opens any links in a new Edge window. It thinks that it's a browser and that I want to use that.

    Yeah, I could probably use a different client or even browse Twitter in a regular browser window. Still annoys me.

    469:

    I have one question, fashionably late, to Charlie:

    Has the editing process and specifically continuity error checking changed let's say during your career and if so, how?

    I'm asking this in the context of one book - obviously continuity checks for a series can be a huge effort and especially hard for pantsers like you. Even one novel is a long piece to write and keep track of, with multiple plot lines. I assume every novel has some continuity errors after being written and submitted.

    Then I think it's also hard to see mistakes when reading your own text - I've run into it myself many times. I was just thinking that do many other people read the manuscript checking for things like continuity errors. I understood that you did the proof reading yourself, and that's hard work, but is it the author's job only or are there other people? And were there more in earlier times?

    470: 468 - Not an issue I'd ever have noticed because I don't read tw@tter! 469 - OK, OGH's answer is his answer, but other authors may differ. I say this because I'm a beta reader for a couple of other authors. Both of whom have a sufficiently large beta pool that not every reader gets to read every draft of $book.
    471:

    paws4thot @ 467: #464 - Unless your sysadmin bans you from doing so, most of the issues with (blunt) Edge can be resolved by using it to download Chrome, then making Chrome your default browser. Oh and Start -> Power -> Shut down does exactly that on my machine, provided you've run updates first anyway. If it want to update stuff the sequence is ... Shut down -> Update -> power off.

    Since I'm my own sysadmin here at home, I've already given myself permission to install Firefox.

    In this case the sequence was Start -> Shut down -> Nope, just gonna' sit here.

    I've had a lot more problems I haven't mentioned & there's no use going into them now. I've concluded the hardware is defective. Looks like the video card has failed, so there's nothing I can do but get an RMA and return the POS.

    So, back to the clan & the invisible empire games ...

    I'm still working my way through The Bloodline Feud. Miriam believes she was adopted and her mother was murdered. I don't know how much deeper into the book before Miriam finds out that her adoptive mother Iris is really Patricia the Countess who was supposedly assisinated, but I think it's gonna' happen before the end of this book.

    But what I'm trying to figure out ... Countess Patricia/Iris was safely OUT. She escaped the clan by appearing to be dead after the assassination. Miriam never would have gotten involved with the clan if Iris hadn't given her the shoe box with the locket in it. It ends up blowing Patricia/Iris's cover and she gets dragged back into the clan.

    Why did Patricia/Iris do that? Why did she give Miriam the locket when it was obvious Miriam would get dragged without a clue into the middle of the clan's civil war?

    472:

    This is all explained in later books. I just reread all of them before the launch of Invisible Sun. But I didn’t quite make the deadline and had to put off reading Invisible Sun for a day.

    473:

    I am sorry, but I call bullshit, for the reasons I explained in #453. Post-hoc 'explanations' are exactly why the pre-Abrahamic religions invented their pantheons - and those are every bit as valid as that theory. As an explanation of why it was POSSIBLE, it's valid - as an explanation of why it HAPPENED, it's bullshit.

    Inter alia, in evolution, there has to be some definite advantage for the change at every stage. It is NOT enough for there to be a definite advantage towards the end point. I keep repeating this, but seemingly to little avail. So what WAS the advantage for the brain expansion? Yes, there are at least half a dozen plausible explanations, and many dozen unlikely ones, but we simply don't know.

    If a smaller gut caused brain expansion, the great cats would have larger brains than humans. Yes, cooking allows us to get away with shorter guts - but, even more significantly, smaller jaws (think: speech). But why a shorter gut should have gone into brain expansion rather than any other organ (e.g. gonad and genital size) is another matter entirely. Or even simply giving humans a larger survival margin when food was scarce (i.e. no other change needed).

    474:

    Has the editing process and specifically continuity error checking changed let's say during your career and if so, how?

    What, aside from the editor who commissioned and nurtured the entire series dying suddenly right after editing "Dark State", totally up-ending the editorial workflow for the last book (and production workflow for the penultimate one)? And apart from "Invisible Sun" being finalized for production during COVID19, so everybody -- copy editors (who are outsourced), typesetters, proofreaders -- was working from home and getting to grips with new workflow?

    Also note that I'm generally a pantser, not a plotter. And I don't keep readable notes outside my own head -- at most, a few jotted aide-memoires to clue me in -- and that new characters kept walking on stage, doing stuff, and disappearing again throughout the entire 18 year writing process?

    A secondary issue is that I don't normally re-read books for pleasure and by the time a book of mine is in print I've already gone over it an absolute minimum of four times (once when I write it, once for polish and/or editorial notes, once in copy-edits, and once in page proofs). "Invisible Sun" actually got rewritten four times, so make that somewhere in the range 7-10 read-throughs. By read-through 5 I am usually blind to the text: that is, I read it and see only what I meant to write, not what's actually on the page.

    I'm not on my own in this job: there's at least one professional proofreader at work on each book from Tor (usually two, I think). But stuff slips by because proofreaders don't necessarily understand authorial intent and assume something is right when it's actually wrong, and vice versa. (The latter is easier for the author to spot happening.)

    475:

    What, aside from the editor who commissioned and nurtured the entire series dying suddenly right after editing "Dark State", totally up-ending the editorial workflow for the last book (and production workflow for the penultimate one)? And apart from "Invisible Sun" being finalized for production during COVID19, so everybody -- copy editors (who are outsourced), typesetters, proofreaders -- was working from home and getting to grips with new workflow?

    Uh, yeah - didn't realize that even though I did read the 'Invisible Sun' backmatter. I was thinking more about the publishing industry in general. Things have been very much in motion when this book was written.

    I get the same text blindness even when writing shorter pieces and re-reading them fewer times, and I usually write stuff where the intent should be more clear to the other readers.

    476:

    Oh, the other big change that's happened is that ebooks went from about 2-3% of book sales when "The Family Trade" came out to somewhere in the range 30-60% for SF/F as of "Invisible Sun", while the mass market paperback distribution channel in the USA imploded. (In the UK, the mass market channel collapsed entirely in 1991 and no longer exists: small format paperbacks are just small trade paperbacks.)

    Also, the collapse of Borders and declining sales at Barnes & Noble removed the procrustean price cap that led David Hartwell to chop the original big fat book in half and run the series as shorter novels. But that happened way too late to be relevant to the format of the new trilogy.

    477:

    Cats - they are obligate carnivores. We, on the other hand, are actually omnivores... and cooking lets us process the non-meat faster. Actually, meat faster, too.

    478:

    Because I know you enjoy arguing, I'll indulge you. However, I wish someone like you who's more mathematical than I am could tackle the craziness of time being half quantum entropy, half relativistic dimension. That's worse than half man half biscuit, at least when I think about it. This has to make sense to somebody. Right? A relativistic consideration of three dimensions of space and one (or more) of entropy just seems so wrong. But that's where the simplest clock crowd seemed to be heading.

    Anyway, to break down the evolution argument: Inter alia, in evolution, there has to be some definite advantage for the change at every stage. It is NOT enough for there to be a definite advantage towards the end point. I keep repeating this, but seemingly to little avail. So what WAS the advantage for the brain expansion? Yes, there are at least half a dozen plausible explanations, and many dozen unlikely ones, but we simply don't know.

    I think you were arguing that we can't know, because brains are too flexible to have one use. That's what you argued previously, am I right? So is there any downside for being smarter? Only if you can get by with being stupid. The key point to remember is that hominids evolved during ice ages, which are known for their climatic unpredictability. Note, I'm not talking about adapting to ice sheets. Instead, I'm talking about forests going to savannas, the Sahara switching between grassland, and desert, that sort of thing. That's an argument for why bigger brains and fire use coevolved in hominids.

    If a smaller gut caused brain expansion, the great cats would have larger brains than humans. Yes, cooking allows us to get away with shorter guts - but, even more significantly, smaller jaws (think: speech). But why a shorter gut should have gone into brain expansion rather than any other organ (e.g. gonad and genital size) is another matter entirely. Or even simply giving humans a larger survival margin when food was scarce (i.e. no other change needed).

    There's a simple experiment that's been performed with humans and a number of animals: give them the same food, raw and cooked. Everyone prefers the cooked food and does better on a diet of cooked food. You can do this yourself with two steaks, and I've done this with my cats, who adore cooked tuna but won't touch tuna sashimi. The point is that on a taste bud level, animals taste cooked food as better and go for it preferentially. In the wild, this means scavenging around wildfires, for those animals that eat meat.

    As for why not make bigger genitals and gonads, with long-lived cultural beings like hominins, bigger gonads and genitalia don't necessarily correlate with more offspring, since the number of surviving offspring is always going to be an infinitesmal proportion of the sperm and eggs produced by each parent. But I will bet that one might correlate increasing brain size with increasing transmission of the cultural component of human inheritance. I think we can safely assume that culture is at least as important as genes in forming competent adult humans.

    479:

    > Inter alia, in evolution, there has to be some definite advantage for the change at every stage. It is NOT enough for there to be a definite advantage towards the end point.

    Actually mutations are random, and neutral mutations can persist indefinitely (if there's no selection pressure against them, then why not?). Heck, even mildly deletrious mutations might persist for quite a while, depending on the environment. Evolution has no end goal in sight, and just makes use of whatever's available. You could also have situations where a "good" and "bad" mutation both arise in the same individual, and the benefit of the "good" outweighs that of the bad so the "bad" mutation ends up spreading alongside the good one... then later that "bad" mutation could pair up with something else to become useful. It's all just random...

    480:

    > However, I wish someone like you who's more mathematical than I am could tackle the craziness of time being half quantum entropy, half relativistic dimension. That's worse than half man half biscuit, at least when I think about it. This has to make sense to somebody. Right? A relativistic consideration of three dimensions of space and one (or more) of entropy just seems so wrong. But that's where the simplest clock crowd seemed to be heading.

    I'm not a physicist, but I am a mathematician and I've been trying to learn some quantum mechanics. I think from your description that you may have been misled by some popular science accounts (not surprising, since I've been studying I've learned that pop-sci descriptions of QM and relativity tend to be pretty bad).

    First of all, I don't think anyone truly understands how time and space work, and we probably won't until a quantum theory of gravity is developed. There are all kinds of speculations, but at this point they are just speculations and must be taken with a huge grain of salt.

    Energy and time are deeply related both in classical mechanics and QM; for example, the law of conservation of energy is derivable from the symmetry of the laws of physics under time translation (an experiment in a closed lab in a fixed location will produce the same result today that it did yesterday). So in that way it's not too surprising that entropy and time are related. But my sense (as an amateur of physics) is that what entropy does is to pick out a preferred direction for a coordinate of time. That is, you could in principle use any 4 linearly independent vectors as your coordinates in spacetime, but in one direction entropy is increasing and we pick that one as our "time" coordinate. Much like near the surface of the Earth we can use any 3 vectors as spatial coordinate axes we, but we naturally choose to pick one of them pointing towards the center of the Earth ("down") because the gravitational potential is increasing in that direction.

    481:

    Not quite so bad. What I'm pointing to is the following quote this article:

    "The more regular the ticks, the more accurate the clock. In their first paper, published in Physical Review X in 2017, Erker, Huber and co-authors showed that better timekeeping comes at a cost: The greater a clock’s accuracy, the more energy it dissipates and the more entropy it produces in the course of ticking.

    “A clock is a flow meter for entropy,” said Milburn.

    They found that an ideal clock — one that ticks with perfect periodicity — would burn an infinite amount of energy and produce infinite entropy, which isn’t possible. Thus, the accuracy of clocks is fundamentally limited."

    So there's a fundamental link between time and entropy. This isn't news, there's even a song about the arrow of entropic time. All I'm doing is pushing that to the logically bizarre limit of saying that perhaps time is entropy. Or perhaps entropy is the first derivative of time with respect to space, or something.

    The simplest clock crew is doing something interesting, which is trying to get at the granularity of time to help with the search for quantum gravity. Their take is that the fundamental time quantum has something to do with how minimal a clock tick the universe will physically allow. That's also fine, but that's where entropy enters the picture, because it's integral to setting the limit.

    Pulling that in a science fictional direction, I think it's not impossible to contemplate that a theory of quantum gravity may have three spatial dimensions and one dimension of entropy, from which time can be derived (or perhaps, integrated) to fit relativity.

    I freely admit this is "not even wrong" in the famous quote. But if you want a batshit theory to explain where timelines in a fictional paratime multiverse come from, it is certainly less boring than most. It also has the advantage that it can handwave a superficially plausible explanation for dark energy causing universal expansion to increase over time.

    And finally, this gaseous excreta has emergent black humor features: one can postulate that timelines split in paratime when the split increases entropy more than not splitting would. Since most writers think of splits caused by political events, think about what a timeline split implies about the politics that caused it...

    482:
    But my sense (as an amateur of physics) is that what entropy does is to pick out a preferred direction for a coordinate of time. That is, you could in principle use any 4 linearly independent vectors as your coordinates in spacetime, but in one direction entropy is increasing and we pick that one as our "time" coordinate.

    There is, in fact, another important distinction between time and spatial dimensions in relativity. This distinction doesn't require GR -- it exists in Minkowski space. There is a topological distinction between time-like and space-like vectors in Minkowski space. Along with that comes a topological distinction between two directions of time. There is no allowed Lorentz transform that exchanges the forward and backward directions of time. This is in contrast to space: any spatial direction can be rotated into any other spatial direction by a Lorentz transform. (In fact, SO(3) is a subgroup of the group of Lorentz transforms.)

    Thus, the topological structure of SR already picks out a distinct direction in spacetime that has a direction to it. SR doesn't tell you that entropy has to change monotonically in that dimension, but if entropy does increase in one direction, it pretty much has to be the time coordinate.

    We don't really need GR to understand this. Quantum mechanics has been fully reconciled with SR -- the result is QFT, quantum field theory. Understanding why the universe started in a low entropy state is a big unsolved problem, however. It probably has something to do with GR, in the sense that the increase in entropy that drives the second law is fundamentally gravitational. Roger Penrose has written a lot about this.

    483:

    there's even a song about the arrow of entropic time.

    You know what they say…

    Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. :-)

    484:

    "Fruit flies like a banana"

    They also like red wine. Pesky little things do suicide dives into the glass.

    485:

    "There is no allowed Lorentz transform that exchanges the forward and backward directions of time. "

    Hence, going back to threads past, "SR, FTL, Causality -- pick two".

    486:

    They also like red wine. Pesky little things do suicide dives into the glass.

    In fact, every Drosophila lab in the world has bated traps with something fruity-smelling and an alcoholic liquid in them to take care of the flies that inevitably escape when you work with them.

    487:

    Which is wrong. If it said "unrestricted FTL", it would be correct, but I have posted why and how restricted FTL is possible without breaching causality.

    488:

    " restricted FTL is possible without breaching causality"

    I don't think anybody disputes that.

    489:

    You are not a probabilist, are you? :-)

    That is true, but is irrelevant in this context. It is why some populations that go through tight bottlenecks end up with particular characteristics, but only ones that are due to a small number of genetic differences, NOT a long sequence of them.

    Such things are a simple random walk problem, and the chances of changes like that occuring due to an unbiassed random walk (i.e. with no positive selection) are so small as to be discounted. No, I don't mean one in a million, but more like one in a googol.

    490:

    Oh, God, yes :-( Some of us have been trying to educate a few repeat offenders here about that for ages, to no apparent effect.

    While quite a lot of people CLAIM to have reconciled QM and GR, their reconciliations are often incompatible and none are widely accepted. Indeed, I know a fair number of experts on quantum mechanics (ignoring relativity), and none of them claim to fully understand it; at most, they understand some aspects of it. There is strong evidence that nobody understands how they interact.

    492:

    At this point, it might be that causality is the weakest of the three: https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect-20210311/

    Whether this form of causality violation leads to FTL is another issue. My guess is that it does not, just because modern physics is all about buzzkill with a big budget.

    493:

    Kardashev @ 484:

    "Fruit flies like a banana"

    They also like red wine. Pesky little things do suicide dives into the glass.

    They seem to like red wine vinegar even more. That's what I bait fly traps with. Wish it worked for mosquitos.

    494:

    On FTL and causality and time travel and things like that:

    Without claiming to read OGH's mind, I think he had things pretty much right in Singularity Sky.

    As long as you stay within a suitably bounded set of inertial reference frames A, you can do FTL without running into trouble with temporal sequence of events, aka causality. But someone in another equally valid inertial reference frame B outside A may see the temporal sequence in A differently. And that, in turn, can be engineered into backward time travel/communication.

    The Eschaton didn't like that.

    495:

    "At this point, it might be that causality is the weakest of the three"

    Yeah. In any event, the March of Science(TM) pretty obviously has a long way to go and that many surprising realizations will be realized. Perhaps getting into Fermi Paradox territory.

    496:

    Things to pay attention to, from the desk this morning (post-dated "told you so") and since it appeared to be a genuine question and no-one answered it:

    A) CN Bond situtation: not doing what you think it's doing, but it's exciting / causing wet trousers depending on where you're sitting right now. B) # HK heavy hitters, old families with UK ties (HSBC) getting gutted; list is growing. Also lists of 'ceased trading' stuff with some really odd moves going on. C) They were throwing people out of windows during the 'Democracy' protest / riots, you just didn't pay attention (even with video evidence); as stated, the Criminal Elements have already switched sides, year+ ago, expect them to be utilized. D) UK offering HK (?how many?) citizens flight = Capital Flight = Easy to get an easy mobilized The Diamond Age dynamic going on: this was obvious years ago. E) HSBC is getting toasted this side of DB on this and, well: let's just say the Opium Wars are not forgiven. F) This is considered an Internal Affair and Chinese Taipei is not in play, other than a few strong arm shows to scare the weak into panic.

    The largest single loser took a ~$24-28 billion loss over three days (single Family, not Corp) which is probably evidence of how seriously "the reigns are being tightened on billionaires not willing to accede the wisdom of the plan" is being taken.

    Chances are: she's rich (or her family are percieved to be or at least in the bracket to be under that Aegis) and they have made moves to UK citizenship. There are lists of names because the UK security is crap and/or the UK .gov leaked them to use them as pawns, depending on your level of cynicism / belief that behind the Buffoons are some really nasty old school Chess Players[1].

    Remember Bill Hwang? Similar M.O. and these aren't people scared of blowing a few buildings up to get where they want to be.

    But you can safely say that the days of Chris Patton having any relevance to the situation are long, long gone.[0]

    ~

    Anyhow, you all get parallel stuff wrong: you need the right RESONANCE. This is easy peasy for "worlds very much like your own", it gets exponentially harder the more things diverge. It also (this is the important bit) gets exponentially harder for your Minds.

    Jaunt into a close approximate? Easy... but.... there's that Deja / Jamais vu creeping up on you. It's not the phones, it's the entire thing: axial tilt, the Moon, little stuff like dust / air density, smells - huge red flag in this thread is everyone saying Odour isn't a Knot in itself.

    Bet you can't smell your own personal smell, right? You can when you jaunt, as it's not natural there.

    And YOU PONG!

    Lots of other stuff (it's not the Earth removal that kills it, it's the references you have to put in each N+1 shift to make sure the occupant can always tell the Origin Plateau, otherwise they dissisociate.

    And so on.

    Really? Smell isn't important? Tell that to your canine friends, they know when they know.

    [0] This means "Leave if you can" btw. She won't be able to, esp. since you fingered her here. [1] Spoiler: there are. Slightly fewer than there used to be[2], but at least three still "Life-Adjacent". [2] This is one of those understatements, in the regions where even DV don't see. Five to One, Baby, One in Five. And we survived, fuckers. Get's expensive in the top leagues...

    497:

    [And for actual Jaunters who appreciate the book as funny, you jaunt into Organized Patterns of Sufficient Complexity, aka, Minds. Shifting actual matter across Planes/Topography of that kind isn't possible. Energy / Information: proven. Matter... no.]

    Shout out to the mice: their sight is really really good if you consider their perspective and environmental requirements from it. Much like spiders.

    If you wanted to consider seriously Jaunting, you'd need some squid in your blood.

    The majority of transcripts in the squid nervous system are extensively recoded by A-to-I RNA editing

    https://elifesciences.org/articles/05198

    Apes? Crumble after about N+6/7, your Minds totally dissociate around N+3/4.

    ~

    Good book though, happy it was a success. #342: ignoring the UK media sets' current attempts to get more Blood-Hound-Witch-Hunts going, we've some bad news on that front. Along the lines of "We met G_D, and He's a fascist".

    [0] Meditation? OMMM. Quite opposed when you're puppeting the larynx to fake it.

    498:

    Here's the tryptch joke (that ties into DNA discussions above):

    Tiny human brain grown in lab has eye-like structures that 'see' light

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/2287207-tiny-human-brain-grown-in-lab-has-eye-like-structures-that-see-light/

    The issue being that just like your "MLM AI" on 12 nn silicon, it's not sufficient for Jaunting. An octopus or a dog is a better bet there.

    (Yeah, funny: until this happens - check your twitter for the newest Dog-Robot-With-Functional-Sniper-Rifle-On-Its-Back for shits n giggles).

    ~

    No, but really: you just Jaunt into a sufficiently Complex Harmonic Resonance then do your thing. ELF / Havanna syndrome is kinda real.

    The House passes a bill to provide care for U.S. officials suffering from ‘Havana syndrome.’

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/politics/havana-syndrome-house-bill.html

    They're just a bit sore that the [redacted] got invited to their Mind-Fuck Party.

    ~

    Hey: WE ARE THE ORZ.

    499:

    The NEW new computer arrived. I'm getting it set up now. No problems SO FAR!

    Y'all keep your fingers crossed and if I'm not back in three days, notify the 'Murcan Embassy.

    500:

    FUCK ME 496-8 obviously have some content in there, but it simply isn't worth the effort digging for it, & rootling it out of the shit layer.......

    501:

    Hey: WE ARE THE ORZ.

    Uh oh, happy campers ready to dance.

    502:

    Mikko TRANSLATION - please?

    503:

    The point is that causality is a global effect, not a local one; and, if the contraints are global, there can be FTL communication without any breach of causality. My matrix arithmetic is too rusty to state what the constraints need be, but I posted a couple of realistic (and not onerous) sufficient conditions for that.

    504:

    I am of course not sure of the original Orz reference, but I understood it to mean the Orz from the old computer game 'Star Control II'. (It's a good game, also available as more open source versions nowadays.) The main part of the game is to explore a star map and encounter new peoples living in the stars. There are multiple species in the game, and Orz are one of them.

    They are quite enigmatic and seem to have replaced one species which is mentioned in the materials. The translator with the player character is not perfect, and the speech of the Orz has many words marked by asterisks when the translation is just something close by. The Orz speak about happy campers referring to their friends, and talking about dancing seems to lead to fighting often.

    At some point it might be discovered that the Orz are just parts of one large extra-dimensional monster who is planning to perhaps invade at some point, and then everything they have said seems even more sinister.

    That's what I got from the Orz reference, but as said, I'm not sure of the original meaning. For the people who have played the game (it was published in 1992) it used to be somewhat of a scary thing to say in the context of the game.

    505:

    It's been fairly well understood for many decades, and is not a causality violation, despite what the press say. It's closely related to weak ordering in parallel computing, and similar to several important issues in probability and statistics. It's very simple, but you need to think outside the 19th century physics box to understand it (think: abandon the law of the excluded middle).

    Once you accept that a fact need not be true or false, but can also be indeterminate (by which I do NOT mean unknown), it all starts to make sense.

    That doesn't mean that its consequences aren't extremely hard to work out, and quite often seriousky counter-intuitive - the same applies to the issue in those other fields I mentioned.

    506:

    Fair enough, I'm trying to figure out how to implement indigenous ternary logic in a story universe that more-or-less runs on intuitionist math.

    I still think that causality is the weakest of special relativity, FTL, and causality. Special relativity seems to work every time we test it, warp drives haven't been ruled out on first principles (AFAIK), and causality may be irrelevant if we're in Einstein's "brickverse" or something more unusual.

    Getting back to stories, if someone hasn't done it, there's probably room for a super-Rashomon in the SF cannon. The basis of the story is that, with FTL, there are "causality violations" such that society contains people and organizations whose histories contradict each other. It's not that reality is unknowable due to human frailty (Rashomon) or because someone's history gets silenced (The just out Last Duel). Instead, the histories are known, and due to FTL, they contradict in dramatic ways. Part of an FTL civilization's function will be mediating those contradictions, and part of a good FTL civilization will be mediating those contradictions without arbitrarily imposing an official timeline that privileges one causal chain and silences disagreements. That probably isn't easy.

    507:

    That is often said, by both physicists and others, but I have never seen any of the people saying it actually think it through. Replacing it by something weaker might be feasible, but they don't propose what - and simply abandoning it is just plain insane. There are two key aspects:

    (The physics one) Without causality, the increase in entropy goes to pot, too, and you are in a universe whose state over time is fixed (but potentially multi-valued, indeterminate etc.)

    (The human one) If you abandon causality, you have immediately broken logic, the scientific method, most of cognition and much of human behaviour.

    Every SF story and everyone I have heard propose this assumes that any breaches of causality are limited in number, scope, and with a very coarse granularity. But that is implausible, without a mechanism enforcing it. Your proposal is no different.

    508:

    Yes, I agree that a weaker form of causality would fit better.

    What I'm proposing is to take the standard argument for FTL, that it causes "time travel" and basically say "so what?" instead of proposing that there's a reality editing function that enforces strict causality. If you do something like time travel with FTL, you get stuck with a personal history-line that disagrees with those who did not follow the same route. The difference is that both sides are provably right. For example, in a story, one might have some dyed-blond fascist set up an FTL itinerary that lets him claim he undeniably won an election that he was otherwise sure to lose.

    It's somewhat akin to a paratime multiverse. Instead of timelines splitting into different universes, conflicting timelines get stuck together in a single universe, but only when FTL courses on timelike curves are traveled.

    The only reason this might be interesting is that silenced and ignored histories (of women, people of color, neurodiverse, gender diverse, etc) are becoming more prominent. This is a mechanism to talk about colliding histories in a SF way, without having some white male time cop getting to decide who's right.

    509:

    Ah, and in my Famous Secret Theory, I screw with time (it doesn't go negative), and get FTL. If light goes faster than light in a relative frame of reference....

    510:

    I am unconvinced about the physics, but that's not the point for such a story. It sounds like an excellent framework to satirise a large number of groups that richly deserve it!

    511:
    • The China/Hong Kong material is about interesting political shifts in China (including HK) threatening some wealthy people both directly and indirectly. (Aside: China's plans to increase coal usage are not a good look.[1])
    • The "Shout out to the mice: their sight is really really good if you consider their perspective and environmental requirements from it." is both a comment on upthread mentions of mice and jaunting, and perhaps also a ref to a novel previously mentioned called "The End of Mr. Y", which includes both jaunting to other brains (default as a first person observer, with the original body staying behind in a unresponsive state), both animal and human, and a large subplot involving mice and a mouse god. (And also time-travel jaunting.) For a longer treatment, see Iain M. Banks' "Transition".
    • The bits about jaunting your mind state to (/accessing) your own brain in very nearby [timelines] are just that.
    • "Meditation? OMMM. Quite opposed when you're puppeting the larynx to fake it." might be a ref to another recent thread. (Cyberpunk Octopode Hive: If so, no audio mantra or verbal stuff for me, despite the various browser urls with OM in them.[2])
    • "The House passes a bill to provide care for U.S. officials suffering from ‘Havana syndrome.'" - I've not seen public evidence that anybody in the US government knows what Havana syndrome is. This is both amusing and serious. There is insufficient epistemic humility among many (not all) of the investigators.
    • The Orz have already been described. https://www.sa-matra.net/quotes/orz/ - Do NOT ask about the Androsynth.

    [1] Will China’s plan to build more coal plants derail Cop26? - Analysis: while the short-term consequences are grim, veteran analysts talk of a wobble rather than a fall (Jonathan Watts, Wed 13 Oct 2021) [2] e.g. https://www.swamij.com/yoga-nidra-method1.htm (e.g. #4, with shortcuts). Well-described.

    512:

    Do NOT ask about the Androsynth.

    Indeed.

    The fact no-one here picked up on the fact that a non-industrial / non-primate Time Dimension smells completely different is kinda worrying. You really do stink!

    Then you need to grep "It's Just Sex" and be able to find / know / understand what the second part of that statement was: [ spoilers ] it was "Very tempted, very very tempting but I think not..." (or close enough).

    Spoilers: It was never about sex.

    The "OMM" stuff is actually about actual events that lead to [redacted] executions / complete exile[1]. Quotation: "I supported this, I thought ze was meditating".

    WE ARE ORZ.

    Chances are: we can tell you a fairly accurate picture of current CN events without relying on Western Media, along with the multi-billion Yuan/HKD/USD losses going down.. well. Just after we posted, but hey, that's why it's funny.

    You, however, cannot even tinkle the tinkle at what we're actually talking about.

    ~

    The Jaunting stuff is kinda actually real, and not about The ID jaunting into it's own ID, it's about.. well. You'd call it "Possession" or "Being Ridden by LOA" or whatever.

    Greg is completely immune to this, he has an Elder God of Legumes on his watch, so don't worry about it.

    ~

    "SV is the highest clearance level" did tickle us, it really did though.

    [1] This means a little bit more than strapping some poor nice guy to a fucking Cross, btw.

    513:

    Also, spoilers: if you're presenting yourselves as Sophisticated Entities Worthy of Respect then you can parse the username/password already.

    Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonagon

    And if you admit knowing that Joke, then, well: I think it was Queen Victoria who said: "We are not amused". We'll also fuck your entire world up because, well: you're massive cunts. Sociopathic Cunts, to be precise and Accurate about it.

    Causality is really easy to view outside of Temporality btw. Don't even have to be autistic to do it. Then again, your version of Temporality is largely a massive fucking con perpetrated by scum-bags, so hey. [Spoilers: they get off on "shaping Reality", kids].

    "Why don't we have trains and local transport" - the answer isn't "because Reality works that way", now is it?

    ~

    What's that? You've created an environment where every human's sperm is slowing, no-one is having children due to disfunctional social models and you managed to kill the entire biosphere?

    Fuck me.

    Sounds like you need a Nuremberg Trial or Nine and not descend into Right-Wing nonsense now doesn't it? [spoilers: if you spot that all other options but falling into reactionary vibes have been eradicated, well: now you're cooking on gas]

    No, really. 4chan (pre-8chan split / infestation) got a single thing right: "If you only knew how bad things really are".

    ~

    And you were such a beautiful and special little species, with so much potential. @Host - "The Prince of Hammark" was a serious play and costly. There's simply not enough material left to forment another strike there, Souls / LOA / Minds are fucking Owned by Principles beyond your ken. [#6 Dominion]

    514:

    Would it be useful for me to provide a list of typos and/or continuity errors for this book?

    515:

    I'm re-reading Invisible Sun. At the beginning when Elizabeth is leaving the apartment one step ahead of Colonel Smith, there is an explosion. It was big enough for Elizabeth to feel the shockwave from a block or two away, which implies at least a lot of broken windows. What was that?

    516:

    On causality violation:

    I'm a Haskell programmer. Haskell is famously a "pure" functional language. Lots of people say it has no side effects. That isn't really true; what it means is that you can embed your own model of "effects" inside it. These models are generally in the form of "monads". Haskell programmers routinely create new monads to reflect the semantics of "this happens, then that happens" within whatever domain they are working with.

    The term "effect" here is basically a synonym for "causality", which is where things get interesting.

    One simple model of effect is the "state monad". That lets you treat some value (could be anything from a single number to an entire database) as being threaded through a calculation; you can change the value and then in the next step retrieve the value and see that it has changed.

    There is also a concept of a "fixpoint". In the formal maths that underlies Haskell the "fix" function is a clever way of introducing recursion into a language that doesn't have it (if you don't understand that last statement, don't worry). But in Haskell it can also be used to create monads where causality seems to run in reverse, the simplest example being the reverse state monad. This works like the state monad, except that when you set a value for the state it is visible in the previous steps rather than the later ones.

    (To get your head around this, it helps to abandon the notion of steps in a monadic computation being like steps in a Von Neumann computer; Haskell has lazy evaluation, meaning that the actual work isn't done until the result is required, so if a computation requires information from a subsequent step then that computation gets deferred until the information is available).

    What happens if you set up a paradox in this? You get an endless loop.

    (BTW the simplest paradox in Haskell, needing no monads, is "x = x + 1". If you ask the Haskell interpreter for the value of x it simply goes off counting to infinity. Paradoxes involving the reverse state monad are just more complicated versions of the same thing).

    Now let me mention some other monads.

    The list monad models non-determinism. Instead of a step returning exactly one result it returns a list of zero or more results. Each step gets applied to all the results from the previous step and the list of lists of results are then mashed together into one long list ready for the next step.

    You can combine monads, so you can have a list-state monad. You can have a single state value, or you can have each result be associated with its own state.

    In theory (I've never tried this) you could do this with the reverse-state monad too.

    Alert readers may have noticed the close similarity between the list-state monad and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. But the list monad is not the only way of evaluating a non-deterministic program. An equally valid way is to simply choose one of the list of returned values and run with that. If the state value includes a concept of probability then you can create probability distributions either by computing every possibility of by a "monte carlo" approach of running the same computation many times and measuring the results.

    This maps on to the difference between the Copenhagen interpretation of QM and the Many Worlds interpretation. Given a computation in a probabilistic non-determistic monad, we can evaluate it in two different ways: the Copenhagen evaluation engine picks one result, weighted by probability, at each step and discards the rest. The Many Worlds evaluation engine keeps all the results from each step and evaluates the future that flows from each one, creating a tree of possible futures. From inside the monadic computation you can't tell the difference (i.e. the programmer can't create a step that returns True for one evaluation and False for the other) and you can't get access to the state in any of the other branches.

    So what happens when you try to set up a paradox in such a monad?

    Remember that a step in a non-deterministic computation can return zero or more results. If you set up a paradox then some of the computations will never return a result, either because an endless loop happens or because the set of possible results is empty. So as long as you have a suitably flexible evaluation engine, you can discard the endless loops by simply picking a different alternative which is more probable (I'm glossing over details here). Since the probability of a computation can only decrease, it follows that the likelihood of an endless loop being followed tends towards zero.

    So lets suppose that we live in a universe which is being run on this kind of basis. What happens if you attempt to implement, say, the Grandfather paradox. The simple answer is that something stops you. No matter how carefully you plan, some freak event ensures that you fail. Maybe you get arrested, maybe the gun misfires, maybe you shoot the wrong person by mistake.

    But what if we try to set up some more deterministic paradox involving machinery which operates in a deterministic manner? Well ultimately that machinery is composed of atoms and electrons with quantum states. The heisenberg uncertainty principle says that momentum and position are intrinsically uncertain. Normally the uncertainty is small enough not to matter for macro objects, but if the only consistent solution is fantastically improbable, that is what is likely to happen.

    However I should caution anyone planning such experiments: at some point the likelihood of the experimenter suffering a heart attack or having the ceiling cave in or some similar freak accident will exceed the probability of the experiment failing. Temporal paradoxes are likely to be very bad for your health.

    517:

    Would it be useful for me to provide a list of typos and/or continuity errors for this book?

    Emphatically not!

    518:

    Stun grenades during the forced entry into the Major's apartment.

    519:

    Stun grenades: that poor medic must have had a really bad day. And Pauline was already in there wasn't she? But presumably Smith doesn't care about her eardrums.

    520:

    "Reverse state"?

    I wasn't interested in haskell before, now I actively dislike it.

    Sounds identical to the ALTER statement in COBOL. When I read about that, I asked my manager if he would defenestrate someone who used it before or after he fired them.

    521:

    It's not as bad as Paul's post would imply, though it's not quite as side-effect-free as is often claimed - you don't HAVE to snarl yourself up in such insanities. Don't ask me about what you can do to yourself in C++! There are plenty of other languages that have apparently acausal logic - starting with SNOBOL, and following on with Icon, Prolog and more.

    Haskell's monads are a kludge, and don't actually help with the requirements for which you need state (as distinct from the cases when people use state, but don't need to). They are just enough for pseudo-random numbers, but not enough for more than the simplest cases of iterative algorithms, I/O etc.

    522:

    Whitroth: you have the wrong end of the wrong stick.

    EC: You don't know the power of the monads. I find your lack of IO monad disturbing. Much to unlearn you have.

    523:

    You probably don't know that I knew the designers of Haskell quite well, and was very peripherally involved myself. The key to the problem is in the name 'monad'.

    I also suspect that you don't know the sort of algorithm to which I am referring - oh, yes, I could force the program structure into monads, but only at the cost of turning multiple, simple data structures into a monolithic mess and handicapping extensibility.

    Actually, I do know how to use I/O monads, but you may not be aware of how fundamentally incompatible some important I/O uses are with ANY form of pure coding.

    524:

    Charlie Stross @ 518: Stun grenades during the forced entry into the Major's apartment.

    Stun grenades shouldn't have enough blast effect to be felt several blocks away.

    They're mainly a flash that blinds the target for 5 seconds or so and a BANG loud enough to "temporarily" deafen & disturb the fluid in the inner ear (causing dizziness & loss of balance).

    525:

    We have a question:

    You do understand which philosophers' work generated the names of the [Conceptual Entities] you're using, right?

    It's very very 16th-19th Century.

    https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giordano-Bruno https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz

    This is fucking hilarious btw. Spinoza and Hegel laughing at you right now.

    You won't understand why, but it explains a great deal.

    "paradox"

    Doesn't mean what you think it means. We'll be very nice and just put it this way: Our types of Paradox mean that either side of the Causal Breach is equally and computationally exactly Improbable (=0) when viewed before the Paradox breaks.

    It's so improbable that your Mind will reject even considering it a part of your Mental Perception of the Universe.

    ~

    Now run that for Nine Years. Hint: "The Mind is a Garden" is kinda a pitiful response from 731 land.

    ~

    Disco Elysium: good game. Great Ending.

    526:

    Guess someone read the password.

    Let's see: what could possibly be furnished from a Somali (non-national) "possibly Islamist" (The Times says) young man with a machete randomly attacking an (expendable) Knight of the Realm, MP, in a place where absolutely zero people of that nature are situated.

    Like, literally: the percentage of "non Anglo-Saxons" in that particular place is... under 4%. The percentage of "Non Natives" who are asylum seekers is: 0.5%.

    "PARADOX"

    So, magic makers of the Dark Arts: if you want this one to stick, explain the "Paradox" of it. Aka, explain the Impossible Odds of it All.

    No, really. Ohh, we know what you can do to Minds, we're just waiting on how you explain dumping your Rabid Attack Ferret from Somalia into that zone. It's not even credible like the BNP Fascist you dumped on M. J.Cox.

    ~

    Kids: UK is losing it, total shit-show, it's like Vietnam for credibility levels.

    Oh, WHAT? You surprise me, you're saying that there were 10k social media bots / Media bleating about "Tory Scum = danger" only 10 minutes after the attack?

    Shocking: it's almost as if some fucking mentalist head-case with a fucking danger level #Dominion in his head panicked and put this live and expects us all to cower under the Terror and Psychosis and believe it happened "Organically".

    ~

    Hint: you wired that boy up so badly, it's got your finger-prints alllll over his Mind (what is left of it).

    And, btw: you will sacrifice your Own, he was a sad deluded and pathetic Man, but he was at least consistent in his beliefs (Catholic etc) and so on.

    Brass Eye says: CAKE.

    Kids: who knows what went into that poor man's head. But, sure as shit: we can do it better. #Dominion.

    527:

    see Iain M. Banks' "Transition".

    The most salient and Paradoxical point is this: All these Idelogically Cauterized Minds who are pulling this heinously (and obviously) evil shit and expecting their Social Gomjabbar to stick... have already not noticed the huge fucking parasites in their Minds lapping up their Abhumanity.

    Weird, isn't it?

    So what is making it work?

    p.s.

    The Amazon "Foundation" series: literally shit.

    528:

    Thanks for last night's pointers and notes; appreciated. (Note I use a real name here.)

    Not my country, (and seems to have been a decent man; looked at a skim of history and some parliament transcripts) but re "Brass Eye says: CAKE.", for others, Once famously duped into condemning the non-existent drug ‘cake’ on Brass Eye, the Conservative MP for Southend West is now the government’s go-to man on drugs (2015)

    529:

    I can see it now.

    A somber memorial in a little courtyard in some technology school somewhere. Chiseled in the imperishable granite, these words:

    "This memorial honors the now unknown postdoctoral researchers, whose selfless pursuit of the truth led them to cease existing, all to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood that God programmed the universe in a purely functional language.

    "May their sacrifice be remembered, even if they cannot be.

    "Ou ekpeirazō kyrios ho sy theos."

    530:

    So how long until the US's talking heads/propaganda shills starts complaining about the Commonwealth for being "racist" because they do things like having national healthcare, a basic income, not letting the economy be run by the finance sector, etc?

    I imagine the ATL's US and Chinese propaganda campaigns against the Commonwealth to promote people sticking with the status for both international/domestic consumption would look quite soviet both in content of propaganda and level of hamfistedness.

    531:

    Elderly Cynic @ 523:

    You probably don't know that I knew the designers of Haskell quite well, and was very peripherally involved myself. The key to the problem is in the name 'monad'.

    Simon Peyton Jones agrees with you: in hindsight he thinks "warm fuzzy thing" would have been better (see slide "Our biggest mistake" about half way down).

    Actually I think the real problem was the word "return", which is really confusing for anyone who ever learned an imperative language.

    (BTW, Seagull: yes I know about Leibniz's monadology. These monads are a very distant cousin).

    I also suspect that you don't know the sort of algorithm to which I am referring

    I seem to recall that any imperative algorithm can be translated into a functional form with at-most an O(log n) increase in complexity. The example that springs to mind is the Fisher-Yates shuffle, which is O(n) in imperative and O(n . log n) in functional form. Is that what you were thinking of? Or are you thinking of something more architectural, like using state machines to process input data?

    only at the cost of turning multiple, simple data structures into a monolithic mess and handicapping extensibility

    My experience is the opposite: a monadic approach lets you turn a monolithic mess into nice modular functions. For example, an approach I've used multiple times is continuations for state machines, which let you create a continuation monad that represents a state machine, so you can split a monolithic state machine up into nice modular functions.

    Ignore my joke about "I find your lack of IO disturbing": the trick in Haskell is to come up with an abstraction that captures what you need to do without explicit IO; the IO lives in an outer layer which interprets some kind of language with much more constrained notions of input and output, and that language is generally defined using a monad.

    you may not be aware of how fundamentally incompatible some important I/O uses are with ANY form of pure coding

    Such as? I think you might be surprised at how far things have come in the Haskell world.

    532:

    all to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood that God programmed the universe in a purely functional language.

    It's not really about functional programming; I got a bit carried away explaining monads. What I really wanted to get over was the idea of fixpoints in a causal model that features quantum uncertainty. Haskell is merely a handy vehicle for thinking about it.

    In maths, a fixpoint of a function "f" is a solution to the equation "x = f (x)". "x" can be a number, but it doesn't need to be. It could just as equally be the state of the universe, with "f" being the time evolution around a time travel loop.

    What this means is that all time loops are stable: it is not possible to observe a violation of causality.

    533:

    Backing up to fire and human evolution, what are alternative animals that would have the intelligence and manipulative ability to control fire?

    534:

    I'm not a mathematician, I'm an ecologist, so I dealt with issues of what scales and what doesn't scale a lot. Now I deal with environmental politics, but that's a different set of messes.

    Anyway, my general critique of causal arguments is that they're scale independent, at least when people aren't thinking very hard about them. This shows up most clearly in the idea that a quantum system that resolves in two different ways spontaneously splits the universe in two. It also shows up in causal arguments where entangled particle systems that link multiple cause-effect chains demonstrate a universal breakdown in causality.

    And the presumption of the scale independence of causality might be really problematic, possibly to the level of bovine excreta.

    With the many-worlds model, the split between universes may be instantaneous, but information about the split propagates at light speed, as far as anyone knows. Assuming this is true, why are we not drowning in a some higher infinity of splitting universes? My guess is that there's a nearly-universal "meh" process known as decoherence. When those photons propagating the split interact with other particles, there's a huge mess of interactions and the split gets lost in the noise, possibly and simply because it both universes are equally good in context. The result is classical physics on a macro scale, and no way to tell if many worlds or Copenhagen are more right on the quantum scale, due to the composting effect of decoherence when many particles interact.

    Causality has similar problems, I suspect, and we have to be really careful extrapolating from quantum-scale experiments to the macro and relativistic scales.

    Now we get to the notion that the universe chooses two of three states: special relativity, faster-than-light travel, and causality. In our universe, the one most probably missing is FTL. The problem with this are alcubierre-type warps, which warp space to effectively change the distance traveled, rather than accelerating a physical object faster than light (these are not the same thing). Such warps in principle seems to be consistent with special relativity. So now we look at causality, and see that the strongest version of it is effectively special pleading--things just wouldn't make sense if different observers have conflicting records of the same events. Thus we presume that there has to be something like a universal blockchain (/sarcasm) that records all events.

    And of course we live in a causal world at our scales of space and time. It's just that, like quantum entanglement, no one's poked this idea hard to see if it's true at all scales.

    The problem is, in a universe with special relativity and working warp drives, causality presumably occasionally gets conflicted, so there can be situations where different observers have different records of the order of events. While this is a violation of universal causality, the weak causality that replaces it might be interesting, especially if you're writing SF stories. You're left with a universe where different people may have different histories in some circumstances.

    A FTL civilization has to make this work, somehow. They can, of course, set up an official, imperial history, and suppress anything that contradicts it. Since history is as much about reifying and accounting for possessions as anything else, this gets interesting in a hurry. Or they can try to make some messy pluralism work, where they "honor all histories," whether or not some histories are more honorable than others. And again, this has its own problems.

    As EC picked up, my point here is that SF normally piggybacks off popular science and current politics. Right now, we've got huge political fights around the world over multiple, conflicting histories, where the powerful say one thing, the oppressed say another, factions argue violently, some genders are forcibly silenced while some are lionized, and many problems are ignored because arguments about differing histories are such good distractions. If someone wanted to tackle these disputes from the side, setting stories in a SF universe where multiple, conflicting time loops are normal is one way to do it.

    *NOTE: I don't look for remuneration for ideas. Only words get copyrighted, and Charlie owns the rights to what's written here. If someone wants to use this or any other silliness I post, go right ahead. I'm emphatically not posting about anything I actually work on.

    535:

    Nancy L Raccoons?

    536:

    wow... worth the wait... though I wish we hadn't had to... now there's a need for yet more to keep the saga going...

    after re-reading it, there were some typos I noted below...

    TYPO = It case they needed to launch a first strike against the Commonwealth, sending warheads through para-time. SUGGEST = In case they needed to launch a first strike against the Commonwealth, sending warheads through para-time. TYPO = She came with a side-order of mus cle SUGGEST = She came with a side-order of muscle TYPO = brinks-manship SUGGEST = brinksmanship; brinkmanship; TYPO = Explorer-General, but I’ve gotten to do precious little exploring these past five or ten years SUGGEST = Explorer-General, but I’ve gotten to do precious little exploring these past ten years TYPO = twenty four hours SUGGEST = twenty-four hours (multiple occurrences) TYPO = timeline SUGGEST = time line TYPO = the POTUS SUGGEST = POTUS (typically in American journalism that particular "the" is dropped) TYPO = eighty-seventh Airborne Division SUGGEST = Eighty-Seventh Airborne Division TYPO = Mint—“Rita SUGGEST = Mint—“ Rita AMBIGUOUS = About one in five astronauts suffered from nausea on their first flight. SUGGEST = About one in five astronauts -- those of timeline two -- had been known to have suffered from nausea on their first flight. TYPO = para-time paratime
    SUGGEST = please choose one TYPO = “General, I bought you a battleship: whose lawn do you want me to park it on?” SUGGEST = “General, I brought you a battleship: whose lawn do you want me to park it on?” TYPO = Mothers Against Drink Driving SUGGEST = Mothers Against Drunk Driving TYPO = swarming in through the three-meter diameter SUGGEST = ??? possible error ??? mention made of a widened gateway of 40 meters ??? TYPO = “You’re in charge the phones while I sort this out.” SUGGEST = “You’re in charge of the phones while I sort this out.” TYPO = and whichever way they went, they didn’t came back. SUGGEST = and whichever way they went, they didn’t come back. OR and whichever way they went, they never came back. TYPO = a postgraduate degree in imprisonment to set beside her mere diploma SUGGEST = a postgraduate degree in imprisonment to set beside her mere high school diploma TYPO = she’ll probably show up right here in the American’s time line SUGGEST = she’ll probably show up right here in the Americans' time line TYPO = USS Maine SUGGEST = italicize USS Maine TYPO = followed the green-haired girl SUGGEST = followed the blue-haired girl TYPO = Miriam noticed sandbagged firing points manned by tense Commonwealth Guards in battle dress. SUGGEST = ??? what happened to the blindfold ??? TYPO = direct the fightback against the enemy SUGGEST = direct the fight back against the enemy TYPO = The Commonwealth, I mean? Because—” She took a sip of coffee to cover her turmoil—“that would be a bad sign. For me, I mean. SUGGEST = The Commonwealth, I mean? Because—” She took a sip of coffee to cover her turmoil “—that would be a bad sign. For me, I mean. TYPO = affine SUGGEST = ??? uncommon word; was it necessary ??? TYPO = Their-five dimensional fortresses SUGGEST = Their five-dimensional fortresses TYPO = to build a four-dimensional wall that would deny SUGGEST = to build a five-dimensional wall that would deny ... ??? six ??? TYPO = JUGGERNAUT, LOW EARTH ORBIT, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020 The screen at the front of the command capsule continued to display a view of the Pacific Ocean. It provided a peaceful, turquoise backdrop, lightly brushed with clouds, unrolling hypnotically as Juggernaut hurtled south-east, departing French Imperial airspace. SUGGEST = ??? TIME LINES THREE AND THEN TWO ??? TYPO = nearly forty eight hours ago SUGGEST = nearly forty-eight hours ago TYPO = blue hair or green hair SUGGEST = please choose one TYPO = the previous, abortive revolution against the Crown—” He was imprisoned by the Imperial regime, escaped and worked selflessly as a Party SUGGEST = the previous, abortive revolution against the Crown "—He was imprisoned by the Imperial regime, escaped and worked selflessly as a Party TYPO = UGM-133A MIRV'd as both 8 and 12 SUGGEST = ??? uncertain ???

    537:

    Racoons are a good choice, but I'm hoping for something expansive and hypothetical, too.

    I admire the way Poul Anderson came up with a number of ways to get human-intelligent flying creatures, even though they're presumably not feasible on earth.

    So, we get a low gravity planet in one novel. And ram-jets of a sort in another-- flying forces enough air (through slits in the neck, I think) to feed the brain. And most inventively, a symbiosis between approximate rhinoceroses, birds, and monkeys so that the capacities of all three are combined.

    I want an octopus which becomes amphibious.

    538:

    If you want flying sapients, I strongly suggest getting a copy of Tim Low's Where Song Began: Australia's Birds and How They Changed The World. He makes an excellent case that until the end of the Paleogene (possibly the much later), the most intelligent species on Earth were parrots and passerines, both of which evolved in Australia and New Zealand. For those who don't know, corvids (ravens, crows, and allies) are all passerines.

    The evolutionary evidence that songbirds and parrots (their sister group) both evolved in Australia and New Zealand, as the majority of the early-diverging lineages in both groups are confined to Australia and New Zealand.

    So far as parrots go, we know about the intelligence of African gray parrots (the late Alex), but New Zealand's parrots, Keas in particular and possibly kakapos, show evidence of high intelligence too. Although Keas haven't been studied to the extent of African Grays, in one test where they were put up against New Caledonian Crows, they smoked the crows on the same test, and New Caledonian crows beat African grays on other intelligence tests. Parrots beat non-human mammals on some intelligence tests. Queensland Palm Cockatoos use tools in the wild, but they can't be kept in captivity, so no one's sure just how intelligent they are. And that doesn't even get into the Australian choughs, an intelligent songbird that keeps conspecific slaves...

    Anyway, there's a lot of avian intelligence on Earth, and it's worth exploring. It's just not in the northern hemisphere.

    539:

    Adrian Tchaikovsky did it with spiders in Children of Time. Rather good, I thought.

    540:

    I'm fascinated by the fact that birds have more compact brains than mammals, though it's also interesting that flightless birds don't take advantage of this to become even smarter. Different lineage?

    541:

    I'm fascinated by the fact that birds have more compact brains than mammals, though it's also interesting that flightless birds don't take advantage of this to become even smarter. Different lineage?

    Kakapos are flightless, but they're so effing rare that no one keeps a colony of them for intelligence tests. New Zealand colonists in the 19th century kept a few of them for pets, and claimed that they played like kittens.

    Flightlessness evolved multiple times (dodos are pigeons, ostriches are paleognaths, rails are waders, etc.). Most of the really intelligent birds are clustered in the pasaerine/parrot/falcon part of the bird phylogenetic tree. Sort of like primates having a disproportionate number of intelligent species.

    One thing that gets weird: parrots and falcons are sister clades. Parrots went for intelligence, falcons went for speed and instinct (by analogy: if parrots were humans, falcons would be a human sister clade of werewolves). The basal-most parrots are keas, which are known to be omnivorous and really intelligent. The basal-most falconids are caracaras, which are also omnivorous and really intelligent. The caracaras take the place of ravens in southern South America. The earliest fossil "parrots" actually look a lot like falcon-parrot undifferentiated ancestors.

    542:

    Sorry, another continuity question. How did Miriam know about the Wolf Orchestra?

    Rita wouldn't have told her because it would have been compromising. Kurt wouldn't have told Irine because he had no reason to reveal such a secret: at most he might have admitted to knowing some useful tradecraft himself.

    543:

    I removed a remark about causality at smaller scale from an earlier post, for compactness. Just think about what losing it would do to the molecular reactions that operate living organisms. You would also have spontaneous combustion and more! Furthermore, in the physical universe as it is speculated by current physicists, causality isn't absolute on a very small scale, but becomes so on a larger scale by relying on (roughly) the law of large numbers.

    Never mind whether the universe could survive without causality - human cognition couldn't, even even humans could, and we probably couldn't.

    544:

    "the trick in Haskell is to come up with an abstraction that captures what you need to do without explicit IO"

    Oh, yes, and that is precisely why it doesn't work. Yes, it works for the portable subset of FORTRAN (and yes, I mean that spelling) that some of us have been using and teaching for well over 50 years - i.e. pure stream input, pure stream output, and pure anonymous scratch files, and (with restrictions) extensions of those. No problem there.

    But files and, worse, duplex pipes (as in terminals) are external interfaces, and Haskell programs have no power over them. Writable, externally modifiable and rereadable files, and pipes to an external entity, are necessarily globally stateful objects.

    You have the same problem with parallel programming, when part of the application is non-Haskell.

    545:

    Again, I agree. In human scales of space and time, causality is strong.

    In a SF context, it's certain uses of FTL that cause causality problems, getting outside of the light cone of certain events whose order turns out to be important. In other words, I'm taking the usual example of why special relativity leads to paradox and turning those paradoxes into plot points.

    This also implies that those who use FTL (e.g. the rich and powerful) are more likely to create their own timelines, presumably for fun and profit. To the extent that they do so, this can presumably be used to drive a plot. How? I'm not bothering to work it out, but I'd be surprised if there aren't financial scams that depend on FTL interacting with special relativity.

    546:

    Do they call my generation Baby Boomers in the U.K.? Or is that a U.S. centric naming?

    I'm presuming there was a similar rise in births world-wide after WW2, but I'm wondering what it was called locally? And whether it is still "locally" called by whatever name it was given in any particular region?

    547:

    I see... so, Haskell is like Wirth's original version of Pascal, with no i/o at all.

    548:

    Ah, yes, the cone... which we know can be modified (we can make light go slower).

    And yes, the rich and powerful timeline - that would include the one with kidnapped Black (and probably others) working literally on a plantation, with no North to invade and end it.

    549:

    Bugger FTL. There are scams that rely purely on communication speeds. 'Futures traders' have a significant advantage if they can run their scams, er, programs on servers in the same room as the stock exchange.

    550:

    No, it's not that restrictive. As I said, there are forms of I/O that have been known to be easy to use in a pure fashion for well over half a century. They are enough for many programs and most moderately simple ones. What they aren't is enough for ALL programs.

    551:

    Elderly Cynic @ 550: Bugger FTL. There are scams that rely purely on communication speeds. 'Futures traders' have a significant advantage if they can run their scams, er, programs on servers in the same room as the stock exchange.

    And there's even greater advantage if they can run them on the Stock Exchange's own servers.

    552:

    A phrase to look for is "latency equalization": Cboe/Equinix Latency Equalization Infrastructure provides an equal optical length of fiber to customers connecting in either the NY4 or NY5 Secaucus, NJ datacenters.

    I once watched a demonstration of a readout of a key from a (fairly secure in other ways) crypto device in the next room using basic electronics lab equipment. Have wondered if the "customer cages" are audited for listening apparatuses, and how much RF shielding is involved. (noise generators, too?)

    (SotMNs mentions Chicago above, so link is for the Chicago Board Options Exchange. As you say, with tick to trade low ending at roughly 100 nanoseconds (haven't checked lately), even several hundred nanoseconds of causality violation would be more than enough cheating in such environments.)

    553:

    Correction - 24 nanoseconds tick-to-trade mid-2020. Trading in 24.2 Billionths of a Second (Medium, Schweitzer Scott, Jun 1, 2020)

    554:

    Elderly Cynic @ 545:

    [quoting me] "the trick in Haskell is to come up with an abstraction that captures what you need to do without explicit IO"

    Oh, yes, and that is precisely why it doesn't work.

    I think we need to drop this. One of us obviously doesn't understand Haskell, and I don't think its me.

    This isn't the place for yet another monad tutorial. (Monad tutorials are a running joke in the Haskell world: beginners suddenly have this lightbulb moment when they grok monads, followed by a desperate desire to share their enlightenment with the rest of the world).

    All I will say is that, yes, you can write Fortran in any language. But if you try writing Fortran in Haskell then you are in for a world of pain. You think you've identified some nice little pure function, but then you discover the need to access a file inside it, and bang! Its all got to be in the IO monad once more, which means rewriting every line. I suspect you discovered that and concluded that Haskell is useless because you can't write Fortran programs in it.

    Once you start writing Haskell in Haskell all this pain goes away. But you need to take the time to rewire your brain to think in Haskell instead of thinking in Fortran (or any other imperative language) and trying to translate it into Haskell. "Much to unlearn, you have" isn't a joke.

    555:

    God save me from religious fanatics, and especially from converts!

    Perhaps I don't understand about monads, but I trust the opinion of the people who designed Haskell more than people who have merely learnt it. And they confirmed my analysis.

    Incidentally, I have used over 200 languages, have been an expert in over a dozen, and have been using and teaching functional techniques (*) for over half a century. No, I don't program one language in the style of another, my first and preferred languages have never been Fortran, and my preferred style has always been functional (where appropriate). If you want to be abusive, at least try to get your facts right.

    (*) Your remarks are an age-old bigotry - I used FORTRAN as an example, because its original I/O model (yes, 1958) was FAR more functional than anything up to and including the original Haskell.

    556:

    I trust the opinion of the people who designed Haskell more than people who have merely learnt it. And they confirmed my analysis.

    Can you give me a citation on that?

    I mentioned Fortran because you did (OK, and because of the old joke about writing Fortran in any language). I have to confess that I never actually learned it; I got as far as implicit typing off the first letter in the name and decided that this wasn't the language for me.

    While I can't claim your range of experience, I've been noodling around the computer programming world for a few decades and have worked in a range of languages and paradigms. I pioneered OO languages and methods with my employer back in the early 90s, and tried to persuade them of the obvious superiority of Eiffel over C++ (no such luck, then Java came out and they suddenly discovered that GC was a Good Thing. Urrgh). I've also worked in Lisp, Prolog, and an experimental dialect of Pascal with concurrency (can't recall its name now). Oh, and bits and pieces in a few assemblers.

    557:

    I have no idea how you turn an Alcubierre warp into a time machine, but let's assume it's possible. At a rough guess, you probably don't want to be lighting off this kind of superluminal warp inside a trading floor. Or on the surface of a planet you're at all fond of. But these are mere details.

    So anyway, FinBro gets a hot tip about a trillion dollar trade or financial something-or-other. So he hires a mere billionaire with a rocket to haul him up to his solo warp ship, blows most of a trillion dollars getting it up to speed, and loops back in time to snatch the trade away from those who were engaged in it.

    Problem is, he's created a paradox. Do the time cops bust him? Does a bullet-shaped meteorite put a hole in his head? Not precisely. Only he and his warp ship made that trip, so that's his reality now. As for everyone else, they're stuck with FinBro claiming the proceeds from a trade that everyone else knows he wasn't part of.

    That's what I mean by not having absolute causality in a story where FTL is in play. The SF question is, of course, what happens next? Since FinBro throws around trillions of dollars very stupidly, is he going to throw more money around insisting on his version of reality, this time with lawyers and other, less pleasant forms of coercion? If so, do you go along or fight back? Do you call the Consensus Reality Feds on his sorry ass? If so, what does case law say about time travel and conflicting realities?

    Now, why would anyone be silly enough to make a story like this? Perhaps they want to say some things about how colonialism or capitalism work, especially when rather unsavory people show up and assert that your reality is wrong and they own you or your land. It's certainly impolite to appropriate the history of colonized peoples, but I don't think there's any reason not to file down the serial numbers and substitute FTL causality violations for the horrors of colonial imperialism.

    558:

    "Backing up to fire and human evolution, what are alternative animals that would have the intelligence and manipulative ability to control fire?"

    Salamanders, obviously.

    559:

    I have no idea how you turn an Alcubierre warp into a time machine

    I thought they were more of an end of time machine? Wherever you go isn't there any more.

    560:

    "Backing up to fire and human evolution, what are alternative animals that would have the intelligence and manipulative ability to control fire?"

    Bears.

    https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fire/

    561: 561 etc - an interesting problem I see for any notably hairy creature playing with fire is the likelihood of setting fire to said hair. I wonder if that might have played any sort of role in the early days of nascent civilization? If you’re still hairy like a bear, you can’t do the whole BBQ thing safely, so no cheese and whine gatherings to protest about the neighbors and the state of their cave.

    Then again, if you’re basically hairless and can do fire juggling shows, you probably need the fire to keep from freezing your delicate parts off. So which came first - the fire or the furlessness?

    And as for Eiffel, well I never liked it and William.. something I can’t remember right now... sawed the legs off that tower at ECOOP 1989 or so. I remember much scurrying around trying to weld them back. C++ was never an actual OOP language either.

    562:

    Well, that was a wild ride...

    Super stuff, Charlie, and well worth the wait. Thank you especially for pushing on through much adversity and providing a fine conclusion to the series without doing a Douglas Adams on it. I certainly noticed the Eon/Eternity-ish aspects - and some Forge of God, too - and I was constantly expecting something to turn out to be the seeds of disaster. Maybe the Hive would have turned out to have the ability to trace a jaunt if they were close enough behind and found a route through on someone's tail. Or they would recover some sets of coordinates off dick features's corpse. Or off the final transporter that failed to cycle back. Or that the US sitting on their arse for three weeks instead of nuking the dome the instant they were all out would turn out to be a big mistake.

    Or that the US cosying up to the Commonwealth was a bluff to get them to jaunt the Juggernaut into the middle of an enraged Hive, only instead of destroying it the Hive take it over and use it to seed themselves into all the time lines the crew know about... I wasn't entirely convinced by the explanation that they wanted its crew to observe the US strike to let them know about the US's para-time strike capability. Surely the crew would know bloody well about their para-time strike capability from having their homeland glassed less than 2 decades before. I had it in mind that that was simply yet another excuse-for-internal-consumption by the DHS; that they had not fully got to grips with the idea of following the President's orders yet, and decided to give the appearance of complying while setting up one last lash-out at the Commonwealth with very plausible deniability.

    Most gratifying climactic display of nuclear fireworks anyone could hope for, and the descriptions of the Juggernaut's takeoff were superb. The idea of being inside this thing with Thump. Thump. Thump. going on under your arse and each thump is a whole nuke blowing you skyward and you're not dead yet... excellent.

    It didn't worry me about Angie's hair changing colour; she even says at one point "my hair is blue right now", which suggests that she changes it all the time anyway, and even hints that maybe she does indeed change it on the fly so it's possible for it to be green a few minutes later. (I'd be surprised if there aren't things that would let you do that in OTL; plenty of people would like it.) Maybe that wasn't intended, but it works for me anyway.

    Couple of things that jarred:

    • As MSB pointed out, all the German is wrong; it stands out even with my little and uncertain knowledge of German, so it must be pretty bad for someone who speaks it properly.

    • Someone's horrible software has done a shit over a large portion of the text. There are multiple instances of some Hideous Thing arising which repunctuates/recapitalises according to its misconceptions about where the end of a sentence is, especially around close-quotes. So there are a lot of things like this:

    "What?" asked Smith. (Presumed original) "What?" Asked Smith. (Printed) or "No!" snapped Gomez. (?O) "No!" Snapped Gomez. (P)

    That one is distinctly jarring because I first encountered it as something that crops up every other line in shitty fanfics being held up as examples of how not to do it. Because of that association, when I subsequently encounter it elsewhere it's not merely something I'm aware is wrong, it screams "Wrong!" at me.

    More complex examples include:

    "(Other sentences). Unless" - she bit her lip - "you think we'd do better (etc)?" (?O) "(Other sentences). Unless" - She bit her lip - "you think we'd do better (etc)?" (P)

    "When did we set this up?" she asked Brilliana. "I don't remember authorizing this." (?O) "When did we set this up?" She asked Brilliana: "I don't remember authorizing this." (P)

    Angie glanced at the corridor. "Ready to move out!" she called. (?O) Angie glanced at the corridor: "ready to move out!" She called. (P)

    (What is this? The transformations seem to occur in situations where they sometimes might actually be correct, but not always, and you need to understand what the text actually means to resolve the ambiguity, so the machine gets it wrong; but it's a rather odd thing for it to be wanting to do in the first place. Is it Microshaft?)

    The first instance I noticed was on page 232 and the last on page 362; I don't know if that enables you to identify someone who needs to be warned "hey, your software is borking stuff", but it might do...

    Once again, thanks!

    563:

    Super stuff, Charlie, and well worth the wait. Thank you especially for pushing on through much adversity and providing a fine conclusion to the series without doing a Douglas Adams on it. I certainly noticed the Eon/Eternity-ish aspects - and some Forge of God, too - and I was constantly expecting something to turn out to be the seeds of disaster.

    I did like that too! I was kind of dreading a "it all ends in a nuclear fire" ending, or even "many major players get killed", but that didn't happen. There still was a sense of foreboding in the book, so the ending was not obvious. For once something going at least relatively well and there being a hope for the future is nice to read about.

    Or that the US cosying up to the Commonwealth was a bluff to get them to jaunt the Juggernaut into the middle of an enraged Hive, only instead of destroying it the Hive take it over and use it to seed themselves into all the time lines the crew know about... I wasn't entirely convinced by the explanation that they wanted its crew to observe the US strike to let them know about the US's para-time strike capability.

    I thought that the idea was to put the intertimeline ballistic missiles on display. The Gruinmarkt was bombed by jaunting bomber planes, which presumably had crews, but the ballistic missiles are more of a fire-and-forget type of weapon, and jaunting them successfully into an another timeline is probably more prone to error than bombers.

    Most gratifying climactic display of nuclear fireworks anyone could hope for, and the descriptions of the Juggernaut's takeoff were superb. The idea of being inside this thing with Thump. Thump. Thump. going on under your arse and each thump is a whole nuke blowing you skyward and you're not dead yet... excellent.

    Yes! I've liked the Orion drive since I first read about it as a kid and while I understand why it's somewhat hazardous to use in the real world, both physically and politically, having somebody lift off with it in a book was brilliant.

    564:

    "Problem is that H. Beam Piper's Paratime books and Pohl's Coming of the Quantum Cats both run on the notion that proximity in Paratime does equal shared history."

    (a) Doesn't matter, they're different books. And also...

    "Furthermore, if timelines branch in some higher space, why shouldn't daughter timelines be in close proximity?"

    (b)...The "proximity" as observed by someone using the Forerunner jaunting mechanism is not the same thing as the "actual" proximity in terms of the shape of the timeline tree. The mechanism was deliberately engineered to have that property. Using Many-Worlds-Interpretation-based handwavium, since a split is triggered by any quantum choice event and the paths never re-merge, your current timeline is surrounded by an absolute shitload of timelines with no discernible difference; you need to jump past an outrageous number of them just to get to one that's different enough to be worth the bother at all. So the mechanism was made to impose a minimum degree of difference. Being able to jump to a random world and not find that it's full of people just like your mates and they've used the same amount of oil and there's another squad of cops chasing someone who looks just like you is a built-in feature.

    The graph of the connectivity the Forerunner mechanism gives you doesn't map to a tree in any case. It has loops in it. It's a set of connections between points based on their distance apart in some multidimensional cross-section of the tree falling within certain bounds, not a tree walker.

    A tree walker would get lost in any case because time still passes in a time line when you're not visiting it. So by the time you tried to navigate a second time to a world you'd mapped the coordinates of before, that time line would have branched so many times that you'd have an intractable number of choices to try and define an "original" from and say "this is the same one". Most of the time you'd never know the difference, but should the choices include something like "meteorite strike Y/N" and you can't tell which fork leads where until you follow it you would quite likely care quite a lot. By contrast, in the transverse-similarity metric you only ever see the results of N, and the Y choices are an unmistakably distinct set.

    On the same basis you almost certainly don't ever go back to the same time line you started from. But you still find Inspector Morgan waiting for you in the same place for the same reason to bring the same message. Some fish did or did not respond to the angler fish's lure, perhaps, but apart from the fish nobody else gives a shit.

    This also implies that the mechanism has to adapt to circumstances. If it was the fish you were actually going to see you'd be using the same knot as Rita but you'd have a different idea of what made your destination a different time line or not. Perhaps this is why the mechanism (as originally designed) operates via the brain - to incorporate that necessary context awareness. Perhaps this is a limitation of the ARMBAND units that nobody has noticed yet because of their limited deployment and short shelf life. It also makes me wonder what world-walking on acid would do.

    565:

    Using Many-Worlds-Interpretation-based handwavium, since a split is triggered by any quantum choice event and the paths never re-merge, your current timeline is surrounded by an absolute shitload of timelines with no discernible difference

    Some of the conversations with technical people imply that the Empire Games multiverse doesn't work that way. Someone (sorry, quote not on hand) says that timelines with trivial differences just merge, so what you get is a kind of cloudy rope of closely related timelines; the extra flap of a butterfly's wings in one doesn't take it far enough away from its neighbours to break free, and it gets dragged back by some kind of causal cross-talk attraction. Or something.

    It's just occasionally that a quantum change gets magnified fast enough to make a big difference and a new timeline splits off.

    I admit I'm inferring a lot from some very sparse clues, but that is one of the things about good world-building; you get the feeling that there is stuff going on beyond the scene you are looking at, and that this stuff is knowable. One of my favourite examples is from Anathem by Neal Stephenson. A techie is explaining how their version of the Internet reaches consensus, and refers to "reputon glass". You can unpack that single phrase into an entire technology which sounds like it could really be built.

    566: 563 on German - Well maybe. Charlie and I both live in Scotland, and that places us to be well aware of multiple dialects of $language. So I just took it that I was most familiar with a different dialect to they were using (BTW most of my visits to German speaking areas have been to the Mosel, Bavaria, Austria and Sud Tyrol. I'm fairly sure that Brandenburg actually does speak a different dialect now I look).
    567:

    Ha! Found it; p300 pbk. I'd failed to register that sentence. But it doesn't really matter, since Charlie then goes on to say "In a move to tame the untameable, the Forerunners restricted their para-time mechanisms to work in fixed increments across a higher-level graph which could be reliably selected by a secondary mechanism embedded in the visual recognition circuitry of world-walker brains." So basically Charlie's world-building is good enough that I can waffle my way past gaps I forgot based on what I remembered and end up in pretty much the same place. It hangs together just like real science does. Neat.

    568:

    Well, MSB is German, and he pointed it out first; I'm just emphasising his post by pointing out that being German or even being very good at German is not a prerequisite for noticing it.

    569:

    "Anyhow, you all get parallel stuff wrong: you need the right RESONANCE. This is easy peasy for "worlds very much like your own", it gets exponentially harder the more things diverge. It also (this is the important bit) gets exponentially harder for your Minds."

    This is true, but it's a different kettle of fish from the Merchant Princes/Empire Games phenomenon. It's all about information and probability fields and multi-state variables and stuff. As you say, "Shifting actual matter across Planes/Topography of that kind isn't possible. Energy / Information: proven. Matter... no.]"

    The one Charlie's on about is pretty well up towards the other end of the scale, to the extent that you can map the two qualities onto a single axis - it's heavily matter-connected, needs only ~20 ordinary binary bits to make it work, and doesn't transfer information at all except that which is directly encoded in configurations of matter.

    And less useful, when it comes down to it, but it does have a very straightforward and immediate appeal to hominid brains that have evolved to be all about physical configurations of matter.

    513 ""Why don't we have trains and local transport" - the answer isn't "because Reality works that way", now is it?"

    Unfortunately, the closer anyone is to having any kind of influence over the situation, the more they actually do believe that is the answer. They fail to see that that reality is highly contingent and potentially extremely plastic, vastly more amenable to alteration than the kind of reality they think it is.

    570:

    I am no idea what the multinominal one is blithering on about, but don't much care. The parallel world model used in this series isn't entirely physically and mathematically consistent, but that's not the point; SF is allowed to waive such things in a controlled fashion, in order to provide a basis for the story.

    571:

    BTW most of my visits to German speaking areas have been to the Mosel, Bavaria, Austria and Sud Tyrol. I'm fairly sure that Brandenburg actually does speak a different dialect now I look

    Some (most?) southern Germans have (had?) a chip on their shoulder as the northerners looked down on their accents. (Of course the Lederhosen outfits don't help here.) Don't know if was different enough to be called a dialect. From my mother in law who was born (1928) and grew up in the areas near Stuttgart.

    Then there is High German or Hochdeutsch. Which is different in the spoken word and how it is written. Which from my distance and limited knowledge seems to be fading for most Germans. My mother in law put together a booklet 5 generation genealogy in Hochdeutsch while in school in the mid 30s. It was a standard thing country wide as I understand things. Younger Germans I've met in the last decade or so didn't do it.

    On my round2it list is getting some cousins of my wife to translate for us. So far the husband of a second cousin thinks his mother might be able to read it. Now I need to scan it and put it where they can download it.

    I'm open to correction on this as my knowledge in this area is thin at best.

    572: 569 - Ok, MSB is German, but my point is that "correct German" can vary between Lander so my default assumption to German that is different to what I know is that I know a different dialect, not that the character's pronunciation is wrong. 572 - My point exactly.
    573:

    A tree walker would get lost in any case

    Michael Flynn's novella "The Forest of Time" does a rather good job with this.

    574:

    No. I was told about monads, checked them out, didn't see how they would help with more complex situations, and asked one of the designers. I think that I can remember whom, but am not going to post his name.

    What I am pretty sure that you are missing is something that I taught in my courses. Creating a (decent) program consists of a series of mappings: actual problem ##(*) mathematical or logical formulation ## algorithmic and data structural formulation ## program code ## execution. Any serious 'program proving' (which used to be called validation) needs to validate ALL of those mappings, not just one or two of them.

    The more natural a mapping is, the easier it is to understand, and the more feasible and reliable the validation is. This is why (in the early days only) FORTRAN, Algol 68 and (later) Fortran 90 are so superior for most dense matrix algorithms, though a few modern languages are beginning to follow in their path. It is also why those are so BAD for graph-structured algorithms, though few languages are actually good for those.

    Yes, of course someone like me can convert highly non-functional algorithms to Haskell and Monads, even now, but that adds a level of contortion that makes validation extremely hard, and makes the programs very hard to follow or even use (e.g. library interfaces). Worse, the non-functionality is often at the mathematical or logical formulation level, so changing the algorithm and data structures doesn't help :-(

    The same thing applies to object orientation, for problems that aren't organised that way - I was involved in that morass in the 1980s, and the result of forcing non-OO problems onto objects isn't pretty. It also applies to parallel programming.

    It is why there never has been and never will be a universally best programming language.

    (*) ## means 'maps to'.

    575:

    I have no idea how you turn an Alcubierre warp into a time machine...

    You do that by pairing it with a slower than light drive. To make a closed timelike curve (aka Grandfather paradox) with any FTL mechanism whatsoever, you only need to be able to change reference frames (slower than light velocity) and have the FTL mechanism work the same in the new reference frame. This applies to wormholes, warp drives, jump drives, etc... The warp drive passengers never locally go back in time, just as they never locally go faster than light, but an outside observer could record them arriving at a time before they left.

    576:

    Creating a (decent) program consists of a series of mappings: actual problem ##(*) mathematical or logical formulation ## algorithmic and data structural formulation ## program code ## execution. Any serious 'program proving' (which used to be called validation) needs to validate ALL of those mappings, not just one or two of them.

    Ahh. Now this I think I can get my teeth into.

    The trick in Haskell is to find an abstraction which reduces the mapping distance between the logical formulation and the program code. This abstraction is frequently (but not always) monadic, because one source of the distance I mentioned is the difference between "x THEN y" in the logical formulation and in the programming language. Monads let you bring the logical and programming concepts into alignment.

    There is also a strong emphasis in Haskell on composable abstractions. Its just generally assumed that if you can't compose two values to make a new one then you don't have a modular architecture.

    Let me give a concrete example: suppose you have to write a component in a distributed system that talks by multiple protocols to multiple other components. The protocol is defined as a set of asynchronous messages between interacting state machines. The trouble is that the protocol keeps evolving as the application requirements change. The analysts in charge of the logical formulation of the problem think in terms of conversations between the components (e.g. "a sends a message to b, which then sends a query to c with a cookie, waits for the reply from c quoting the cookie, and then sends an update command to d"). However all of these components are communicating via asynchronous messages, so the programmer of "b" needs to send a message to "c". Then the message handler for the reply needs to check some shared table of outstanding cookies to figure out what to do with the reply.

    If this sounds like a nightmare, well I've seen a large mission-critical system that did exactly this. My employer was considering purchasing this system, so I was asked to review the design. I asked the developers to walk me through the processing of a typical use-case. Somewhere around the tenth asynchronous message handler I lost the will to live.

    The fundamental problem was that asynchronous messages are really bad for modularity; the code to handle any particular part of the problem winds up scattered around the system. Even within one component, the code that sends a request has no clear connection with the code that handles the reply. Worse yet, the only way for those two bits of code to communicate is via some mess of shared global state.

    Haskell lets you handle this with continuations. (BTW, I'm aware that call/cc is a Scheme primitive, but its Haskell I'm familiar with). You can construct a monad with a primitive that puts a continuation into a table of message handlers. Once you have this essential abstraction you can go ahead and write code that behaves in a synchronous manner; the code for "b" sends its message to "c" and adds its continuation to a table indexed by the cookie value. When the reply arrives the continuation receives the message contents and the operation continues from the next line of source code.

    So now the structure of the source code matches the structure of the logical problem ("...send a request to c, wait for the reply..."). So verifying that the code is correct becomes a lot easier, as does modifying the code when the requirements change.

    Of course this could be coded in Scheme, or even C++ these days (to my mingled horror and disgust). But I prefer languages with strong static types. Also the nice thing about Haskell is that monads can be combined more-or-less arbitrarily. Call/cc is a magic primitive in Lisp; as far as I know you can't implement it for yourself short of creating a tiny Lisp interpreter with it as a primitive. But in Haskell the Continuation monad is just another library package and callCC is just another function. You can use that, or you can just write the functionality directly into whatever monad you are creating.

    Of course you still need to verify the monad itself, but that isn't a big deal; you are typically looking at a few lines of code, and much of that code has exactly one type-correct implementation. (Did I mention I'm a fan of Hindley-Milner type systems?)

    I find there is an analogy here to coordinate transforms in physics. If you want to do e.g. orbital dynamics then you can work directly with Cartesian position and velocity vectors and use Newton's equations. But that is really hairy. Or you can work with orbital elements, which makes all the maths much easier at the small cost of switching between Cartesian and orbital parameters. Another example is the Laplace Transform being used to analyse dynamic systems on the s-plane instead of working in the time domain. Monads change the basis of your coding in the same kind of way that a coordinate transform changes your analysis of a physics problem.

    This is why (in the early days only) FORTRAN, Algol 68 and (later) Fortran 90 are so superior for most dense matrix algorithms

    I'll happily agree with that. In much the same way, Prolog is particularly good at doing logical inference algorithms. Thing is, you can capture a lot of this by writing a monad. You can do logical inference in Haskell using a List monad or some variant on the same theme.

    As it happens, you can use the continuation monad to create a poor man's concurrency. I've actually used this myself; I had to write a simulator for a work-related thing that would let us explore possible approaches to a company-wide capacity problem. I needed to replay logs that described events in the problem domain, with scenario-specific variations applied to the sequences of events in each log (e.g. something got delayed). I wrote a monad to track the behaviour of the entities being simulated as the events occurred, with a global queue of entity threads sorted by the time of their next event. As with the protocol example above, it let me write the code in a nice sequential way that mirrored the problem domain. I could have done it with explicit concurrency, but the monad was nicer.

    577:

    Re trivially-different timelines merging... as I said, many, many posts earlier.

    And that's not even considering timelines that cannot exist, because we're assuming quantization of timelines.

    578:

    I agree. I had a course in OOPS and GUI* in '94, and while I found OO design interesting, the closer you got to actually writing code, the fuzzier and less useful it became.

    • Which always sounded like the result of someone dropping a raw egg.
    579:

    Congratulations. I don't have to learn another computer language, and in your short discourse, what I see confirms that I consider it utterly an abomination (troutwaxer, please bury it in your story on Ryleh).

    And "the protocols keep changing", as do the requirements? My instant response is that you are trying to create a programming language that resolves the problem of utterly incompetent management who have no idea what they want, and keep changing their (alleged) minds, and your manager failing to do their job and get upper management's buy in on "lots more time, lots more money".

    You got to ten? Around 1986, I wrote an entire database system - I mean the code - in, of all things, compiled BASIC, and it worked. And ran fast. And used function calls. Halfway through, "oops, we do have to have duplicate keys", which was another month or two of coding... but I wrote it neatly. What you're describing is a maintenance and enhancement nightmare.

    Just like I can remember, in the nineties, reading (literally( that java would eliminate null pointer references. And how wonderful OO code was... and every time tomcat crashes, I see 150-200 lines of call stacks.

    What you're describing sounds like my description of 90% of programmers' OO code: they're told to get a clipping of Gojiro's toenail, and they show up with Gojiro, him/herself, with a frame around the toenail.

    It's lousy specs, and lousy design.

    580:

    That's certainly one solution. Since we're talking about story physics, the advantage of having clouds of very similar trees in a similar area is that easter eggs like Angie's hair color can be handwaved away as jumping to similar timelines.

    That said, the handwave I proposed in 323 is simpler: when timelines split many-worlds style, they split perpendicularly in the time direction. That way you can't jaunt from a time where the meteorite hit to the almost identical timeline where the meteorite did not hit, because they no longer align in time. You can, however, jaunt to other timelines that, by sheer chance are more-or-less parallel in time with your own. So long as you assume that jaunting magically links timelines so that they start splitting in parallel, then this works much more simply than a forestwalker algorithm.

    Another way to think of this is that forest-walker type stories tend to fall more towards TV series like Quantum Leap or Sliders, where the point of the series is to get home. If the story depends on precision jaunting among timelines (as it does here), then perhaps it's better to assume that you're jaunting between the same timelines no matter what. One way to think of this is that if you're doing paratime negotiations, jaunting to within a cloud of similar timelines probably isn't good enough. You want to make sure you're having the same conversation with the same person, not similar conversations among similar versions of that person.

    581:

    One way to think of this is that if you're doing paratime negotiations, jaunting to within a cloud of similar timelines probably isn't good enough. You want to make sure you're having the same conversation with the same person, not similar conversations among similar versions of that person.

    In his very first Paratime story H. Beam Piper had a scene where the Paratome Cops were testing Verkan Vall to make certain he was their Verkan Vall, and not one from a close timeline. (And on the way back from a mission he sees one of the close timelines with another Paratime Police HQ.)

    After that story Piper apparently decided not to deal with the problem of multiple paratime-travelling timelines, and for all subsequent stories there is only one Prime timeline with the technology of paratime travel (and thus the need to preserve the Paratime Secret.)

    582:

    every time tomcat crashes, I see 150-200 lines of call stacks.

    I'm using CLion because I prefer to have an IDE, and one thing it does is an incessant stream of commentary to the terminal window it was started from. Often just whining that it took more than a second to open a window or whatever, but every few minutes there's an exception caught by the top level "log it and continue" handler. I'd like to think that the folk at JetBrains know what they're doing, in which case this is normal?

    The happy news is that CLion has integrated clang-tidy so I can spent some happy hours deciding which whining noises I care about, and fixing them. And asking stupid questions on SO about whining that I don't understand (like "why does clang-tidy want me to have 7 constructors if I have a single non-default one?", or even more excitingly "what's the advantage of five lines of stream manipulation then a conversion to std::string over just std::format() straight to a string?" (it kind of feels as though the existence of std::format is the end result of a holy way on the topic of streams vs printf, because format is like printf except that it isn't printf)

    583:

    The fact that almost all languages make a complete pig's ear of asynchronous messages doesn't mean that they HAVE to be cocked up! And you CERTAINLY don't have to cock things up as thoroughly as the X Windowing system did. Smalltalk (which I have never used) didn't.

    The problem about such designs is that they are a directed graph where the direction is both logical and temporal, and that is a thoroughly intractable problem, logically / mathematically as well as programmatically. Forget the details - trying to work out if a structure is valid (e.g. will terminate) is damn-near impossible, even before you get near the actual programming language.

    The killer is that a hell of a lot of problems inherently have that structure, and there's often nothing you can do to get around that. Better programming language support for detecting dynamic loops would help, a bit, but even that wouldn't help with the hard cases.

    584:

    I think Robert Anton Wilson went there with his Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy. Although, since we're talking about RAH, it's hard to be sure. Especially if, like me, you weren't able to finish it in college (sadly, my silliness vector is close to orthogonal to his, so I didn't quite appreciate his greatness appropriately. Or something).

    585:

    You do that by pairing it with a slower than light drive.

    Thanks!

    586:

    they are a directed graph where the direction is both logical and temporal, and that is a thoroughly intractable problem, logically / mathematically as well as programmatically.

    The core problem for me is that you have a fork in execution, so the program naturally flows in two directions "at the same time" (so to speak). Which is slightly hard for people to reason about as well as hard to write down. A bit like an FTL dive, now that I think about it.

    So you get a bunch of code that goes:

    result = OpenThisURL(...) when(result.ok) {do something with the URL} when(result.pending) {do something while you wait}

    I do prefer the languages that say "call this, get a thing. Keep writing code as though the thing is what you want, but also pass the thing over to the code that does what you don't want". Like exceptions, for languages that use those. Or result/optional types, for languages that use those.

    I like the "result.pending" code somewhere you don't have to look at it. This is where "yield" and other keywords come in and I'm still not entirely sure they're a good idea, even though they make the code easier to read... but much harder to reason about (nested yields!)

    OTOH event loops are another popular choice. But I have seen a 30k line event loop and that was both impossible to understand and impossible to refactor (none knew what it did, and none who challenged it ever returned).

    Shutting down a program that has a collection of active async handlers floating round can be a nightmare, if you want to do so politely. I haven't seen a good implementation of "tell all the async handlers to clean up" yet.

    587:

    "You do that by pairing it with a slower than light drive. To make a closed timelike curve (aka Grandfather paradox) with any FTL mechanism whatsoever, you only need to be able to change reference frames (slower than light velocity) and have the FTL mechanism work the same in the new reference frame. This applies to wormholes, warp drives, jump drives, etc... "

    Yes. "any FTL mechanism whatsoever".

    It's a matter of the Minkowskian geometrical representation of space-time the equations of Special Relativity imply. The paradox doesn't depend at all on the means/technology used to do FTL.

    Analogies for this are a bit hard to come up with, but I kind of like the idea of traveling from, say, Amsterdam to Geneva and asking what the difference in altitude is. Doesn't matter what the means of transportation is or the path you take, the important matter is the topography of the Earth. So too is it with SR space-time.

    588:

    I'd suggest stepping carefully on this one. I'm not a physicist, obviously. However, the problem with warp drives is that they're not exactly FTL. They change distances until the distance can be traveled STL. The problem, as I understand that, is that distance is supposed to be more-or-less invariant in SR, and all the SR fun comes in when you talk about distance/time, or distance/time^2 (and maybe time^3, but I don't know what a SR jerk looks like). That's why I'm not sure how you do time travel with warp. I suppose traversable wormholes have analogous problems, actually...

    ...Oh, and if you were about to turn on a scripted memory dump, we have been down this particular rabbit hole before. Probably worth thinking about whether there's anything new to add to the script and putting that part first, so as to properly showcase your knowledge.

    589:

    Just finished the book -- enjoyed it and the series!

    I'm curious about Liz's incredulity that the Dutch ever had an empire. Wasn't the Dutch Empire was largely built before timeline 3 diverged from our own? (I thought in fact it peaked in 1688, and the divergence doesn't happen until 1745.) I take it Liz is taught a highly edited version of history, but why would either the Bourbons or the Hanovers want information about Dutch colonialism suppressed?

    590:

    No Kingdom of the Netherlands, for a start; Dutch East India completely kaput some time before that didn't happen, ie. later half of 18th century; but the Netherlands still firmly established as a persistent pain in the arse to the Catholic powers, a Protestant upstart that would not shut up and conform, but was determined to secure its independent existence and expand its area of influence and was doing pretty well considering the odds. And (sometimes, at least) getting some help from that other Protestant upstart on the other side of the North Sea, who they'd shared a nob with to be their Protestant king and boot out the Catholic sympathiser in a move the French empire reversed. So I can well imagine Elizabeth's - and everyone else's - 21st-century history textbooks of the French empire portraying the Netherlands as something like "an unimportant bug we squashed two and a half centuries back" and mostly leaving it at that.

    591:

    "What you're describing sounds like my description of 90% of programmers' OO code: they're told to get a clipping of Gojiro's toenail, and they show up with Gojiro, him/herself, with a frame around the toenail."

    And then send him to your fucking browser, along with The Iron Man, one of the Children of the Gods, Leviathan-FUCKUP, a couple of random passing brachiosauruses, and the Watcher in the Water, all crumpled into a ball in some higher set of dimensions and the wrapping fastened up with what looks suspiciously like one of Cthulhu's spare tentacles. Whereupon the whole mess does the call stack conga fifty levels deep and then throws an exception, and tools to help untangle the code that's actually being used from the 20 megabytes of crud are nonexistent.

    592:

    Makes sense for the Bourbons. I kinda feel the Hanovers would have a different view.

    593:

    I think we're really talking about different approaches to the problem of how to derive a tractable and useful abstraction of the same intractable fundamental topology. Yours is about reducing it to a simplified collection of major nodes, connected by branches which represent bundled complexity you don't need to differentiate, which you can map by walking down the road and making notes like "2nd left, 3rd right..." etc. You can then do the equivalent of drawing your notes out as a map on paper which you can look at and put your finger on a particular road (= bundle of undifferentiated complexity: a road is a line on a map but a broad ribbon on the ground) and say "I want to jaunt to there", (ping). Or convert the line of the road on the map grid to a vector which you can turn into binary and encode as a knot. ("Road" in this map is of course "branch of a tree that started off perpendicular to the branch it sprang from" in your description.)

    (OK, the arrangement of lines is in three dimensions (maybe more), but imagining it flattened down to two and drawn on paper is easier and doesn't change the appropriateness of the image.)

    Mine is about not bothering to plot out roads, but instead looking at the (unsimplified) topology "edge-on" - ie. what would be "edge-on" in terms of the flattened map representation, but without flattening it, so you get a two-dimensional edge... right? - and taking a photo through a filter that selects the wavelengths emitted by the same associations of complexity that your system maps like roads, like a satellite photo filtered for those bits of the IR spectrum that show you what plants are growing where. This gives you a map of possible destinations represented as coloured blobs rather than as lines, and you can put your finger on a blob and say "I want to jaunt there" (ping), etc.

    They both work, given the problem as set, and produce indistinguishable results in use.

    Maybe I find my representation more natural because it's more directly related to what the jaunting mechanism's user interface is actually doing; we are calling the destinations "time lines" because it's a standard term for alternate histories, but from the user's point of view the destinations are not lines, they're blobs: they have a distinct "there" as in "I want to jaunt there" which refers to a specific place - a set of coordinates with the time value set to "now", so the dimensional extent that puts the "line" in "time line" is flattened.

    I'm also taking the view that huge complex data structures may well be intractable computationally, because you have to do things one step at a time and they're so bloody big, but are not necessarily intractable mathematically, in the sense that you can derive a fixed set of squiggles which encapsulates all possible states at once - even if it is far too large or complex a set of squiggles to actually do anything with, it may not now be too overwhelming to get a computer to do something with it. So just as while looking at a raw sample of audio and trying to work out what frequencies are in it by looking at the wiggles going up and down is intractable, but if you shift it from the time domain to the frequency domain with a Fourier transform the frequencies stand out immediately as clear spikes, I'm imagining you can run a Gobero transform on a tree of timelines to shift it from the time domain to the similarity domain, and get timelines showing up as clear spikes along the what-shit-is-going-down-here axis. Or the Forerunners knew how to do this, at least.

    Trouble is I'm not merely answering the problem as set, I'm quibbling with it too :) I don't buy the "insufficiently differentiated time lines re-merge" aspect. Because, as LAvery said, in standard Many Worlds, they don't. They may, however, remain indistinguishable for billions of years. Somewhere deep in the mantle there is one unstable nucleus the fewer and one helium atom the more and it's a tiny tiny tiny tiny bit hotter; who gives a shit? And that's a big split. So the number of these things is beyond stupid. A lot of people find it hard to get their head round having to have this stupid number of things, but I don't mind it too much.

    So I'm taking Charlie's "re-merge" line as being not literally true, but more as a description of what "they don't re-merge but they do take forever to become noticeably different" looks like when you view the thing from an ordinary distance. A bit like Newtonian physics works for all ordinary things and you have to get really extreme to notice the relativistic difference. This is a sensible narrative abbreviation, because otherwise it opens up a relativity-sized zoo of potential weirdnesses that would require many rather irrelevant and potentially tedious pages to make it clear that the story setting is "Newtonian" and none of those weirdnesses apply. So I'm building a jaunt navigation system that works for "it's simplified" as well as for "it's literal" :)

    594:

    There was a great deal of kiss 'em one minute and kick 'em the next in the relations between Britain and the Netherlands, depending on whether the matter at hand was something to do with local politics and Protestantism, or with trade and empire. The French invasion and exile of the British monarchy shut down all the "kiss 'em" causes but if anything emphasised the "kick 'em" ones, so (per the appendix to Dark State) the British in America regarded the Dutch as a hostile rival empire, and no longer had a reason to alternate between that view and a more sympathetic one.

    Mind you I find a few pages later on that Charlie says the Dutch still had a bit of empire in Africa in 1950. So... I don't bloody know.

    595:

    Maybe it's "just my reading", but I'm not sure that Hanover (house of) were ever rulers in Timeline 3.

    596:

    Whitroth @ 580:

    in your short discourse, what I see confirms that I consider [Haskell] utterly an abomination

    Shrug. Your loss.

    And "the protocols keep changing", as do the requirements? My instant response is that you are trying to create a programming language that resolves the problem of utterly incompetent management

    Not even managers have a crystal ball. The system in question was for a market with a small number of very big customers. It was written to a spec from the first customer, then sold to subsequent customers. Each customer (us included) had their own spec, which meant adding new capabilities for each customer. This took place over about 15 years during which the industry had evolved substantially too. I don't see how a more competent management could have avoided this.

    Requirements always evolve after development has started. Anything which makes this cheaper and faster to cope with is a win in my book.

    Elderly Cynic @ 584:

    The fact that almost all languages make a complete pig's ear of asynchronous messages doesn't mean that they HAVE to be cocked up!

    That was my point, I think; while the monad I've described doesn't solve the entire problem (as you point out, the general case is pretty intractable) it does make life a hell of a lot better. BTW the same approach works well for GUIs, which is where I'm using it. The underlying shape of the problem is similar: you get asynchronous events from the user (in my case, events from the underlying widget library) and you have to present a stateful response.

    Also, using continuations to cope with asynchronous events is just one example of the flexibility of monads. The cool thing about Haskell is that, because the underlying model is of pure computation, you can overlay your own concept of sequencing or whatever without having to fight the one built into the language.

    I believe that Lisp/Scheme macros can be used to do some similar kinds of things, but as I say, I like having the H-M type system.

    Moz @ 587: I do prefer the languages that say "call this, get a thing. Keep writing code as though the thing is what you want, but also pass the thing over to the code that does what you don't want". Like exceptions, for languages that use those. Or result/optional types, for languages that use those.

    This is the cool thing with Haskell: you can build all this stuff for yourself, and make it work the way you need it to, instead of being stuck with what the language designer thought you ought to have.

    Monads are a unifying abstraction, in exactly the same way that Maxwell's equations unified electricity and magnetism, or the way Newton's laws of motion unified physics on Earth with physics in the solar system. Option types, exceptions, logic programming, non-determinism, concurrency, asynchronous events... they can all be described as monads.

    I like the "result.pending" code somewhere you don't have to look at it. This is where "yield" and other keywords come in and I'm still not entirely sure they're a good idea, even though they make the code easier to read... but much harder to reason about (nested yields!)

    "yield" in languages like Python is actually a neutered version of continuations. (I don't know why Guido didn't just provide callCC directly; maybe it was just too difficult to implement).

    What callCC gives you is a "continuation". This is normally defined as "a value that represents the rest of the computation", which is kind of obscure. What it means is that you get the entire state of the current thread (call stack, local variables etc), packaged up in a box (I'm carefully not saying "object"). That box has exactly one operation, which is "continue (arg)". The argument to "continue" is some data you want to pass into the continuation, such as the contents of an asynchronous message that the original thread is waiting for.

    You can write "yield" with this. Unlike the built-in "yield" of Python, this doesn't just take some data from the thread, it passes some other data back in return. It also gives you the continuation as a value, just like any other. Because Haskell is a pure language calling "continue" doesn't modify the continuation, it creates a new continuation representing the thread one step further on. So you can call "continue" multiple times with different data if you want (one way of doing non-determinism).

    Shutting down a program that has a collection of active async handlers floating round can be a nightmare, if you want to do so politely. I haven't seen a good implementation of "tell all the async handlers to clean up" yet.

    With continuations you can make the parameter to "continue" a union of data, exception value, or whatever else you want. The current state of each async handler is represented as a continuation. You will be keeping these continuations in a table so that incoming messages can be passed into to the right continuation. You can write the "yield" function to invoke local clean-up code if the value passed back is "shutdown-cleanly", and then when your program needs to shut down it just calls each continuation in the table with that flag value.

    597:

    "in fact the "same height" is actually "same gravitational potential energy""

    I think I just automatically assumed that without thinking. I once spent a while trying to think up a warp drive physics model solid enough to be plugged into a narrative and written around, and your warp space was a map of a network of connections between gravitational equipotential points corresponding to the equipotential surfaces outside warp at the same potential you went in at, since conservation dictated that you could only come out at the same level you went in. So I'm naturally primed to think height = GPE in this sort of context :)

    Interesting to think about the gate from TL4 to the black hole TL; what happens to the other side of it as the black hole gains mass? If it was in orbit it would adjust its orbit automatically, but it isn't. I suppose the gate itself is massless, and just comes out at the right height as part of its nature, but there's that gantry sticking out of it (or there was)... I suppose over time people crossing over to it would start feeling really heavy and really cold, and eventually it would break off.

    598:

    Pigeon, Moz - I'd taken both "sides" of the transfer to be at the same coordinates (to centimetric accuracy) in a 3 dimensional whole earth model (eg WGS84 spheroid) even if someone had dug a 60 feet deep hole on your target side (or built a similar height embankment on your origin side).

    599:

    And of course the WGS84 spheroid is only an approximation to the true geoid.

    600:

    Ok, but if you start at (Lat, Long, Ht) given a specific planetary geology you finish the jaunt at the same coordinates. Any gap between Ht and local surface on the target side of the jaunt is then your problem, not the jaunt's.

    601:

    No, that's not right. Special relativity is pretty simple, and does not include ANY kind of space-time manipulation. It is compatible with a certain amount of FTL, provided that the FTL has nothing to do with motion. ANY form of FTL that has anything to do with motion or space-time manipulation is solidly GR and, in GR, there is no way to distinguish those. Indeed, in GR, the speed of light in vacuo isn't fixed :-)

    602:

    20 megabytes? I wish. Modern ones are more like 20 gigabytes of crud, given that a lot of the code is created dynamically, and the data are equally important.

    In the 1970s, before things has got this insane, I blew up REDUCE (an algebraic package), which attempted a traceback and crashed, so its implementation language LISP attempted a traceback and crashed, so its implementation language BCPL attempted a traceback and crashed, so I got a machine-code dump. No, I didn't attempt to use it to find what I needed to change.

    As you say, modern systems are often an order of magnitude worse.

    603:

    I'd suggest stepping carefully on this one. I'm not a physicist, obviously. However, the problem with warp drives is that they're not exactly FTL. They change distances until the distance can be traveled STL.

    No. The paradox arises if strictly slower than light observers (ones who never themselves go FTL) can use some means to exchange messages faster than c, and that method does not give a way to determine an "absolute" speed. How the observers exchange messages doesn't matter; if warp drives are possible, they could (for example) send them via warp drive equipped carrier pigeons. What the carrier pigeons experience and whether they think they went FTL is irrelevant; all that matters is that (a) the original observers are moving (slower than light!) relative to one another, (b) from their perspectives the messages are FTL, and (c) there's no way to distinguish which observer is "at rest" and which is "moving". If (a)-(c) all hold, then the two slower than light observers can conspire to send messages backwards in time to their past selves.

    (a) is demonstrably possible to arrange in our universe. So in order to avoid causality violation, one must give up either FTL communication (b) or the principle of relativity (c). Or, invent some other way to prevent paradoxes, like the branching universes discussed elsewhere in this thread.

    (This problem is well known in the literature, and papers about warp drives or wormholes explicitly acknowledge the potential for "closed timelike curves" as being an issue.)

    604:

    Sorry, but I haven't lost anything.

    And it is management. Late nineties, I worked for a subcontractor for the company that sold the City of Chicago a 911 system. Oh, and once they'd sold the dog-and-pony show, then they had to write it so that it worked. (True story). Then, I understood that they sold it to other cities, who had different requirements.

    After a couple or so of this, if it were me, I'd have a complete spec review, to find out what was the same for all instances, and what changed. Then those were separate modules of functions... and you write those for each new sale. Or for someone's upgrade. That's the way code's supposed to be written, not add more exceptions and call in more crap, leaving unused cruft in the code forever.

    605:

    I am pretty sure that the paradox arises only if the messages are fast enough, where that depends on the relative speeds of the observers. If you know of a competent reference that proves otherwise, please tell me, but none of the relativists I have asked have been able to. "Competent" means working directly from the SR equations, not that damn light cone analogy.

    For example, in the limiting case of none of the observers moving relatively to one another, even instantaneous messages cannot create a causality violation.

    606:

    I am pretty sure that the paradox arises only if the messages are fast enough, where that depends on the relative speeds of the observers.

    True, but for any FTL message speed there's a slower than light observer speed that can cause a paradox (except, as you correctly pointed out, in the limiting case where the observers are all at rest relative to one another). The exact calculation is done on Wikipedia's Tachyonic Antitelephone page.

    607:

    The Hanovers had other fish to fry.

    If anything the most fantastical element of the story is a single British imperial dynasty surviving over three hundred years. (Historically, the House of Hanover dead-ended in 1837-ish, with the death of William IV, after which Queen Victoria marked the start of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who changed their name to Windsor during the first world war. So the Hanovers ran from 1689 to 1837, and the Windsors kinda-sorta from 1837-2021 and counting. Both of which are unusually long for a British monarchical dynasty.

    608:

    Okay, here we go.

    Per the tachyonic antitelephone reference, your proof is:

    Tolman used the following variation of Einstein's thought experiment:[1][4] Imagine a distance with endpoints A and B. Let a signal be sent from A propagating with velocity a towards B. All of this is measured in an inertial frame where the endpoints are at rest. The arrival at B is given by:

    Δ t = t 1 − t 0 = (B − A)/ a .

    Unfortunately, this proves my point, because the warp is not dinking around with velocity a, it's messing with distance B-A.

    These examples assume B-A is constant. Warps mess with distance, not velocity, and that's why this doesn't work.

    As a mundane example, you and I both set out to go next door. I walk next door (a distance of a few meters), while you hop in a helicopter and circumnavigate the city. When you land, you claim that I traveled in time, because I beat you. Instead, I took a different route.

    That's the problem with warps and wormholes: they change the distance traveled.

    I'd also point out that you may be going backwards in imaginary time, if you look at the denominator on the lorentz-transformed equation and assume superluminal speed. Communicating from imaginary time to real time is a neat trick in itself.

    609:

    All distances and times are as measured by the slower than light observers (that's what the "as measured in an inertial frame whose endpoints are at rest" means). How the warp drive works doesn't matter, unless it permanently alters the distance for everybody, including the slower than light observers. That's not the way the usual warp drive is envisioned as working.

    610:

    I was considering GR, and a glance at the light cone hit me. The problem with this "it can't possibly work because time travel" is... Consider A and B, both moving slower than light. A fires up their ansible, and sends a message to B. B gets it... inside the light cone. B now responds with their ansible.. and A receives it, again inside the light cone, and that's after they sent it,

    Whether you could sent an ansible signal while moving FTL is questionable. Actually, I hadn't said this explicitly, but in my novel you can't. You both have to be stl.

    No paradice.

    611:

    That is NOT a proof of a causality breach; I did slightly more thorough calculations and convinced myself that it couldn't be made into one. Yes, without an exclusion principle (i.e. that two frames cannot both use FTL if they are too 'close'), it can be, but such a principle is no more implausible than much of modern physics. I posted the exact restriction needed on this blog a while back, but now forget what it was.

    It's irrelevant what delusions other frames have; a causality breach requires a sequence of messages to arrive at the original sender before the first message was sent.

    The claim that FTL necessarily breaches causality is a dogma of fanatical relativists and, as far as I can tell, is bullshit.

    612:

    Speaking of the Hanovers, I wonder what will become of Liz Hanover. She seems like a natural policitian, and IIRC even asked whether she would be allowed to participate in politics and was assured she would be. But in practice the party would be crazy to let her anywhere near the levers of power, at least not for a long long time, lest she turn out to be a Trojan horse. Maybe they'd let her sit on a back bench for a while, but that doesn't seem like her style.

    So what will she do? She's smart, photogenic, and can turn a good phrase (as evidenced in her speech on arrival in the Commonwealth). My guess is that in the short term she'll become some kind of political commentator or journalist. In the long term... once her democratic bona fides are firmly established perhaps she'll enter politics after all. It'd be incredibly ironic if some day she were to become First Woman...

    613:

    That is NOT a proof of a causality breach; I did slightly more thorough calculations and convinced myself that it couldn't be made into one. Yes, without an exclusion principle (i.e. that two frames cannot both use FTL if they are too 'close'), it can be, but such a principle is no more implausible than much of modern physics.

    I don't think such an exclusion principle can be enforced (at least not and still have practical two-way communication). You could try to say the observers have to be at rest relative to one another to communicate FTL, but that won't work: Alice can send FTL to Bob who's at rest relative to her, who then hands the message to Charlie who's passing at .99c, so effectively Alice has communicated FTL with Charlie. I think any other restriction could be worked around too, except ones that are so severe that they make round trip FTL impossible (e.g. you can only send FTL in one direction). One way FTL doesn't lead to causality problems, but it's also unnecessary -- time dilation can get you one way travel with slower than light speeds.

    614:

    Right. That was where I started - I couldn't make sense of the claim that FTL necessarily broke causality. But I went back to the original formula, because light cone arguments are NOT definitive. However, in light cone terms, the exclusion principles I referred to have the function of ensuring that messages are transmitted only within the light cone.

    615:

    Consider A and B, both moving slower than light. A fires up their ansible, and sends a message to B. B gets it... inside the light cone. B now responds with their ansible.. and A receives it, again inside the light cone, and that's after they sent it,

    There is no "the" light cone, there's one associated to each event, and you have to specify the event (the "point" of the light cone).

    If you mean that the event "B receives A's message" is inside the light cone of the event "A sends the message" then by definition that means the message was slower than light according to both A and B.

    Time dilation is symmetric:

    Given a certain frame of reference, and the "stationary" observer described earlier, if a second observer accompanied the "moving" clock, each of the observers would perceive the other's clock as ticking at a slower rate than their own local clock, due to them both perceiving the other to be the one that is in motion relative to their own stationary frame of reference. Wikipedia

    The really strange thing about time dilation is that it is symmetrical: if you and I have relative motion, then I see your clock to be running slow (with respect to my frame), and you see mine to be running slow. UNSW Physics

    Given that, and given instantaneous communication (an ansible), then the ability to relay a message backwards in time via a third party who is moving (and hence time dilated) relative to you is obvious: it's an immediate consequence of the relativity of simultaneity.

    If the communication isn't "instantaneous" but merely "very very fast" then you'll need a compatriot who is moving relative to you at some appropriate slower than light velocity. This is at least theoretically possible for any slower than light velocity you choose.

    [[ html fix - mod ]]

    616:

    And I guess before this spirals out of control again: you can have both FTL and causality, you just have to give up on relativity. And that's fine! The principle of relativity is not logically inevitable. But if you're writing SF, you should darn well know the science, and know what you're doing. If your FTL device doesn't follow relativity, then there are consequences: e.g. the ansible will work slightly differently on Earth than it does on Mars (since they are in relative motion). Ansibles may be used as speedometers. Perhaps to perform an FTL jump you must be at rest relative some specific preferred background frame. Etc, etc...

    617:

    Again, you're wrong. Consider a beam of light going from A to B, and bouncing, and returning to A. Simply by doing that... they are in the same frame of reference. As the helicopter analogy, there is no back in time.

    For that matter, given that time seems to work the same in either direction, it proves my point.

    618:

    Probably expect a US-Chinese codominion like Pournelle's US/USSR alliance, with the US and China both deciding authoritarian capitalism is the way to go.

    I can imagine the US/China deciding to use propaganda calling the commonwealth racist/antisemitic for not letting blackrock/the communist party of china own everything. Expect lots of US propaganda comparing the Commonwealth to the third reich.

    Even fits with it being a female democrat who just got successfully reelected bc she navigated the crises well enough.

    619:

    I'll point out another silly idea, for how universes split in paratime.

    That idea is that something goes FTL within a universe and induces a causality split. The two timelines split: One continues on dimension t, the other on dimension -it in relation. The -it dimension endures another FTL-induced causality split. The daughter timelines are now -it and -1t^2. Another causality split, and the four progeny are on timelines t, -it, -t^2, and -it^3. Split again, and we've got t, -it, it^2, -it^3, and t^4.

    This might be how you get a paratime where uninhabited timelines end up in paralleling inhabited ones. What's causing the causality breaches? I don't know. Maybe they're being caused by black holes emitting reality breaches, or something, and changes accumulate on timelines, rather than changes causing timeline splits.

    Anyway, multiple time dimensions look like complex numbers, since you can't necessarily get there from here. That's the point of this bit of silliness.

    Anyway, this has been daffy pseudoscience part carrot 12 twinkle.

    620:

    The Commonwealth has full access to all the public literature on [propaganda] in the alt-USA timeline, including the Russian material(some interesting), and with some effort could acquire some of the classified material. With some focus and resources they would be a formidable adversary. Though lacking equivalent computational propaganda resources due to (narrowing) tech disparities, they probably could/would do OK, and effective retaliatory influence ops (fueled by anger, including "remember the coup") would not be out of the question. That timeline's USA, like ours, has seriously exploitable fault lines and related fragilities. (China, too.)

    621:

    Probably expect a US-Chinese codominion like Pournelle's US/USSR alliance, with the US and China both deciding authoritarian capitalism is the way to go.

    I can imagine the US/China deciding to use propaganda calling the commonwealth racist/antisemitic for not letting blackrock/the communist party of china own everything.

    I'm not so sure about that. The Commonwealth and ~USA are virtually neighbors, so they have a strong incentive to get along, particularly now that both have demonstrated paratime nuclear strike capabilities. It's not clear whether ~China has ARMBAND yet; if not then inevitably they will acquire it, but when they do their interests will likely focus on the neighbors in other timelines.

    Which raises an interesting question: how stable are things in TL2? The ~USA possessed (at least for some period of time) a monopoly on ARMBAND, which has huge strategic implications. Even rumors of world-walkers were enough to spark the nuclear war between ~India and ~Pakistan. How has ~USA managed to avoid a similar war with ~China and ~Russia? What guarantees were they able to give that they wouldn't use ARMBAND for a first strike? Did they give away the technology? If so there's been no hint of it in the books.

    622:

    Again, you're wrong. Consider a beam of light going from A to B, and bouncing, and returning to A. Simply by doing that... they are in the same frame of reference.

    In relativity a "frame of reference" is a set of observers at rest with respect to one another. It's really worth your while to learn at least special relativity if you want to speculate about FTL. There are some good online resources, like Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics book.

    Myself, I learned relativity by taking a course on General Relativity on my way to a Ph.D. in mathematics. That was many years ago, so I don't claim to be an expert, but I do remember the fundamentals (like "events", "frames of reference", and "light cones").

    623:

    Yes, Smalltalk didn’t screw everything up. By being properly, fully, object oriented and not fudging things (cough, java/c++/c#/ruby/etc/etc) it works very, very, well. In the old days of 40 years ago when I started using it, it was a system that required much better computers than most people could get - it was designed that way since the entire project was intended to work out some things we could do if computers got faster. This was 1980 remember. We had to make our own CPUs for goodness sake. By the mid 80s we were able to get early ARM machines with a staggering 4MB of ram and that really showed that Smalltalk was practical outside the ivory towers of Page Mill Rd. Since then it has got faster and better as a system without the language having to change at all. That, I would claim, is good initial design. By contrast c++ has become staggeringly complex, java has warped the minds of too many victims and c#.. well. And whilst a modern Smalltalk working development image is perhaps 60MB, that includes all the tools, all the libraries, all the source code, etc. I think some cellphone cameras make ‘image files’ bigger than that. It’s not the same world where 1MB of ram was an expensive business proposition. Those new Apple laptops announced yesterday are, for example about one million times faster than the ARM1 machine mentioned above. And quite a lot cheaper, even ignoring inflation over 35 years. OOP anecdote - a long time ago at a tech con somebody was announcing their ‘new object oriented language ‘. It didn’t send messages, it didn’t do metaclasses, it didn’t have garbage collection - but as the speaker said “well, who is to say what OOP really is?” At which point my friend Alan Kay stood up and pointed out that he invented the term and that this stuff was definitely not what he had in mind.

    624:

    Was thinking more of it being for domestic consumption to keep the US more economically conservative+on board with the idea of a paratime cold war. Think like various movement conservative talking points about individualism, particular definitions of "freedom", individual vs collective talking points to name a few.

    I honestly hadn't considered the idea of attempts to try subverting the commonwealth by propaganda, though.

    625:

    "The principle of relativity is not logically inevitable."

    Perhaps not a priori, but as Einstein developed special relativity, the principle follows from the observed independence of physical laws and the speed of light from the inertial reference frame in which the observations are made. To get around the principle in the SR sense, I suppose you'd have to come up with a different theory that accommodated the observations but led to different results in some cases (temporal ordering of events being the case of interest here).

    I don't think anyone has done that yet.

    626:

    Here are a couple of other solutions to the problem of having Special Relativity and FTL in the same universe.

  • It's not a universe, it's an infinite world paratime. Paradoxes split timelines. If you're feeling stabby, you can choose to live in the Universe of Your Dead Grandmother, but you can't commit suicide by paradox.

  • You the author grind out the equations such as the ones in the tachyonic antitelephone, and solve for time, especially for duration. If there's an i somewhere in the answer, the event is unobservable and therefore can't cause a paradox. How do you capture a signal that lasted 60i seconds on your real timeline?

  • This creates a form of auto-censor that looks like causality. FTL is possible, but Carli's frantic ansible signaling to get Alice to break his vow of causality with Lady Bob simply goes unobserved by Alice and Bob. Just due to relativity plus FTL, there's a lot of distortion. Things appear to slip into unseeable imaginary time, due relative causality breaking. This serves to prevent paradoxes, as the only things that can be seen are not breaking causality because they have a real duration relative to the observer. Is this what EC was referring too?

    627:

    I am afraid that erturs is doubly wrong.

    Firstly, SPECIAL relativity IS inevitable given Newtonian mechanics and the observed fact that the speed of light is constant in all frames. There is no other solution but the Lorentz transformations. That's exactly like the inevitability of the inverse square law from the observations made by Brahe, Kepler and Newton. The same does NOT apply to general relativity, and most certainly not to the specific formula that is regarded as Holy Writ (and for which there is still no valid(*) and convincing evidence).

    Secondly, the 'proof' that you can have only two of relativity, causality and FTL depends on making the assumption that the UNIVERSE does not have an appropriate exclusion principle. There is no good evidence either for or against the existence of such a principle, though we do know that such principles exist. However, there is essentially difference between that and assuming that there are finite event horizons.

    To Heteromeles (#626): no, it wasn't. But there are physicists who believe that something a bit like that is why quantum effects cannot be scaled up into usable FTL.

    (*) Every single piece of evidence that Einstein's formula is the correct one (i.e. the theory extends to very high space-time curvatures) is based on assuming part or all of general relativity! Physicists condemn many of the social scientists for doing just that, but there is a parable about a mote and beam that is relevant ....

    628:

    A glaring oddity in the series has somehow only just prompted me to ask about it.

    Why on earth (whichever version) do the Commonwealth extract Elizabeth by such an elaborate and risky method? The "need for speed" does not explain it. It takes them weeks/months to get all the bits set up - certainly a good length of time elapses between them first sounding Elizabeth out and the actual extraction taking place - and while they are indeed in a tearing hurry to get her back when they do do it, that is because the shit chooses that moment to hit the fan back home, which event they didn't have a date for in advance when they began to set the operation up.

    They aren't limited to the original TL3-TL1-TL2 and back again route any more, and haven't been for years. They have now mapped enough uninhabited timelines to begin to consider them disposable under sufficient need. All they need to do is use one of those to send an airship over and have it hang around where Berlin isn't. They have plenty of time to ferry over anything they need to set up some kind of base camp to look after the airship with while it's waiting (wood-gas reinflation apparatus, even, perhaps) and to wait out bad weather if necessary once Elizabeth comes across; the limiting factor is still how long it takes for her to install herself at the finishing school. It's not without risks and uncertainties, but they are far less serious and far more predictable than those of the route they do take (even if that hadn't gone wrong).

    I have also omitted to mention how pleased I was with Rita's character development in Invisible Sun. I find her a far more relatable character now that she's able to get beyond just being tharn all the time and start getting her own ideas about what to do.

    629:

    Firstly, SPECIAL relativity IS inevitable given Newtonian mechanics and the observed fact that the speed of light is constant in all frames. There is no other solution but the Lorentz transformations.

    I wasn't wrong. I said that the (Galilean) principle of relativity is not logically inevitable. Neither are the laws of Newtonian mechanics. One can imagine some form of FTL that violates them. I think it highly unlikely, but it is logically possible. (We know that Newtonian mechanics is only an approximation, after all...)

    Secondly, the 'proof' that you can have only two of relativity, causality and FTL depends on making the assumption that the UNIVERSE does not have an appropriate exclusion principle.

    No, it depends on exactly what you mean by "causality". It appears to be used in two different senses:

    (1) Temporal causality: Causes always must precede effects. (2) Paradox-free causality: It is impossible to create a closed timelike loop (such as sending a signal to your own self in the past).

    FTL communication clearly and inevitably violates temporal causality in our (relativistic) universe. Given any FTL signal there is a frame of reference in which the cause ("the signal is transmitted") comes later in time than the effect ("the signal is received"). I think you know this, but readers who doubt it may see an example starting at page 108 of Taylor and Wheeler.

    Whether paradox-free FTL is possible is another question. One way to achieve it is to require that all FTL travel must be forward in time in some specific frame of reference (typically one in which the Earth is approximately at rest). Then clearly there can be no loops and no paradoxes in that frame of reference, and hence in any frame of reference. This is the solution implicitly adopted by most SF. It violates (Galilean) relativity by introducing a preferred frame of reference, and the full implications of this are typically not explored in SF.

    Other solutions are clearly available, and I alluded to this earlier in the thread -- any of the usual methods of avoiding time travel paradoxes, for example.

    What isn't reasonable is to pretend the problem of avoiding paradox with FTL doesn't exist. To be clear, I'm not accusing you (EC) of doing that: you seem to have thought about the issue.

    630:

    My point was the mathematical one: given the observations / assumptions I referred to, there is a single mathematical answer that fulfils them. There are other formulations, but they are necessarily equivalent. I agree that, if there were a flaw in any of the observations or assumptions, the result would not follow.

    I have never heard of the first being referred to as causality; yes, it obviously breaks that, but it should say "the cause APPARENTLY comes after the effect". Even without FTL, you already have observers disagreeing on the order of events.

    However, in the latter case, you don't need a preferred frame; that is a possible solution, to be sure, but it's incompatible with even special relativity. My calculations were all on the basis of treating special relativity as inviolate, and it STILL allows FTL communications (NOT motion), but does need an exclusion principle.

    631:

    Pigeon @ 628: Why on earth (whichever version) do the Commonwealth extract Elizabeth by such an elaborate and risky method?

    See here starting at post 14. Also I suspect that tasking an airship to pick them up would have drawn too much bureaucratic attention for what was essentially a rogue operation by Brilliana.

    632:

    I've been diving into airships for a project I've been working on. While the idea of dragging an airship to an uninhabited timeline to extract someone has The Rule of Cool going for it...practically, if we're talking about a transatlantic extraction, we're talking about using the Graf Zeppelin or, yes, the Hindenburg in an undeveloped wilderness. I'm picking on those two because they're the two that completed transatlantic flights.

    Even attempts to use airships to log forests didn't fare well, to the point where "balloondoggle" was coined. The infrastructure for launching and landing an 800'-ish long airship is nontrivial. You need lots of people on the ground handling ropes, something to moor the sucker, and a lot of hydrogen gas in tanks. Building the entire system in secret, worldwalking it, shipping it to Europe and getting the airfields set up? Possible to be sure, but certainly in "neat trick" land. For the same resources, you can almost certainly jaunt a helicopter and appropriate sailboat over, and they have the advantage of depending on existing technology and being easier for people to miss for the weeks or months needed for the operation.

    633:

    Your argument is invalid. If A fires up their ansible and sends a message to B, then fires up their laser, aimed at B, then B receives the message on their ansible, responds, then, some time in the future, receives the laser signal and returns it, A and B are now obviously IN THE SAME FRAME OF REFERENCE, and the message from B via ansible did not arrive before A sent it out.

    634:

    FTL communication clearly and inevitably violates temporal causality in our (relativistic) universe.

    I think this may be where we're getting stuck. Please don't take it as an affront that the last person we had this debate with was also a mathematician who was defending physics he'd learned in college. Two points isn't a pattern, but he came around to our thinking.

    Anyway, what MIGHT be the sticking point is the idea of "clearly and inevitably violates." This is an assumption, based on the notion that one causality violation makes FTL completely and universally impossible. Whether that assumption is universally valid is unknowable at this point. However, I (and I think the others arguing with you) am working from the assumption that causality violations make some FTL impossible, but that conditional impossibility isn't the same as universal impossibility. That's a different standard entirely.

    Whether you agree with this notion or not is up to you. Don't ignore it, either way. If you're arguing from an absolutist position against people who are arguing from a conditional position, you may end up becoming very, very confused.

    And again, I'll point out that warps and wormholes are entirely conditional arguments, not universal ones. I notice you've been ignoring this, and it's getting rather comical, because you're ignoring what your equations actually do and do not cover.

    If you want a non-relativistic example of universal versus conditional, I'll give you one. Arrhenius' original climate change equation from 1896 is very simple: it relates increase in global temperature to increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. He derived it from really cool infrared spectroscopic observations of moonlight that others were doing to figure out what the moon was made out of. They had to subtract out the effect of the atmosphere, and that gave him the CO2 data he needed. Arrhenius' equation is amazingly accurate, considering the critical coefficient is based on a first generation spectroscope working from moonlight measured in 19th century England (IIRC). Trouble is, this little universal equation is, by itself, utterly insufficient to figure out what's going to happen to the climate in a location. That's where you need the supercomputer and a lot of conditional modeling.

    It's almost certainly the same thing with relativity. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. If the universe allows us to warp and wormhole it, then everything will depend on which path photons follow, and different paths will have different lengths and different causal relationships. Similarly, if the universe actually does do many worlds, then paradoxes never meet. Both of these meet the standards of relativity, and both allow FTL under some conditions while making it impossible in others.

    635:

    Anent general relativity,

    "Einstein's [general] theory of relativity states that clocks running closer to a large body (such as the Earth) will run slower than those farther away, such as out in space. This phenomenon, known as gravitational redshift, has been previously validated by researchers. In this new effort, the researchers have once again shown the theory to be true by measuring the "ticks" of a very tiny atomic clock with its parts spaced just a single millimeter apart, one above the other."

    From https://phys.org/news/2021-10-atomic-clock-relativity.html

    636:

    I have never heard of the first being referred to as causality; yes, it obviously breaks that,

    The idea that cause must precede effect is hardly original to me :).

    but it should say "the cause APPARENTLY comes after the effect". Even without FTL, you already have observers disagreeing on the order of events.

    I'd be very leery about that word APPARENTLY. The whole point of relativity is that all inertial reference frames are equally valid. For effects propagating slower than light all observers will agree on the temporal ordering of cause and effect. But for FTL effects, that is not the case.

    To use the example from Taylor and Wheeler, consider two inertial frames, one consisting of the Klingon homeworld (and an associated swarm of recording robots, all at rest w.r.t. that world) and one being the starship Enterprise and its associated swarm of recording robots (at rest w.r.t. the starship). The two are moving apart at 0.6c. (Note: the starship is moving slower than light!)

    In the Klingon frame of reference, an FTL missile is launched by the Klingons and zips through space (or hyperspace, or a wormhole, or whatever) until striking the Enterprise, destroying it in a huge explosion.

    In the Federation frame of reference (as recorded by all of the robots at rest w.r.t. the Enterprise), the Enterprise explodes, flinging out a Klingon marked FTL missile which flies backwards through space (or hyperspace or wormhole) and lands gently on the Klingon planet. The Federation robots all are consistent in recording this sequence and all agree when compared.

    Are the laws of physics equally valid in both reference frames? The principle of relativity says they must be. But it's hard to reconcile the Federation account with our usual notions of causality, not to mention the laws of thermodynamics.

    It doesn't matter whether I post this message before a distant star in Andromeda explodes, or after, and different observers will disagree on the ordering: both are OK, because there is no causal connection between my post and the star's explosion.

    But with the Enterprise and missile example, it's pretty hard to argue that the ordering of events in both reference frames is equally possible.

    (Someone will no doubt bring up quantum entanglement. It's impossible to say whether the measurement of an entangled particle caused the collapse of it's partner's wavefunction, or vice-versa. Quantum field theory says it literally doesn't matter: if the measurements are spacelike separated, both accounts are equally valid, and lead to the correct correlation.)

    637:
    I'd be very leery about that word APPARENTLY. The whole point of relativity is that all inertial reference frames are equally valid. For effects propagating slower than light all observers will agree on the temporal ordering of cause and effect. But for FTL effects, that is not the case.

    The more strictly correct relativistic version of causality would be

    If event A causes event B, then the interval B - A is timelike and tB >= tA, where A = (tA, xA, yA, zA) and likewise for B. The interval (in units in which c=1) is

    s^2 = t^2 - x^2 - y^2 - z^2

    It is timelike if s^2 is positive. Since s^2 is invariant under all operations in the Lorentz group, a timelike interval is timelike in all frames of reference. Further, the actual operations allowed by SR are those of the Retricted Lorentz Group, which are that topological component of the group that don't invert space or time.

    Thus if B - A is timelike and tB >= tA in one frame of reference, then B - A is timelike and tB >= tA in all SR frames of reference.

    638:

    Fine. So, riddle me this: at the same time the Klingon homeworld fires its FTL missile, it launches an stl (but close to lightspeed) probe. Aforesaid probe shows up to see the destroed Enterprise.

    Explain to me why, with the probe in this position, the Klingon homeworld and the Enterprise (destroyed) are not in the same frame of reference.

    639:

    I will try again, once. With what I am talking about, the cause DOES precede the effect, in all frames involved in the causal chain. Yes, that would apply to the planet and ship in that example, when the speed of the missile is below about 1.66c, if I recall correctly.

    640:

    Anyway, what MIGHT be the sticking point is the idea of "clearly and inevitably violates." This is an assumption, based on the notion that one causality violation makes FTL completely and universally impossible.

    Obviously we're talking past each other, and it's frustrating, sorry. I did try to qualify what kind of causality I was talking about (the ordering of cause and effect) and I'll stand behind my claim that any FTL at all leads to violaton of this in some frames of reference. That doesn't make the FTL impossible, but it's a problem that means you'll need to impose restrictions on the FTL to avoid a paradox. We're probably in violent agreement about that.

    And again, I'll point out that warps and wormholes are entirely conditional arguments, not universal ones. I notice you've been ignoring this, and it's getting rather comical, because you're ignoring what your equations actually do and do not cover.

    No, I haven't been ignoring it, it's irrelevant to my arguments (which rely only on the perspective of slower than light observers who never experience a wormhole or warp -- those are the ones who experience the paradox, not the travelers). Again, we're talking past each other, and not really hearing what the other has said. :(.

    Anyway, as far as warp drives and causality go, I think Miguel Alcubierre knows this stuff better than either of us, and he acknowledges that causality is a problem in this paper. Indeed, the very last sentence of the paper is "Finally, it was shown that these spacetimes induce closed timelike curves.", aka Grandfather paradoxes.

    641: 631 - To borrow from Pterry, "because Plot". 632 - R-100 did a trans-Atlantic double, oh and BTW that was my instant reaction, delayed only by double-checking my facts.

    Also, there's this element called "helium". You may have heard of it before?

    642:

    I will try again, once. With what I am talking about, the cause DOES precede the effect, in all frames involved in the causal chain.

    Inertial frames of reference are coordinate systems. Only events can be "involved in a causal chain".

    643:

    This is the cool thing with Haskell: you can build all this stuff for yourself,

    If I wanted to do that why would I bother with someone else's language? The cool thing about computers is that you can write your own operating system in a language of your own devising.

    I prefer to build on work done by others. If I want to make an HTTPS request I don't have to work out which standards to implement, I just grab the relevant library or builtin function and call it.

    When I started my last project I made a list of necessary functions and was quite annoyed with language fans who said stuff like "AES128 is easy to implement in our language" or "you should be able to build a distributed persistence framework yourself". Maybe I should, but that's not what my employer expects.

    I quite enjoyed playing with Eiffel, for example, but I did not enjoy even slightly trying to use it as the host for embedding Microsoft Office programs. Eiffel seems as though it would be great for implementing high-risk algorithms, but you'd want to wrap that code in something more accessible.

    644:

    Sigh. That was a contraction of "in all frames that include events that are involved in the causal chain." I thought that it was clear.

    645:

    #632 - R-100 did a trans-Atlantic double, oh and BTW that was my instant reaction, delayed only by double-checking my facts. Also, there's this element called "helium". You may have heard of it before?

    You're absolutely right about the R-100 of course. For added lulz, I just finished reading Neville Shute's Slide Rule, where he describes working on and flying in the R-100. So there really is no excuse on my part. Pure brain fart.

    That said, my interest is I wanted to do steam punkish things with air ships, and fortunately, I read enough to realize I was effing clueless. I got enough of a clue that I dove in to Shute and reading about the Hindenburg and others. Which I recommend.

    This isn't mockery, it's just that I think most of us who haven't flown in one (I haven't) think they're just big, old, stupid airplanes, the way fantasy authors think horses are hay-burning cars with attitude instead of GPS. That's me, anyway.

    Here are the some details I found that are relevant here:

    The most important thing is that gas bags leak, and it doesn't particularly matter what gas they have (hot air bags leak heat, for that matter). Back in the days of the Hindenburg and R-100, they figured they could get about a week's worth of lift out of a bag of gas, before it was too "dirty" (their term) to be useful. Dirty hydrogen meant that it was combining with air, which as we all know, is quite dangerous. Even now, with mylar balloons, I don't think the leakage situation is all that much better.

    It also took the Hindenburg and R-100 around 2-3 days to get across the Atlantic.

    You can see where this is going. Suppose we stage a transatlantic airlift in an uninhabited timeline. So we have to fuel up a dirigible, jaunt it as soon as it's out of sight of land, and then get it down in Germany. I'll need to get back to that last part. While it's down, it's leaking, and it's going to take 2-3 days to get back. That's a pretty tight operational window. Now of course you can stockpile the gas. Problem is it's about 16:1 w:w lift ratio for hydrogen, 14:1 for helium. The R-100 had about 160 tons of lift from hydrogen, so that's 10 tons of gas that either have to be manufactured in this uninhabited timeline, or ported over there. More if it's helium, which would pretty much have to be ported. By worldwalkers.

    Then there's the ground crew problem. While the Dragon Dream project tried to create an airship that didn't need a ground crew, it never made it into production. So we're stuck with lots of guys and lots of ropes. And they have to be jaunted in too, somehow.

    The logistics are just ugly. I'm very fond of airships, but they are basically giant balloons, with all the fragility that implies.

    Thing is, I agree with you: The Commonwealth having forward bases in Europe in uninhabited timelines makes a heck of a lot of sense. Doing it with airships is tricky, and the only reason I've been thinking about it is that I'm playing with a story universe where something like this needs to happen for plot reasons and sound realistic.

    There are alternatives to airships. One is to jaunt a Navy construction ship over to the TL:X Atlantic, sail to Europe, and set up primitive bases along the coasts. The coast of Denmark might be good for an airstrip, I don't know. Then you have a construction battalion from the ship build a low-tech runway near the coast (I'm trying to pick a flat place where it's easy and not too obvious to build), and the ship jaunts back to the Commonwealth before it runs out of fuel. Then you handwave into existence a long-range STOL plane that can use said runway, something like a C-17 perhaps, because it needs a range of at least 4,000 to schlep from North America to Northern Europe. Anyway, you use this beachhead and jaunting aircraft to stage equipment to Europe and then into the European interior for whatever tactical and strategic reasons are relevant.

    Now Liz Hanover could have come out this way, complete with close encounters with uninhabited timeline wildlife, like cave bears and aurochs. That would have been fun. I think what OGH did was considerably more fun, but tastes differ.

    646:

    (Having just finished re-reading Invisible Sun):

    (1) Did the Clan worldwalker on the Lufthansa airliner jump twice in quick succession? It reads as if there was only one jump, but presumably that would have put the airliner in the Gruinmarkt, not the Commonwealth.

    (2) Do the ~US know that worldwalkers could move large objects before Juggernaut turns up? Some bits of the text suggest they don't (they talk about the Clan only being couriers, only lifting what they can carry, etc) - but they're also worried about bombers in uninhabited timelines with worldwalker pilots. I wasn't sure what was going on there.

    647:

    1) When I read it, I understood the text to imply there was more than one, possibly several.

    648:

    Then you have a construction battalion from the ship build a low-tech runway near the coast

    You mean build a runway by hand just inland of the runway that's already there? Seems like an exciting plan.

    Back in the old days of long distance "maybe we can" flight commercial operators used a lot of flying boats specifically because they could land on the water if they had problems. Often they could also take off from the water.

    An ekranoplan would be one obvious variant. Sea level probably changes less than land level, and most ekranoplan designs can handle being up in the air with some level of grace. They generally can't climb back up, though, so you'd probably want to do your exploration near a long, gentle slope that goes quite high (say from the Doggerland coast to Switzerland) so you can grid your way up until you can jaunt back.

    There's also the short story about a nuclear powered ekranoplan flying across a giant flattened disk of "planets" made by aliens to experiment. I suspect it's physically possible to build such a thing and that would be one obvious option for long-duration exploratory trips. More practical that a chain of airships carrying tanks of compressed helium, or one big enough to carry a nuclear reactor to power a hydrogen manufactory.

    649:

    Yeah, landing a seaplane on the North Atlantic might be fun. It's a valid point.

    I'm waiting for someone to contradict me, but I think the Netherlands have the widest beach in Europe. I'd vote for flattening some sand dunes into a runway first.

    Since you went nuclear, here's my "solution":

    True fact: steam is a better lifting gas than hot air. Indeed, it lifts about half as much as steam, give or take (flyingkettle.com looks like it might have been hacked, so I can't link to the source).

    So I propose the nuclear-powered steam dirigible as the source of all your worldwalking transportation needs. It self-ballasts (let the steam condense), and it's easy to refill the gas bags. While yes, it's a little hard on the rigging crew to fix holes in gas bags that are running over 100oC, at least we've got these really clever water heating systems that don't produce radioactive steam any more. Use them to jaunt anywhere there's water and an atmosphere!

    650:

    There's also this: https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/nuclear-powered-airships.6303/ Differing in some details. For some nice pictures (mostly other airships): https://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/03/airship-dreams.html?showComment=1206047280000 and especially search on Russian Nuclear Airship (Sorry if links duplicated.)

    651:

    Who cares about holes? Your lifting force scales with the volume of the envelope, mass scales with area so make the thing a mile wide and build it out of steel.

    For those who play computer games I'm getting a "highfleet" vibe.

    652: 645 - Agreed. Also, if we start considering contamination of the lift bags, there's the question of where do we get more lifting gas from in [uninhabited timeline]?

    I do have an idea for littoral work though; I'm fairly sure (but can't remember nation involved or vessel name) that someone (almost certainly Imperial Germany, UK, or USA) experimented with a floating airship carrier, which would make your gas extraction and compression plant, and HP lift gas storage, portable. We know Armband could jaunt a manned B-52 or a 747, and world-walkers could jaunt a several thousand ton spaceship (Juggernaut), so jaunting a wet navy ship is plausible.

    648 - Wikipedia suggests that an ekranoplan would normally operate up to 150m above local terrain. That doesn't seem to preclude flying up a slope to a lake, although you do need to know that the lake exists in your present timeline.

    The Dornier Do-X rarely operated above about 50 feet AMSL because of the range improvement it effected when flown Wing In Ground effect (WIG).

    649 - How long a run do we need? The Traigh Mohr in Barra is a commercial airport, all runways graded by the tide twice daily.
    654:

    On jaunting to other worlds with airships - this sounds exciting, in a bad way. Airships are especially vulnerable to crosswinds and you're talking about a very sudden shift in wind direction and speed, the exact nature of which you might not be able to predict in advance. Similarly for anything flying close to the ground.

    655:

    Yes, but doing it with aerodynes is also hairy; and it has a beard as well, in that the default response of an aerodyne to Heavy Shit Happening In The Air is to go down, fast, quite likely in a fashion that canes the ability of a biological pilot to respond, and is likely to get even worse if you respond by trying to jaunt back again. An aerostat's default response, by contrast, to anything short of catching fire, is to stay up, or at worst descend only slowly, even in severe cases of structural failure (note also that rapid loss of buoyancy from catastrophic gas leaks basically just doesn't happen). As long as it had enough altitude in the first place, which kind of goes without saying if the pilot's not an idiot, the crew will "always" be able to use gravity to accelerate clear of the airborne wreck, then once clear control their descent with parachutes; the "jaunt back home" step can happen at whatever point is most favourable depending on etc etc etc.

    The Commonwealth had encountered this point many years ago, and had decided that from their point of view aerostats were definitely the safer and more usable option. They already had a well established team with plenty of experience in using airships to check out alternative timelines of which they had no knowledge at all - this is how they put together their library of alternative timelines in the first place. Unlike the US, they were limited to human jaunt-inducers for such exploration and needed to develop a method that was as secure as possible against total loss no matter how badly things went wrong; they determined that airships were the way to do it, and they had been doing that long enough to be good at it.

    656:

    *Question for the electrical engineers at teh end)

    I mostly agree about the safety of aerostats. Things like barrage balloons have flown in conditions that would send aerodynes down hard. So if the purpose is week-long, slow aerial surveys with up around 10,000 miles round trip maximum, it's not a bad choice, although it will get pretty uncomfortable by the end of the trip (the luxury of something like the Hindenburg was superficial. It was the fastest intercontinental transport available at the time, and people paid for the speed of a two-day trip and not getting seasick in an ocean liner taking six days to cross).

    The fun part is that dirigibles do take a lot of damage, and repairing rips and even worse damage midair is fairly normal. They're only going around 60 mph, maybe 500-1000' up, and the skin even in the 1930s is tough enough to walk on. To repair the bottom fin of the R-100, where it crumpled after hitting something, they literally climbed up to the top, walked back to the tail, rappelled down, and spent many hours repairing the frame and skin.

    The problem is that dirigibles take a lot of damage. A leaky hydrogen cell in the Hindenburg was one of the problems that doomed it. It was undoubtedly a fixable problem, but for some reason, no one patched the rip. Patching rips is one reason why the Hindenburg had a crew of 50 working her.

    The interesting problem (and here's where I'd appreciate some help) is what to do about static electricity. Airships normally build up a static charge moving through the air. When conditions are dry, dropping a rope to the ground from an airship doesn't cause massive sparks and a resulting hydrogen explosion. The Hindenburg landed after a rainstorm. So it was leaking hydrogen, had a static build-up in the skin, and had a wet rope. Sparks flew, hydrogen ignited, and the rest is history.

    Since there are electrically wise people popping in to read these things, is there an easy way to dissipate charge from an airship that's 800' long? The Zeppelin company tried putting wood/air gaps between the Hindenburg's metalized skin and the aluminum frame, so that the skin would build up a charge and the landing ropes were tied to the frame. That apparently made for a really nice spark gap when the rope got wet enough to be conductive. What's a better, ideally low-tech, solution?

    657:

    "there's the question of where do we get more lifting gas from in [uninhabited timeline]?"

    I answered that one when I first brought the point up :) Wood gas. You cook up basically anything that used to be a plant in the absence of air and lifting gas comes off; you squirt water into the red hot charcoal and more lifting gas comes off. You'd need to take some apparatus with you, but it's only thin sheet metal so it doesn't weigh much empty.

    I'm not sure that some of the early balloon experimenters didn't actually do this. Certainly once laid-on supplies of town gas (ie. much the same except in how long ago the source material ceased to be a plant) became available, people did start to use it to fill balloons with. It may not be as good as pure hydrogen but it's not that much worse and the convenience of having it come out of a tap beats all. You can also use the methane that comes out of those taps now. Some people tried to get out from behind the Iron Curtain using home-made balloons filled from their domestic gas supply and I think at least one of them succeeded.

    "I'm fairly sure (but can't remember nation involved or vessel name) that someone (almost certainly Imperial Germany, UK, or USA) experimented with a floating airship carrier"

    That does vaguely ring a bell as a proposal to split the Atlantic crossing. I'm not sure if anything was ever actually built. I think they found it was easier in the end just to make airships with enough range not to need it.

    "jaunting a wet navy ship is plausible."

    Jaunting something of that kind of mass is, but jaunting something that well grounded isn't.

    I'm pretty certain that "put the hull inside a rubber bag" doesn't work either. The details given in the books are a long way from being experimental results that address the question specifically, but looking at what works and what doesn't suggests strongly that the "electrical isolation" thing isn't just about not having a straight DC path, but very much also about minimising capacitive coupling. You'd need a lot more separation than just a thin layer of dielectric to be effective.

    There's also the "interfering objects" exclusion, which again is not fully and formally described, but seems to relate more closely to how much mass (relative to your own) needs to be displaced than to how hard it resists displacing. We are shown gross comparisons between A Thing being In The Way and it not being, and it looks pretty binary because of the three orders of magnitude density difference between air and anything else; but we know also that sufficiently small amounts of interfering solid matter do not prevent a jaunt, because you can jaunt from A to B and then jaunt back again from exactly the same spot even though the floor height will fail to be "equal or lower" in at least one direction. Therefore the exclusion cannot be based on the state of the interfering matter, but it can be based on whether it exceeds some maximum tolerable amount and/or degree of encroachment. Obviously on that basis "a hull's displacement of water" in the way is closer to "tree trunk" than to "fraction of a millimetre thickness over the area of two soles", so it looks to me as if it's pretty well certain you cannot jaunt into a liquid, nor could you jaunt into too deep a level of a gas giant's atmosphere should you take it into your head to want to.

    658:

    I remember this from O level chemistry. In the First World War British hydrogen balloons were filled with gas generated by passing steam through fed hot iron tubes. That seems low tech enough to be practical in uninhabited timelines.

    659:

    So far as lifting gas goes...

    Why not use wood gas? Per Wikipedia, it's around 51% nitrogen and 31% CO and CO2. And 14% hydrogen. It's weight is pretty close to that of ordinary air, so you're not going to get much lift. Hot air would be a better choice, I think, and you only get a 2.98 N/m3 out of hot air.

    Figured out what was going on with flying kettle, so here's a useful link with stats about halfway down the page. The good thing about steam is that its produces 6.24 N/M3 of lift (hydrogen produces 11.19 N/m3, helium produces 10.36, methane produces 5.34 N/M3).

    Producing hydrogen isn't hard chemically: some version of steam, iron, and/or methane works, although the first airshippers preferred barrels of sulfuric acid and iron filings, hearty souls that they were. Apparently the supply dynamics of "barrels of sulfuric acid" were better in most cases than those for "big old steam production facility." Storing hydrogen is a temporary affair (any molecule that small is hard to keep penned) and fires are common in facilities that have lots of hydrogen floating around. This may be why barrels of sulfuric acid were preferred? I don't know. Any acid and iron or zinc (or presumably other metals) will do.

    Helium, incidentally, comes mostly as a side product of oil extraction in certain oil fields. While the Hindenburg was designed to use helium, it flew on hydrogen. Apparently the Zeppelin Company investigated getting mass quantities of helium from its sole manufacturer (the US) and decided it wasn't worth the hassle. At that point, almost the entire world supply of helium was in Abilene Texas.

    660:

    Who cares about holes? Your lifting force scales with the volume of the envelope, mass scales with area so make the thing a mile wide and build it out of steel.

    Actually, the mass scales as the volume too. Lifting gas has mass, it just has less mass than the surrounding air, and produces upwards force by displacement. That's ignoring the fact that big airships have quite a lot of internal structure too, although you're right, they try to minimize that as much as possible.

    661:

    Nuclear powered steam dirigible.

    Right.

    Over among the 1632 universe fans, there's a saying: the only thing a steampunk dirigible needs... is wheels, since it weighs too much to get off the ground. (Note that 1632 tech works, including the wooden airplane engine that someone built and ran.)

    662:

    Lavoisier, 1783: took a gun barrel, stuffed it with tacks, heated it to red heat, and passed steam through it, and H2 was exhausted out a tube, then bubbled through water to collect it.

    IIRC, 1965, my personal chemistry class, I got out of several periods by helping my chemistry teacher, who took a shotgun barrel, stuffed it full of steel wool, set three Bunsen burners under the barrel, and ran steam through it.

    663:

    I do have an idea for littoral work though; I'm fairly sure (but can't remember nation involved or vessel name) that someone (almost certainly Imperial Germany, UK, or USA) experimented with a floating airship carrier, which would make your gas extraction and compression plant, and HP lift gas storage, portable. We know Armband could jaunt a manned B-52 or a 747, and world-walkers could jaunt a several thousand ton spaceship (Juggernaut), so jaunting a wet navy ship is plausible.

    I think you're remembering the USS Patoka, which was used as an airship tender for the USS Shenandoah, USS Los Angeles, and USS Akron, the three dirigibles that demonstrated that the US Navy really shouldn't be in the airship business (you can see what an airship docking accident looks like if you visit the USS Los Angeles Wikipedia page). The Patoka was fitted with a 54 meter tall mooring tower in that role, and was the tallest US Navy ship at the time.

    If a jaunting US drone spotted the Commonwealth equivalent of the Patoka on some ocean, they'd know that the Commonwealth had airships out exploring that world, even if they couldn't find them. That risk would have to be taken into account.

    664:

    Really? Have they rebuilt Solomon Andrews' Aereons?

    Steam balloons have flown. Their problem is that you've got load up a bunch of water, and that's tedious. What I agree with you and the 1632 crowd on is that coal fed, steam-powered propellers are a waste of time on an airship, for the same reason they don't work on an airplane: they're too heavy.

    In the story I'm working on, it's a gasoline-powered steam-blimp. It's a 2nd Gen US military vehicle (counting 19th Century hot-air signal corps balloons as Gen 1), and they're using steam because it lifts twice as much as does hot air, and water's more available than hydrogen and less problematic under violent conditions.

    665:

    "What's a better, ideally low-tech, solution?"

    I didn't know that bit about the Zeppelin engineers trying to insulate bits of it from each other, but it strikes me that they were probably going the wrong way. If you try and fight it you are just inviting the potential to build up to greater levels until the insulation breaks down anyway, only now with more stored energy and more of a bang - which is what they seem to have found out. It's better to go the other way, and bond everything electrically together so there aren't any insulated bits that can build up a potential difference.

    The airship will accumulate charge, and you can't discharge it relative to ground while it's still up there; you can put spikes on it to act as corona leaks to equalise it faster, but that will only equalise it with whatever the potential is at its current altitude, which will still be several kV: the potential gradient above the Earth's surface is something over 100V/m under default conditions over a flat area, and rather more near a sticky-up thing like a mooring mast. So you can't expect to avoid there being a bang when the mooring cable makes contact. The problem is if that suddenly grounds parts of the airship while leaving other, insulated parts now at a different potential, so they catch up via sparks at random inconvenient places; and to avoid this you need to bond everything together with metallic connections to provide a harmless path.

    That is not as straightforward as it sounds because you have to take thought not just for straightforward DC continuity, but also for the electrodynamic effects of the sudden surge of discharge current when the mooring cable makes contact, which can result in large transient potential differences between things that your continuity tester thinks are the same piece of metal. But that's OK as long as you do realise you need to take care of it at the design stage.

    (You could deal with the charge by flying the airship inside a conductive grounded hangar and having it keep station in mid-air until the charge has leaked away of its own accord, but it's almost certainly far too impractical to bother thinking about it.)

    649 - Beaches etc - The whole of the coast from the Rhine estuary all the way round up the west side of the Jutland peninsula is a series of sandy islands and sandbars a few miles off the actual coast, with the strip between the islands and the coast being a kind of huge long shallow tidal lagoon. See "The Riddle of the Sands" by Erskine Childers for a super portrayal of one stretch of it, and it goes on for hundreds of miles in the same kind of style.

    Steam as a lifting gas - YES. A sadly underappreciated point.

    In fact you don't even need to go that far: if you're using any kind of heat engine for propulsion you can use the waste heat from it to keep a hot air balloon hot. There is way more available from a normal-sized engine than you need to make up for the loss through the envelope, even with ordinary envelope materials; and if you line the envelope with the kind of flexible aerogel insulating sheet you can get nowadays, with a thermal conductivity of a few tens of milliwatts per m2.K, you're ready for anything.

    There even is/was recently an outfit - at Cardington, no less - developing an airship using its exhaust heat for lift with commercial intent. I think one of their ideas was to have a fleet of these things that would fly out to North Africa using exhaust-heated hot air, let themselves down, reinflate with methane and fly back using that as a cold lift gas. This was supposed to be superior to liquefying it and carting it back in sea ships, though I'm not sure how they worked that out.

    666:

    No, but they have built a wood-block engine. And it works, here in the real world.

    667:

    Yes, that works, but you need a supply of iron; the iron is oxidised by the water to give iron oxide with hydrogen left over. It was a great idea given the kind of resources that were and weren't common in WW1. Given the relative atomic masses of hydrogen and iron, it's kind of dubious as a reinflation source if you have to carry the iron with you in the airship.

    The interesting thing about it is that iron is near the bottom of the list of metals you can do that reaction with at all, and you need to cook it hard to make it go. With something like caesium, on the other hand... :)

    668:

    That's the kind of wood gas they used for fuelling gasoline engines in wartime when they couldn't get the gasoline any more. The idea is you let some of the wood combust with air and then use the heat to gasify more of it; most of the heat is transferred by passing the combustion gases through the bit you're gasifying, so the gas that comes off is heavily diluted with nitrogen from the intake air. It's a convenient method for fuelling automobile engines because the gas production rate varies with the air flow so it automatically adjusts itself to suit the throttle opening. It's a pretty crappy fuel, but it's enough to get you moving.

    I'm talking about the kind of wood gas you get by the same process used to make coal gas: cook it up in the absence of air, in a sealed oven with heat supplied by conduction through the walls. That gets you a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, with a little methane, less more complex hydrocarbon gases, and a bunch of non-gaseous crap from methanol to tar and charcoal which we're not concerned with at the moment. Without all that nitrogen diluting it and very little carbon dioxide, the hydrogen (and other lifting components) is a large enough proportion of the mixture to make it usefully buoyant.

    Half-and-half hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be considered as half a volume of hydrogen, with the corresponding buoyancy, and half a volume of stuff which neither helps nor hinders buoyancy. So you need twice the volume of gas for the same lift as pure hydrogen. But the great thing is that that only needs the radius of the balloon to be 1.26 times bigger (cube root of 2) to contain it, so it is very often easier to just do that and cease worrying about where you could get pure hydrogen from.

    669:

    Hot air for large airships...

    Yeah, it could be done with good insulation. The problem is that hot air is hotter than steam and about half as buoyant, so you need a (sorry Elon) Big Falcon Airship to make it work. For example, you could use Herr Zeppelin's idea of the "airship train" that he used to build his dirigibles: make them longer, train-wise, to carry more weight. So if you wanted to fly a hot air Hindenburg, with the same cross section, it would be 3,000 feet long instead of 800 feet long. You'd do it by running engines under each gasbag (Hindenburg had 14 gasbags). All that to carry around 100 people.

    JD Powell is proposing far zanier (read bigger) airships for his airship to orbit system, so this is far from unthinkable. Practical?

    The limitations: --Fuel. A conventional, uninsulated hot air balloon uses about 30 gallons of propane to heat up 77,000 ft3 of air. How this scales when you're around 30,000,000 ft3 of hot air, but it's insulated, is one of those interesting questions. Naive scaling suggests that you'd go through over 1,500 pounds of propane per hour just to keep the airbags hot. The Hindenburg, in contrast, normally consumed 330 lbs/hr of diesel in its four engines. --Comfort: The Hindenburg wasn't the most comfortable ship to fly in. Walls offered no aural privacy, sanitation was minimal, and there was no AC. Now add a giant mass of 120oC air right over your head. More insulation? --Repairs. Airship crews are expected to go all through the ship fixing things. If most of the ship is 120oC, that's going to be unpleasant. Leaks will still happen, but instead of working in shirt sleeves with goop, you're working in silver suits with goop. Again, doable, but unpleasant.

    The fun question, fuel efficiency: An airbus A-220 sits 100 passengers (same capacity), and flies a 3 liters of fuel/passenger/100 km. So taking a route of around 4000 km, that's around 1,200,000 liters of jet fuel, or about 430,900 lbs of fuel for 4000 km. The Big Falcon Airship takes (say) 2 days to fly the same distance, at 1,500 lbs/hr of propane consumed, so that's around 72,000 lbs of propane to fly the same number of people the same distance. So yes, it appears to be more fuel efficient, if cheap aerogel is available.

    So not exactly our future (unless we get some decent non-GHG-emitting fuels), but not entirely batshit insane on all grounds.

    Oops, better get back to work. That was fun.

    670:

    David Wallace @ 646: (Having just finished re-reading Invisible Sun):

    (1) Did the Clan worldwalker on the Lufthansa airliner jump twice in quick succession? It reads as if there was only one jump, but presumably that would have put the airliner in the Gruinmarkt, not the Commonwealth.

    (2) Do the ~US know that worldwalkers could move large objects before Juggernaut turns up? Some bits of the text suggest they don't (they talk about the Clan only being couriers, only lifting what they can carry, etc) - but they're also worried about bombers in uninhabited timelines with worldwalker pilots. I wasn't sure what was going on there.

    (2) ~USA figured out how to move large objects (nuclear armed bombers) between timelines, so I don't see why they would be surprised that the Commonwealth would develop similar capabilities. Especially since they know that the surviving worldwalkers have taken refuge there and are actively participating in building up defenses to deter ~USA aggression.

    I'm sure both sides are familiar with the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction?

    (1) Haven't gotten that far yet; just started re-reading "The Trader's War", but even before the Gruinmarkt got nuked, the Clan was already sending out exploration teams with multiple worldwalkers for chain jumps.

    On the initial insertion one worldwalker carries another who is prepared to pick up the first and jump back if the situation proves hostile. I think they'd use the same kind of precautions for covert egress.

    671:

    paws4thot @ 652: #645 - Agreed. Also, if we start considering contamination of the lift bags, there's the question of where do we get more lifting gas from in [uninhabited timeline]?

    If you're using hydrogen for your lift gas you could electrolyze it from ballast water. Put solar cells on the top of the outer hull to generate electricity which could also run pumps for sucking up ballast water. Maybe even use hydrogen for propulsion, but I think electric motors would probably work better. You wouldn't need to store extra hydrogen for the engines.

    The Italians built an airship for arctic exploration. I expect they would have already solved most of the problems you'd encounter trying to operate one in an uninhabited timeline.

    Maybe build a hybrid airship that uses Helium for the primary lift gas and supplements it with hydrogen and or hot air to control buoyancy? Might even be able to accomplish the job with a Blimp or semi-rigid airship instead of going full-on Zeppelin.

    I do have an idea for littoral work though; I'm fairly sure (but can't remember nation involved or vessel name) that someone (almost certainly Imperial Germany, UK, or USA) experimented with a floating airship carrier, which would make your gas extraction and compression plant, and HP lift gas storage, portable. We know Armband could jaunt a manned B-52 or a 747, and world-walkers could jaunt a several thousand ton spaceship (Juggernaut), so jaunting a wet navy ship is plausible.

    For an actual WET navy ship, you'd need some way to lift it off the surface just long enough to make the jump across.

    672:

    whitroth @ 662: Lavoisier, 1783: took a gun barrel, stuffed it with tacks, heated it to red heat, and passed steam through it, and H2 was exhausted out a tube, then bubbled through water to collect it.

    IIRC, 1965, my personal chemistry class, I got out of several periods by helping my chemistry teacher, who took a shotgun barrel, stuffed it full of steel wool, set three Bunsen burners under the barrel, and ran steam through it.

    When I took high school chemistry, one of the "experiments" was to make hydrogen gas by dropping hydrochloric acid on a piece of zinc in a petri dish set in a water bath & then inverting a beaker over it to capture the hydrogen.

    673:

    As long as it had enough altitude in the first place, which kind of goes without saying if the pilot's not an idiot

    And aerostats can do that. It's kind of circular - they can't handle suddenly being only 100m off the ground, but since they can get to 5000m they don't need to risk it. Sooner or later someone is going to jaunt a surface effect plane from 150m altitude to 1m altitude and that's going to have exciting consequences.

    I think the big risk of a semi-rigid or even soft design is jaunting from 100km/hr wind going this way to 100km/hr wind going at 90 degrees to 180 degrees to that (wind at 5000m can be fast). There's a whole lot of stuff hanging round going on with a semi-rigid design and it would be interesting to see how it dealt with the change in momentum. Air doesn't do that naturally, so jaunting introduces a new challenge. Probably ok, but I'd rather someone else performed the experiment :)

    674:

    Sorry, to say: but that's wrong.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cyclic_group.svg

    Nice little hexagon, but... No.

    Look, up, above: Nonagon.

    Ok, we'll do this "old Skool":

    1) Infinite Sets are bounded by Infinite Sets (Russell etc)

    2) Lorentz group (sets) are determined by (Spatial)and(Temporal)axis of viewer as well as (limited ability to percieve any other view-point) and inability to parse multi-dimensional functions beyond your causal sets ("Astrology", or rather: your Minds are shit and there's a fucking gamma wave blast -10000000k years ago that produced a particle that hit a DNA stand that made a mutation that made your beetle change color. Etc): Lorentz is basically saying; "Yeah, this is what WE can see in Maths, how shit is that?" [He really is: c.f. his later commentaries)

    If you want us to parse that into like, 9 dimensional stuff: it's kinda hard, but easy.

    It means your MATH is shit, not reality, MR. MAN.

    (And no: your topological stuff is really basic)

    3) None of your examples (and, tbh, the philosophers above) ever mention doing "real world" testing:

    It's easy to do - unless you're talking bullshit and can't model reality in real time. OOOOHhh... that'd be Lorentz.

    HAI!

    Might have missed it.

    Should read more media sources.

    Then X-reference globally.

    Honey-Bunny: someone's been rubbing your face in your inability to do this stuff for... over six years now.

    Children of Men: "But, of course: this is impossible, our Finest Minds (that we allowed into our outdated, purile, misogynistic and pathetic centres of learning could have missed this!!"

    Fun fact: Oxford University, 1992~9 still treated Gay Men (not ...exactly an uncommon feature there) as heinously perverse and (this is real): made them quit when their "higher ups" had fucked them.

    True story:

    But you're wrong. If you want me to pull up the math, it's going to be a little bit more complex than "= (tA, xA, yA, zA)".

    Like. Seriously.

    675:

    Oh, btw.

    Should read all Economics papers 1843-2020.

    The math in a large percentage (that rises to 99.9% in ~1960 or so) of them: is wrong.

    Like: really really really wrong. And they... keep on using stuff that's not even real because it's "cool" and "funky".

    If you were hunting for stuff.

    "The Apes where Wrong!!"

    ~Quantian, My Errant Knight and Lover of Aesthetic vibes who we have given multiple bounties to. We know you like the fine wine, you should perhaps, perchance, grow a little into the vintage and grow a strong vine back-bone and cease being a tawdry common species and grow into something better.

    Like, Dude: Make a choice: the system is fucking broken, the Apes might be wrong (MR ROBOT) but... the Enlightened Path is putting the Apes into something Better.

    [Notes: Quantian, Falcon Finance, TheEmily etc etc -- you failed, you fucked up, we'll take it from here. MR ROBOT SAYS: FUCKING LOOK AT THAT: https://www.reddit.com/r/MrRobot/comments/lat793/inspired_by_ugrumpygrem_s_post_about_the_myanmar/

    Boring Humans. Do something interesting with your life, you only get one.

    ~

    Now. Who amongst us is strong enough against their "Math" and "Reality" to create a "Negative Oil Price Event" in China now?

    Hint: You've no fucking idea how that "MATH" worked, so you should ... STFU.

    677:

    Actually, the mass scales as the volume too. Lifting gas has mass, it just has less mass than the surrounding air, and produces upwards force by displacement.

    True, but not relevant as I was looking at it purely from the perspective of lift.

    That's ignoring the fact that big airships have quite a lot of internal structure too, although you're right, they try to minimize that as much as possible.

    I'm pretty sure you can scale to a couple of miles wide before that becomes a problem. Building large structures out of relatively small amounts of steel is a mature technology.

    If you want to be very low tech you could just use an unpressurised pool type reactor that boils the water directly sitting in the bottom of the envelope. Shielding is for wimps, and you are only going to be depositing fission products on expendable parallel worlds anyway.

    678:

    JBS @ 670 I don't see why they would be surprised that the Commonwealth would develop similar capabilities.

    Up to this point the DHS have been thinking of the Clan as medieval lords who carry their backpack nukes around on horseback. Their only knowledge has come from debriefing Matthias and a few Clan couriers. They don't know anything about the Commonwealth, still less about the use of worldwalkers to industrialise the transit process.

    Separately the US has a bunch of scientists developing ARMBAND and trying to work out the physics. No doubt those scientists, if asked, would say "of course, all the worldwalker has to do is hold on to a bit of metal connected to the rest of the aircraft", but thanks to security compartmentalisation its quite possible that it hasn't occurred to anyone on the operational side to ask the question, and the scientists have no other way of knowing that the answer has suddenly become important.

    Miriam's initial message sent via Rita should have been a wake-up call: she explicitly threatened massive retaliation for any first strike. This was a deliberate gambit on her part to set up the Mutually Assured Destruction game, as it was a game that the ~US understood how to play. However she carefully didn't say how this would be done, which would probably leave the DHS still thinking in terms of world-walkers with backpack nukes. We see a number of scenes with Scranton and Smith chewing over the implications of what they have learned, and in none of those do they reconsider the basics of what they learned from Matthais.

    One of the themes that seems to run through Invisible Sun is that all parties are systematically underestimating each other. MITI underestimate the surveillance capabilities of the ~USA in ~Germany, the DHS underestimates the Commonwealth, the State Department underestimate both DHS and the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth Guard underestimate the State Department ...

    679:

    Simplifying this to formulae I know, the area of a sphere is 4 Pi() r^2, and the volume is 4/3 Pi() r^3. So, unless the skin thickness of your envelope has to rise as its volume rises, your lift will rise, just not in a simple multiple.

    680:

    The useful equation is about buoyancy, from Archimedes Principle:

    Fb=-pGV

    Fb= buoyant force - = against gravity p = fluid density (effectively weight of the fluid displaced-weight of the fluid displacing it) V = fluid volume

    So you're right that the minimizing the weight of the shell of the airship is important, because you're trying to minimize the overall density of the airship. However, difference in gas densities still matters critically.

    The critical trick is that at STP, a cubic meter of air weighs 1.293 kg, while a m3 of hydrogen weight 0.090 kg. if you can surround that m3 of hydrogen with a container that weighs less than 1.203 kg, it's lighter than air and exerts some force upwards, at least at STP.

    681:

    Um, your ignorance is showing. You could have fun with this idea!

    Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Los_Angeles_(ZR-3)#/media/File:Zr3nearvertical.jpg.

    This is what happens when you screw up gas management in a large airship. The easiest way to screw it up is through design, specifically, having a single gas bag inside your airship means the gas moves to the top side. In a sphere, that's not a problem. In any other shape, it tends to be. Airships can get away with single bags if they stay perfectly level and have people running around the inside as "mobile ballast." Climb at too steep an angle, and the gas rushes to one end, thereby sending the ship vertical. It's hard to recover a vertical airship, especially if the gas is above the purge valves at midship. Some poor sucker gallant airman has to climb the ship and cut holes, if there's no valve handy.

    So fine, we'll use a sphere. Basically a giant balloon. Ever tried to fly a balloon against the wind? You're going to need a reasonably large motor with a reasonably large amount of fuel to overcome the air resistance of a big wobbly globe being pushed against air that's considerably denser than it is. Zeppelins can manage 60 mph or more by being highly streamlined, but the problem is that's a cigar shape, and we're back in the previous paragraph, with a bunch of internal structure to keep the ship trimmed properly. If you're in a big balloon, the way you steer is by raising your balloon (adding heat or dumping ballast) or lowering your balloon (not heating or dumping gas) to catch a different current that's blowing in a different direction. But you're only, ever, going downwind at whatever elevation you happen to be at.

    And it gets worse even more fun. A mile-high concrete balloon? Buckminster Fuller proposed that. How much lift does it have? Well, you're going to have to take these formulas and integrate across the entire height of the giant balloon. Continuously, because the weather's going around it. Which way will the balloon travel? That's a fascinating question too. Almost certainly it's getting hit with different winds in different places, plus there's turbulence on the backside of your mile-high sphere. To keep the weight down, you don't have anything like a motor or fuel, so your mile-high concrete Bucky sphere is blowing around at varying elevations above the ground. If you're really having fun, it'll start spinning, as it gets pushed in different directions at different elevations. Maybe it will bounce too? I've always wanted to see how a concrete balloon bounces.

    And you actually want to use concrete, because as I noted above, airships build up a rather large static charge. Having a giant metal sphere would be shockingly fun, I suspect, especially when it got near the ground. Probably you can't do much to actually move the charge around actively, because that adds more weight, which you do not want.

    See what I mean? You should be having fun with your giant sphere, not trying to dunk on us silly little airship boffins.

    682:

    It's all Music, Dear @ 674/675 (I like the nym) Now. Who amongst us is strong enough against their "Math" and "Reality" to create a "Negative Oil Price Event" in China now? Hint: You've no fucking idea how that "MATH" worked, so you should ... STFU.

    China is a big and quirky place, which makes such things more interesting.

    News feed yesterday: China-linked disinformation campaign blames Covid on Maine lobsters - The University of Oxford found evidence that pro-China social media accounts are pushing a new thread of propaganda related to the origins of the pandemic. (Oct. 21, 2021, 10:00, Olivia Solon, Keir Simmons and Amy Perrette) News feed today: Australia asks why Hong Kong considers lobsters national security risk (October 22, 2021)

    And one recalls Lobsters (Charles Stross, 2001)

    the Enlightened Path is putting the Apes into something Better.

    Just quoting.

    (And unrelated, re deleted mention of Moscow Rules, sure, but I mostly don't discuss ... bespoke security mitigations.)

    683:

    See what I mean? You should be having fun with your giant sphere, not trying to dunk on us silly little airship boffins.

    This sounds a bit like the 'Happy Fun Ball'.

    Not being from the US, though, I first encountered the term describing the Tigress class battleships in Traveller. There the happiness is all for to the enemies of the Third Imperium.

    (The term started in a Saturday Night Live sketch from 1991, but we didn't get that here at the time, hence the Traveller link...)

    684:

    Ahh, well.

    "Why do you change your Names so often?"

    Here's the txt file containing previous user name/password that we're not using anymore:

    姜寨 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiangzhai

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

    ...and a whole lot more.

    Let's just say: Just like IL ultra-Nationalists LOVE making up stuff (and LOVE getting peeps like Hobby-Lobby to eradicate the evidence) ... that also happens in CN. We're teasing the things you're scared of.

    You're not going to undertand that one, but hey (and yes: a whoooole lot more if you're just dipping in, whelp).

    (And unrelated, re deleted mention of Moscow Rules, sure, but I mostly don't discuss ... bespoke security mitigations.)

    Oh we noticed the entire edit. Spoilers: grep "Moscow Rules" ... like 2 years ago? These fuckers have been eradicating any rsistance for years now.

    Hey, remember ISIS Lovecruft? The ones they catch under "Moscow Rules", they kill, after torturing them. We get to see it, right lobly under the old ey-skitchtz wonderballs. ~

    How do we survive?

    Well.

    "Welcome to the New Reality"

    "There's no Joy in Zer Heart"

    Your Generation Music: "Brain Damage", Pink Flyod

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhYKN21olBw&list=PL3PhWT10BW3Urh8ZXXpuU9h526ChwgWKy&index=9

    ~

    Yeah, deleted Mentions.

    They're killing them out there. [Redacted] too. Fucking sucks, the Bad Ones Won, eh?

    685:

    "What did it cost?"

    Human Response: 47 human beings lost their lives due to your ignorance. This is your shitty level stuff you think is "Morality".

    "What did it cost?"

    It was Genocide, Dear.

    Sat on the Bone Chair and Argued against the Black Hole Sentence. Oh, Loki and [redacted] and their "New Reality".

    It cost you your Sister. [But she still Lives]

    And there is nothing... ah, well.

    grep: "And the nukes don't work" with that test zone.

    ~

    Yeah, kids. If you can do this you can alter EM stuff in circuits. Also: get in all your networks / Minds / etc.

    ~

    Bored. Now.

    686:

    Since I'm living in the administrative district of Pankow, I've been looking at places where three streets are intersecting. That's a fairly rare thing, and the only one I can think of is the intersection of Schönhauser Allee, Eberswalder/Danziger Straße, and Pappelallee, here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/52.5412/13.4109 . There are also several tramlines there.

    People from here would however say they are in Prenzlauer Berg.

    687:

    "airships"

    As has been noted in the past, Niven's stasis field would make it possible to build vacuum balloons of arbitrary size and shape(*) out of conductive foil/film in space and then de-orbit them to serve as cool airships.

    (*) In their own inertial frame of reference, that is.

    688:

    Vernor Vinge did this in "Across Realtime".

    A "bobble" stasis field was mused to rescue hostages from the top floors of a tall building by enclosing the top of the building in a huge stasis field in the afternoon which then floated away when the air outside cooled.

    689:

    I like the Vinge using the different air density. That is cool.

    As for vacuum airships, that has a surprisingly long history. AFAIK, it was first proposed in 1670 (see link). And no, I don't actually know any of this, I just remembered that I'd seen it in a book. Speaking of which, IIRC, Tarzan at the Earth's Core depended on a vacuum airship to fly from the surface of the Earth to Pellucidar via a hole at the north pole that's somehow not underwater. (Snark)It's sad that you can't get away with hollow earth stories like that anymore(/snark).

    Changing the subject, I was watching the new Dune movie, and I kept thinking of all those titanic Herbertian ships (like the Guild Heighliners) as enormous airships. I'm going to get in trouble for that, aren't I?

    690:

    "I was watching the new Dune movie"

    Would you recommend it? Also the music? The reviews seem generally good.

    691:

    Actually, unrelated to anything else, my SO and I were talking this morning, and she mentioned the Goddess one or more of her characters used to worship in Neverwinter Nights: Mielikki, when she thinks is Finnish. How should the name be pronounced (if it is)?

    692:

    Yes, Mielikki (from the Forgotten Realms D&D world, which also includes Neverwinter) is from the Finnish mythology. She's a forest goddess.

    The pronunciation is easy for me, I just say 'it's pronounced as it is written', but, uh, describing that in text might not be easy. If you can read IPA, it's [ˈmie̯likːi] (from Wikipedia, seems fine to me, but I did learn it in school).

    Wovels: 'i' is close to 'i' in 'is', 'e' is like the one in 'end'. They are a diphthong there in the beginning, so kind of sliding into each other - in the same syllable. The other two i's are the same (to my ears), so short 'i' sounds.

    The 'm' is... a regular m, 'l' is just 'l', but the 'kk' is sometimes a bit difficult. The (most) Finnish phonemes can be either short or long, and long ones are indicated by doubling the letters. 'kk' sounds to me like two 'k' sounds, but in reality I think there's kind of a short pause there.

    Slowly in syllables it'd be 'mie'-'lik'-'ki', and the proper 'kk' sound is kind of made by just saying this faster...

    I am perfectly willing to try to teach these if we ever meet in person. :)

    There's this youtube video where some Finn talks about her, and obviously pronounces the name as it should be pronounced in Finnish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OI--nr4ezw&ab_channel=FairychamberArtandFolklore

    693:

    Thanks! So we were saying it more-or-less correctly.

    Meet? Are you planning on being at a Worldcon one of these years?

    694:

    New Dune movie.

    Would you recommend it?

    Yes from me at least.

    The previous 1980s movie jammed the entire book into a bit over 2 hours of plot time. This one takes over 2 1/2 hours to get half way through the book. This means instead of an almost comic book scene to scene rate of story telling this later one can actually tell the story and it make sense without having ever read the book.

    Turn on subtitles. The cast likes to speak in low voices and unless your sound system is great or you're wearing ear phones it can be hard to follow all the dialog. My wife and I watched it at home last night and very quickly turned on the subtitles. My daughter went to a movie theater at the same time and wished she had had the option.

    I also recommend "Foundation". Not the best movie ever, but they way they tell the stories works well for the format of 10 episodes to get through the first 300 years. A linear book to script would be a mess of characters dying and new ones appearing all the time. Most criticism I've read is from people upset they didn't do a linear book to script treatment.

    695:

    There is a UK bid in progress.

    696:

    I'll give my opinion tomorrow. Unfortunately, I only got to watch about 15 minutes before I had to go do something else, which is the downside of watching at home. I agree on David L's low-volume dialog comment though.

    697:

    No, the 1982(?) movie spent two hours on the first half of the book, then did the second half in a 15 min voiceover. The 1990 rerelease as a miniseries on TV, 6 hr, was a much better version.

    698:

    Well, UK, depending on how soon the "non-binding referendum" for Scotland passes.... (Yes, I'm a presupporter.)

    699:

    Watched Dune. It's definitely the best of the three attempts to film the book. I also noted that the executive producers were mostly surnamed Herbert, with Brian Herbert being at the head of the list. That might have had something to do with it.

    As for details: the soundtrack is Hans Zimmer, not John Williams, and you can listen to the whole thing at the link. It's more minimalist with a pronounced North African vibe.

    Plot is reasonably faithful to the first half of the book. It ends at a certain duel I think we could all reasonably predict.

    The fight scenes run on the Hollywood Rule of Cool. It's the kind of movie where you can tell the good guys because they're not wearing helmets. The shields are cool, and unlike the SyFy version, the guns actually have sights.

    The ornithopters are also cool, based on dragonflies. I giggled at a six-winger with the wingspan of a business jet vibrating its wings too fast to see and lifting off in close formation with two others of similar size. Admittedly I'm not an engineer, maybe it would work? But they are cool.

    I only said "are they really that stupid" about a dozen times, which was rather less than I expected. About a third of those instances involved scenes where the actors wore those interestingly uncomfortable stillsuits and then went bareheaded into daylight on Arrakis. Given what the actors had to wear to film that, I hope all the desert scenes were filmed in the dead of winter, because those costumes must have been hot.

    And a month of HoBO is $15 in my neck of the dunes, so it's about the price of seeing it in the theater. If you do watch on a laptop, crank the volume. There's only one scene that might hurt your ears if you do.

    I'll give it eight sandworms out of ten. Throw in two crawlers too.

    700:

    Great! Pronunciation is not easy! I fail it in English all the time, and I do use it on most days (company main language is English and not all my coworkers speak Finnish, so I use English every day at work).

    I kind of want to attend Worldcon, and maybe I can manage it one of these years. Most likely would be some European one, as it might just be possible to travel without flying. Continental Europe is easier than the British isles, obviously.

    Worldcon was in Helsinki in 2017, and I had the ticket, but couldn't attend for personal reasons, sadly. Still makes me sad, but that's life.

    701:

    That has always worried me, because it means that bobbles aren't impenetrable. There's no real reason that when a bobble eventually bursts the contents are the same way up in relation to the surrounding terrain as when it formed. When the hot air rescue bobble bursts in the mountains where it comes to rest it should be just as likely that the top of the building is upside down as right side up, and I've always had the image of Vandenberg suddenly finding itself upside down. Because things like the attack on Peacekeeper headquarters using bobbling for a few hours work it means you should be able to work out the mass distribution of bobble contents from the outside, so they can't be full statis fields, yet someone spends millenia bobbing around on the surface of the sun without being squashed flat implying they do block gravity.

    702:
    New Dune movie. Would you recommend it? Yes from me at least.

    I second that. I saw it in the theater yesterday afternoon. Chalamet is a great Paul, and Momoa as Duncan Idaho was better than I expected. Although there are some great action pieces (the ornithopters are very cool), it is much more about mood and intrigue than battle. It definitely helps to have read the book.

    Also, the music (Hans Zimmer) is extraordinary. I have trouble saying what it is like, because it's really not like anything. I would say there are obvious Middle Eastern influences, but more than that it reminded me of Kenji Kawai's scores for the Ghost in the Shell movies, which are some of my favorite movie music ever.

    703:

    Also, the music (Hans Zimmer) is extraordinary

    To me the music didn't register. Which was great for me. It set the moods without being intrusive. Unlike a in a lot of such movies.

    704:
    To me the music didn't register. Which was great for me. It set the moods without being intrusive. Unlike a in a lot of such movies.

    Yes, I get that, I am usually that way myself. However, my best friend is very musical and always remarks on the music in a movie, so under her influence I have come to listen a little harder. I agree, though, that the music doesn't usually force itself on your attention.

    705:

    Great! Pronunciation is not easy! I fail it in English all the time

    It's a problem even for native English speakers. Most of my vocabulary comes from reading. Since, as has been frequently remarked, in English you can't figure out how a word is pronounced from the way it's spelled, I use lots of words whose pronunciations I can only guess at. It's way too much trouble to look them all up, and I don't mind being corrected.

    706:

    The bobbles are still subject to gravity. I assumed that the bobble would be oriented with the heaviest content at the bottom but since no time passed in the bobble external gravity would affect the bobble contents only by keeping the centre of mass at the lowest point. So the bobble containing the top of the building would be the right way up but landing on anything but a flat level surface would be a problem.

    707:

    Apparently the (nominal) surface gravity of the sun is about 28G so yes, it would be a tad stressful to float there in a bobble

    708:

    I've got to thank Kardashev for asking about the music. It didn't register when I watched the first bit, but when I went back and watched the whole thing I listened for the music. Hope I remember to do that more often.

    One day-after question I'm contemplating is how much Covid19 affected the movie. It has a lot of huge sets with small numbers of people in them (not universally, just often). I wonder if that was a concession to filming in a pandemic, or merely an artistic choice.

    709:

    Para 2 - A bit of both I'd guess, since Arrakis is a desert planet (hence the title "Dune").

    710:

    Well, you could always volunteer to help a bid. Glasgow's the next bid I know of set on your side of the Atlantic.

    Helsinki - which DC was bidding for, and lost. And I've heard they had a lot of problems - really interesting panels cancelled, rooms too small. And that isn't just from what I've read - if you'd been there, you'd have had a chance to meet one of my daughters, who was there.

    711:

    Vulch @ 701: That has always worried me, because it means that bobbles aren't impenetrable. There's no real reason that when a bobble eventually bursts the contents are the same way up in relation to the surrounding terrain as when it formed. When the hot air rescue bobble bursts in the mountains where it comes to rest it should be just as likely that the top of the building is upside down as right side up, and I've always had the image of Vandenberg suddenly finding itself upside down. Because things like the attack on Peacekeeper headquarters using bobbling for a few hours work it means you should be able to work out the mass distribution of bobble contents from the outside, so they can't be full statis fields, yet someone spends millenia bobbing around on the surface of the sun without being squashed flat implying they do block gravity.

    AFAIK the Vandenberg "bobble" was stationary for the entire duration of its existence, so it shouldn't have any reason for inverting. And the way I remember the story the Tinkers were led by the original inventer of the "bobble", who worked out the mass distribution BEFORE the Tinkers "bobbled" the top of the tower (or the "kid" had) so that a large volume of hot air ABOVE the tower got "bobbled", like a hot air balloon with the basket at the bottom ensured that when it came to rest the portion of the building that was taken off was sitting on the ground.

    And consider the shuttle that had been sent up from Vandenberg and was returning with the evidence of what the "Peace Authority" cabal were up to just before they launched their coup.

    Their "bobble" conserved momentum so that the "bobble" plowed into the ground & half buried itself, but when the "bobble" finally burst the shuttle was still in its original orientation and because it had the same momentum as the "bobble" containing it, it only fell a few feet to the ground ... and "Paul Naismith" was expecting it to happen, knew the crew had survived (because time was stopped inside the "bobble" - which the Peace Authority didn't know) & was ready to use the information they had collected to locate the Peace Authority's generators.

    What I am having a problem with is I just searched the Wake County Public Libraries online catalog and they no longer have a copy of "The Peace War". And I know they used to have a copy in their collection. At least they still have a bunch of Charlie's books (missing the original Merchant Princes series) with 15 copies of "Invisible Sun" on order & only 7 people on the wait list. But I'm cool with that. I bought the three omnibus editions along with the three second series books.

    I already have my copy of "Invisible Sun" sitting next to my desk waiting for me to finish re-reading the series leading up to it so I'll be up to speed when I get to it. I'm still early in "The Traders' War". Brilliana has just returned to assist "Helge" negotiate the family bureaucracy.

    712:

    LAvery @ 705:

    Great! Pronunciation is not easy! I fail it in English all the time

    It's a problem even for native English speakers. Most of my vocabulary comes from reading. Since, as has been frequently remarked, in English you can't figure out how a word is pronounced from the way it's spelled, I use lots of words whose pronunciations I can only guess at. It's way too much trouble to look them all up, and I don't mind being corrected.

    FWIW, you can look words up at https://www.dictionary.com/ and they have a pronunciation guide along with a little speaker icon you can click to hear the word pronounced.

    https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hors-d-oeuvre

    I know some here have mentioned they don't have speakers for their computer, but if you DO have them you can get the pronunciation for words.

    Also, even if you're not sure how to spell a word, you can type an approximation into Google Search and there will usually be a hit for the correct spelling that links to one of the online dictionaries.

    713:

    timrowledge @ 707: Apparently the (nominal) surface gravity of the sun is about 28G so yes, it would be a tad stressful to float there in a bobble

    Time is stopped inside the "bobble", so gravity has no effect on the contents INSIDE (while they remain inside). "No force known to man can penetrate a "bobble"", and gravity is certainly a force known to man.

    If, OTOH, the "bobble" burst while it was on the surface of the sun the contents would then be subject to an instantaneous acceleration of 28G, but probably wouldn't have time to notice while being instantly vaporized by the 10,000°F (5537.8°C) temperature rise.

    714:

    I'm kind of impressed at the breadth of vocabulary, but sadly the pronunciation guide seemed to be limited to common US words. Viz, they have 'marae' (Maori) but not 'gulara' (Eora) or 'bogach' (Celtic) and no audio for any of them.

    I do like that "gif" is pronounced "jif or gif" though. And something else I checked had a similar workaround.

    715:

    Forgot to thank you for your thoughts on dealing with static electricity in airships. Maybe I can use this....

    716:

    Para 2 - A bit of both I'd guess, since Arrakis is a desert planet (hence the title "Dune").

    You're likely right. I was trying to hint, in a spoiler-free way, that those watching the film might enjoy guessing what was filmed pre-pandemic or post-vaccine, and which scenes were altered to deal with the realities of filming with limited crews and casts.

    717:

    but sadly the pronunciation guide seemed to be limited to common US words

    Here's one for the crowd.

    Are other languages as littered with homonyms as English?

    718:

    Well, I can't really compare, but Finnish does have homonyms. The classic example is "kuusi palaa" which can mean at least nine different things. Of course we inflect words, which means different words can look the same in different inflections.

    I can't speak for many languages, though, but at least in Mandarin and Japanese (both of which I've learned a little) there are a lot of homophones - not so many homonyms as the writing systems try to prevent this. Both of these have quite a limited set of syllables available, and in Japanese not even that many tones as Mandarin. So, you get a lot of words which sound the same and the meaning just has to be either asked or deduced from the context.

    Also there's an amusing one in Swedish (probably a lot more, too, but my vocabulary is sadly not that big, and I don't use it regularly): "tunnelbanan". This can mean (literally) "the tunnel tracks", that is, the metro, or "a tunnel banana", though then it's missing the irregular article. The pronunciation is different, with the stress on the second to last syllable in the metro one, and on the last one in the banana one, so it should be mostly audible when speaking.

    719:

    I've only ventured here after finishing reread of the whole series and invisible sun (which I enjoyed very much). So pardon my dredging up old threads.

    I couldn't figure out why they were in TL2 Berlin either. Even without recourse to more timeliness. They're able to operate in TL1 pretty easily (as shown by Miriam asking for help at a pre arranged emergency call box), and as shown by the construction of a landing platform co-located with the museum/school cleaners cupboard in both TL3 and TL2.

    So why not have a platform built in TL1 to co-locate with the princess's bedroom in TL3? She puts the signal in her window, someone in TL3 spots it with binoculars and reports back to TL1. The go team do the walker in the wheelbarrow trick to jump right into her bedroom, pull the girl and jaunt back. 10 seconds spent in TL3. Then it's 2 hours walk to the River Spree where there's an amphibious plane waiting that will taxi to the nearby Großer Müggelsee and take off. I'd presume that the Commonwealth would be beset by wildfires more than our timeline, as global warming is more advanced, so they'd have need of aircraft similar to the CL515 (twin turboprop amphibious water bombers). With a basic design from the 1960's (CL215) it shouldn't be beyond the Commonwealth to be manufacturing them. With responsibility for Canada, Australia and South America it would be very surprising if they didn't have plenty of them and a means of ferrying them across the Pacific. If they can go that far, then getting back from Berlin shouldn't be hard, particularly if there's a fuel dump arranged by the lamplighter, or dropped from a long distance cargo freighter or bomber into a lake in TL1. There's mention that the French have their first aircraft carrier (implying many conventional ones already), so I'm guessing the Commonwealth would have several. Just have to fly far enough across the Atlantic in TL1 to meet a carrier waiting in TL2 that is far enough off shore to not panic the French.

    Of course, as you point out, more timelines makes it even easier.

    720:

    So why not have a platform built in TL1 to co-locate with the princess's bedroom in TL3?

    I asked a similar question in the Themes & Nightmares thread @ 14. Charlie replied that (a) he didn't think of it, and (b) because the Commonwealth doesn't operate in TL1 any more than it has to, for fear of detection by the ~US.

    Speculating off my own bat, its quite likely that the Commonwealth doesn't know of any timelines adjacent to TL1 apart from TL2. So the whole operation east of mid-Atlantic would have to be done in TL1. Possible in theory, if they can get an aircraft carrier. However that would require the Commonwealth Navy to get in on the act. The extraction is a rogue operation by Olga (even Miriam doesn't seem to know about it until its under way), so no way are they going to be able to go to the Commonwealth Navy and ask to borrow an aircraft carrier.

    Erecting a platform at the Princess's bedroom level might be doable with enough resources; you would need to purchase and port enough lumber over from ~Berlin and then erect it on site. The trouble would be the survey: the Schloss is on landscaped grounds (near an obviously artificial lake) in the middle of a city, while on TL1 it is presumably somewhere near a river in a flat and probably marshy area. Fixed landmarks for a survey are going to be thin on the ground. You would also need to deal with whatever medievals are inhabiting the area. One person in a camouflaged hide can rely on not being noticed. A timber tower not so much. So you need a guard squad to discourage inquisitive locals.

    721:

    I don't think independence could be achieved so quickly that it'd be outside the UK by then.

    (My wife had back-to-back Zoom calls last night, one for the small one day convention we're attending in Bristol this coming Saturday, and one for the not-yet-a-Worldcon. Some years back she swore to give up con-running and yet, here we are.)

    722:

    "Speculating off my own bat, its quite likely that the Commonwealth doesn't know of any timelines adjacent to TL1 apart from TL2."

    Do you mean "...any timelines adjacent to TL3 apart from TL1"? Because otherwise I don't see what it's got to do with it.

    And they certainly do know, because they've been running their exploration of other timelines from TL3...

    723:

    Do you mean "...any timelines adjacent to TL3 apart from TL1"? Because otherwise I don't see what it's got to do with it.

    Aahh yes, you are correct.

    However any plan involving an expedition to the location of Berlin in an uninhabited timeline would still run into the challenge of needing too many resources from the Commonwealth for a rogue operation. The DPR used TL2 because they could leverage the existing technology there to transport the Princess, and they could set up the operation using their own resources.

    724:

    The whole survey thing was a mystery to me. So not knowing how it was done, one survey seemed as impossible as another. They all look like majic.

    If you can't stump up an aircraft carrier (I guess they don't grow on trees, and a carrier fleet just off the coast might make the French nervous) then you could fly from TL3 Newfoundland to TL1 Greenland, TL1 Iceland, TL1 Norway, TL1 Berlin, snatch the girl then from TL1 Berlin to TL1 Norway, then TL1 Iceland, TL1 Greenland then TL3 Newfoundland which is Commonwealth territory. They've all got fjords (other than Berlin which has a lake), which apart from giving a continent a lovely baroque feel, make for nice landing areas. If you can manage a spy trawler fleet, then you can drop off a few barrels of fuel in each fjord. The Norway-Berlin hop is short enough that you wouldn't need a fuel dump in Berlin. The return flight is well within the range of a CL415. The team flown into TL1 Berlin could bring light scaffolding with them. No need to get anything from TL2. You could even airdrop the scaffolding over the TL1 school grounds.

    Of course, all much better done from an uninhabited time line, as pointed out by Pigeon.

    Harder to make into a page turning spy v spy thriller though. I'm very glad that the story I read was much more exciting.

    725:

    The return flight is well within the range of a CL415. OK, but concealing a 20m by 28m flying boat that stalls at about 80mph might still be awkward?

    726:

    Moz @ 714: I'm kind of impressed at the breadth of vocabulary, but sadly the pronunciation guide seemed to be limited to common US words. Viz, they have 'marae' (Maori) but not 'gulara' (Eora) or 'bogach' (Celtic) and no audio for any of them.

    I do like that "gif" is pronounced "jif or gif" though. And something else I checked had a similar workaround.

    The one I mentioned is primarily a U.S. dictionary, but I'd be willing to bet there's a dictionary localized to Australia - New Zealand (or wherever in the world someone happened to need one) that has the same capabilities. The broader point about online dictionaries having pronunciation guides & audio examples should still apply.

    727:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/science/worm-blobs.html

    I trust that there's an Institute for the Study of Collective and Emergent Phenomena somewhere. If there isn't, there should be.

    728:

    Very cool, thanks. [3]

    Peter Watts (the SF author) was recently enthusiastic about a definition of organism that has been emerging the last few decades (any real biologists please correct this), quoting a 2018 paper[1] John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: or, The New Individualism (19 Sep 2021, Peter Watts)

    And now, once again: a bolt from the blue that (for me at least) redefines the word “individual” in a way that could almost be a deliberate response to Pepper et al. An individual— an organism— is
    “a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component.”

    Both Peter's piece and the 2018 paper (and some of the papers it cites) are interesting.

    [1] Are Planaria Individuals? What Regenerative Biology is Telling Us About the Nature of Multicellularity (Chris Fields, Michael Levin, 2018)[2] [2] which cites Beyond society: the evolution of organismality (David C. Queller and Joan E. Strassmann, 2009) We suggest that the essence of organismality lies in this shared purpose; the parts work together for the integrated whole, with high cooperation and very low conflict. Specifically, the organism is the largest unit of near-unanimous design; the qualifying ‘near’ is required because some conflicts, like meiotic drive, probably remain in all organisms. All organism concepts emphasize function and integration; ours differs in stressing unanimity, and in ignoring other traits. Our definition is a social one; the organism is simply a unit with high cooperation and very low conflict among its parts. That is, the organism has adaptations and it is not much disrupted by adaptations at lower levels. [3] Paper ref for worm blobs: Collective dynamics in entangled worm and robot blobs (PNAS February 9, 2021, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, Daniel I. Goldman, M. Saad Bhamla)

    729:

    Ex Libro de Nymphis 684/685: (I did not know of that book)

    a whoooole lot more if you're just dipping in Just dipping in, yes. India has more of my attention ATM. Both need to be slapped hard about GHG emissions. (As do most other countries, especially the USA.)

    ...due to your ignorance. ... [But she still Lives] (How well do you know me? Might be important.)

    Your Generation Music: "Brain Damage", Pink Floyd "Got to keep the loonies on the path" I listened to that song now with a lot more clarity than decades ago. Was not entirely amused by a few spams (but laughed) that appeared to break through gmail's very good spam filter right before(?) that post. That happens much less than once per year for those spam categories.

    Anyway, just saying hi.

    730:

    The French empire in TL3 doesn't know that TL1 exists. If the bright yellow plane stays in TL1 it's pretty well concealed from the French authorities.

    731:

    gasdive @ 724: The whole survey thing was a mystery to me. So not knowing how it was done, one survey seemed as impossible as another. They all look like majic.

    Yes, I had previously wondered about the tower in the swamp used to deliver the backpack nukes to (IIRC) the Pentagon, and also the tower used to access the Treason Room in the Hjalmar Palace.

    To conduct any such survey to within a centimetre you need at least one and preferably two or three fixed reference points in both worlds, and time to do the necessary survey. For movements between TL1 and TL2 or TL3 the only likely points I can think of are outcrops of rock that are identical in both worlds.

    If you have world-walkers enough and time you can create your own reference points by having someone transit and then estimate how far they dropped, or testing if they get blocked by the platform on the other side being to high. Its going to take several tries.

    Once you have your reference points established in both timelines you can use them to establish the point of your target platform. The best theodolites in 1900 could measure angles to 1 second of arc (1/3600 of a degree), which translates to an error of about 5mm at a distance of 1km. So your reference points can be quite some way from your target.

    In the case of the Hjalmar Palace I presume the survey was done at the time the Treason Room was constructed. Concord MA is a small town, so the ground level is probably much the same on both sides. Worldwalkers seem to be able to deal with minor natural variations, so the main concerns would be a precise measurement of the location of the Treason Room (simple but tedious) and mapping that location to the USA. Best option: rent a couple of houses in the vicinity and do some worldwalks from within them, then sight a theodolite out of the windows. Once you have the ground location pinned down in the USA measure the bearings from it to some big nearby buildings that aren't likely to get demolished in the next few decades, and keep an eye on the town planning authority in case they are.

    The nuclear attack on Washington is much tougher. The Weasel was able to obtain approximate locations by a handheld GPS, but precise surveys would be another matter. I can only assume that the attackers spent some time doing experimental world-walks somewhere they would not be observed from within the ~USA in order to prepare a survey; I can't see any convenient outcrops of rock on Google Earth.

    732:

    Maybe I'm too fast a reader, but I miss how Mike Fleming ended up. In hiding in the USA? Escaped abroad or in the Commonwealth?

    733:

    Paul @ 731:

    gasdive @ 724: The whole survey thing was a mystery to me. So not knowing how it was done, one survey seemed as impossible as another. They all look like majic.

    Yes, I had previously wondered about the tower in the swamp used to deliver the backpack nukes to (IIRC) the Pentagon, and also the tower used to access the Treason Room in the Hjalmar Palace.

    [ ... ]

    The nuclear attack on Washington is much tougher. The Weasel was able to obtain approximate locations by a handheld GPS, but precise surveys would be another matter. I can only assume that the attackers spent some time doing experimental world-walks somewhere they would not be observed from within the ~USA in order to prepare a survey; I can't see any convenient outcrops of rock on Google Earth.

    In Washington DC I believe the crossover point was in a parking garage next to a department store & the device was planted in a locked utility closet inside the store. It was a commercial property in downtown Washington, DC NEAR the White House.

    IIRC "Daddy Warbucks" first recruited the clan for an "Operation Northwoods REDUX" style operation when he was SecDef during a prior administration. Don't remember if DC was one of the actual targets for "Daddy Warbucks" false-flag operation or the clan decided they should add it for a contingency in case of betrayal, but I'm pretty sure they already had the location for planting the device chosen in advance.

    The platform in TL1 could be a few inches higher than the parking garage deck. It only wouldn't work if it was lower, and there would be no indication in TL2 before hand. And IF it didn't work, they'd only need to add a bit - another layer of 2x4s - and try again until the platform was the right height.

    FWIW, If you ever wondered about the SADM munition:

    Declassified U.S. Nuclear Test Film #31: SADM Delivery by Parachutist/Swimmer

    It gives you a fair idea of the actual size of the device.

    This is just about my favorite "Army Training Film"

    There's another one I've not yet found on YouTube that IS my all time favorite. After the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went into effect the Army still needed to conduct a test on nuclear blast effects ... so they simulated it with actual TNT. I remember it being half a megaton, but it might have been half a kiloton. Anyway I remember them showing how the pile of TNT was assembled & how they wired it up so it would all go off at the same time.

    734:

    "Anyway I remember them showing how the pile of TNT was assembled & how they wired it up so it would all go off at the same time." "

    Try searching for "MINOR SCALE" and "MISTY PICTURE".

    735:

    Charlie, I want to say thank you for Invisible Sun, which I've just finished (along with its afterword, although I was already roughly familiar with the contents of the latter). I had been in the middle of the 4 books by Max Gladstone that I hadn't previously read when it came out, so my delayed start put it into a timeframe where it's really helped me through a difficult patch. Probably going to re-read the series from scratch now, something I just didn't have time to do in advance. Anyhow: goto reading is therapeutically useful and it's been just the thing, so many thanks.

    736:

    I miss how Mike Fleming ended up.

    Charlie answered this on a previous thread somewhere. It's not in the books: we don't see him after he tried but failed to warn the press.

    If I recall correctly he just wound up living somewhere in obscurity because there was nothing else he could do.

    737:

    Kardashev @ 734:

    "Anyway I remember them showing how the pile of TNT was assembled & how they wired it up so it would all go off at the same time."

    Try searching for "MINOR SCALE" and "MISTY PICTURE".

    I've looked at all the YouTube videos I can find about those and didn't find the film I remember. Mainly they show the explosion and some of the effects, but the film I remember showed a lot of the preparation; how they wired everything up to ensure the whole pile of explosives would detonate at once. It was a TRAINING film to show you how to do it, rather than a film documenting the test.

    And I remember the test site was out in Nevada where the atomic tests had been conducted.

    738:

    I'm currently about ¾ of the way through (and avoiding reading the comments) but I am dropping by in the interest of accuracy: with 2-way radio etiquette, you can be over, or you can be out, but you can't be over and out. Over means "I am releasing the channel so you can reply," out means "this conversation is finished."

    739:

    Btw the next book on my list after Invisible Sun is Billy Summers. I’m 9% in and grinning like a fool (and sure that may be an accurate representation of me, but I digress) because I am thinking that this is Stephen King writing an Elmore Leonard novel, and having a total ball doing it.

    740:

    Agreed, but TBF Hellywood (sic) have been getting that wrong for literally decades now. (I think probably since the 1940s or even earlier)

    741:

    I am pretty sure you are correct. Of course, if you want to be insulting, "over and out" would work ....

    742:

    Well, reading through over 700 comments is enough to make me regret taking my time over the book, although it felt right to savour it. A few of my own notes on comments, with the caveat that I mostly listened to the audiobook version which may have been more different than I realised (I listened to some sections synced to the kindle version and noticed some minor differences like time line numbers, Angie's hair colour, but I'd guess these were the minor corrections the author mentioned above)

    I didn't remember Elizabeth having felt the explosion at the start, so much as hearing it. I assumed this was either a sonic boom from stuff happening at Templehauf, or something like a breaching charge at the apartment.

    The messenger bag in the hotel room confused me because it was left in a bin somewhere, presumably one not the wrong one this time, however the P90 was left in the room (I don't think it was mentioned whether it was in the large handbag bought before ditching the messenger bag) so Gomez would have found that, and smelled the powder residue, giving the probable cause due to recent firearms use, and the story still works. I'm sure that could you updated for a second edition, but it's not really a plot hole.

    I have my own ideas of what an everybody-jaunts city might look like, but this comment is going to be long enough that I don't want to get into the weeds on that too. Poke me if anyone's still interested.

    What I came here to all about is done it the world h building which I'm curious about for the purposes of potentially compatible fan-fiction. In one of the info-dumps we found out about the creation of the Q machines, and that the knotwork encoding deliberately targets descrete offsets, with some hand-waving about it being chosen to allow world-walkers to jaunt into the same timeline and get back to wherever they left from. It's stated that the act of jaunting creates a new timeline. The but which set my mind whirring was this: " The mechanism itself shielded them from one implication of jaunting—that by doing so, they inadvertently created a macroscopically different time line. Or at any rate it did so when the machinery was working as designed. " My idea for a short story is one in which the Hive prion alters to Q-machines for one individual in a way they didn't intend: it's no longer sending the traveler to these fixed offsets, but to points where the timeline diverged within their own lifetime, switching place with their alternative self. Hijinks ensue as the affected world-walker brute-forces probability to make their own life better, until <hand-waving>things</hand-waving> happen to convince them to use their newfound power for a collective good (possibly one of their own alters disrupting their plans by jaunting into their desired outcome, displacing them to a less desirable state of affairs), ending with a heroic sacrifice preventing the Hive from discovering TL1.

    This all relies upon a couple of assumptions:

    1) That the Q-magic can even work this way. They were evidently locked down to traversing fixed distances within an n-dimensional plane within 11th dimensional space-time, with a restriction that the first 4 dimensions are matched, and we're given a justification as to why, but we're not given any idea of the full set of possibilities. 2) That many other macro-scale decisions also create new time-lines. Part of this gets into the weeds of cognition and free will, as if every decision you could make gets made, with every possible outcome, it feels like your decisions don't really matter, and aren't really decisions at all, so much as just your experience resolving to be that which is consistent with said decision. I'd argue that from a story-telling point of view it doesn't matter, it just means we're choosing to document the experiences of the protagonist which ended up with the narrative we found most interesting.

    743:

    Billy Summers

    For reason, I have never been able to enjoy Stephen King's books. I know that he is a universally praised author, and he's admired by many of my favorite authors. But somehow his books always make me feel dirty in a way I can neither explain nor endure.

    I have also never been able to get through Don Quixote, either in Spanish or English translation.

    These odd little literary blind spots...

    744:

    @ 737:

    It's a funny thing how the mind works. Certain numbers have an association with pleasant memories. I can't see the numbers 707, 727, 737 and 747 without being reminded of Fundermontz Airlines "You won't even know you're off the ground ... because you're not!"; the creation of a local radio DJ named Pat Patterson back when Rock 'n Roll was still mostly found on AM radio. In the competition between morning radio personalities Pat Patterson was a true comedic genius.

    Every time I see comment 707:, 727: ... it cracks me up for a minute while I remember happier, more carefree days & I just have to laugh.

    745:

    Adam Rice @ 738: I'm currently about ¾ of the way through (and avoiding reading the comments) but I am dropping by in the interest of accuracy: with 2-way radio etiquette, you can be over, or you can be out, but you can't be over and out. Over means "I am releasing the channel so you can reply," out means "this conversation is finished."

    As Roger Ramjet used to say "Roger Wilcox"

    746:

    I think I see what you mean about Stephen King. There's a kind of sense that he's writing from a room in a building on a world that always has a faint black mist hanging in the air, no less concentrated indoors than out, which perfuses his writing and leaks out around the gap between the words and the page when you read the book. It basically makes me want to not read another such book.

    Don Quixote... well I got through it OK but it left me somewhat at a loss as to what all the fuss is about. Maybe there was nothing else like it at the time it was written, but that's a long way from being the case now, and while being the first of a kind may be a matter of some abstract historical interest, in terms of the actual enjoyment of reading it it's of much the same kind as a thousand other books these days.

    I would not, however, count it as an unreasonable literary blind spot that I fail to appreciate Moby-Dick. I think it's entirely reasonable for me to consider it a large and sloppy pile of rich orangey-brown soft oozing dogshit, and the handful of passages which are powerful agonists of the juvenile-giggling-fit receptor do not make up for it. Mind-bendingly tedious narrative interleaved with crazily and wilfully inaccurate whale biology, even the supposedly dramatic episodes where they are fighting whales and getting drowned are about as gripping as the leaflet in some medicine packet, and for a supposed archetype Ahab is a pissant milquetoast production compared to someone like General Woundwort.

    747:

    Para 3 - I'll agree about the Herman Melville novel (not least because his "research" consisted of buying people in whaling bars in Boston some drinks and letting them ramble whilst he took notes. He was not a whaler). I won't agree about the film adaption with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, but that's a comment on Peck's performance in the role.

    748:

    paws & Pigeon H Melville ... Wall-to-wall ranting, partly-religious utter bollocks. Couldn't get past about page 30.

    749:

    Not sure if this has been replied to yet, but... world-walking is reversible: a knot/engram will take you from timeline X to timeline Y and back again, but that's all.

    The original world walkers (Clan on Timeline 1) had a knot/engram that connected to timeline 2 (the alternate USA), and the Lee family had a garbled knot/engram that gave access from timeline 3 (North American Commonwealth) to timeline 1 (Gruinmarkt).

    Experimentation using Mathematica by Huw(?) Hulius and Elena found the Dome timeline, and shortly after that everything turned to shit. It's probably considered extremely dangerous now, and only done indirectly from TL3 (in case they pop-up in TL2 and come to the attention of DHS, etc.).

    The topology used by the knots/engrams is unknown and hazardous to experiment with, so there is no (discovered) knot/engram to get you from TL3 to anywhere except TL1 (Gruinmarkt), i.e. the Lee family knot. TL2 (USA) is off-limits to everyone except DPR agents, and then only when absolutely essential.

    So it has to be from TL3 -> TL1 -> TL2 (for air travel) -> TL1 -> TL3 to get around the various political problems. (TL3 to Maracibo, then crossover to TL2 (possibly via TL1), then commercial flight to Europe and cross over to TL3 again to avoid the Bourbon Empire security.

    It's possible they've found an engram that gets them from TL3 to TL2 directly, but the Lee knot won't do it.

    Chris. (Too late to be thinking about it in detail.) It's been a Damned Fine Read.

    750:

    Greg Tingey @ 748: paws & Pigeon
    H Melville ...Wall-to-wall ranting, partly-religious utter bollocks.
    Couldn't get past about page 30.

    I agree with your assessment. If anything it's too generous.

    But it was the assigned reading for a [required] college literature course, so as they say in the Légion étrangère ... March or Die!

    751:

    "but you can't be over and out"

    I always understood that this was valid, and meant "I have finished, you can have the last word." But I claim no inside knowledge.

    JHomes.

    752:

    If the uninhabited timelines are full of megafauna, how long until they become a destination for big game hunters?

    753:

    If the uninhabited timelines are full of megafauna, how long until they become a destination for big game hunters?

    Jinx! Check out 349. I was playing with the idea of how a multi timeline civilization would work. The bleeding colonial edges are in uninhabited timelines, the metropole center is in a rapidly developing, resource depleting timeline (a la 19th and 20th century), and the trailing edge is full of ruins, failed, grandiose ambitions, decaying cultural treasures, and people who want to be left behind, because they figure it's more sustainable to live in the ruins than be part of the eternal find-and-grind operation that's the colonial frontier or the engorged metropole.

    754:

    I’m thinking more “what’s next for TL2?” After the multi-para-California gold rush, of course.

    755:

    About the Swarm.... One thing I thought a lot about, and covered, in my novel, is that I have a problem with everyone and their robots desperately wanting to invade Earth.

    Why? Are they that exactly alike that the biosphere is perfect, no alienforming it needed?

    The same applies to the Swarm: if there are close to an infinite number of worlds, why fight, when you can make take the right, then the left fork, instead of the right fork, and no humans.

    756:

    If you’re expanding exponentially you’ll go down every path.

    757:

    That's not quite how I remember it: they have certainly been exploring alternate timelines from one adjacent to TL3 rather than from TL3 itself, but that one was itself one of a number discovered by exploration that did start from TL3; they didn't use TL1 for anything other than getting to TL2, partly because too much of it was unvisitably radioactive, and partly because it was adjacent to TL2 and therefore at even more risk of intrusion than TL3 was. So they know about a bunch of timelines which are reachable from TL3 without going through TL1, some directly and some at one or more steps of remove.

    They know enough of these to have a subset of them designated as "OK to nuke the fuck out of" for Juggernaut to manoeuvre in, and they have set up sufficient infrastructure either in or connecting with one of these to make it possible to use that one to build Juggernaut. This infrastructure must include a pretty capable runway-independent airlift facility to move all the necessary materials around in uninhabited timelines, and it is controlled by the same semi-clandestine group who are running the Elizabeth operation.

    758:

    I think that's a good point about the swarm. The questions are: --Which is easier, extracting resources from an uninhabited world, or from an inhabited world, and --Which is more dangerous, allowing humans to live on adjacent timeline, or exterminating them?

    I can make a case for all combinations of these, but OGH thinks a bit like a Dalek, so he went for the maximum brutality version of the interaction for purposes of drama. His universe, so why not?

    759:

    I’m thinking more “what’s next for TL2?” After the multi-para-California gold rush, of course.

    Ah, that's a good question!

    The first limit is the ARMBAND technology, which limits how many craft can move stuff among timelines. The next limit is that a bunch of those will be used for recon. I'm quite sure the US military will resurrect the Corps of Discovery to check each timeline for infestations or inhabitants before they do anything else. Probably it would be a multi-force operation. For example, the Space Force could launch an armband-equipped minimal space station (or even sophisticated drone) to prowl among the timelines doing hyperspectral scans of what's on the ground and in LEO on each timeline. Then you send in the Navy and Marines (Navy has the hovercraft) to do local-scale recon and set up a beachhead.

    Anyway, the second limit is determining what uninhabited means. The inhabitants nuked themselves to oblivion? H. sapiens never evolved? Plate tectonics may turn out to be completely stochastic, so...do we find worlds with no ice ages/no hominids (we're ice babies)? No Chicxulub/smart dinosaurs? Other extinction events we somehow missed? The possibilities for alt-biospheres might be considerably weirder than we've bothered to think about. OGH never went into how divergent divergent timelines would be. My suspicion is that the worldwalking technology was developed on a timeline where things were fairly radically different. But we don't know how divergent timelines can be.

    If uninhabited means no hominids, then that's a weird world we Euro-moderns have barely seen--lots of naive animals who don't know that humans are dangerous. Big, toothy, naive animals. Now we have some decent evidence that the megafauna went extinct in a few hundred years around the La Brea Tar Pits (heard that in a recent lecture). But that was during a major climatic bad event (the Younger Dryas) and after thousands of years of humans and megafauna coexisting. Something analogous happened in Australia at a different time, and in Europe at still a third time. So it's possible for humans to both coexist with and wipe out giant mammals, and it's not clear whether the change from coexistence to ecocide is a human population pressure thing, a millennia-long great hunt thing, human fire changing the landscape more each century, or what.

    How does this play out in a paratime scenario? Depends. Resettling a depopulated world is different from colonizing Dinosauria, or settling a world where the ice ages are alive and well. Just to have something to talk about, let's pick the latter.

    I'd suggest that panning for gold in cave lion country is all kinds of stupid. A hungry young cat will look at that head bent over and exposed neck as a gift from the God of cats, and they'd be right. Probably the safer, more boring thing is to set up an oil camp first, get a baby refinery going, and then use the gas to power trips to exploit other resources, and expand that way. If I had to do it, I'd pick some place like Venango County Pennsylvania (site of the 1859 first oil well), or Long Beach California as a beachhead. Long Beach is a pretty good location, because there's a good natural harbor, the LA river is nearby (fresh-ish water) a big oil formation about 10 miles away, a tin mine within about 50 miles, and there's lots of flat ground suitable for grazing Imperial Mammoths or eventually farming (now all paved). To protect the colony, I'd probably use US imperial military technology: sand bags, concertina wire, and ubiquitous small arms to keep the lions, jaguars, and bears out of the camp. And I'd probably go fishing for most of my food, since the waters off Long Beach were a world-class fishing area a century ago. Elephant hunts are all well and good, but when you've got to chase off sabertooths, cave lions, jaguars, dire wolves, regular wolves,, short-faced bears, grizzly bears, black bears, mountain lions, coyotes, etc (don't forget the flies), it's going to be really tedious to shoot a mammoth and butcher it properly. Definitely not a one-person job. That's why I'd go fishing and abalone diving instead--less hassle.

    760:

    JHomes @ 751:

    "but you can't be over and out"

    I always understood that this was valid, and meant "I have finished, you can have the last word." But I claim no inside knowledge.

    JHomes.

    Technically it would mean something more like "You can have the last word, but I won't be listening, 'cause I'm hanging up the phone now."

    761:

    Heteromeles @ 759:

    I’m thinking more “what’s next for TL2?” After the multi-para-California gold rush, of course.

    Ah, that's a good question!

    The first limit is the ARMBAND technology, which limits how many craft can move stuff among timelines.

    How does "ARMBAND technology" limit "the number of craft that can move stuff among timelines?"

    I'm about 150 pages from the end of The Traders' War and still have to REread my way through the third omnibus, Empire Games and Dark State before I get to Invisible Sun, so if why ARMBAND would be limiting is explained in final book, I'm not bothered by spoilers. You shouldn't have to reveal the whole story line to explain ARMBAND.

    ... The next limit is that a bunch of those will be used for recon. I'm quite sure the US military will resurrect the Corps of Discovery to check each timeline for infestations or inhabitants before they do anything else. Probably it would be a multi-force operation. For example, the Space Force could launch an armband-equipped minimal space station (or even sophisticated drone) to prowl among the timelines doing hyperspectral scans of what's on the ground and in LEO on each timeline. Then you send in the Navy and Marines (Navy has the hovercraft) to do local-scale recon and set up a beachhead.

    Just as a side note ... Isn't it strange the Navy SEALS rarely if ever use Navy or Marine Corps aircraft for deployment?

    I'll get back to your other points later (if there's anything turns out I want to argue about) ... but ... Why do you assume a paratime gold rush would mean panning for gold in AltX-Californa?

    We already know where the gold was found in our own timeline - I'm guessing ~USA in TL2 do as well - so why wouldn't we/they go straight to mechanized extraction?

    And what use is gold? You can't eat it. It's not usable for currency in TL3 (or wasn't before the revolution). You can't burn it to produce power. Why not go for the oil instead?

    In fact, in The Traders' War Dr. James says as much to LTC Smith:

    'Oil, son. Makes the world go round. You know what the business with al-Qaeda is about? Oil. We're in Saudi Arabia because of the oil: bin Laden wants us out of Saudi because of the oil. We're going go into Iraq because of the oil. Oil is leverage. Oil lets us put the Chinese and Europeans in their place (...)

    and

    He took a deep breath. 'The Clan. A bunch of medieval jerks squatting on our territory - or a good cognate of it. What's going down in Texas, Colonel Smith? Their version of Texas, not our Tesas: what are they doing there? I'll tell you what they're doing: they're sitting on twice as much oil as Saddam Hussein, and that's what's got Mr Cheney's attention. Because, you see, if JAUNT BLUE delivers, eventually all that good black stuff is going to be ours ...'
    762:

    Assuming I didn't get confused again, we've got three paratime technologies among humans: 1. The Forerunners, where everyone can jaunt. 2. The equivalents of the Clan, where tampering by the Hoppers has made it a recessive system, so that only some people can jaunt 3. TL2 (our timeline) where ARMBAND technology and/or genetic manipulation of the children of worldwalkers are the only way to get stuff between timelines.

    If we're in systems 2 or 3, there's a bottleneck based on how many people and/or smart systems can jaunt, compared with system 1, where everyone and their maiden aunt (but not their pet cats) can jaunt. This makes a huge difference in how stuff moves.

    The problem with jaunting is that it's ultimately weight limited to whatever you can land successfully on the ground. In practice, this means the biggest vehicle that can jaunt to land on an unexplored timeline is probably a hovercraft (not an airship).

    Now, why go to mechanical extraction of gold? Why effing bother with gold in the first place. Jaunty types have to eat and not be eaten long before they go digging out notionally precious metal. That's why I'd go for coastal oil deposits first: put the parts of the oil rigs on hovercraft, jaunt them over after I take the sand bags, tarpaulins, water tanks, fishing gear...

    As for mining gold, Sierran gold deposits weren't from veins, they were placer deposits in ancient and modern river deposits. In the California gold rush, gold was found by demolishing mountain slopes with hydraulic cannons (search on "monitor") and washing the resulting sediment through separation apparatus before dumping it in the Sacramento. So do we know where the richest stuff would be in another timeline that had randomly different erosional patterns? Probably not.

    Anyway, precious metals are silly, because when you get enough of them, they're valueless. When settling a new timeline, you need water, shelter, food, medicines and materials to manufacture a good life. Gold is at best an epiphenomenon of this.

    763:

    In the short term most inhabitants of as rich a society as ours aren’t going to be interested in leaving. They’re going to be interested in going and getting something to improve their status back home. Gold is pretty good that way in terms of status boost per load. And presumably you’ll have a team, with armed guards and maybe land mines.

    764:

    Just remember, the people who got rich off the gold rushes (Stanfords, Crockers, etc.) were the suppliers, not the miners.

    If you're planning on staying, then investing in infrastructure that other people will need is probably the best way to get very, very wealthy. This can be everything from nurseries to oil to well-diggers, road builders and pavers, lumber extraction, surveying, fertilizer, seed farms (that produce seed for farmers, not just seed for food).

    765:

    Kinda depends on how people are travelling between timelines. If they can jaunt daily then most supplies can be provided in their home timeline and supply isn't such a big deal.

    766:
    How does "ARMBAND technology" limit "the number of craft that can move stuff among timelines?"

    Because there exists only a limited number of ARMBAND devices, and each one is only good for a limited number of jaunts. They seem to wear out eventually, although I don't remember whether there's an exact explanation for this in the books.

    When the ~USA began manufacturing ARMBAND devices each one needed to be built around harvested brain tissue of a world walker, and there was a limited supply of that (the (unwilling) donor didn't survive the process; so the production of ARMBAND devices doubled as a particularly gruesome form of death penalty for Clan members).

    By the time of Invisible Sun the ~USA are able to genetically engineer the needed tissue, so they no longer need a steady supply of captured Clan members. But they're still not anywhere near something that could be called "mass production". However, it's possible that they'll get there some day, and jaunting may become a recreational activity for the masses.

    767:

    Kinda depends on how people are travelling between timelines. If they can jaunt daily then most supplies can be provided in their home timeline and supply isn't such a big deal.

    Yes and no.

    The two challenges are: 1) do we assume that the surfaces of alt-Earths precisely match each other, or not? I learn hard towards not, because things like ice sheets distort the surface rather strongly, not just under the ice but well away from it due to the weight of the ice. So easy jaunting may be conditional.

    2) If civilization isn't sustainable, then there has to be a build-up of infrastructure on colony/developing worlds, commensurate with the abandonment of developed worlds. There are huge financial advantages to being the person/corporation that created and owns the infrastructure that everyone depends on. That will incentivize people to settle colonies and make their fortunes that way.

    Commuting among timelines sounds cool, and it certainly makes sense under some conditions. Because it doesn't necessarily translate into ownership of a patch of land on a particular timeline, it may not be the most desirable lifestyle.

    The bigger fun in paratime may be about questions of access and denial to particular bits of land on particular timelines.

    768:

    Just a random thought: if the Earth's surface varies across timelines, then aerial surveys of new timelines may be good. Problem is (per Word of God), weather varies fairly strongly across timelines, so jaunting gets a bit crazy.

    Planes certainly work (seaplanes probably best in many areas, because lakes become landing fields). Airships might work, although I have no idea how they handle wind shear. Since something like a dirigible is around 300 m long, wind shear could be problematic. Landing an airship will be tricky on an undeveloped world, especially if you want to take off again.

    There's a third, goofy idea: flying saucers. While it would be cool if there is antigravity available, the bigger advantage is that they're discoid flying wings, so they're equally unstable in all directions. Getting slammed sideways after a jaunt would make them more unstable than they already are. It makes for a goofy sidenote if those UFOs that buzz military bases and disappear are paratime scouts.

    769:

    Heteromeles @ 762: Assuming I didn't get confused again, we've got three paratime technologies among humans:
    1. The Forerunners, where everyone can jaunt.
    2. The equivalents of the Clan, where tampering by the Hoppers has made it a recessive system, so that only some people can jaunt
    3. TL2 (our timeline) where ARMBAND technology and/or genetic manipulation of the children of worldwalkers are the only way to get stuff between timelines.

    If we're in systems 2 or 3, there's a bottleneck based on how many people and/or smart systems can jaunt, compared with system 1, where everyone and their maiden aunt (but not their pet cats) can jaunt. This makes a huge difference in how stuff moves.

    The problem with jaunting is that it's ultimately weight limited to whatever you can land successfully on the ground. In practice, this means the biggest vehicle that can jaunt to land on an unexplored timeline is probably a hovercraft (not an airship).

    So it is NOT some kind of inherent limit in "timeline physics" that says you can only have some number 'X' of ARMBAND machines that can move stuff among timelines.

    It's only a "limit" because of the number of ARMBAND machines they've been able to manufacture, not an inherent limit in "timeline physics" like in nuclear physics where Atomic Numbers over !04 appear to have half lives of hours or minutes ... and much higher numbers don't appear to be able to exist at all.

    As for mining gold, Sierran gold deposits weren't from veins, they were placer deposits in ancient and modern river deposits. In the California gold rush, gold was found by demolishing mountain slopes with hydraulic cannons (search on "monitor") and washing the resulting sediment through separation apparatus before dumping it in the Sacramento. So do we know where the richest stuff would be in another timeline that had randomly different erosional patterns? Probably not.

    I think you missed my point. Searching other timelines for gold is a waste of time, BUT if you ARE going to do it anyway ... you aren't going to be panning for it.

    Those hydraulic cannons ARE mechanized extraction. Exactly what I was referring to.

    And randomly different erosional patterns notwithstanding, if you're looking for gold, the FIRST PLACE you're going to look for it is the "AltX-Sierra Nevada foothills" along the banks of the "AltX-South Fork American River". It's only if you DON'T find it there that you start looking somewhere else.

    For any mineral resource you want to extract from a new timeline, the FIRST PLACE you look is somewhere you know from your home timeline where that mineral resource existed in readily accessible abundance, even if it has been mined out on your home timeline.

    You don't go to "AltX-New York State" looking for oil, you go to "AltX-Texas".

    770:

    MSB @ 766:

    How does "ARMBAND technology" limit "the number of craft that can move stuff among timelines?"

    Because there exists only a limited number of ARMBAND devices, and each one is only good for a limited number of jaunts. They seem to wear out eventually, although I don't remember whether there's an exact explanation for this in the books.

    By the time of Invisible Sun the ~USA are able to genetically engineer the needed tissue, so they no longer need a steady supply of captured Clan members. But they're still not anywhere near something that could be called "mass production". However, it's possible that they'll get there some day, and jaunting may become a recreational activity for the masses.

    So, it's a supply chain or resource extraction limitation, rather than a limitation imposed by the physics of world walking. How many ARMBAND machines can you build and how many times can you use one before it wears out and you have to replace it? [rhetorical question]

    That's really what I was getting at. The prior comment seemed to imply there was some inherent limit of the amount of ARMBAND traffic that could occur during any one instant in time.

    771:

    "do we assume that the surfaces of alt-Earths precisely match each other, or not? I learn hard towards not, because things like ice sheets distort the surface rather strongly, not just under the ice but well away from it due to the weight of the ice. So easy jaunting may be conditional."

    From the evidence we have of how it works in practice, I think we have to conclude that "can't do it if there's something in the way" is not an absolutely accurate description, but a "lies-to-children" type simplification. If it was absolute, then all jaunts at any given spot would only work one way, depending which timeline had a fractionally higher or lower ground surface at that spot, and to get back again you'd have to either jump in the air or wander about experimenting until you found a spot where the difference was the other way round. (And if the two timelines were exactly identical then you wouldn't be able to go either way, because your own weight would deflect the ground minutely so your current side would always be a tiny bit lower.)

    As it is we see the principle working in gross but failing if you ask sufficiently nit-picky questions, like: Why is the ground an obstruction but the air isn't; it's still matter? Why isn't it a problem to jaunt from clear air to air with raindrops falling through it? How does someone manage to jaunt equally well in either direction between timelines where the same spot, though happening to be at the same level in both, is paved in one and grassed in the other; why doesn't the grass get in the way going in that direction? Etc.

    I think we have to assume that a jaunting object does have some limited ability to shove matter out of the way on the other side, but only to the extent of somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of its own mass. That would account for the observed result that jaunting can be blocked by such partial obstructions as a length of rope or the corner of a table, but not by such lesser ones as raindrops, grass, or the ground level being a couple of millimetres different. (In the final case of course the "shoving out of the way" is more noticeably applied to the jaunter than to the obstruction, but it's one of those "I fall down and hit the ground/The ground falls up and hits me" situations really.)

    How this limitation takes effect is unclear, but it's unlikely to be a straight conservation of energy thing. A minor difference in gravitational potential would very likely be counterbalanced by a minor gain or loss of heat - similar to chemical reactions which are endothermic but nevertheless go by themselves because it's entropically favourable and pinch the energy they need by making things cold. You would never notice this: a couple of millimetres height change would correspond to a temperature change of around 0.000005K for a mass of water or something soggy enough to be considered as water, like a human.

    It feels more like some kind of interference effect, and its severity may be to some extent implementation-dependent: one of those things where the design embodies some idealised assumption to make it tractable, and there is enough tolerance and slop in the system that it also works in real situations as long as reality doesn't differ from the ideal by too much. (Then if "not too much" isn't enough to stop people complaining, over time the same principle is applied to deal with the error terms, recursively etc.)

    We are told in very vague terms that the jaunting mechanism performs some process of bringing the jaunter into "correspondence" with the other side. It could very well be functioning along the same kind of lines as SCORPION STARE, a mechanised instantiation of the standard cat-based quantum magical principle that goes "you set up a quantum view of the thing in which there are exactly two states it can be in, the state it's in and the state you want it to be in, and they are equally likely; because of quantum, that means it's actually in both states at the same time and isn't in one or the other until you look to see; therefore if you look at it properly you can see it being in whichever state you're looking for it being in, and that means it is in that state". In the jaunting case the two states are the corresponding jaunter-shaped volumes of space from the two identical timelines distinguished only by the jaunter being in this one or that one. By the quantum cat magic principle this means the jaunter is half in both at the same time and there is no barrier keeping them on one side or the other.

    If, contrary to that idealisation, in reality the other timeline has grass and the jaunter's current one doesn't, this introduces an additional difference between the two states - whether the grass is standing up, or squashed down - which is not represented in the quantum view. This skews the real probabilities away from exactly half-and-half and towards the side of the jaunter staying where they are, so the cancellation of the barrier is incomplete. But it still shrinks it small enough for there to be a very high probability of tunnelling past it during the period of time when the fluence is on.

    The displaced-matter condition - grass squashed down, here - is of course not actually a single discrete state, but a superposition of a whole bundle of states with extremely trivial differences in the matter of the exact manner in which each blade is bent. This "fuzz" interferes with the simple two-discrete-states model the magic is using and greatly amplifies the probability-skewing effect. As the grass gets longer, the number of possible trivial differences increases (more ways to bend a longer blade), the interference gets worse, and eventually the barrier cancellation is so poor that there is negligible chance of tunnelling past it while the fluence is on. Because the rate of increase of complexity is basically factorial, "eventually" comes on very abruptly, and from the user's point of view it looks like a binary barrier as well-defined as a cliff.

    The jaunting mechanism is implemented as little blobs of quantum nanogoop the same sort of size as mitochondria and distributed with similar density, operating at around 310K. Clearly the computational capacity available is pretty small. But it's enough to handle a great enough level of divergence to make the thing practically useful, and it can do so with an acceptably small energy consumption for intracellular use.

    With a larger computational capacity you could handle greater levels of divergence, for instance being able to jaunt into and squash out of the way grass higher than your head. But the chances are that the extremely rapid growth in complexity means that this sort of processing power would be totally impossible to either install or find the power for in an intracellular configuration.

    This is probably also why, if you want to set up a barrier-cancellation that is persistent and is valid for any matter that happens to be around, you need to keep a pet black hole as a matter-energy converter to power it.

    Where is the heatsink for that thing? There are temptations in this theory towards the idea of using it to build a device to cheat thermodynamics and not need one... but it wouldn't work; it's only an unusually complicated Maxwell's demon, and the computational entropy increase would outweigh the gain.

    I think you can work from that point to an absolute best-case theoretical maximum figure for how long the grass could possibly be while still handling the computation on intracellular machinery (of ideally perfect efficiency) that wouldn't instantly cook anyone who tried to actually jaunt with it. But not at this time of night.

    772:

    Those are all excellent points, probably more detailed than I was thinking of. I was just thinking that many of the forces that shape the ground (erosion, earthquakes, lava flows, distortion by the weight of glaciers, beaver ponds, ad nauseum) could cause the ground level to vary by meters among timelines. The reason I was going on about people's naive assumption that jaunting among worlds is possible at any point on land between any two timelines.

    OTOH, I realize that 1:1 3 dimensional mapping between timelines with centuries of different history is an integral part of many of the stories. And also, this is a fantasy.

    773:

    "How many ARMBAND machines can you build and how many times can you use one before it wears out and you have to replace it? [rhetorical question]"

    Answering it anyway :) Since they don't actually understand how it works, they're developing it by a clone-and-hack method, and are still not really all that far beyond getting "hello world" to work. As far as I understand it, the magic parts are currently being produced by maintaining some delicate and slow-growing cell cultures in highly regulated conditions and cutting bits off the edges every now and then. So an obvious next step would be to get the same material reproducing in some more robust and faster-growing kind of cells that can be cultured in less demanding conditions. Take that far enough and you could build the production and replacement of magic parts right into the machine itself: make it reproduce in yeast and you could have the machine keep going indefinitely with just a drop of sugary water every now and then. Although they wouldn't want to if they have any sense.

    A more practical approach would be to get the structure analysed in sufficient detail to be able to reproduce a working version of it using integrated circuit fabrication techniques. They'd be laughing then.

    774:

    The fun part with this technology is that strange matter structures seem to spontaneously accumulate around the real matter structures created by the genes. That level of self-assembly is surpassingly cool. Since jaunting runs on strange matter handwavium, it's really neat that you don't have to supply the strange matter to get the system to run.

    775:

    Pigeon @ 773:

    "How many ARMBAND machines can you build and how many times can you use one before it wears out and you have to replace it? [rhetorical question]"

    Answering it anyway :) Since they don't actually understand how it works, they're developing it by a clone-and-hack method, and are still not really all that far beyond getting "hello world" to work. As far as I understand it, the magic parts are currently being produced by maintaining some delicate and slow-growing cell cultures in highly regulated conditions and cutting bits off the edges every now and then. So an obvious next step would be to get the same material reproducing in some more robust and faster-growing kind of cells that can be cultured in less demanding conditions. Take that far enough and you could build the production and replacement of magic parts right into the machine itself: make it reproduce in yeast and you could have the machine keep going indefinitely with just a drop of sugary water every now and then. Although they wouldn't want to if they have any sense.

    A more practical approach would be to get the structure analysed in sufficient detail to be able to reproduce a working version of it using integrated circuit fabrication techniques. They'd be laughing then."

    Yeah, but it's NOT a structural limit of the universe that only X number of ARMBAND machines can be operational at one time as the comment seemed to imply.

    It's a technology-logistical limitation, not a limitation imposed by the "physics" of world walking. You can use as many ARMBAND machines as you can produce.

    776:

    Yes, I quite agree.

    777:

    Binge Read Review

    When this post dropped, I realised I hadn't read any of the Next Gen/Empire Games stories and I found my trade paperbacks of the original set were going mouldy on the bookcase. So I bought ebooks of the omnibus editions and started a binge read of the entire series from the very start, culminating in finishing Invisible Sun last weekend.

    Wow. Consuming the entire series in one sitting (at a daily rate of at least 30 minutes but more usually an hour or two per night) was an experience and a half. It really was like binge watching a Netflix season!

    The compendium edits of the first books definitely helped, I remember being somewhat frustrated with the sheer amount of recap material in the second and third books, so the edit and updates certainly make all of the first part hang together much more fluidly.

    Overall, we go from portal and medieval fantasy through cold war spy thriller and wind up in hard sci-fi with answers to the Fermi paradox of the most unpleasant variety. There is no way anything like this has any right to hang together and feel consistent... and yet it does.

    The strength and consistency of Miriam's character was one of the keys to that sense of unity; her ability to think rings around her opponents doesn't always save her, in fact it leads to hubris and the worst of her calamities. Although she is not the central character of Empire Games, sure remains the linchpin on which the story hangs.

    Are there gaps and gaffs that only a single read through would reveal? Of course there are, but none that disrupt the overall narrative structure. That Paulie fades in and out of the story so often and so suddenly is the closest i'd come to a criticism of any that I spotted, I did feel she deserved a sub plot of her own earlier in the series to give her a bit more screen time.

    But that's kinda my only nit pick in an epic that is as long as War and Peace and The Lord of the Rings back to back. I've never got past the first few chapters of W&P, but I've read LotR several times including as a short-term binge, like this. Doing Merchant Princes as a binge read was every bit as satisfying as LotR, it may not have the sheer breadth of immersive and all encompassing background but it has pace, intrigue and novelty which are in turn relentless, fascinating and insightful.

    Like all good stories, the series held up a mirror to the world and showed me just how dangerous the rabbit hole of authoritarianism is for the US and how close to the edge we were, and still are, dancing along it. There is a ray of light at the end of the book as the President reigns in the hawks in her agencies, compromises and finds common ground. And I can perhaps imagine a future where the enlightenment of the Commonwealth might light the way back for America. In our own timeline, those pressures that drove reprieve do not exist and though the path the story warns of may not be quite as slippery, we aren't off of it yet.

    So... Should you spend a month reading the whole thing back to back in a binge? As long as you have the omnibus edits: definitely yes, consuming this body of work like this was hugely enjoyable.

    778:

    Here you go, we don't just work in English:

    Evergrande technically defaulted, forcing HSBC and other international banks to write off US$197 billion

    https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4329732 - Nov 1, 2021

    Taiwan News is old skool Propoganda / Establishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_News

    grep: "HSBC" in memo to Martin.

    ~

    Now: working out what of that is true, and who is liable and who is pushing which agendas? Over Martin's Pay-grade.

    But. There you go, we do not lie. We're just better at it than you.

    779:

    Late to the party, but ...

  • Great ending for a great series, I really enoyed "Invisible Sun".

  • I second/third the comments about the German parts - some of the scenary description (like the colour of police cars) can be explained by timeline differences, but the German soundbites should really be corrected, they are distraction to native speakers.

  • The book I read after "Invisible Sun" was Tchaikovskys Doors of Eden, quite interesting to see the different approaches to paratime in both books.

  • 780:

    Hi Mr Stross,

    I just read your book, Empire Games, about a week ago.

    I really enjoyed the book. But there is something I want to ask.

    There is a chapter in the book where Rita jaunted into a Commonwealth railyard and took a lot of data via recording.

    Afterwards, Colonel Smith and other governments officials analyzed the data and concluded that the Commonwealth's industrial set-up was such that a highly-efficient manufacturing set-up, where the workers live in public housing blocks and are ferried over to the factories (if I remember correctly, the factory in the book was manufacturing tanks). But they are ferried over by high-speed commuter trains.

    May I ask what is the in-universe explanation for using commuter trains? In our world, especially in the USSR and Maoist China, it was quite common for workers to be allocated living quarters extremely close to the factories (In China, it is called Danwei and the living quarters are just right next to the factory). Why wouldn't the Commonwealth government build the workers' housing nearer to the factories or use buses instead?

    781:

    My guess would be that it's about the fact that most women work too in the Commonwealth, and it's not necessary that a cohabitating could would work nearby.

    782:

    Ronald @ 780: Hi Mr Stross,

    "I just read your book, Empire Games, about a week ago."

    I really enjoyed the book. But there is something I want to ask.

    There is a chapter in the book where Rita jaunted into a Commonwealth railyard and took a lot of data via recording.

    Afterwards, Colonel Smith and other governments officials analyzed the data and concluded that the Commonwealth's industrial set-up was such that a highly-efficient manufacturing set-up, where the workers live in public housing blocks and are ferried over to the factories (if I remember correctly, the factory in the book was manufacturing tanks). But they are ferried over by high-speed commuter trains.

    May I ask what is the in-universe explanation for using commuter trains? In our world, especially in the USSR and Maoist China, it was quite common for workers to be allocated living quarters extremely close to the factories (In China, it is called Danwei and the living quarters are just right next to the factory). Why wouldn't the Commonwealth government build the workers' housing nearer to the factories or use buses instead?

    Just a SWAG, but based on the earlier books, New Britain already had the housing blocks & rail/trolley network before they started building new factories. Using existing housing & rail/trolley networks was the most efficient application of scarce resources for rapid expansion of production to war-time levels.

    I expect it closely parallels how the U.K. increased war production just before and early in WW2.

    783:

    Actual 15TB SSDs are a thing now in the corporate IT space.

    Also as an ex-technical writer I'm pretty sure you meant to say TB and not Tb, although even TB and GB are falling out of use now amongst IT specialists in favour of the more useful TiB (Tebibyte) and GiB (Gibibyte) - the difference being the use of base 2 rather than base 10 (1TB = 10^12, 1TiB = 2^40). Honestly when we dealt in KB and MB the differences were small enough it rarely mattered, but they get bigger as we move to GB/GiB, TB/TiB and PB/PiB.

    (but you probably knew all this anyway!)

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