What Would You Do, Rashek Edition

[SwordNimiForPresident]

The premise is pretty simple, you're in Rashek's shoes when he uses the Well of Ascension. You've just moved Scadrial out of it's Goldilocks zone and now you have to figure out how to save the world.

What would you do?

 

I'll start it off with a few "what I would do's".

Option one:

I think the simplest fix would be to make humans aquatic. Just change our physiology so we can absorb oxygen either though our skin like a frog, or through gills like a fish. I don't think you would even need to do anything else after that. Maybe add some surface volcanoes to keep the planet cool? The added benefit would be that the Well of Ascension would now be on land, and totally inaccessible to anyone other than you.

Option two:

Don't save humanity. Instead, reach out to all the female Feruchemists of the world and make them an offer. You will give ten of them Lerasium and make them into Fullborn, but only if they help you repopulate Scadrial with a race of Fullborn. This one is pretty dark, as you are condemning everyone else do death, and essentially blackmailing a bunch of women into being your concubines, but its still probably leads to less suffering than what Rashek did.. and on the up side, you are now the leader of a planet of gods. Let's see a Scadrial vs. "insert random Cosmere planet here" thread when Scadrial is peopled by nothing but Fullborn lol.

[Frustration]

14 minutes ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

Option two:

Don't save humanity. Instead, reach out to all the female Feruchemists of the world and make them an offer. You will give ten of them Lerasium and make them into Fullborn, but only if they help you repopulate Scadrial with a race of Fullborn. This one is pretty dark, as you are condemning everyone else do death, and essentially blackmailing a bunch of women into being your concubines, but its still probably leads to less suffering than what Rashek did.. and on the up side, you are now the leader of a planet of gods. Let's see a Scadrial vs. "insert random Cosmere planet here" thread when Scadrial is peopled by nothing but Fullborn lol.

That wouldn't have your desired result.

Spoiler

Snipexe

Is Allomancy a recessive or dominant gene?

Brandon Sanderson

It doesn't work according to Physical genetics, it works according to Spiritual genetics, and they don't work exactly the same way.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/385/#e12576

Travyl (paraphrased)

Why do the Twinborn in Alloy of Law have only one Feruchemical power, when all previous Feruchemists, in spite of breeding programs, could use all the metals? 

WetlanderNW (paraphrased)

Or were Ferrings always part of the system and we just didn't meet them in Mistborn?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

The Ferrings are a new development since Mistborn, as the Feruchemists have been interbreeding with the Allomancers. Basically, the Allomancy genes interfere with the Feruchemy genes, breaking it down and creating the limitations we see in Alloy of Law.

Footnote: Brandon's response was very enthusiastic. He noted how perceptive the question was, and obviously enjoyed the discussion. The reporter has expressed their regret at lack of an audio recording to share his enthusiasm.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/215/#e4696

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is also possible that at the time you couldn't be born as a Fullborn at all

Spoiler

Doc_John

Hey, you've mentioned before that for the Lord Ruler to be able to be a Mistborn and a Feruchemist he had to alter his spiritweb in some way because a person can't normally hold all 32 powers. What about a Mistborn Ferring? Would it be possible for someone born with all 16 powers of Allomancy to also be born with a Ferring power? What about a Ferring Misting? Thanks

Brandon Sanderson

This is possible now, when it once wasn't, but would be very unlikely.

Doc_John

Just as getting a Mistborn nowadays is very unlikely but that hasn't stopped people from trying

Follow up, having past a certain number of medallions doesn't work currently in world. Is this because of this same issue? Or is it more of a technical hurdle with the medallion?

Brandon Sanderson

The core root is the same issue, but it's not insurmountable with technological improvements.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/406/#e14103

 

 

 

 

 

[Treamayne]

8 hours ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

The premise is pretty simple, you're in Rashek's shoes when he uses the Well of Ascension. You've just moved Scadrial out of it's Goldilocks zone and now you have to figure out how to save the world.

What would you do?

1. Not panic
2. Realize my mind was expanding with knowledge of the power and its Connections
3. Realize the "deepness" Mists were part of the power I am holding (interfered with by the prisoner)
4. Move the planet back where it came from (since you stipulate it's after the planet moved - otherwise just not move it at all)
5. Fix the Mists to be nighttime-only

[SwordNimiForPresident]

7 hours ago, Frustration said:

That wouldn't have your desired result.

  Reveal hidden contents

Snipexe

Is Allomancy a recessive or dominant gene?

Brandon Sanderson

It doesn't work according to Physical genetics, it works according to Spiritual genetics, and they don't work exactly the same way.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/385/#e12576

Travyl (paraphrased)

Why do the Twinborn in Alloy of Law have only one Feruchemical power, when all previous Feruchemists, in spite of breeding programs, could use all the metals? 

WetlanderNW (paraphrased)

Or were Ferrings always part of the system and we just didn't meet them in Mistborn?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

The Ferrings are a new development since Mistborn, as the Feruchemists have been interbreeding with the Allomancers. Basically, the Allomancy genes interfere with the Feruchemy genes, breaking it down and creating the limitations we see in Alloy of Law.

Footnote: Brandon's response was very enthusiastic. He noted how perceptive the question was, and obviously enjoyed the discussion. The reporter has expressed their regret at lack of an audio recording to share his enthusiasm.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/215/#e4696

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is also possible that at the time you couldn't be born as a Fullborn at all

  Reveal hidden contents

Doc_John

Hey, you've mentioned before that for the Lord Ruler to be able to be a Mistborn and a Feruchemist he had to alter his spiritweb in some way because a person can't normally hold all 32 powers. What about a Mistborn Ferring? Would it be possible for someone born with all 16 powers of Allomancy to also be born with a Ferring power? What about a Ferring Misting? Thanks

Brandon Sanderson

This is possible now, when it once wasn't, but would be very unlikely.

Doc_John

Just as getting a Mistborn nowadays is very unlikely but that hasn't stopped people from trying

Follow up, having past a certain number of medallions doesn't work currently in world. Is this because of this same issue? Or is it more of a technical hurdle with the medallion?

Brandon Sanderson

The core root is the same issue, but it's not insurmountable with technological improvements.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/406/#e14103

 

 

 

 

 

The dilution of Allomancy and Feruchemy happened over generations, where any children born after would be first generation and descended from two Fullborn parents. I’m sure there would be plenty of duds, but there would also be a few successes. I see the point you’re making though.

 

I think he meant that a Fullborn couldn’t be born then because a Mistborn couldn’t be born. Rashek hadn’t distributed the Lerasium yet, so Allomancy in its current form hadn’t been introduced to humanity yet.

[alder24]

9 hours ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

The premise is pretty simple, you're in Rashek's shoes when he uses the Well of Ascension. You've just moved Scadrial out of it's Goldilocks zone and now you have to figure out how to save the world.

What would you do?

That's hard. Firstly, I hold the power of Preservation only, so I can't create new things, only change those which are made of Preservation's power. So I can't change the star's luminosity, as this star existed there prior to Ruin and Preservation's arrival, nor can I create a ring of dust surrounding this star.

Secondly, I can't move Scadrial back where it was. I don't know where it was and I don't have any reference points. Sazed was able to do it only because he had Trellism's star maps, which show him where to put Scadrial. I don't have this, I don't know, I can't move it back, and trying to do it, might only push the planet into cold regions of the system, making it as cold as Mars. Which is the same conclusion Rashek reached after moving Scadrial closer to its star.

Thirdly, experience comes not with the time I hold the power, but with the amount of power I use. So the most complicated things, like drastically changing human's biology, must be done in the last place, because I can mess things up while doing it, if I do not learn how to be delicate with this power.

Furthermore I have a limited amount of power. I could move Scadrial's orbit maybe once more, but I can't keep moving it until I find the correct orbit. The power will run out fast if I keep using it.

What does it mean to place a planet closer to its star, out of the Goldilocks zone? It means that now it's too hot for water to exist on the planet's surface in liquid state. I can't ignore it, I have to find a way for water to remain in liquid state, or else it would all boil away in few years, which would release a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas, which would cause runaway greenhouse effects and made a planet into a Venus-like planet.

Taking all of this into consideration I think all that Rashek did after moving the planet closer to its star were brilliant moves. He focused on fixing the problem instead of trying to reverse it with little hope of success. Ferromagnetic ash coming from Ashmounts was a great way to cool down the planet. Bacteria eating ash is a great way of preventing ash from accumulating. Little changes to human and life biology to adapt them to new, harsh conditions. He did surprisingly good, and I don’t think there is a lot more that could be done which would yield better results.

 

But I have some ideas.

Option 1: 

Move Scadrial again, away from the sun. I will certainly overshoot it this time as well, and move it out of the Goldilocks zone into freezing orbit, but that's ok. Then I will change the planet completely. Move all the water, or most of the water on the planet's surface underground. Move humans, plants and animals underground, and create a stable, underground caves for humans to live. Make sure that heat generated from the planet's core is enough to create an underground environment suitable for sustaining liquid water and life, but reduce the plant's tectonic activity, and make sure human's caves are far away from places where two or more tectonic plates meet. Change life's biology so they can survive there, and create plants that can grow underground and provide a stable food supply for humanity and other animals. Planet's surface will freeze, but life can exist underground. This would create a world far worse then the one Rashek did, but life will survive. To play a long game, create a star maps after moving Scadrial closer to its star, and another one after moving it away - you have too little power left to move Scadrial for the third time, but with 2 star maps providing you a reference points, when Well would fill up again after 1000 years, you could calculate precisely where Scadrial should be in its orbit, and move it back where it once was.

 

Option 2:

Now the second option is a weird one, I don't know how it works, so I'm just going wild. What I need to do is to create an atmosphere that will reflect most of the sunlight back into space, and not absorb it. For example low and thick clouds are good at reflecting sunlight back to space. There are some gasses that have anti greenhouse effects, like Dimethyl sulfide. Creating a reflecting surface on the planet will also help, just like ice and snow, but it's too hot for it so I need to find some other material. So basically this will be like creating the same effects that Ashmounts did, without them. I need to change Scadrial's albedo from 0.3, which is Earth-like, to much greater value, like 0.7. Ashmounts are again the easiest solution, without them I need to find some other ways, like cover the planet's surface with silver mirrors or something  

 

Option 3:

I was thinking if I could take some material from Scadrial, and scatter it around a planet in a spherical, thick layer of dust. But that won't work for long. That dust will "collapse" into a ring system around the equator, or fall down back on Scadrial most likely. But it might be stable for 1000 years at least, which would provide a nice and cold planet.

 

Option 4:

Another wild idea. Synchronise Scadrial's rotation with its orbit - which would mean that one side of the planet will always face its star, while the other will always be dark - like the Moon is tidally locked with Earth. It might require to move Scadrial even closer to its star, so it can be tidally locked, but I can likely do it without it, and create a rotational period close enough to being tidally locked, so it can cause similar effects on orbit Rashek move Scadrial into. Like Venusian day is longer than its year, but in this case make it even longer, much longer. I will have to move all life to the dark side of the planet. And to help the planet even more, I need to create very strong water and air currents that will carry heat from the day side to the night side of the planet, maybe even I could manage to keep the day side oceans from boiling. Humanity can have agriculture in a twilight zone of the planet, where the sun is still shining, but not so much to cause burns. I will have to make water life more numerous and increase their breeding ratio (from plankton and plants to fishes and mammals), so it can sustain itself while being likely the main source of food for humanity. With these changes Scadrial can become an eyeball planet, on which life can "thrive".

 

9 hours ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

Option one:

I think the simplest fix would be to make humans aquatic. Just change our physiology so we can absorb oxygen either though our skin like a frog, or through gills like a fish. I don't think you would even need to do anything else after that. Maybe add some surface volcanoes to keep the planet cool? The added benefit would be that the Well of Ascension would now be on land, and totally inaccessible to anyone other than you.

Without creating Ashmounts, oceans will boil away. And if you are going to create Ashmounts, just do what Rashek do, as changing humanity to be an aquatic species would create far more problems than it would solve - like for example there would be no fire, so you won't have metal tools, means no technology, means no civilization.

10 hours ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

Don't save humanity. Instead, reach out to all the female Feruchemists of the world and make them an offer. You will give ten of them Lerasium and make them into Fullborn, but only if they help you repopulate Scadrial with a race of Fullborn. This one is pretty dark, as you are condemning everyone else do death, and essentially blackmailing a bunch of women into being your concubines, but its still probably leads to less suffering than what Rashek did.. and on the up side, you are now the leader of a planet of gods. Let's see a Scadrial vs. "insert random Cosmere planet here" thread when Scadrial is peopled by nothing but Fullborn lol.

That won't work. Firstly again, water will boil away, the planet's surface will be turned into inhospitable hell. While Feruchemist can survive by storing excess heat in brass, you don't have bendalloy, nor you won't have technology to create it, so you can't compound food/water, and there will be no food left very soon. To add more, mixing Allomantic genes with Feruchemical genes will break down Feruchemical genes, resulting in Ferrings and Twinborns being born, not Fullborns. To add more, future generations will face much more power and gene decay, so you will not see Feruchemist show up at all, just Ferrings, Twinborn and Halfborn at best, with weak Allomancy. But your population won't survive long enough to see it. As soon as the water completely boils away, you're dead.

[king of nowhere]

It's very simple: figure out some astrophysics, then move the planet back where it was.

What? rashek modified plant dna to make them ash-tolerant. that's incredibly complicated. Right now, with our modern science we would have no idea how to do it. And the smallest mistake will result in a plant that won't live.

on the other hand, they already figured out the laws of radiated heat one century ago. they are not that difficult. By making some gross simplifications on the albedo, I myself could calculate more or less the right distance from the sun - and I'm not even a physicist. getting a more complete climate model would be harder, but still much easier than making widespread dna modifications.

Another way to calculate scadrial's supposed orbit would be to look at its near asteroids. any planetary body has a bunch of minor bodies trapped around its lagrangian points, or in quasi-stable horseshoe orbits, or in orbital resonances. You can figure out your orbit from that.

No, wait, even easier. Rashek knew how long the year was supposed to last on scadrial. All you need then is kepler's laws, which we figured early in the 16th century, and you can calculate your orbital radius.

even better, with moving the planet you don't need to be accurate. with dna you have to alter hundreds of genes, and getting just one mistake will result in death. with moving a planet, you can easily afford a 10% margin of error. Sure, the tropical lines are going to move a bit. Perhaps the ice caps will melt and cause flooding in coastal areas. or perhaps they will grow some more. but none of that will be a disaster, not even close to what the ash did. life will go on. you need to miss your target by a lot to get something like snowball earth.
when vin removed the ash, people got instant sunburn. this is something i would expect on mercury. rashek did a real crap job of moving the planet around.

 

P.S. Instead of coming up with the vague deepness stuff, I'd tell everyone about ruin, about how i trapped him. I may leave out some details, like the exact workings of the well of ascension, to avoid others trying to steal my power. But I certainly do want that, in case a hero defeats me, they will know to not give up the power. And I absolutely would not use hemalurgic creations as servants - regular humans may be less effective, but who cares, I'm invincible anyway, if my armies are defeated I'll just have to deal with that personally. I'm not so lazy as to give ruin powerful tools just because I can't be bothered to destroy an army by myself.

[Treamayne]

3 hours ago, alder24 said:

Secondly, I can't move Scadrial back where it was. I don't know where it was and I don't have any reference points. Sazed was able to do it only because he had Trellism's star maps, which show him where to put Scadrial. I don't have this, I don't know, I can't move it back, and trying to do it, might only push the planet into cold regions of the system, making it as cold as Mars. Which is the same conclusion Rashek reached after moving Scadrial closer to its star.

Not quite true (see below). 

2 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

It's very simple: figure out some astrophysics, then move the planet back where it was.

Shouldn't be necessary

As we saw in SA:

Spoiler

With Taravangian becomming the Vessel of Odium. The Power remembers what has been done with the power. If Rashek had not panicked, he would have realized the Power of Preservation "knew" how much the planet had moved and could simply reverse the action. 

 

[alder24]

4 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Not quite true (see below). 

Shouldn't be necessary

As we saw in SA:

  Reveal hidden contents

With Taravangian becomming the Vessel of Odium. The Power remembers what has been done with the power. If Rashek had not panicked, he would have realized the Power of Preservation "knew" how much the planet had moved and could simply reverse the action. 

 

Yes, it's likely the power would know that. I don't however know if there was enough Preservation’s power in the Well for it to know where the planet was. So we don't konw how much knowledge would you get just from holding the power, but for sure far less than holding whole Shard. But I could figure out where the planet should be. The problem however is that I lack practice. Even if I knew, I wouldn't be able to move it in the right place, I would always overshoot, and I can't gain practice in moving the planet - there is not enough power there. Plus there is likely Ruin’s power subconsciously opposing my actions in some way at least, or allowing them to happen as they bring destruction.

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Forty-Four - Part One

Subtlety with the Power

The Lord Ruler created koloss, kandra, and Inquisitors during his time holding the power. This took some practice and experimentation, however. As has been explained, holding the power granted some intuitive understanding of how to use it. For instance, he knew how to make Hemalurgic creatures—but he wasn't practiced enough with the specifics at first to know exactly what he wanted to make or what the results of his experimentations would be.

In a similar way, he knew that he could move a planet—and did. With practice, he could have figured out how to shove the planet the right way to place it correctly in orbit. Unfortunately, you can't really experiment with moving a planet around without causing a whole lot of damage.

And so, he could do something as subtle as create three new races—and, with that practice in biology, redesign the world's plants and animals slightly—but could be so far off in the way he shoved the planet about the first time.

The Hero of Ages Annotations (Dec. 4, 2009)

And there is another problem, you can't wait indefinitely for you to understand the world around you, power of the Well would just go away on its own.

Spoiler

Yata

When someone Ascended with the Well, if He don't use the power and neither release it...Would He keep his status for long time ?

Brandon Sanderson

No, unfortunately.

Stormlight Three Update #5 (Nov. 19, 2016)

 

But tbf I really wanted to have fun and explore what could be done other than boring "move the planet back to where it was". Of course that would be the best solution, but too boring  

[Treamayne]

2 minutes ago, alder24 said:

 The problem however is that I lack practice.

I understand all of that - what I am saying is that he didn't need to know where he started. If you take two stpes forward, you don;t need to "know"  where you were or are to know that two steps backward returns you to where you started. In other words:

If the power of the Well was X and expended Y to move distance Z, then expending Y again to move -Z returns you to the location you left. 

Now, if even one more iteration of Y was not possible, it's a different story; but that is not what was understood to have happened. He panicked and went into triage/band-aid mode. It worked and they survived (ish*); but I think his Intent was also partially warped by the desire to have Scadrial in a position that he could take and keep power. Subconsciously, he didn't want to realize there was a better fix.

• Spoiler

  I say "ish" because we still don't know how all of those societies survived Rashek's remaking of Scadrial, when they didn't have the storage caverns to hide in while the planet was terraformed

   

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But tbf I really wanted to have fun and explore what could be done other than boring "move the planet back to where it was". Of course that would be the best solution, but too boring 

Nothing wrong with a bit of theorycrafting. I'm theorycrafting as well, just in the "hindsight-best-solution" variety. 

[alder24]

13 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

I understand all of that - what I am saying is that he didn't need to know where he started. If you take two stpes forward, you don;t need to "know"  where you were or are to know that two steps backward returns you to where you started. In other words:

If the power of the Well was X and expended Y to move distance Z, then expending Y again to move -Z returns you to the location you left. 

That's what I meant by practice. Rashek knew he needed to use the same amount of power to move the planet back on its correct orbit again, the problem is he couldn't even if he tried. There is simply too much power and he is too limited to move it with that precision. He would always push the planet with different forces. The practice comes from using the power, so the more he moves Scadrial's orbit around, the more precise he can get and finally use the correct amount of power to bring Scadrial on its right orbit. But at this point he would run out of power or destroy Scadrial even more. That's what the WoB said.

Quote

In a similar way, he knew that he could move a planet—and did. With practice, he could have figured out how to shove the planet the right way to place it correctly in orbit. Unfortunately, you can't really experiment with moving a planet around without causing a whole lot of damage.

Edit:

14 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Nothing wrong with a bit of theorycrafting. I'm theorycrafting as well, just in the "hindsight-best-solution" variety. 

Naah, I prefer "what other terrifying things can I do"  

Edited March 17, 2023 by alder24

[JustQuestin2004]

5 minutes of Godhood?

Uhhh firstly I might decide to just split a portion of the population to live in the Cognitive Realm, giving them the ability to grow food and stuff there too. Just so that if I screw the physical planet up, then not everyone will die. 

Secondly I'd try to figure out a more efficient way of blocking some of the suns heat, so as to not need Ashmounts. It wouldn't need to be perfect just good enough to last over a thousand years. Maybe a dust cloud, maybe just lift the Mists up a bit to make them Clouds or just make the environment very cloudy. Something simple like that so that I wouldn't have to change humanity too much.

Thirdly I'd make sure everyone knew about ruin and knew to only write with metal. Just to limit Ruin's influence a little more.

Fourthly I'd take the population of Terris and place them on a separate continent from everyone else in a more moral way of limiting the mixing of Allomancy with Feruchemy. Probably also give them some kind of 'Divine Mandate' to follow or something just to give them something to do.

Fifthly I'd make some Lerasium on the Main Continent to give to kings and tempt them to my side, keeping a few beads in reserve and for my own experimentation.

Sixthly I'd move the Well to near Ruin's Perpendicularity and hide the both of them.

Seventhly I'd give myself proper immortality by maybe raising my own amount of Innate Investiture to match the Fifth Heightening?

 

And that's about it. I'd probably lose the Well's power before number 5 but yeah, I'd just try to keep myself alive for the next 1000 years and become the God Emperor of Mankind on Scadrial then keep using the Well. Also figure out how to kill Ruin properly.

[Sky Breaker]

Option one: make a moon that is both tidally locked between scadrial and their sun make it just big/close enough to only let a good amount of sunlight through 

option two: tidally lock scadrial to its sun with the well of ascension in a habitable zone 

option three: just do to everyone what he ends up doing to the southern scadrians ( made them incredibly heat resistant 

[cometaryorbit]

Assuming the planet can't be put back exactly right, I think it'd be better to go too-cold than too-hot. It'd be way easier to adapt humans to an atmosphere somewhat richer in greenhouse gases than to Rashek's ash world. (If I could mess with the atmosphere at a molecular/atomic level, it might be possible to get away with no changes to humans at all, by creating relatively low toxicity, very strong greenhouse gases that are stable for 1000+ years ... like SF6.)

There's way more outward room for error in the habitable zone than inward room (Mars is possibly technically in the habitable zone, it's just too small to remain habitable, possibly). I think that level of precision ought to be manageable.

Edited March 18, 2023 by cometaryorbit

[alder24]

6 hours ago, Sky Breaker said:

Option one: make a moon that is both tidally locked between scadrial and their sun make it just big/close enough to only let a good amount of sunlight through 

That won't work. Earth's moon blocks only a small portion of sunlight during a solar eclipse and affects only a small region. You can't put a moon too close, because it will be ripped apart by tidal forces. And you have the power of Preservation, you can't create, you would have to take a portion of Scadrial and form a moon out of that.

6 hours ago, Sky Breaker said:

option three: just do to everyone what he ends up doing to the southern scadrians ( made them incredibly heat resistant 

He didn't do anything to them, they were his "control" group in case he messed up humans with his genetic changes. And you are still outside the Goldilocks zone, oceans will boil.

Edited March 18, 2023 by alder24

[kenod]

14 hours ago, Sky Breaker said:

Option one: make a moon that is both tidally locked between scadrial and their sun make it just big/close enough to only let a good amount of sunlight through 

option two: tidally lock scadrial to its sun with the well of ascension in a habitable zone 

option three: just do to everyone what he ends up doing to the southern scadrians ( made them incredibly heat resistant 

Pretty sure tidal locks don't work the way you imagine them doing here.

If something is tidal locked to a different body it means their rotation around their own axis has a specific ratio to their rotation around the body they're orbiting (1:1 for the moon, iirc, but I think a couple others are possible too?). They still keep orbiting. What you're talking about for option 1 is placing the moon at the Scandrial-Sun L1 Lagrange point, but this point isn't actually stable, so the moon will start to drift with time.

Tidal locking the planet to the sun is going to give you a world where one end is basically frozen, one is heat-blasted into a desert, and any potential habital zone would be somewhere around the twilight zone, which I suspect might not be all that habitable anyway, since the temperature differentials would likely cause some pretty bad storms.

[cometaryorbit]

11 hours ago, alder24 said:

 He didn't do anything to them, they were his "control" group in case he messed up humans with his genetic changes. And you are still outside the Goldilocks zone, oceans will boil.

To be fair, the Southern Scadrians did survive, so it's possible that Rashek's big changes in the North were an overreaction.

Habitable zones are a long-term (astronomical time scale) thing. Venus is well outside the inner boundary of the habitable zone, but if Earth was magically pushed to Venus' orbit, our oceans wouldn't boil immediately - the process would probably take vastly more than 1024 years (likely millions). If current Earth had Venus's solar energy input, the average temperature would be in the 90s F - high latitudes would be quite habitable. Over a very long time span, the oceans would slowly be lost, water vapor would increase the greenhouse effect, and you'd end up with a superheated totally uninhabitable planet. But that's a *really* long time scale.

Scadrial in TLR's time might be even closer to its sun than Venus, because the sun intensity we see at the end of HoA seems too high. Venus gets about x2 Earth's (at the top of the atmosphere, before the effects of reflective clouds).

[alder24]

53 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

To be fair, the Southern Scadrians did survive, so it's possible that Rashek's big changes in the North were an overreaction.

Not really, Vin messing up with Scadrial proved changes were necessary. And volcanic ash generated on one side of the planet would cool down the whole planet. "The year without summer" - 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora caused year 1816 and the following to be extremely cold across the whole world, in the Northern Hemisphere during summer snow fell in many places.

HoA ch 76

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Well, she would fix that. She felt electrified with power. She reached out and plugged the ashmounts. She soothed them, deadened them, smothered their ability to spray ash and lava. Then, she reached into the sky and wiped the smoke and darkness from the atmosphere—like a maid wiping soot from a dirty window. She did all of this in a matter of instants; not more than five minutes would have passed on the world below.
Immediately, the land began to burn.
The sun was amazingly powerful—she hadn't realized how much the ash and smoke had done to shield the land.

[...]

Vin, Vin . . . he said. Do you realize how like the Lord Ruler you are? When he first took the power, he tried to solve everything. All of man's ills.
She saw it. She wasn't omniscient—she couldn't see the entirety of the past. However, she could see the history of the power she held. She could see when Rashek had taken it, and she could see him, frustrated, trying to pull the planet into a proper orbit. Yet, he pulled it too far, leaving the world cold and freezing. He pushed it back again, but his power was too vast—too terrible—for him to control properly at that time. So, he again left the world too hot. All life would have perished.

ch 77

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He jumped from building to building. He kicked up ash with each leap. Things were happening. The ash was slowly trickling away—in fact, it had mostly stopped falling. That was good, but he remembered well a short time ago when the sun had suddenly blazed with an amazing intensity. Those few moments had burned him so that his face still hurt.
Then, the sun had . . . dropped. It had fallen below the horizon in less than a second, the ground lurching beneath Elend's feet.

ch 82

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Outside, the sun rose into the sky. The heat was incredible, like an oven.

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He glanced upward. The sun was rising. It was getting hard to breathe for the heat. He felt his skin burning. By the time the sun reached its zenith, it would likely be so hot the land would burn.

[...]

The ash had killed the plants. The sun would burn away anything that remained.

[...]

Koloss cried out in pain from the burning. The heat was terrible, and around Sazed, trees began to pop and burst into flames. His touch on the twin powers kept him alive, he knew, but he did not embrace them.

Temperature at which the wood ignites is between 250 and 600 °C. This is far greater than 30 °C. And far above boiling temperature of water, which would likely boil away whole water in decades or less (I've seen estimates that at 100 °C of surface temperature it would take 2 years or 168 years (at ~0.5 AU) to boil away all of Earth's water. No idea how accurate, I can't do that math). So Scadrial is probably closer to the orbit of Mercury than Venus.

[cometaryorbit]

Well, it's weird, because the SoScads survived somehow, and they didn't have the ash adaptations. Now maybe volcanic clouds just kept the overall planetary temperature low enough that they could survive, without there being a lot of ash in their area... but still, then, why bother with the ash adaptations vs just putting everyone on the south pole?

I'm skeptical you could actually make it work with RL physics with a sun intensity high enough to ignite wood (I don't think volcanoes could make *that* much of a difference, especially as Scadrians can still see the sun so the reflective cloud layer isn't *that* thick).

Rashek also missed a trick by not putting the habitable areas on a Tibet-like plateau. You could get significant extra cooling that way.

[alder24]

11 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Well, it's weird, because the SoScads survived somehow, and they didn't have the ash adaptations. Now maybe volcanic clouds just kept the overall planetary temperature low enough that they could survive, without there being a lot of ash in their area... but still, then, why bother with the ash adaptations vs just putting everyone on the south pole?

There was less ash in the southern hemisphere, so no ash cloud, but it was still there, significantly cooling the region down to livable conditions. But that's not why Malwish survived. Temperature in the southern hemisphere was still much higher than in the northern hemisphere, humans there had to adapt to the new environment and evolve. They did it over 1000 years, but this could still likely end with their extinction. Just look at Malwish after the Catacendre. 10 years of average Earth temperature and their entire society collapsed, many died because of "cold", which was not so different from temperatures in the northern hemisphere. Their bodies evolve to adapt to much hotter temperatures, but evolution is random, so putting everyone on the south pole and hoping they adapt to a new harsh environment would be a very stupid thing.

There is even mention in BoM ch 21 that during the Final Empire, oceans close to the equator were boiling.

Evolution in Cosmere happens on much shorter timescale than in reality:

Spoiler

Questioner

Do the Purelakers get pruney feet because of the water? If not, is it because they have special feet or does it have to do with the magic fish?

Brandon Sanderson

They have adapted over time and they do not have magic feet. They have special feet, but they have adapted over time to the situation. Now, let's make the note that most natural selection does not work on the timescale of the cosmere and so there probably have to be some magical foundations for this. The fact that everyone on Roshar is Invested with a bit of Investiture more than average is going to push people over time in a way. Kind of the rationale I give myself on this is because Intent and these sorts of things are so important cosmerelogically that we get evolution on a faster scale in most of the cosmere. And so you can see this just by adaptations that have happened since the history of Roshar itself and the arrival of humans on Roshar and things like that.

YouTube Livestream 9 (May 28, 2020)

Rashek found a way to help them survived without changing their genetics:

Spoiler

Comatose

So here's my last question. If there ARE people on the other side of the world, did Vin kill them all by placing the sun on their side, or do they have they're own Ruin/Preservation battle going on over there as well? Do they also have allomancy feruchemy and hemalurgy?

Brandon Sanderson

No, they're not dead. Yes, Rashek was aware of them. In fact, he placed them there as a reserve. I knew he wanted a 'control' group of people in case his changes to genetics ended with the race being in serious trouble. All I'll say is that he found a way other than changing them genetically to help them survive in the world he created. And since they were created by Ruin and Preservation, they have the seeds of the Three Metallic Arts in them—though without anyone among them having burned Lerasium, Allomancers would have been very rare in their population and full Mistborn unheard of.

Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

This one explains how they've adapted:

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

South Scadrians have low natural body temperature. This is related to their cold intolerance.

Footnote: The MAG had written the opposite, which was incorrect.
JordanCon 2021 (July 16, 2021)

 

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I'm skeptical you could actually make it work with RL physics with a sun intensity high enough to ignite wood (I don't think volcanoes could make *that* much of a difference, especially as Scadrians can still see the sun so the reflective cloud layer isn't *that* thick).

Yeah, I agree, volcanic ash cooling down Scadial by 300 degree Celcius is far too much to be realistic. But ash still can have significant cooling effects. If one volcano eruption like Krakatoa or Tambora can drop global temperatures by 1 degree for several years, then several volcanoes pomping ash into the atmosphere every single day, for 1000 years, would drop global temperatures by dozens of degrees. So it's just a bit exaggerated, but still based on real life events of volcanic winter and impact winter. Like Brandon once said, he writes fantasy not hard sci-fi.

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Rashek also missed a trick by not putting the habitable areas on a Tibet-like plateau. You could get significant extra cooling that way.

As long as there are ice caps on mountains around them, which provides water, then yes, without them this would be a deserted wasteland. Maybe Malwish were placed on such plateau

TLM spilers:

Spoiler

Scadrial's continental map shows that Malwish are geographically located in a very mountainous region, so it's likely they lived high up in the mountains and caves which allowed them to remain cool until they adapted naturally over time.

 

Edited March 19, 2023 by alder24