scadrial calendar before and after the ashworld

[king of nowhere]

In the newly published annotation for alloy of law, sanderson mentions that scadrial is very similar to earth, including the lenght of the year being the same.

That actually make me wonder on a potential contradiction.

in the ashworld, the planet was closer to the sun (much closer, if the characters felt the sun burning immediately without ash). So for the laws of gravitation the ashworld year had to be shorter to accomodate a shorter orbit. significantly shorter. And so a year during the ashworld was bound to be shorter than our year (note that they still have one winter per year, so they're not using the old pre-ascension calendar).

Vin at the beginning of the story is 15. 15 ashworld year. That would make her, like, 12 in earth years. And I'm not willing to believe she was that young. she's clearly an adolescent, and she's been for a while.

 

So, what's the catch? did the lord ruler change humanity so that thhey would grow faster? and somehow make them smarter so they could mentally grow faster too? Am I overstimating the shortening of the year, so that the ashworld year and the earth year still differed by less than 10%? but how that relates to elend in HoA getting sunburned in a few seconds before vin turn the world?

[Baine]

The planet probably rotated around the sun slower, too. Just assume it coincidentally takes the exact same time as our year.

[king of nowhere]

The planet probably rotated around the sun slower, too. Just assume it coincidentally takes the exact same time as our year.

Impossible. for a planet rotating around the sun at a certain distance, the angolar momentum required to keep that distance is automatically fixed. the closer a planet is to its star, the faster it will go, and the shorter the orbital time.

[Scriptorian]

Unless the mass of the planet changed....It could be that they kept the same measurement of years, despite the fact that the planet was orbiting faster.

[king of nowhere]

Unless the mass of the planet changed....It could be that they kept the same measurement of years, despite the fact that the planet was orbiting faster.

 

again, nope. the mass of the planet is irrelevant for the orbital period. only the mass of the star and the orbital radius counts. so unless tlr changed the mass of the star, which he didn't (because that would open a completely new can of worms, and anyway if he didn't have enough power to keep pushing the planet around he certainly couldn't change the mass of the star), the scadrial year became shorter.

[PorridgeBrick]

The power of the shards might be artificially keeping the planet in a slower orbit than should be possible. This is magic, after all.

[Robot Aztec]

if years lenth are dififernt then is 1024 on OLD year or on NEW year??

[Mistdork]

Could it be that the star that Scadrial is orbiting might have a different mass than our sun anyways and be a different size? I'm not sure we know exactly how big the planet itself is anyways, and as PorridgeBrick said, magic is as magic does. Or rather, sometimes we don't have all the answers and we have to live with it.

[thecatinthehat]

Vin at the beginning of the story is 15. 15 ashworld year. That would make her, like, 12 in earth years. And I'm not willing to believe she was that young. she's clearly an adolescent, and she's been for a while.

 

Well, maybe they kept counting years the pre-ashworld way, so she was 15 earth years =~ 18 “ashworld years”?

Or so I hope.

[TheArcanist]

Or maybe it moved closer to the sun not by altering orbit, but rather by altering the tilt of the planet. Remember, Mistborn takes place in Northern Scadrial, we have no idea how the southern hemisphere was affected. Earth maintains a planetary tilt on orbit of 21 degrees. If the northern hemisphere began to tilt closer to the sun, it would cause dramatic, catastrophic climate change. This is without counting the damage that would occur on the surface of the planet if magic suddenly moved a planet going at a dramatic speed through space.

 

You know how we don't really feel any of the earth's orbits? Imagine what would happen if they suddenly stopped, and then altered dramatically. It's a miracle that when the Lord Ruler altered Scadrial's orbit without thinking that everyone didn't just fly off the surface of the planet and get launched into orbit.

[Kobold King]

My feeling on the subject is this: the World of Ash didn't really have any points of reference for determining the new year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember any mentions of seasonal changes like Winter or Summer. The Ashmount probably insulated the planet in such a way that no annual climatic changes were possible.

With this in mind, I'm inclined to think that the people of Scadrial... simply didn't notice. How would they? Every day is exactly the same, no seasons, so they had no reason to assume that anything about their calendar system had changed. They probably still use traditional dates.

[WeiryWriter]

My feeling on the subject is this: the World of Ash didn't really have any points of reference for determining the new year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember any mentions of seasonal changes like Winter or Summer. The Ashmount probably insulated the planet in such a way that no annual climatic changes were possible.

With this in mind, I'm inclined to think that the people of Scadrial... simply didn't notice. How would they? Every day is exactly the same, no seasons, so they had no reason to assume that anything about their calendar system had changed. They probably still use traditional dates.

 

They have seasons.  There are a couple of mentions of Luthadel getting snow during winter.

[Robot Aztec]

 

They have seasons.  There are a couple of mentions of Luthadel getting snow during winter.

but sesons are hard to notiuce (it is in annotation0

[Kobold King]

They have seasons.  There are a couple of mentions of Luthadel getting snow during winter.

Huh. Yeah, apparently there are a number of very clear references to winter and the passage of seasons in TFE alone. Clearly I should pay better attention while I'm reading.

With that in mind, all I might suggest is that the people who survived Rashek's Ascension decided to keep their original calendar for some reason. Maybe they split their calendar in half--one for age counting and official business and another for keeping track of crops and the weather. It would be perfectly in character for the Steel Ministry to pull convoluted shenanigans like that.

[king of nowhere]

I'm making a few calculations to see what would be the orbital distance of scadrial.

The amount of heat a planet receives from its sun is proportional to the square of the orbital radius.

the heat lost by irradiation is proportional to temperature^4.

The formula to calculate the orbital period is found at this link as small body orbiting a central body (I don't know how to write a formula with forum tool)

 

Now, if we assume that the average temperature of scadrial increased by 30 degrees (enough to make human life impossible in the temperate regions, but to keep the poles livable) and approximating the average earth temperature to 27 degrees (just to have the round number of 300 kelvin) it would take 1.46 times more energy to keep the planet that warm. It means the new orbit should have a radius 0.83 times the old radius. by fitting that into the orbital period formula, the new orbital period would be 76% of the old one. By that calendar, vin should be twelve at the beginning of tfe.

In the final empire, the increase in temperature was less than 30 degrees because of the ashmounts, an in fact temperate latitudes were still livable. An increase of average temperature of 30 degrees would be enough to make even subpolar latitudes unlivable - cause in the summer the temperature there can reach 20 degrees, that translates to 50 degrees with that model, enough to kill everyone if it keeps for a few days.

 

In a more optimistic calculation, we can assume the increase in temperature to only have been 20 degrees. In which case the planet would need 1.3 times more energy, the orbital radius would be 88% of the old one, and the orbital period would be 83% of the old one, and Vin would be 13 at most; since it is implied that she reched sexual maturity a few years before, I'd say we can discard that.

 

Furthermore, those calculations are quite optimistic, because filling the atmosphere with ash would have a dramatic effect. greenhouse effect and albedo counts for much more than pure irradiation, which is why venus is twice as distant from the sun as mercury, gets fours times less energy, but is actually hotter on the surface. So the planet was probably closer to its star than my assumption.

 

At this point the best explanation is that they still count years in pre-ascension calendar. I don't like it, because tlr worked hard to stamp out memories of pre-ascension times , so why keep the old calendar? But it's still a better explanation than vin actually being 12.

[Robot Aztec]

 

 but sesons are hard to notiuce (it is in annotation0

at who downvot me loook here http://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-mistborn-3-chapter-fifty-four/ each of the Mistborn books has covered many months—the first one covered almost an entire year. The nature of the Final Empire, where it tends to have very mild winters, makes the changing of seasons rough to follow.

Sh

[king of nowhere]

wwhen i was at work today I had a sudden intuition that could actually give a better explanation: positive feedback.

In my previous model, I assumed that the temperature of scadrial was only regulated by the laws of irradiation, and thus to have great heating you need much more energy, but that's an oversimplification. a planet dont work that way.

It is possible, for example, that the increase in the temperature caused by the new orbit was only minor, a few degrees. that, however, was enough to melt many icecaps, and that increased the amount of light absorbed, causing further heating. that increased heat would kill many forests, that would become ddeserts, and again deserts absorb more heat than forests. the dead forests would burn, or decompose, releasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and further heating the planet, killing forests in more temperate areas, and so on.

 

So even an increase of only 10 or even 5 degrees, with that kind of positive feedback, would have been devastating to scadrial within a few decades.

And now I am much more worried about global heating than i was before.

the lord ruler, with the power of preservation, had an expanded mind, and could see that the planet was in the wrong place, but couldn't calculate the exact distance that was needed because there were too many variables. that's actually more realistic than just assuming he couldn't figure out how to calculate heat radiation - especially when you consider he could then figure out how to manipulate dna.

 

Only a couple of things don't add up: the first is that with an increase in the "base" temperature so small, even with all the feedback effects magnifying it, the poles would have remained livable, and the damages to the environment and its capability to sustain men, while massive, would have beeen smaller than the ones caused by the ashmounts. the second is that when vin removes the cloud cover it is said that the planet "started to burn", while in truth it should have just warmed up slightly.

 

If I were to speculate on the real-world causes of the calendar problem, i'd say that it is either a genuine mistake from brandon, or it was done because at the time he still wasn't famous, his books had to appeal to the casual reader, and writing in those books that vin was an adolescent at 30 would have been confusing or would have required troublesome astronomical explanations, so it was cut out.

Edited March 31, 2014 by king of nowhere