What did Harmony dor for the Southern Continent?

[Eran of Arcadia]

Just finished Bands of Mourning, and it left me a little confused. Harmony has power over all of Scandrial, doesn't he? So why, after the Catacendre, did he remake the northern continent and go to great lengths to make a paradise for them, then ignore the southern continent? They all would have died if not for the timely appearance of the Sovereign, it seems. Am I missing something?

[RShara]

We don't really know why he didn't help them. It is odd, and we don't have a good explanation for it right now.

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Questioner

Why didn't Harmony heal or change *inaudible*? [from notes: Why didn't Harmony change Southerners on Scadrial?]

Brandon Sanderson

That is a RAFO. Good question.

Warsaw signing (March 18, 2017)

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Ah, good old RAFO.

[cometaryorbit]

Yeah this is very strange...  It could just be some kind of Ruin/Preservation balance thing, where Sazed was only able to do so much (the Elendel Basin etc.) before Ruin's influence "kicked in" and kept him from helping anyone else at that time. But if it's that simple, why would Brandon RAFO that?

I wonder if the Southern freezing wasn't a simple consequence of Sazed moving the planet back to the right place, but was something much weirder that wasn't predictable from what Sazed knew at the time. As I understand it, Sazed could see the history of what was previously done with the powers he now held, but otherwise his knowledge of the past was limited to what he already knew (his memory/copperminds).

So he would know what TLR did with the Well, but wouldn't know anything about what happened in the intervening thousand years.

And there is something very weird about the Southerners' non-tolerance for cold vs. the WOB that TLR didn't alter them genetically. If that's something that happened during that unknown thousand years, then Sazed might not have realized the new conditions would be deadly (maybe regular humans would have been fine). The South might not actually be that uninhabitable, by our modern Earth standards, or Sazed's (he calls Terris a tundra in the first book...)

[I think I am here.]

We have a WoB that Harmony is doing something with the extra bit of Ruin he has to sort of keep it busy, maybe it has something to do with the Southern continent? That while Elendel and the Basin is lush there has to be a balance, making the Siuth barren and cold?

[Karger]

8 hours ago, I think I am here. said:

We have a WoB that Harmony is doing something with the extra bit of Ruin he has to sort of keep it busy, maybe it has something to do with the Southern continent? That while Elendel and the Basin is lush there has to be a balance, making the Siuth barren and cold?

Ruin is about entropy and increasing total disorder of a system.  I do not think that the shard Ruin would realy want to make a cold region.  Also every action that Sazed takes must use both intents simultaneously.  This is one reason he does not tend to do much.

[RShara]

The Southern continent isn't actually cold. It's normal-human-range temperature. The Southerners just, for some reason, are extreme-heat adapted. So normal temperature for us is incredibly cold for them.

[+robardin]

1 hour ago, RShara said:

The Southern continent isn't actually cold. It's normal-human-range temperature. The Southerners just, for some reason, are extreme-heat adapted. So normal temperature for us is incredibly cold for them.

Right. When Rashek changed the northern hemisphere to rely on ashmounts for cooling, he also altered human physiology - but left the Southern hemisphere unchanged, including the people, who then evolved to deal with at the hotter climate.

When Harmony "undid Rashek's alterations" immediately upon Ascension, that reckoning would not have included those in the South. The fact that they had naturally adapted in ways that would have a reversely bad effect on them when he restored Scadrial to its Classical orbit may not have occurred to him until later, when his intent as Harmony would make it much harder to make sweeping changes.

What he could do was to send some agents. Which perhaps he did.

[+Harrycrapper]

It could be that because the changes they went through weren't caused by a Shard and therefore Sazed doesn't know how to reverse those changes with absolute surety that the reversal will work properly. He may just genuinely lack the knowledge to accomplish that while he kinda had the equivalent of Rashek's notes when he fixed the northern Scadrians.

[cometaryorbit]

On 6/28/2019 at 6:01 PM, Harrycrapper said:

It could be that because the changes they went through weren't caused by a Shard and therefore Sazed doesn't know how to reverse those changes with absolute surety that the reversal will work properly. He may just genuinely lack the knowledge to accomplish that while he kinda had the equivalent of Rashek's notes when he fixed the northern Scadrians.

Yeah, the "history of the power" aspect of holding the Shard wouldn't tell him about it. But he might not have even known until after the fact, for that reason. If he'd known about it but not known how to fix it, he could have just warmed the region up (moved it to the equator, lowered the elevation and surrounded it with raised land to keep the sea out, or something).

On 6/28/2019 at 2:03 PM, robardin said:

Right. When Rashek changed the northern hemisphere to rely on ashmounts for cooling, he also altered human physiology - but left the Southern hemisphere unchanged, including the people, who then evolved to deal with at the hotter climate.

There should be more to what happened than natural evolution.

From what we see at the end of Hero of Ages, near-the-sun Scadrial without ashmounts would have been rapidly lethal - they couldn't have survived long enough for evolution to work. Trees are bursting into flame - I think that would imply a much higher sunlight intensity than you'd get at even Venus' distance from our Sun. The Scadrian system map in Arcanum Unbounded also shows a huge difference between old and new orbits. Even at the south pole itself, it probably wouldn't have been survivable without some form of protection.

Now, there are possible things TLR could have done that would have allowed survival without genetic modification, like lifting the entire south pole region to much higher altitude. Combining the effects of a polar latitude and Tibet-like elevation would have made it dramatically cooler. But if it was cooler, they wouldn't need to adapt to extreme heat...

(By the way, at least in real world physics, I think Scadrial as TLR made it was ultimately doomed to total desiccation, as too much water evaporated from the seas reaching outside the shielded area of the Final Empire, and rose into the stratosphere, got dissociated by UV radiation, and escaped as hydrogen from Scadrial's gravity. Eventually, without the oceans' role in the carbon cycle, the planet would become like Venus. But this would take far, far longer than the thousand years of the Final Empire - millions, maybe many millions for the complete process, though it'd be lethal to humans well before that.)

[+robardin]

5 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Yeah, the "history of the power" aspect of holding the Shard wouldn't tell him about it.  ...

There should be more to what happened than natural evolution.

From what we see at the end of Hero of Ages, near-the-sun Scadrial without ashmounts would have been rapidly lethal - they couldn't have survived long enough for evolution to work. Trees are bursting into flame - I think that would imply a much higher sunlight intensity than you'd get at even Venus' distance from our Sun.

So, I think we all suspect that the "undoing what Rashek did" thing left out the Southerners at least partly because what happened to change them from Classical humanity had not been done with the power of Preservation.

But you're right about how incredibly inhospitable Scadrial was described as being once the mists and ashfalls were removed from play at the endgame at the Pits of Hathsin. The searing heat was described as happening "as the sun rose into the sky" after Marsh killed Elend, and then Vin destroyed Ruin along with herself.

So did all that happen "overnight" - the deadly heat was due to Vin Ascending, stopping up the ashmounts, and withdrawing (absorbing) the mists? When did the ashmounts stop again?

When Vin looked at how Rashek had used the power,

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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.

He opened the ashmounts, clogging the atmosphere, turning the sun red. And, in doing so, he saved the planet - but doomed it as well.

Earlier, Ruin was described as having increased the output of the ashmounts; if he'd really been after the destruction of life on Scadrial, shouldn't he have stopped them up instead? (I know, he was leaving Vin and co. in play to find the atium for him that he couldn't do directly on his own.)

When Elend arrives to Luthadel to see Kredik Shaw "exploded" from Vin's Ascension, he notes that the planet lurches, and the afternoon sun suddenly drops below the horizon. The next time the sun rises, is when things are blazing hot.

So what happened in the South while all this was happening? If they were lucky, it was "winter" for them while it was "summer" for the Northern Hemsiphere? That's assuming Scadrial has or had a significant axial tilt like Earth's that causes the seasons to alternate between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

In which case, the real "hot spot" on the planet that would have been in the most trouble would have been not the other hemisphere, but the far side of the same hemisphere: when Luthadel and the Pits of Hathsin suddenly lurched from afternoon to nighttime, then started burning as the sun reached midday the next day after Vin absorbed the mists and plugged the ashmounts, the worst off area would have been the part of the Northern hemisphere that got pulled from nighttime to around 8am from her "planet lurching", and had already spent half a day baking in the unshielded sun.

Edited July 1, 2019 by robardin

[Karger]

7 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Yeah, the "history of the power" aspect of holding the Shard wouldn't tell him about it. But he might not have even known until after the fact, for that reason. If he'd known about it but not known how to fix it, he could have just warmed the region up (moved it to the equator, lowered the elevation and surrounded it with raised land to keep the sea out, or something).

The region is a normal temperature.  Doing what you describe would work but it would likely cause a cascade of other problems.

[cometaryorbit]

On 7/1/2019 at 7:33 AM, robardin said:

Earlier, Ruin was described as having increased the output of the ashmounts; if he'd really been after the destruction of life on Scadrial, shouldn't he have stopped them up instead? (I know, he was leaving Vin and co. in play to find the atium for him that he couldn't do directly on his own.)

 

 

Right. That would have been faster, but he needed to leave enough Hemalurgically spiked people alive to find the atium -- he must have known it was shielded behind metal since he couldn't see it immediately, so if everyone died, he'd probably never find it. And once he got the atium, I think he could just disintegrate the planet or something... (I think that might be important. IMO, Ruin's goal wasn't specifically to kill everyone, it was to destroy the entire planet, inanimate aspects as well.)

Driving people to seek out TLR's storage caches might even have been part of the purpose for the increased ashmount activity, the same way he strengthened the mists to create the Deepness, driving people to seek out the Well of Ascension.

On 7/1/2019 at 7:33 AM, robardin said:

So what happened in the South while all this was happening? If they were lucky, it was "winter" for them while it was "summer" for the Northern Hemsiphere? That's assuming Scadrial has or had a significant axial tilt like Earth's that causes the seasons to alternate between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

 

It does, from the Hero of Ages Annotations, Chapter 76 (it's a really long one, just quoting the relevant bit)

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However, he [Rashek] realized that on a planet with a tilted axis, a city at the north pole would have seasonal daylight variation so extreme that at the height of summer the sun would never set and during the dead of winter the sun would never rise. He could remove the axis's tilt, but that would just make the sun perpetually skirt the horizon all year round.

What Rashek decided to do (and he had to make split-second decisions in the brief time he held the power) was to shift the crust of the whole planet so that the Well was at a latitude that would have more standard seasonal variation, and to re-create the Terris mountains in the new North (to maintain the rumors that the Well was located there).

 

On 7/1/2019 at 7:33 AM, robardin said:

In which case, the real "hot spot" on the planet that would have been in the most trouble would have been not the other hemisphere, but the far side of the same hemisphere

True. Thankfully, no one lived there! A bunch of lifeless desert just got even more fried than it already was.

On 7/1/2019 at 9:07 AM, Karger said:

The region is a normal temperature.  Doing what you describe would work but it would likely cause a cascade of other problems.

A normal temperature in Era 1, or Era 2?

I don't see why moving it to the equator would have particularly caused any problems, if Sazed had done it when he was rearranging the entire planet's surface anyway. I don't think the Southerners are so heat-dependent that they'd have trouble in a tropical sea-level climate.

 

[Karger]

16 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

A normal temperature in Era 1, or Era 2?

Era two.  Ruin started messing things up in small ways by altering the mists.  Reshek kept everything together(sort of) by moving stuff making the planet warmer adding ash mounts and so on.  Sazed mostly set everything back to default with some minor improvements  Moving a continent would alter ocean, currents ecology, and a bunch of other stuff that could lead to even more problems.

[cometaryorbit]

13 hours ago, Karger said:

Moving a continent would alter ocean, currents ecology, and a bunch of other stuff that could lead to even more problems.

 

Sazed did totally re-shape the continents. I'm talking about moving it then (if he had known about the issue) not later.

He already had to totally re-create all the ecology and so on anyway, most of the planet was totally lifeless except for the comparatively small protected regions of the Final Empire and the South.

-

The more I think about this "adaptation to heat" thing, the less sense it makes as a biological/natural thing. It's got to be something magical... but I don't see how it can be, if Rashek didn't change them.

If the heat medallions allowed the Southerners to survive, that implies it wasn't cold enough to kill off the other animals and plants (since they have to have some kind of food source). And if it is warm enough for that, you shouldn't need heat magic to survive - just warm clothing and fires.

It's almost like the Southern Scadrians are cold-blooded, but there is no way that could be a natural adaptation, especially not in a mere thousand years, 30-40 generations, and probably not at all.

Raising the body temperature (so the environment is cooler, relatively) shouldn't work either. There is some variation in body temperatures between individuals - not everyone averages out at a perfect 98.6 F - so there is a little room for evolution to work. But it wouldn't be nearly enough to help, even given far more time. The brain is very vulnerable to temperature changes.

[Karger]

3 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Sazed did totally re-shape the continents. I'm talking about moving it then (if he had known about the issue) not later.

Then why did he look at the old maps of the final empire to see how the contents were shaped before?

3 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

He already had to totally re-create all the ecology and so on anyway, most of the planet was totally lifeless except for the comparatively small protected regions of the Final Empire and the South.

The word is re-create.  Sazed did not believe he had the capabilities to safely create his own ecology.  Altering continent's shape too much would produce problems with the ecology.

3 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

The more I think about this "adaptation to heat" thing, the less sense it makes as a biological/natural thing. It's got to be something magical... but I don't see how it can be, if Rashek didn't change them.

He did not change them physically.  I believe the prevailing theory is that he altered their spiritual aspect.

 

[Subvisual Haze]

I think the cold-sensitivity of our Southern friends has something to do with the planet itself.  Scadrial is actually quite unique in that Ruin+Preservation created the planet and humans and as such the very planet is suffused with their investiture.

Rather than change the southern humans physically, I think instead their spirit(web?)(DNA?) was in some way modified to cause all southerners to be constantly be "storing" heat energy into the essentially infinite metalmind of the planet itself (maybe even linked to the spewing ashmounts in a giant investiture recycling system).  This made the extremely hot un-shaded by ash conditions on the Southern Continent feel comfortable for them.  When Sazed cooled the planet back to normal temperatures though, for some reason the constant low level heat-leaching has continued.  As a result, Southerners need to tap a heat metalmind just to "get back to normal" by cancelling out their constant low level heat drain.

Maybe Sazed didn't want to tinker around with the Southerner's spiritual aspect or didn't feel knowledgeable enough to change the system when he realized what was happening down under?  Or maybe this heat piracy system is how Harmony balances his extra Ruin out, bumming heat from humans certainly feels Ruin-ish.

[Use the Falchion]

Maybe he left it as-is because he needed them to develop certain technologies in order for Scadrial as a whole to advance? 

Edited July 15, 2019 by Use the Falchion

[Karger]

13 hours ago, Use the Falchion said:

Maybe he left it as-is because he needed them to develop certain technologies in order for Scadrial as a whole to advance? 

That seems kind of cold for Saze(no pun intended).