Yolen

[Hoid the Former Drifter]

How do you hide an entire planet? Is it Yolish Lightweaving?

[Mat]

Pretty sure it's not really hidden. Just no character besides Hoid has been there.

[Hoid the Former Drifter]

5 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

Pretty sure it's not really hidden. Just no character besides Hoid has been there.

I'm pretty sure Khriss says it's hidden.

[RShara]

2 hours ago, Hoid the Drifter said:

I'm pretty sure Khriss says it's hidden.

If everyone who knows where it is refuses to say anything, then it's pretty hard to find. Or it could be surrounded by traps and weird things, like Aimia or Sel or Taldain.

Edited August 17, 2020 by RShara

[Weltall]

If you don't know where it is in Physical space it's going to be harder to find in Cognitive space and it's possible the world looks weird in the latter realm due to the momentous things that have happened there (like the Shattering) and/or due to its competing ecosystems that probably give it a rather odd subastral as well. It's also probably got a much smaller Cognitive presence than an inhabited planet normally should because we know its (sapient) population is small enough that you could reasonably count to it.

[Chinkoln]

On 8/17/2020 at 11:27 AM, Hoid the Drifter said:

How do you hide an entire planet? Is it Yolish Lightweaving?

Well, let’s look at our universe. We have thousands of astronomers, scientists, and space probes looking out into the stars for new planets, meteors, stars, and any other celestial body. We have been looking for hundreds of years, getting more and more advanced the entire time. We have military grade telescopes and we still find new planets EVERYDAY! 
Now let’s look at a new universe, we will call it the Cosmere. They have few astronomers and little technology. Only a few planets that we know of are inhabited. The inhabitants don’t care about the stars, they care about surviving a few more years because all of these planets have messed up societies. These people don’t know about many planets, especially not a specific one that could be anywhere in the entire Cosmere. The handful of people that MIGHT know where this one planet is, aren’t telling or giving hints. Now, on top of the uncaring people, the people who aren’t going to tell, and the prospect of finding not a needle in a haystack, a needle in a country piled high with hay, there is something else. This one, tiny little needle/planet can use magic that makes illusions. Also a dragon lives there.

Does that answer your question?

[Hoid the Former Drifter]

On 8/24/2020 at 7:14 AM, Chinkoln said:

Well, let’s look at our universe. We have thousands of astronomers, scientists, and space probes looking out into the stars for new planets, meteors, stars, and any other celestial body. We have been looking for hundreds of years, getting more and more advanced the entire time. We have military grade telescopes and we still find new planets EVERYDAY! 
Now let’s look at a new universe, we will call it the Cosmere. They have few astronomers and little technology. Only a few planets that we know of are inhabited. The inhabitants don’t care about the stars, they care about surviving a few more years because all of these planets have messed up societies. These people don’t know about many planets, especially not a specific one that could be anywhere in the entire Cosmere. The handful of people that MIGHT know where this one planet is, aren’t telling or giving hints. Now, on top of the uncaring people, the people who aren’t going to tell, and the prospect of finding not a needle in a haystack, a needle in a country piled high with hay, there is something else. This one, tiny little needle/planet can use magic that makes illusions. Also a dragon lives there.

Does that answer your question?

No.

 

... Duh, it did!

[+robardin]

On 8/17/2020 at 11:32 AM, Matrim's Dice said:

Pretty sure it's not really hidden. Just no character besides Hoid has been there.

Which is a combination of odd and ominous, if you think about it.

From a Cosmere POV, I'm going to assume "looking for planets" as Khriss does is (at present) a matter of searching the Cognitive Realm, as they are not really interested in uninhabited worlds, and certainly still lack the technology to scan the heavens for possibly habitable worlds and then reaching them to find out.

We have a WoB that all the pre-Shattering Vessels of the sixteen Shards came from Yolen, as well as Hoid and Frost, and that that is where the Shattering took place (or was done), and that Frost still resides there, so the planet was not destroyed in the Shattering. It had enough people to support things like taverns or restaurants, where Tanavast could have bought Hoid drinks once upon a time, or for a young Ati to refuse to partake in card tricks.

It seems that humanity originated on Yolen as originally created by Adonalsium (and later physically replicated on Scadrial by P+R), with the only sentient species we've seen in the Cosmere other than humans being the singers/Parshendi on Roshar, who also pre-date the Shattering. (Leaving aside Frost, who has not officially been shown in canonical work except indirectly, though we have plenty of WoBs that he is a dragon.)

Every Cosmere planet we've seen has humans on it, who are primarily responsible for doing the thinking and associating that create the CR in the first place. In fact, worldhopping from one planet to another via the CR is only even possible because there is nothing sentient in between the planets, so the loci of activity are not so much like islands but vortices of consciousness-generated "cognitive mass".

So... Is Yolen now devoid of people? And/or are the beings who remain there (dragons?) either so few, or think so differently, that their footprint in the CR is obscured (or they have a specific means of making it so, and want to do so)?

Also, in the cases where we know humans have migrated from one world to another they have preserved some kind of history or legends about the event, even if in legendary or religious terms. How most Rosharan humans say they came there "from the Tranquiline Halls", but the Iriali say it is the "Fourth Land" in their Trail of a predicted Seven Lands, or the distant Homeland of the people now living in the Forests of Hell on Threnody (implied to be a land mass on the same planet, but who knows for sure yet?).

It seems odd that humanity everywhere would just forget about Yolen if by and large, they all originated there. Though the Iriali may implicitly preserve it as their "First Land", we don't know if they have names for the first three before Roshar.

And some kind of link is still going to Yolen, otherwise how does Hoid's Letter and its reply reach Frost there, or the three Seventeeth Shard members at the Purelake expect to communicate with Frost?

[Weltall]

5 hours ago, robardin said:

So... Is Yolen now devoid of people? And/or are the beings who remain there (dragons?) either so few, or think so differently, that their footprint in the CR is obscured (or they have a specific means of making it so, and want to do so)?

There's a WoB that implies that the remaining population of Yolen is very small, though Khriss also says that it's 'shrouded' in Secret History so it could be a bit of both. There's no reason to suspect that 'thinking differently' would affect a world's Cognitive presence though. Braize has one and aside from the Heralds it's populated entirely by spren and cognitive shadows. Since thinking creates space and even indirect thinking about something gives a Cognitive presence to the thing, even if the thought patterns of every living thing on Yolen were very different from how humans think, the world would still create space in the Cognitive Realm that could be distinguished from 'non-space'.

So it seems more likely that the world has such a small presence due to its population that it doesn't stand out so much that Khriss can easily find it, and maybe that there's something like the Dor (but less spectacularly lethal) that's keeping people away, possibly through some sort of Cognitive misdirection.

Quote

It seems odd that humanity everywhere would just forget about Yolen if by and large, they all originated there. Though the Iriali may implicitly preserve it as their "First Land", we don't know if they have names for the first three before Roshar.

Yolen being the first world where humans arose doesn't mean that all humans can trace their origins back to Yolen in any tangible way. It's entirely possible that, like the singers, the humans on most other Cosmere worlds were created by Adonalsium rather than being brought directly from Yolen.

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Zach G

Dunno if you can answer this now, but if everyone is from Yolen way back when, is there a migration story?

Brandon Sanderson

Not all humans originated on Yolen, but the first humans were there. Watch the books for myths that hint at more.

General Twitter 2016 (Jan. 3, 2016)

The Iriali are an example of a people with a myth that is largely influenced by something more recent than the Shattering though it has echoes of that too, something they don't clearly remember the details of.

Edited September 28, 2020 by Weltall