Easiest Way to Beat the Mists

[ShardofChance he/him]

I’ve been rereading the Cosmere recently, and while I read Hero of Ages, I started to think. Some of the issues those characters face is the fact that the mist is staying for longer and longer, and soon there will be no more daylight for plants to grow.

The characters seemed very worried about this, with good reason, but I find a solution pretty easy. Mist cannot enter buildings so why not build a greenhouse for plants to grow in. I’m not sure how tall this building would need to be, but it’s only as tall as a Mistborn can Push on a coin before the link is almost gone. 
 

This greenhouse would also remove the extreme labor needed to remove ash from crop fields. While this would certainly be challenging, I am certain that the might of the New Empire could achieve this task. I recognize that perhaps there were bigger issues going on at the time, but I almost wonder if they had just focused on food generation and building as many greenhouses as possible, they might have had some success. Of course the gathering Koloss army would just kill everyone anyway.

 

What do we think of this idea for stopping the mists? Anyone have any better ideas? 
 

This is my first post here so I’m sorry if anything is wrong or odd.

[alder24]

8 minutes ago, ShardofChance said:

I’ve been rereading the Cosmere recently, and while I read Hero of Ages, I started to think. Some of the issues those characters face is the fact that the mist is staying for longer and longer, and soon there will be no more daylight for plants to grow.

The characters seemed very worried about this, with good reason, but I find a solution pretty easy. Mist cannot enter buildings so why not build a greenhouse for plants to grow in. I’m not sure how tall this building would need to be, but it’s only as tall as a Mistborn can Push on a coin before the link is almost gone. 
 

This greenhouse would also remove the extreme labor needed to remove ash from crop fields. While this would certainly be challenging, I am certain that the might of the New Empire could achieve this task. I recognize that perhaps there were bigger issues going on at the time, but I almost wonder if they had just focused on food generation and building as many greenhouses as possible, they might have had some success. Of course the gathering Koloss army would just kill everyone anyway.

 

What do we think of this idea for stopping the mists? Anyone have any better ideas? 
 

This is my first post here so I’m sorry if anything is wrong or odd.

Hello, welcome to the Shard!  

Stop Mists? There was no stopping them. The book actually admits that the bigger problem was ash, it would kill them faster then Mists. The rate of ashfall increased after Ruin was freed. Greenhouses wouldn't help, they would need to be too big to cover entire fields and too tall to get above Mists to allow the sunlight to enter through the roof. And they would be very costly to build. Even if they manage to build one, it would quickly collapse under the weight of falling ash. There was no other way to stop what was coming other than how it went. HoA ch 5:

Quote

"You have to admit now that the sun is getting darker. Redder. It's even worse down here, in the South."
"Actually," Elend said, "I doubt that the sun has changed at all. It must be all the smoke and ash in the air."
"Which is another problem," Vin said. "The ash falls almost perpetually now. People are having trouble keeping it out of their streets. It blots out the light, making everything darker. Even if the mists don't kill off next year's crops, the ash will. Two winters ago—when we fought the koloss at Luthadel —was the first I'd seen snow in the Central Dominance, and this last winter was even worse. These aren't things we can fight, Elend, no matter how big our army!"

[Duxredux he/him]

1 hour ago, ShardofChance said:

I’ve been rereading the Cosmere recently, and while I read Hero of Ages, I started to think. Some of the issues those characters face is the fact that the mist is staying for longer and longer, and soon there will be no more daylight for plants to grow.

The characters seemed very worried about this, with good reason, but I find a solution pretty easy. Mist cannot enter buildings so why not build a greenhouse for plants to grow in. I’m not sure how tall this building would need to be, but it’s only as tall as a Mistborn can Push on a coin before the link is almost gone. 
 

This greenhouse would also remove the extreme labor needed to remove ash from crop fields. While this would certainly be challenging, I am certain that the might of the New Empire could achieve this task. I recognize that perhaps there were bigger issues going on at the time, but I almost wonder if they had just focused on food generation and building as many greenhouses as possible, they might have had some success. Of course the gathering Koloss army would just kill everyone anyway.

 

What do we think of this idea for stopping the mists? Anyone have any better ideas? 
 

This is my first post here so I’m sorry if anything is wrong or odd.

I think it's worth looking at this from multiple perspectives, and greenhouses aren't a bad place to look. There's quite a few non-trivial considerations that would complicate them as a stable food source though. I'm not an expert, but I once helped maintain a greenhouse and read through the spec sheets. First it's worth understanding what a greenhouse is designed to do. Greenhouses were made to regulate the internal temperature and humidity to create an artificial climate to allow crops to grow unsuited for the local environment. The issue isn't that the temperature or humidity is unsuitable for the local plants, it's the available sunlight. Yes, Mist won't enter buildings, but it's not just the roof of a greenhouse that's made out of transparent material, it's also the sun-facing walls too.  The angle of the sun with respect to the mists means that the greenhouse gets the most light when the sun is directly overhead and at a much lower rate compared to a greenhouse not built in the Mists. I don't think this would be much more beneficial than if they were to build giant elevated terraced gardens. 

You also have to understand that when to create an enclosed environment like that, you replace one kind of work for another. Clearing ash from plantation fields is substituted with watering plants sheltered from precipitation. Damage from ash accumulating on the roof can be mitigated by engineering the pitch of the roof so that ash will slide off instead of accumulating (greenhouses in snowy climates require snow load calculations and the pitch of the roof is designed to compensate). By trapping the air in the greenhouse, you will need systems in place to regulate the temperatures - as greenhouses will get much warmer compared to the outdoors. There's a whole industry and science to properly regulating a greenhouse environment to maintain good temperatures, proper humidity, reduction of algae growth, and on and on - I just did troubleshooting for the controller and cleaned the evaporative cooler. We had systems to regulate all that, but you're going to need a lot of incredibly smart people to build, design, and maintain greenhouses large enough to support the entire Final Empire. It's definitely not as simple as slapping giant panes of glass into the shape of a house.

I wont say yet that it's impossible, but it would take a tremendous amount of work. Irrigation would have gotten much harder as the canals choked with ash and failed, and even if you were to build the greenhouses over the canal, it doesn't protect the source waters. The rest of this is really vague internet calculations so expect a lot of error. Several sources on the internet say that about 200 square feet of land is needed to sustain a person for regular seasonal gardening with normal IRL crops - not the modified stunted stuff they had in the Final empire. I'll just leave that number alone since I have no idea how much yield is affected The current world record largest greenhouse is the Eden Project in the U.K., which is 180' tall, and has 273,000 sq ft of floor space. So... one of those can support a bit less than 1500 people. Beyond that, the Eden Project is a dome shape, and I suspect it addresses snow falling on the roof simply by the roof being hot enough to melt it off which won't work with ash. You would need a huge number of these to support the Final Empire in the last days leading up to the Catacendre. I looked at it for a while and I don't think it's actually sustainable at the scale they would need, even if the Mists truly were the only concern and they didn't have to worry about rampaging Koloss, homicidal Inquisitors, accelerated ash accumulation, Ashmount eruptions causing earthquakes, or Ruin literally trying to kill them all. That large of a greenhouse would absolutely need to be reinforced with steel or something similar, making it child's play for a Inquisitor to destroy them all. 

At any rate, welcome to the Shard! We think about stuff a lot.

Edited March 14 by Duxredux

[ShardofChance he/him]

Both of you made great points, I think it would be pretty easy for a Coinshot or a Mistborn to get on top to keep the ash off. While it wouldn’t be a way to keep everyone alive, I think if there was a way to maybe source the water needed from underwater aquifers, they might have been able to keep a small population alive, probably just Allomancers. 
 

I started this thought experiment with the implicit knowledge that it wasn’t a real solution with the inquisitors and the Koloss marching around able to destroy an efforts at surviving.

[Treamayne]

Welcome to the Shard

5 hours ago, ShardofChance said:

Mist cannot enter buildings so why not build a greenhouse for plants to grow in.

Others have mentioned some considerations, so I won't dupicate that information; I'll just mention something that has not yet been discussed. 

Don't forget the tech level of that society. Greenhouses, in Europe really began in the 17th century, but didn't progress until the 1800s. Even then, it was a fledgling science. Scadrial may be ahead in its understanding of metalurgy, but it remains significantly behind in the understanding of biology, botany and agriculture (as will become apparant when you continue to Era 2). Even if a greenhouse (maybe built atop tenements) were viable in the situation, they simply did not have the understanding to make them (except maybe the Keepers - who were nearly extinct by this time). Also, keep in mind the ashmounts and mist all filter out light (their sun appears Red due to high-atmospheric ash), so even if you are keeping the mists and ash away from the plants, there would not be enough light getting to the greenhouse. 

Great lateral thinking though. Thank you. 

Edited March 14 by Treamayne
SPAG