Planet Math

[CtrlAltDepressed]

Hi All,

 

I was thinking about Sunlit Man and I realized something. The cosmere is not that big, astronomically speaking. 

 

Sigzil has been skipping every couple of days for about a hundred years. There cant be that many habitable, investiture readily available planets in the cosmere. We have this wob:

Spoiler

College_advice12

Wit claims Nomad has seen more of the [Cosmere] than him, is this assessment accurate? How has Nomad seen so much in comparison considering their ages?

Brandon Sanderson

No, he hasn't. But, he's been running from the Night Brigade for a long time, so he's been on a lot of, lot of planets. Hoid has actually seen more, but Sigzil at this point is up there. Probably top 5 for number of planets in the Cosmere visited. So, so while he's not...Hoid is...perhaps deliberately underestimating his own breadth of experience, Sigzil's is up there.

Secret Project #4 Reveal and Livestream (March 29, 2022)

which makes me think saying 100 years is a safe bet. 

 

 Coppermind says:

Spoiler

In the Physical Realm, the cosmere is a star cluster of about 50 to 100 stars.^[

So at most there are 100 stars. If we assume 1 habitable planet average for those stars, which I feel is extremely generous, we get 100 planets available for Sigzil to evade the Night Brigade. I will also assume an average duration on a planet at 7 days, which I also feel is extremely generous considering his timeline in this book

100 years * 365 days = 36,500 days

36,500 days / 7 days to get investiture and leave = 5200 planets. 

Even if we say that he has been chased for 20 years (is that a long time?)

We get 

20 years * 365 days = 7,300 days

7,300 days / 7 days to get investiture and leave = 1,042 planets.

 

But there should be at most 100 habitable planets in the cosmere. So is sigzil going back to the same planets sometimes? Or are one of my assumptions way off? If sigzil is going to the same planets over and over again, why hasn't the night brigade staged people at the 100 planets? Shouldn't he have gone to Roshar several times in the cycle? Shouldn't he have been to every planet? It must have taken the Night Brigade a long time to find him in the past and only recently got spaceships. 

 

Any idea whats going on here?

 

 

Edited July 18, 2024 by CtrlAltDepressed

[JustQuestin2004 he/him]

I get the feeling that the Night Brigade has simply gotten better at tracking him over a long period of time. Like after his first Skip I'd be willing to bet it took them a few years to find him each time, then they somehow devised a better way of tracking him and then the question stopped being "Which planet is he hiding on?" and became "Where on this planet is he hiding?".

After all it took them, like a day to reach Canticle which Nomad was shocked by so they must be getting better at hunting him somehow.

Maybe Skipping leaves behind some trace Connection that points to where he went, we know from other stories that take place around this time period that there are machines that can read Connections, so maybe the Brigade is using something like that?

[alder24]

12 hours ago, CtrlAltDepressed said:

Hi All,

 

I was thinking about Sunlit Man and I realized something. The cosmere is not that big, astronomically speaking. 

 

Sigzil has been skipping every couple of days for about a hundred years. There cant be that many habitable, investiture readily available planets in the cosmere. We have this wob:

  Hide contents

College_advice12

Wit claims Nomad has seen more of the [Cosmere] than him, is this assessment accurate? How has Nomad seen so much in comparison considering their ages?

Brandon Sanderson

No, he hasn't. But, he's been running from the Night Brigade for a long time, so he's been on a lot of, lot of planets. Hoid has actually seen more, but Sigzil at this point is up there. Probably top 5 for number of planets in the Cosmere visited. So, so while he's not...Hoid is...perhaps deliberately underestimating his own breadth of experience, Sigzil's is up there.

Secret Project #4 Reveal and Livestream (March 29, 2022)

which makes me think saying 100 years is a safe bet. 

 

 Coppermind says:

  Reveal hidden contents

In the Physical Realm, the cosmere is a star cluster of about 50 to 100 stars.^[

So at most there are 100 stars. If we assume 1 habitable planet average for those stars, which I feel is extremely generous, we get 100 planets available for Sigzil to evade the Night Brigade. I will also assume an average duration on a planet at 7 days, which I also feel is extremely generous considering his timeline in this book

100 years * 365 days = 36,500 days

36,500 days / 7 days to get investiture and leave = 5200 planets. 

Even if we say that he has been chased for 20 years (is that a long time?)

We get 

20 years * 365 days = 7,300 days

7,300 days / 7 days to get investiture and leave = 1,042 planets.

 

But there should be at most 100 habitable planets in the cosmere. So is sigzil going back to the same planets sometimes? Or are one of my assumptions way off? If sigzil is going to the same planets over and over again, why hasn't the night brigade staged people at the 100 planets? Shouldn't he have gone to Roshar several times in the cycle? Shouldn't he have been to every planet? It must have taken the Night Brigade a long time to find him in the past and only recently got spaceships. 

 

Any idea whats going on here?

It was stated that the Night Brigade has been hunting Nomad for decades, not hundreds of years. The simplest explanation to your question is that on Canticle Nomad was lucky to find both Scadrians and the Cinder King who both had enough investiture to get him out of the planet that fast. Normally he would probably have a much harder time to gather so much needed investiture, thus it would usually take him longer to Skip. While the Night Brigade arrived hours after Nomad did (which was a surprise) they didn't know where Nomad was on the planet, which gives him additional time for hiding. As JustQuestin said, Night Brigade probably wasn't that good at following Nomad's Skips. TSM ch 27:

Quote

“Get back under cloud cover,” he said, striding toward the hub of Beacon. “Run dark, as you’re so good at doing. They won’t know immediately where to find me and will need time to survey the planet. I hoped it would take them longer to follow me to this system, but we’ve still got time.”

In the epilogue Sig said that he can't afford returning to the planets he already was on, because it would alert the Night Brigade that there are people on this planet that he's close to. He also said that he was only a short time on Canticle, which kind of sounds like that's not how much time he usually spends on a planet. TSM epilogue:

Quote

He’d likely never know what happened to Rebeke, Elegy, the Greater Good, and all the other Beaconites. Because he couldn’t afford to look backward, didn’t dare bring the forces that chased him anywhere near people he cared about. If he ever returned there, they’d know the place meant something to him. Everyone he’d ever spoken to there would become a target.
He had to hope that, since he’d only been there a short time, nobody would realize how deeply he’d come to care for the planet and its people.

Let's try thinking in the opposite way. Using information we have, let's guesstimate how much time on average does Sigzil spend on a single planet before Skipping. Assuming 100 inhabited planets in Cosmere, 1 per star (per Drominad system AU description, 3 inhabited planets are highly unusual, only rivaled by the Rosharan system), knowing that Sigzil visited less planet than Hoid - let's say 80 in total - and lastly assuming he's been running from the Night Brigade for 40 years now, it gives us that on average Sigzil spends around 6 mounts on every planet. This seems a lot, but truthfully I don't think so. Yes, it's not as little as a day or two spent on Canticle, it's still a really short timeframe for Sigzil to find people, hide among them, find enough investiture and escape before the Night Brigade finds him. Planets are massive (Canticle is not), there are a lot of places where a single person like Nomad can hide and disappear among the local population. Every planet can have a population of hundreds of millions or even a few billions of people and that's really a lot of people. And once the Night Brigade finds a planet to where Nomand skipped, their main way of locating Sigzil is by asking the local population about him - which can take a loooooot of time. It's like searching for a needle in a haystack. Taking this into consideration I think half a year per planet isn't that much at all and it's a reasonable guesstimate. TSM epilogue:

Quote

“He was here,” Truth-Is-Waiting said. “They talk about it freely. He reportedly died about a day back, local time. Fighting the king of this place.”
“Died?” the Admiral said, her back still to him.
“Reportedly. Shall we pry for information the, uh, more painful way?”
“You think they have any useful answers to give?”
“Frankly, sir? No.”
She tapped her foot in thought.
“I did find something fun,” he said. “Scadrian ship, embedded here. Doing ‘science.’ They had him and didn’t report it to us—or even send an amiable greeting. Rude, don’t you think?”
She turned to him, eyes glittering, a rare smile turning up the corners of her lips. “Very rude.”
“Maybe,” he said, “we should pay them a visit and see what they know.” He shrugged. “Besides. Folks here are our cousins. Feels wrong to slag them for being in the wrong place.”
“Being in the wrong place,” she said, “is the main reason people get slagged, Truth.”
He shrugged again.
“We’ll proceed with the Scadrians,” the Admiral said. “They will have recordings. We’ll find those far more reliable than accounts from a bunch of backwater peasants anyway. I have a feeling he’s one step ahead of us again. How does he do it?”

 

[CtrlAltDepressed]

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

Yes, it's not as little as a day or two spent on Canticle, it's still a really short timeframe for Sigzil to find people, hide among them, find enough investiture and escape before the Night Brigade finds him. Planets are massive (Canticle is not), there are a lot of places where a single person like Nomad can hide and disappear among the local population. Every planet can have a population of hundreds of millions or even a few billions of people and that's really a lot of people. And once the Night Brigade finds a planet to where Nomand skipped, their main way of locating Sigzil is by asking the local population about him - which can take a loooooot of time. It's like searching for a needle in a haystack. Taking this into consideration I think half a year per planet isn't that much at all and it's a reasonable guesstimate

I would agree this is reasonable. 

 

So if im understanding you correctly, Sigzil is very, very close to running out of planets. Especially considering that the Night Brigade is getting faster and faster at finding the planet he is on. He is only a couple of years away from needing to confront them or risk going back somewhere he has been before. 

 

Thanks @alder24!

[alder24]

4 hours ago, CtrlAltDepressed said:

So if im understanding you correctly, Sigzil is very, very close to running out of planets. Especially considering that the Night Brigade is getting faster and faster at finding the planet he is on. He is only a couple of years away from needing to confront them or risk going back somewhere he has been before. 

It's hard to say as we don't know how many planets Sig was, not even how many planets Hoid visited. Eventually he will run out of planets to Skip. But he wasn't even on Nalthis because "nice places tended to be easy for the Night Brigade to find" (ch 13). So it seems there are still enough planets for Nomad to jump so that he doesn't have to worry that much about confronting the Night Brigade, or returning to people he knows yet. He still can focus on trying to get a head start on the Night Brigade. But one day he will Skip to a planet he already knows.

[Treamayne]

I don't have much to add, but I would like to point out that Nomad's assumption that returning to a planet means he's endangering others is not really correct. Once he realizes that if 2 of every 3 skips or so went to a planet previously visited (but a different part of that planet) then his options open up. Unless TNB has thousands of Worldhoppers to waste leaving at least one in every nation of every inhabited planet, then he still won't necessarily endanger people from previous visits.

Just look at Blunt, Thinker and Grump's efforts on Roshar in the Purelake. . . 

I do find it amusing to imagine the results of TNB trying to track him on Drominad amongst the Pantheon though

Spoiler

oops, another minion was eaten

 

[NewGuy 16]

Yeah I’d like to add on to what Treamayne said—planets are big and varied. I'm also not sure whether Sig would necessarily know whether or not he’s Skipped to a planet before. Consider what we saw of Sel in Elantris vs The Emperor's Soul (and even seeing someone recognisable could just be a worldhopper!). That said, maybe he’d be able to tell based on astronomy or Connection or something.