On sazed fixing the ashworld *almost* as it was before

[king of nowhere]

Something that came to me: when sazed fixed the ashworld and brought back the old world, he used all the accumulated knowledge from his metalminds. Brandon said somewhere that the technology of pre-final empire scadrial was early industrial. So, what kind of knowledge did they have, and what was he forced to improvise?

Of course they knew nothing of genetics, or even the existance of bacteria, but I assume sazed used the knowledge of the shards to figure it out and fix the dna of everything. On the other hand, there's no way he could have gotten informations on the different kinds of bacteria. even if he figured out biodiversity was required for the long-term stability of life, he would have had to rework most of the bacteria from scratch.

As for humans, knowing the internal structures of organs ddoes little to tell the chemical mechanisms of the body. As the lord ruler altered those mechanisms to cope with the ash, sazed had to revert them, but without a reference of what they were supposed to be. he surely did something that worked, but there's no guarantee that it's exactly the same biochemistry humans had before. probably scadrians have a few modified proteins or receptors.

 

as for the general shape of the world, at early industrial age the shape of the continents was roughly known, but there were still many blank areas. the antartica region was still unexplored. greenland had been recently rediscovered, after all the colonies there had died centuries before. many places of siberia were still unexplored, and many small islands in the middle of the ocean were yet undiscovered.

So, I guess sazed had to improvise a lot there.

And then, even today there are remote places in the middle of rainforests were no white man ever set foot. We still don't know most of the creatures that live there, despite sending lots of scientific expeditions. in older times, the knowledge of those inaccessible areas were even less.

So I don't think sazed had more information than "and here was jungle". He had to reinvent all the plants and animals there, using at most some physical descriptions.

 

So, while the new scadrial looks quite like the pre-ash world, there are huge differences in the fine details.

 

I wonder exactly how much sazed had to just invent on the spot, and if all that is going to make any difference.

[Swimmingly he/him]

What if, as a Shard, he can simply look into the past on a molecular level to get his references? Also, if the Southern Scadrians were given technology rather than genetics to survive, perhaps they weren't actually changed from before TLR screwed things up royally. If so, they could have acted as a blueprint for Sazed to work out the more fundemental body chemistries.

[dyring]

When Vin held the power, she mentions that while she is not omnipotent, and dont know everything, she can see the history of the power she held.

 

So Sazed would know what TLR did when he held preservation via the well of ascension, and could thus undo it. He might not know that he knows it thou, it seemed on Vin as she needed to think of it before the knowledge came forward.  

[Shardlet he/him]

The people on the Southern continent were indeed left unchanged by TLR as a 'reserve' of sorts.  I'm pretty sure that that info is in the annotations to HOA. He also had some advantages over TLR.  Sazed continues to hold the power of both shards and therefore had a lot more time to fiddle with things than TLR.  Also, recall that Rashek would not have had much knowledge of DNA and bacteria, yet he was able to make changes that needed to be made to enable the people to survive the ash, the reduced light, and poorer nutrition.  I think it is safe to assume that Sazed had at least as much ability to successfully manipulate the biology of the Flora and Fauna as Rashek did.

Edited November 19, 2013 by Shardlet

[king of nowhere]

What if, as a Shard, he can simply look into the past on a molecular level to get his references?

Can shards do that? Look at the past to see events they missed?

well, if they can look into the future, i guess looking into the past is no more difficult.

 

Otherwise, I agree that the new biology is perfectly functioning, but several animal species were just made up to fill roles in the biosphere