ecohansen

So. An alternative to my CO2 thread. That thread hinges on the fact that horneater/unkalaki consume food more efficiently than other cultures, but seem to have negative returns from it. If you eat something shell-and-all, you have to get at least 5% more calories than if you only eat the choice parts, so you should be able to free up 5% of your farmers for other pursuits, and have a lower-than-average farming population. But horneaters are entirely devoted to food production. I assumed that that meant that food production was harder on the Horneater Peaks than elsewhere, but there is also the alternative explanation that Unkalaki just need more food than other people. And there is one very prominent in-world person who we know needs a whole lot of food. It seems unSandersonian to waste a whole method of utilizing Investiture on a single person, no matter how cool that person is. Maybe Horneaters can also convert food into stormlight. We know that the Unkalaki are trying very hard to get shardblades--maybe they've learned of some synergy between their magic and shardblades that becomes unstoppale when combined, similar to compounding ferruchemists. Maybe Lift is getting set up to be the world-bestriding hero.

Cabbage: great thoughts. Your comment aout the algae is definitely warranted. There definitely could be a higher rate of consumption by marine animals. But then, where are those animals? The stormward Rosharan seas seem to be less productive than the ;Purelake: after all, the people of the Purelake are mostly fishermen, while the Thaylens are mostly merchants. And as for the atmospheric gradient, I definitely don't know enough planetary or atmospheric science to have intelligent thoughts on how planetary density would affect the steepness of change in atmospheric pressure. But my earlier point wasn't that the atmosphere gets thicker faster on Roshar, it was that Honor changes the proportion of different gasses in the atmosphere at sea level. By attracting both carbon dioxide and oxygen, but not nitrogen, towards sea level, Honor makes sealevel air unnaturally rich in O2 and CO2, and unnaturally poor in nitrogen. Again, an easier solution is just to say that Roshar had a more O2- and CO2- rich atmosphere to begin with, but then how do we explain the discrepancies related to the horneater peaks? Does anyone have any alternative ideas on why the Unkalaki culture is so centered on food?

Oh yeah, option 1 was not the inspiration of the title. In option 1, they'd be larvae rather than nymphs, since nymphs are by definition fairly similar to adults in general morphology. It was option 2 that was the sperm thing, and that was a stretch to get a nice title. I was comparing chasmfiend/skyeels to organisms like mosses, which have alternation of generations. That means the diploid phase--the generation with two sets of DNA--the green fuzzy part of the lifecycle that you think of as moss--doesn't directly create another organism like itself. Instead, it spawns the haploid phase, which is a whole separate organism with a whole separate metabolism that is just as large as the diploid phase but only has ONE set of dna. Just like our sperm cells and egg cells. The haploid generation is made up of those big candy-cane-looking thingums that grow above a moss carpet. The haploid phase then makes a whole mess of spores which are genetically clones of itself. It sends the spores to the wind, and two haploid spores have to meet up and combine to arrive back at the diploid phase of the lifecycle. So each generation of moss is the same sort of critter as its grandparents, but looks and acts vastly different from its parents. That is the sort of cycle I was suggesting.

Ah well. It was a beautiful dream.

We know that an earlier lifestage forms the chrysalis that results in the mature adult chasmfiend, but I definitely don't remember encountering where or how chasmfiends lay eggs, or what sort of critter emerges from the egg. Maybe the pre- and post-chrysalis forms are just different adult instars, and skyeels are the true larvae.

I thought that Preservation had to imbue because, while the other shards only preserve human life that originated on Yolen, Preservation had to re-create human life in the image of Yolen life.

So, this topic evolved from my CO2 thread, but I thought I'd bring it out here to stand or fall on its own merits. Shallan's illustration of the chasmfiend asks if the chasmfiends' spren are the same as the skyeels' spren. So, we know that their spren are at least very similar. The easiest explanation for this is that skyeels ARE chasmfiends. And if that's the case, maybe larkin ARE greatshells. I can see two ways this could work: Either 1. Skyeels and larkin are early lifestages (larvae) of chasmfiends and greatshells, respectively. (this is not the sperm option) Or 2. (this is the sperm option. See my more detailed description downthread if it's confusing here) There's alternation of generations, like with moss. There's a haploid generation and a diploid generation, each having a completely different life strategy. Imagine that egg cells and sperm cells had long and fullfilling independent lives before uniting to become humans. Skyeels are thus haploid chasmfiend sperm. Related to this, if cremlings have terrestrial and marine forms, as proposed in my CO2 thread, (2) could be extended into a lifecycle similar to rust fungi. Cremlings on land reproduce clonally, like the uredinial stage in the magnificent lifecycle of rusts. If they happen to come near water, they switch to a telial stage, and produce offspring completely unlike themselves. Any of the above speculations could be a nod to Orson Scott Card's Lusitanian ecosystem, where all organisms have a vegetative lifestage and an animal lifestage. Since Card has blurbed Sanderson, I'd assume Brandon has read Card. And of course, there's the similarity in their biographies. I can't imagine Sanderson having a system as biologically-challenged as Card's, but I can definitely see it as providing an initial idea.

Sorry for my long silence. Real life came after me with a whole conga line's worth of crotch-kneeings. So, first my two major "derps" Skaa: I didn't slightly misunderstand your thread: I somehow completely distorted it in my mind from any semblance of what you wrote. I am very very about that. That'll teach me to cite something without re-reading it first. Labrat: dagnabbit! As soon as you brought up those lines, I remembered having read them and been shocked, but apparently I was so attached to my headcanon that I forced myself into amnesia. If Shallan can do it, so can I. And we do have WoB that Roshar is "higher oxygen", and this was said in relation to the chasmfiends. For both of those major oversights, please accept my Picardian double-facepalm and embarrassed nerdsnort. ccstat: I love your reasoning on thevalue of emeralds. Wow! Your argument on the value of soulcasting in providing an incremental but important value in freeing people from agricultural work was the argument I was attempting to make with regard to the horneaters. I said the horneaters were "starving", but intended it as shorthand. If eating an arthropod shell-and-all provides 10% more calories than only eating the choice parts does, then your culture should have been ale to free up 10% of its arthropod-farmers for other pursuits. But, despite this efficiency, the horneaters are still entirely devoted to food production. Can any of you think of alternative reasons (other than mine) why agriculture on the horneater peaks is so inefficient? ccstat and InstantWalrus: edit: I did give this its own thread, but left it here as well for context with the earlier discussion Aquatic and terrestrial forms for cremlings might relate to skyeels and chasmfiends. Shallans illustration of the chasmfiend notes that they have the same spren as skyeels. Could skyeels and chasmfiends be different lifestages or generations of the same organism? For that matter, could the same be the case for greatshell and larkin? This might have already been asked, and if not it might need its own thread. But I can see a few ways this could work: 1.skyeels and larkin are early lifestages of chasmfiends and greatshells, respectively. 2. There's alternation of generations, like with moss. There's a haploid generation and a diploid generation, each having a completely different life strategy. Imagine that egg cells and sperm cells had long and fullfilling independent lives before uniting to become humans. Skyeels are thus haploid chasmfiend sperm. 3. For cremlings, (2) could be extended into a lifecycle lsimilar to rust fungi. Cremlings on land reproduce clonally, like the uredinial stage in the magnificent lifecycle of rusts. If they happen to come near water, they switch to a telial stage, and produce offspring completely unlike themselves. 4.Any of these could be a nod to Orson Scott Card's Lusitanian ecosystem, where all organisms have a vegetative lifestage and an animal lifestage. Since Card has blurbed Sanderson, I'd assume Brandon has read Card. And of course, there's the similarity in their biographies. I can't imagine Sanderson having a system as biologically-challenged as Card's, but I can definitely see it as providing an initial idea. Thanks all!

Quote So, parts of an awakened item continue moving independently after the item is broken. So give each of your nanobots long tendrils that let it connect to other nanobots throughout the body's bloodstream. You now have a network of bots making up a single, perfectly human-shaped item that should be very easy to Awaken, as long as the bots are made from organic materials rather than metals. Now give the Command "move when commanded". Don't command the bot assemblage to move yet. Do something physical to break the tendrils: change the temperature or acidity of the blood, thereby causing the tendril proteins to coil (this is how you denature enzymes). The bots are no longer connected. NOW command them to move. You'd have to hardwire the desired movement pattern into them at the start, but you could shape some of your bots to have random movement that makes channels through cell membranes, and other bots to move through those channels, etcetera. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

"promote the thriving of sapient entities." "Protect the innocent" would turn Nightblood into an anti-abortion fanatic, or would cause it to follw the orders of innocent children, until that resulted in a great horror, which would destroy the child's innocence, and case nightblood to turn on the child.

But if crem is JUST silicon dioxide, it is just soil. Certainly, if it is storm-deposited, then the diameter of the soil particles would make it aeolian loess, the second-best soil type for agriculture after silt-loam. So it would be a great idea to grow plants IN crem deposits, but ADDING crem to already-growing plants wouldn't do much of anything.

Can't wait to hear more, Labrat. Cromptj, if you're gravitating towards the theory that crem is calcium carbonate, I have thought of one way in which it could increase fertility on a storm-deposited continent. If I correctly understand Skaa's thread "Theory: Zephyr and the Upside Down Planet", the Julia set that would generate Roshar's continent would be made by a storm coming from leeward rather than stormward. Therefore, Roshar was deposited by the everstorm rather than the highstorm--the everstorm was the original storm during the pre-shards, parshendi-only period, and the highstorm is a recent product of the shards. I think someone else has already suggested that the Everstorm could have an acidic deposit. In that case, calcium carbonate could indeed buffer and ameliorate an intrinsically acid soil. Still, if the highstorm has been dominant for several thousand years, I would still expect the upper layer of topsoil to have become permanently alkaline by now, so I still see this explanation as fairly tenuous.

So, imagining each character in their angriest/most badass moment Classy angry songs: Lift: Nina Simone: Pirate Jenny Darkness: Falcon in the Dive: Dalinar: Ego sum abbas: Mr T (Taravangian): O Fortuna (yes it's predictabe, but appropriate): Funny angry songs: Nightblade: Flight of the Conchords: The Humans are dead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1BdQcJ2ZYY Shalan/Wynt: The cake is a lie: Angry songs with a fair bit of cussin': CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK Adolin: rubberbandits: horse outside (explicit) Szeth: blackfield: go to he** (explicit) Kaladin: Tim Minchin: The Pope Song (explicit): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTIorwtJbhE

By the way, cromptj, I definitely agree that if Roshar has an od sun, its emission spectrum would be redder than ours, so that woud solve part of the probem. Thanks for the suggestion.

Nobody's proposed a Laral-Adolin matchup yet? They've never met, but it would take care of both jilted parties in a Kaladin-Shallan pairing, and shuffling the partners from two initia couples is a fairly common trope. I can see Adolin's and Laral's personalities working well together.

We know that crem helps plants grow. If it's not NPK fertilizer, I can see a few other options, but each has its own problems. 1. It is a liming agent, like calcium carbonate. This easily agrees with its use in masonry and pottery (although the pots would eventually dissolve), and several earth creatures have calcium carbonate shells. However, the reason we lime plants is to make the soil more alkaline. If the continent is indeed mostly accumulated crem, then all of the soils are already as alkaline as you could want, and adding more lime won't help. 2. It is decaying organic matter: dead sea creatures swept up by the highstorms. This would improve the soil's cation exhange capacity and water retention, as well as providing a small dose of NPK. However, I don't remember crem actively rotting. Also, all that ocean life would contain salt, and it seems like over time you would be literally salting the earth. 3. It is tiny live creatures which are symbiotic with plants. Maybe crem is made up entirely of tiny cremlings, and the cremlings provide some service. Possible services: A) cremlings act like predatory nematodes, attacking plant parasites. B ) Cremlings harvest soil nutrients, acting like mycorrhizal fungi. Maybe they gather up soil nutrients while they grow, then climb onto the plants to molt, and the plants subsequently use their nutrient-rich carapaces as a substrate. C) Maybe cremlings fix nitrogen directly, acting like the bacterial partners of leguminous plants. Option 3 definitely makes using crem for pottery and masonry seem pretty cruel, but endemic cruelty certainly isn't a sticking point in a Sanderson world.

Also, your excellent observations on crem made me wonder if you had any thoughts on cremlings. Several characters certainy seemed to think that cremlings arose from abiogenesis, spontaneously arising from crem. 1.Other options: they are terrestrial creatures like brine shrimp in desert pools, hatching or reviving after rain. 2. At least some of them are doomed ocean creatures that got picked up by the storm and stranded 3. They are anadromous/catadromous like salmon or eels, with one lifestage on land and another in the ocean, and have evolved structures or behaviors that make them more likely to be picked up by oceanic highstorms, specifically so that they can be deposited on land. Do you have a sense for which of these is more likely?

Magnificent feedback, ccstat! Yep, I entirely agree that airsickness is far from well-established. But if it can be explained by the same phenomena that explain the agricultural disparities, then why not? Your real-world comments were wonderful, and most of them hadn't occurred to me. I'll need to spend a while rounding up facts and figures. I'd entirely forgotten that the Listeners nourished plants with stormlight, and I have no idea what to do with that. One of your Roshar comments did disagree with my understanding. You spoke of soulcast food undergirding Alethkar society. That's certainly the case on the shattered plains, but isn't that situation highly atypical? Im sure I vaguely remember comments that characters were unused to soulcast food. Moreover, the people doing the soulcasting seem to be only undergoing their major physiological changes on the Shattered Plains. If the entire civilisation was supported by soulcast food, wouldn't these altered people be a normal part of society? Finally, weren't the problems in Kholinar largely related to an agricultural collapse? As for Cultivation shifting growth from one area to another, my day job is planning strategies for removing invasive plants from state parks, and I work with a lot of herbicides. The two most widely used herbicides in North America both work by causing unregulated growth in targeted plants. Unregulated growth is just as deadly for plants as it is for animals. Also, cultivation requires more time pruning and weeding than planting. By going with the name "Cultivation" rather than something like "Verdure", Roshar's plant-deity seems to be heavily hinting that she knows the value of restraint. That's all I've got for now. Thanks again for the thorough review!

Ishikk! If ishikk ain't your favorite character, then y'all some snakes. How can you possibly argue against a trickster-fisherman compounded from pure contentment?

Thanks so much for the sourcing and the compliment. Tears and sadness that my WoB support didn't hold up.

Hi skaa. I don't have it directly: I was working off Kaellok's post in the "Is the Stone Shamanate of Odium" thread on page 2. Specifically, Kaellok said " There's another WoB that I need to dig up that says that astronomers would say that Roshar isn't a habitable planet at this time, due to what's going on." Sorry I couldn't give the direct source.

Hi all. Several people have already noted that the existence of chull and other large arthropods requires Roshar to have more atmospheric oxygen than Earth does (if you want to brush up on arthropod respiration, start here: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/03/04/rspb.2010.0001). However, it seems to me that Roshar's flora imposes additional atmospheric constraints. I have a theory which explains the following anomalies: 1: Rockbuds could not possibly be productive enough to support an ecosystem and a civilisation. 2: If crem is fertilizer, stormward waterbodies like Longbrow's Straits and the Steamwater ocean should have massive nitrogen and phosphate pollution, and should therefore be solid masses of algae. But Shallan's journey over Longbrow's Straits shows that this is not the case. 3: The atmosphere on the Horneater Peaks is different from, and healthier than, the atmosphere at lower elevations ("airsick lowlanders"). However, although temperatures on the peaks are similar to temperatures in the lowlands, agricultural productivity must be much lower--almost the entire population is devoted to food production, and the Horneaters are nevertheless still defined by having to eat parts of animals which other cultures shun. My solution to these problems is that Cultivation drains the Progression surge from the stormward waterbodies, and channels that Progression into terrestrial plants. Meanwhile, Honor (or, after his Shattering, some combination of his splinters and slivers) uses some combination of Adhesion (in its atmospheric pressure sense) and Gravitation to pull both oxygen and carbon dioxide towards sealevel. Thus, airsick lowlanders are suffering from both hyperoxia (too much oxygen, causing impired vision and seizures) and hypercapnia (too much carbon dioxide, causing a whole laundrylist of symptoms, including mental impairment (certainly the most common cause of the "airsick" comment) and irritability (contributing to their warlike culture)). A more detailed description is below. .......... First, photosynthesis on Roshar must be more efficient than it is on earth. Why? Well, it is obviously problematic that rockbuds and similar plants support the dietary needs of a reasonably densely populated nation like Alethkar. Rockbuds have to support their own relatively high metabolism (all that movement would mean that they would have to be at least as metabolically active as a sea urchin), and they produce energetically-expensive structures like shells. The drawings show that they have a relatively small leaf area to support all this. Obviously, some of these metbolic needs are met by crem, which seems to act as NPK fertilizer, but even massive fertilisation would only barely allow rockbuds to break even, much less support an ecosystem and a civilisation. How do I know? Well, let's use respiration as a proxy for metabolism. Each day, a sea urchin respires between 15 and 25 mmol O2 per gram dryweight (https://books.google.com/books?id=B322HrCUvNEC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=sea+urchin+metabolism+calories page 51). Meanwhile, on earth, a perfectly fertilized leaf under perfect conditions produces at most 40 micromoles O2 per second per square meter (http://www.saps.org.uk/saps-associates/browse-q-and-a/463-how-much-oxygen-does-a-houseplant-give-off-in-a-day ). Perform the necessary conversions, and we see that one gram drywieght of sea urchin would require 60 square centimeters of leaf to break even metabolically. Again, on earth, it would take absolutely ideal conditions for a rockbud to be able to support itself, much less grow. So, either rockbuds have access to more energy than earth-plants do, or they have access to more carbon dioxide, or both. First, energy. Maybe Roshar's sun is much brighter than Earth's. However, I've not seen any evidence of this, and skin cancer is never mentioned--it seems like skin cancer would be the chief cause of death on Roshar if this were the solution. So, maybe rockbuds use a more efficient pigment for photosynthesis than chlorophyll. But nope: When Shallan had her shipboard vision of her garden, her first impression was greenness, so we know that Roshar plants reflect green light just like earth-plants do, and thus almost certainly use chlorophyll. So if Roshar plants are getting extra energy, they're not getting it directly from their sun. However, one of Roshars two-and-a-half deities is Cultivation, who is closely linked to the Progression surge, which is closely tied to plant growth. Meanwhile, there are the Stormward oceans, which are well-fertilized with crem but strangely non-fertile. It makes sense that Cultivation is channelling Progression out of the oceans and onto land. This might or might not be sufficient to explain rockbud productivity, but it leaves Honor out of the loop, and it doesn't explain starving Horneaters and airsick lowlanders. So, we give half the burden to Honor. Let's assume Roshar's original atmosphere was similar to earth's: 80% nitrogen, 18% oxygen, 300 parts per million carbon dioxide. Honor uses Adhesion and/or Gravitation to Bind both oxygen and carbon dioxide downward. The upper atmosphere is now almost entirely nitrogen, the Horneater Peaks are still similar to Earth, and sealevel is something like 40% oxygen and a full 5 percent carbon dioxide, enough to induce symptoms. Chulls frolic in the high-oxygen environment, plants have much more CO2 to work with, and lowlanders get airsick. Meanwhile, without the elevated CO2 concentrations, agriculture on the Horneater Peaks suffers. This unnatural distribution of gasses might cause Roshar to appear to have an entirely-nitrogen atmosphere from a distance, explaining WoB that astronomers wouldn't think Roshar is habitable. Of course, this theory is significantly weakened if there are superlarge arthropods on the horneater peaks--I think I remember Rock talking about eating Chull heads, but I don't remember if he ever said if Unkalaki chull were as large as lowland chull, or if they were much smaller. Lemme know whacha think. Much respect to all y'all from this first-timer, ecohansen