A Simple Pilgrim

The numbers don't make sense on the face of it: Beacon had 50 ships with 150 people on them. Every ship needs a sun heart to keep going. A group of 150 people would struggle to have more than 4-5 children per year. Let's assume the population is stable, not growing or decreasing, so 5 deaths per year. Let's say all 5 get turned into sun hearts. Some basic math later and, you get that each sun heart has to last 10 years in order to keep beacon running as it is. The text instead makes it sound like they only last months. If every sun heart lasts 3 months, then they need 200* sunhearts a year to keep beacon running. That is obviously impossible on a population of 150. The only way to reconcile this is that beacon hasn't been regenerating sunhearts for years during their situation with the cinder king, or that they had lost many sun hearts in the process of opposing him. Then they instead of dropping ships to conserve energy, spread the energy of their remaining sun hearts through everything in order to keep it running, and that's why they ran out of power all at the same time. The 200 BEU sun heart they gave Nomad was actually already heavily drained, not anywhere near full. One of the only things that support this interpretation is that the Charred creation spear, which Nomad I believe thought had about 2000 BEU in it. As charred are made from modified sun hearts, that means a new floor could be put at 2000 BEU, and the one that Nomad had was only at 10% capacity. If you want to be extra about I you can even assume that the modification process makes the sunheart lose some energy, and thus a normal sunheart holds thousands of BEU. The few hundred on the depleted ones that beacon had left would only last a few months, but a normal full one could last a decade. Dux, where did you find the part that Rebecca's mother had died only a few days ago. I was under the impression it was longer than that, but I could be wrong. Finally on the overall point, I don't think there's any indication whatsoever that Canticle had accelerated aging or birth rates. In fact as I don't even remember seeing any kids. They probably do have tons of kids though, the puritans historically rejected sex in many ways, but definitely not for reproduction. That's how the early puritan settlers had some of the highest population growth rates in the world at that time, once married women had tons of kids. We even see 'an' example of this with Rebecca having a brother and a sister at the start. Brandon's stories usually don't have that many siblings despite being set in historical periods where everyone should have like 5-6 siblings. *It's interesting that despite two different approaches to calculating how many sunhearts are needed, we came up with similar numbers. That means the impression that Brandon gave was consistent.

I don't think the line: "We fled the Evil. Then we fled Threnody." really says much about the timing of these events coming from the shades in the Chorus. More importantly, how do you reconcile that with the line from the chorus: They say that they arrived on ships, and that they were able to (presumably within hours due to the sun) turn those ships into mobile cities. That is a level of sophistication that is far, far beyond any indication of the tech they had on Threnody pre-evil. We know in fact that they were using gunpowder at the time and it was considered advanced. And we know that the tech level of threnody declined after they fled to Hell, as things were lost, and then stuff couldn't be maintained while following the simple rules. The tech that they would need to leave the planet is totally incongruous with what we knew they had at the time. Finally, if the threnodies had ships capable of leaving the planet at the time the Evil came, why in the world would they choose to go to a continent they literally named 'Hell' instead of anywhere else? We should expect a vast Threnodite diaspora as they fled to literally anywhere else. There seems to be none of that until the modern age. About the Greater Good being 80 and thus would know more if the arrival to Canticle was recent, that's not necessarily true. They know plenty about Threnody, and they are the only ones who really got that Nomad could be from another planet. Why would they know the details of the ships that brought them to Canticle? Those were retrofitted and replaced into the modern ships that can run off sun hearts instead of whatever the Threnodites who arrived used for power. They had no intention of leaving the planet, even if they could, so why would they be asking about the details of interplanetary flight to their parents or grandparents?

There is a passage in The Lost Metal where Marasi discovers some of the people who had gone missing recently in Bilming. We learn that the Set has learned how to spike someone who is not an allomancer but who had allomantic potential, in order to steal that potential. This process creates a very weak spike that can't create a misting, but also doesn't kill the person whose ability was stolen. The Set then was able to repeat this, gathering 20-30 very weak spikes that could then be put on one person, creating a Misting from normal people. There's multiple ways this could have been done, we don't know the details. The most obvious method of just directly using all the weak spikes has some severe problems- that many spikes takes a severe toll on a person, there's probably a lack of bind points for this, and it likely required trellium spikes to stabilize. Perhaps instead they melted down all the spikes and instead made a single one from the combined metal. The biggest problem of all though is that the effect was apparently only temporary. Moonlight is still excited by this is at implies that a sufficient amount of investiture spiked, regardless of how it was obtained, can grant the ability. She says that maybe the process could be replicated with pure investiture like Dor without spiking anyone. Personally, I doubt that will be possible, as it goes against the whole 'intent' and logic of Hemalurgy, which is stealing some attribute. A heavily invested spike might do something, but it seems unlikely that it can be used to grant specific metallic arts. Now here is the what-if: Imagine spiking someone who had 5% of the potential needed to become a misting for example, and then using the pure investiture, somehow pump that into the spike in order to increase its power. The original spiking granting the 'intent' for the magic and then the pure investiture making up the lack of power. Then spike the person who the potential was originally taken from with their own powered up spike. Now that person has basically gained the ability their potential couldn't reach before, while minimizing soul damage by using their own spike. Now we don't know if it is possible to 'power-up' a Hemalurgic spike this way, but it seems plausible to me. Far more plausible than creating purely artificial spikes at least. If the Set was using the 'combine into one spike' method, then perhaps there is a way of forging the spike with more investiture put into it. Perhaps the spike could be stamped to think that it came from a full misting, thus being able to grant someone the power without stamping them directly and changing who they are. What are the thoughts about this method? Do you think it is possible? Do you think it is useful, or that if you had access to spikes and pure investiture there would be easier methods to gain power?

I have just finished reading both The Lost Metal, and Sunlit Man over the last week, and one thing stood out to me. The Elendel Basin has apparently never had a major military conflict in the last 350 years. There of course has been fighting, even surprisingly large fights, between law enforcement and organized bandit groups, but there's never been a conflict between 2 government entities. The Basin apparently lacked even an official military of any sort until the 'discovery' of the Malwish, after which Elendel set up its own army. That army has never even been in a single fight. Despite that Scadrians have seem to adapt to combat extremely quickly. Once they saw the necessity they quickly developed such things as machine guns, grenade launchers, grenades themselves, and presumably artillery*. None of these things were even influenced by autonomy, though her agents contributed to an unknown degree to the development of dreadnought style battleships and rocketry. The Set also apparently had little trouble training soldiers by the hundreds, with developed tactics that threatened experienced metalborn. Even Elendel apparently had a plan prepared to enact conscription and stage some sort of attack on the outer cities if it came to that. Contrast that with Canticle- who despite having actually been fighting an actual war of some size over a decent period of time never seemed to have developed anything beyond improvised bombs. No new guns, no real sense of tactics or training. While their smaller population and limitations due to the sun are an excuse, the fact the Chorus can craft advanced weaponry easily means it was certainly within their ability. The only innovation was given to them by Scadrians in the form of Cinderhearts. The charred themselves were then used abysmally for what they are capable of- though that's understandable due to the flower-war like nature of combat which sought to capture rather than kill. Canticle was implied to have been settled by spaceship, and as those are relatively new, it seems unlikely that they have been there a thousand years. Perhaps between 100-200. They came from Threnody, having left due to 'politics' and presumably conflict, as we do know Threnody develops impressive weaponry (see shade gun from the newspaper in bands of mourning, and the Night Brigade itself), which presumably gets used to some degree. So despite being less removed from conflict than the people of Scadrial, those of Canticle seem to be far less capable of it. That, I think, shows an aspect of Scadrial that is rarely thought about. Its people did not arrive there naturally, but were instead created by Ruin and Preservation. Its people are well aware of this and know that every person carries a piece of preservation in them, but perhaps they underestimate how much Ruin they carry as well. Wax alludes to this in the climax of TLM, when he says to worship Harmony is to also worship Ruin, with all that implies. TL;DR: The difference in military capacity between Scadrial and Canticle, despite similar starting situations, show the influence that Ruin has on Scadrians even in the modern era, and that part of them will probably have major implications for the future. *Mayor of Elendel says they can deal with it if Bilming only sends a single ship, which implies they have some way to fight it off- presumably coastal artillery.

having more breaths does explicitly make Awakening more powerful. It grants instinctive awakening, the ability to awaken with sound instead of touch, the ability to awaken non-organic materials, along with just making it easier to awaken and give commands. A person with 10,000 breaths of equal skill to someone with 1000 can do more with 50 breaths. That sounds like 'more powerful' to me. Now I also don't think it would make the surges necessarily more powerful, but it could have other impacts. Also Spren do have physical bodies (shard blades) so you can probably give them breaths while they are in shard form.

About her use of Allomancy, I also noticed that she probably used two powers. Sizgil has been described as a tall (for a non-rosharan) thickly muscled man who is also highly invested. He should significantly outweigh a normal Scadrian woman. Yet when the researcher pushed on him, she wasn't said to move and instead Sizgil was thrown against a wall. That makes me think that she also used her tech to increase her mass to do that. If a presumably non-allomancer researcher can use 2 powers at once with her tools, it stands to reason that they can probably use all the common powers. It will help lower the power difference between Roshar and Scadrial substantially if every Scadrian soldier could conceivably be turned into a mini Mistborn.

About Shades I do wonder if we are ever going to learn more about them. This book clearly makes it seem like there is more to them than the Threnody story did, with the dual murderous/helpful nature of the chorus, and the more human shaped and functional shades of the Admiral. There's been a lot of information about how there's more to lifeless than meets the eye, and how the next Warbreaker book would go into them a lot more. I hope that the if we ever get a book about Threnody (which I think Sanderson has said would be about the Night Brigade) that it goes into shades a lot more, and shows us if there's anything more to them than deadly spirits.

I was aware of the WOB where he says the Cosmere is quite small, but had assumed that meant the pre-space age size. I hadn't seen that reveal stream however, as I was avoiding spoilers at the time. If the total Cosmere only has 50-100 stars, and Khriss is right that Drominad system has the most settled planets around a single star at 3, then that means that Sizgil has probably skipped to the majority of all the inhabited worlds of the Cosmere!

I've always been interested in demographics and populations, and have tried (often fruitlessly) to calculate the population of worlds in the Cosmere, how they are distributed, and the economies associated with that. For a while, I've been wondering what sort of scale of space opera the Cosmere would develop into. It could have been very small, like that of the The Expanse with 2 major planets in a Cold War, and a dozen or so minor worlds struggling to find their place between or away from them. Or it could be a very large scale like Star Wars, 40k, Dune, or Foundation. Now, the fact that the events of the Cosmere would be so influenced by a few significant planets and their empires implies a size smaller than some of the listed settings, but the exact scale remained unclear. Now we have a pretty good guess. In the first chapter of Sunlit Man, Nomad reflects on his inability to prevent deaths as 'millions, or maybe billions, die every day'. That number actually says a lot, as currently on Earth we have a population of 8 billion, yet only suffer 150,000 deaths per day. With this we can do simple calculations for population based on some variables we can manipulate. If the total number of deaths were 10 million for instance, and the Cosmere was twice as deadly as Earth today, that would give us a Cosmere with about 270 billion people in it. Personally I'm inclined to a higher number, as I don't think Nomad would be off by 2 orders of magnitude, after having been to tens of different worlds. 200 million deaths a day would imply a population between 5-10 trillion for example. As it seems unlikely we will get planets with 100s of billions of people, the ease of travel off world would probably prevent that level of density, that implies that the Cosmere probably has a number of inhabited worlds in the thousands, perhaps a bit over 10,000. That would give you a setting of about equal size to the first Dune novel, or Star Trek. The question we will have to see in more future books is how many of these worlds have fallen into one of the factions, and just what scale of galactic war could the Rosharans and Scadrians unleash?

Wasn't it stated somewhere that there were going to be 3 major empires in the space age: Scadrial, Roshar, and Sel?

If Nightblood contains a dawnshard (presumably destroy), wouldn't that mean that Roshar had at least 3 dawn shards on it during the events of SA? At that point I'd be looking out for the 4th.

There's a famous WOB about this. Kaladin would beat Kelsier in an open head to head fight, like a battlefield. Kelsier wins in all other situations.

I think the primary sticking point in this discussion is that some of it is based on SOTD2 info, however at that period at the timeline we just have no clue how enmeshed Shards are in the stellar empires born from their home systems. So far Autonomy and Harmony have been the most active in shaping life and government on their shard world. They give scientific information, talk to important people, lead important religions, and generally facilitate the advancement of society. The other shards we see don't appear to do this, and so I think it's fair to not count them. This might change, perhaps in the Sci-fi Era cultivation/honor/odium or whatever comes out of there is actively involved with running Roshar in a way the shards just aren't really right now. Further these shards have never used their power or personal resources to expand the influence of their shard world, which is a big distinction from autonomy. Overall, I think there's enough evidence to imply that Autonomy has, at this point in the timeline, outsized influence and impact on Taldain compared to other shards, and that should be taken into consideration.

That gives me an idea for the Cyberpunk and Sci-fi mistborn era. You could have some sort of artificial implant that can stimulate/simulate the brain waves that activate feruchemical healing, so that those with access to that ability could survive getting their head blown off, basically making them immune to anything short of their entire body getting obliterated at once. Also from Shallan getting plugged in the head in one of the books with a crossbow and still being able to heal it, it's possible that the physical brain is not that necessary if you are invested enough.

I think there's two separate questions here. How were the pre-everstom singers on the shattered plains maintaining their population, and how are the post everstorm singers across Roshar maintaining their population. For the first question, they explicitly weren't. The Alethi plan to bleed them to death via attrition was indeed working. I think the parshendi lost 2/3rds or so of their population during the war of reckoning, and the percent of the population they had to mobilize to keep fighting was completely unsustainable in the long term, and they were only able to keep it up for so long, and in increasingly worse conditions, because they were fighting a genocidal war. Even then, they couldn't take it anymore by the end, and were willing to do 1 giant gamble with the everstorm as they knew they'd be wiped out. Only a few thousand parshendi survived out of a population that 10 years ago was probably around 100,000. The singers a whole on Roshar are in a completely different situation. There's many different estimates of the population of Roshar, and I find the most credible to be in the 300-800 million range. What percent of that is Singers? Rome's population was 10-20% slaves, so I think at least 5% of the population of Roshar being singers is reasonable. That gets you 15-40 MILLION of them, or basically enough that there's no way to actually defeat them all in a reasonable length of time, especially as they occupy areas with tens of millions of humans, and there's tens of millions more that are actually a part of their coalition. Even if you give huge numbers that aren't really supported by the text, that a million singers are fighting the coalition, and that a million have already died in the war, then you still have tens of millions of singers who aren't actively fighting and can presumably be having kids. About which forms can have kids: WOB about it from 2015 Even in slave form as parshmen, one of the few things they ever asked for was the ability to get married, so I imagine a lot of them went into mate form when they gained that option be able to enjoy themselves with a loved one as a free person for the first time in their life. So Singers away from the front line are probably having enough kids to not let a population collapse happen. We don't have enough info to know whether casualties from being claimed by fused and just form combat are high enough to overcome the birth rate, whatever it is, but the fact that Singers mature faster than humans probably means that hoping for them to run out of numbers is a fool's hope. Such a war will take decades until a clear advantage shows, and centuries to finish.