king of nowhere

I think it is more of a case of "with great powers, come unrealistic expectations". basically, whatever sazed does, somebody will complain that he should have done better. the problem is that he's very powerful, and it is not clear what exactly he can and cannot do, and everyone has a different idea of what he should do, and there's no objective way to evaluate it. most important, everything he does will have a lot of consequences, some good and some bad, and there's always room to claim he could have done better or worse. it's a principle applied to everyone with power. you may notice how the only important decision-makers (politicians, entrepreneurs, whatever) who are really appreciated are those who made something from nothing. the guy who started the enterprise, the leader who took a place in anarchy and forged a real country out of it. that's because they got a crappy start and nobody expected them to make better. nobody complains that under george washington the gnp didn't grow as much as it should have, even if that criticism is as good for him as it is for most other presidents. same goes for sazed. everyone was happy when he led a bunch of refugees to rebuild a civilization. now that at least primary needs are satisfied, everyone is expecting more. i say it's really impossible to judge sazed. we can judge a politician based on what the other guys did before him, but we have no example of what another god did before sazed. the only case where we saw a single shard not conflicting with another shard on a planet is on nalthis, and we didn't saw enough on what the shard was actually doing.

no, but you can actually make yourself sick by thinking that you are sick, without taking any action. though in that case your hormonal system is taking several actions triggered by you thinking you are sick, it's just that you are not aware of them.

yes, but there are limits to the energy you can achieve this way, because ferrings are limited and there's only so much energy that can be exerted by gravity on a human body. you can't power a civilization that way. you don't even come close. same goes for steelpushing and ironpulling, it would be cheap and virtually renewable (there are billions of billions of tons of iron in the planet's crust, no risk of exhausting it), but it also would be limited in output.

I don't remember the quote there. steelrunners are rare, but not that rare. certainly rare enough that wax's grandmother can keep track of them all, but if there were only 2 or 3 of them there would be no need to look for names. I do remember distnctly kriss mentioning that only two or three crushers existed, wax included. but that's a twinborn combination, therefore bound to be much rarer than individual powers.

why terrifying? getting sick so that others can be healed is basically what blood donations are, and i wouldn't mind doing that for a job. staying in bed sick for eight hours a day beats working in an assembly line. Same goes for eating to fill metalminds, at least if the food is good - unfortunately, if the purpose is just to fill a metalmind and sell it cheaply, they will gorge you on the worst crap available. still, may be palatable to a junk food addicted. anyway, the whole point of working is to get paid for doing something you'd rather not do. sleeping all day, gorging yourself on cheap food, being cold, driving a truck around or doing budget sums, what's the difference? and the idea that some jobs are humiliating or degrading are purely based on individial or cultural perceptions. serving as human bait for mosquitoes to study ecology is a hellish job for most of us, yet the researchers doing it swear there's nothing else they'd rather do; just to make one of many examples. food metalminds would probably destroy the fast food industry - you can't be faster than that - but they would not touch the gourmet food industry. also, they would be great for those with weight issues - you don't need to diet, just store the excess into a metalmind. and then you can sell it! as for metalmind abuse, it would be no worse than drug abuse, but unlike drugs, it would not fry your brain. all addiction would be merely phsycological, so it would be easier to quit compared to a real drug, and it would deal less damage.

there are enough of those societies that for any important character we can bet he's part of one just on the statistical argument. must lead to embarassing situations sometimes ("elucitaded brethren? sorry, wrong door")

also, does a shardblade count as allomantic metal? or will the mistborn get sick for trying to burn it? and what will happpen to the partially burned spren anyway?

I have an idea: nightblood reaches into the spiritual realm, right? what if it destroied not just the body, but also the soul of those slain? that would explain why vasher sees it as something inherently evil.

Ah, then it depends on how much the other side understands the power of nightblood. that's pretty important. half the counter to any power is knowing what it does and being sensible about it. if many people make stuff like nightblood, then they will gain the status of shardblades on roshar. even if just one side does it secretly, eventually the enemies will figure out what they're doing - not before losing loads of men, of course. I'd say the lack of a similar armor is what makes the impact of a nightblood-wielder on a battlefield limited - it does not matter how well your sword cuts, you can still get pinned by any arrow, or by one soldier getting inside your guard. of course, you could also awaken a suit of armor with a command "protect your wearer". now that would be quite interesting to see. would the metal plates bend to catch blades and arrows? would the armor get the same telephatical powers of nightblood and give prescience to the wearer, reading the minds of his enemies and letting him know where they are going to strike? the sword + armor combo is much stronger than either alone.

Very, very dangerous to make it work. putting aside that sneaking into an army camp is not trivial (until the rennaissance, officiers sneaked about in the night, and if they could catch one of their own sentinels unaware, by military law they executed the sentinel on the spot; most soldiers were not executed during sentinel duty, so sneaking was hard) , but there is one other main line of disruption for this plan: 3b: the soldiers with more conscience among them escape rather than pick up the fight 4b: the winner of the camp runs out of target, kills himself 5b: the good soldier who escaped before now picks up nightblood. now you lost your all-powerful artifact.

The point about it being not particularly powerful for large scale warfare still stands, especially on nalthis where it was made (and which was the total sum of vasher's knowledge when he decided the weapon was too dangerous). It is too expensive, a lifeless army seems a better use of 1000 breaths. On the other hand, it has other advantages, if you give it to an assassin for example. or again, lifeless need maintenance and eventually wear down after a while, but nightblood lasts forever; a nation accumulating those will eventually gain an edge over one focusing on lifeless. regardless of it all, maybe it is true that it wouldn't have changed the world, but vasher made a decision from his point of view, it doesn't mean the decision was perfect.

Yet, on the other hand, not so different from our world. A lot of people believed they could fly, and eventually two of them invented the airplane. Or, if enough people believe that a minority is made of petty criminals, nobody will give good jobs to members of that minority, and many of them will actually become petty criminals. In fact, I find the way our beliefs shape reality to be much crazier than any belief-based magic system. at least if it was magic it would make sense.

I wonder if some spren associated with informatic would only be visible through the screen of a pc - not as part of the program, but simply because their nature causes them to manifest only on a screen. Also, I wonder if we could look for life on mars by looking for lifespren. but would those lifespren be attracted by life, or just by our idea that there is life?

honor, justice, creation, are also not real. show me one molecule of justice. yet we made them exist, and they have their spren. so yes, there would be batmanspren

I am more obsessed with science in general, and astrophysics in particular, than with the cosmere. But look! Here I have both at once!

roshar, on the other hand, has also a much wetter climate and a lack of combustibles. highstorms would wash out all the dead weeds that would make excellent tinder otherwise. I believe using fire on a large scale on roshar is actually more difficult.

What do you mean by, the most realistic numbers? They are all pretty realistic. By assuming that 0.9 is the radius, you get 0.55 earths mass, and a density of 4.2 g/cm^3, around 75% the value for earth, mercury and venus, but slightly bigger than that of mars. It's a perfectly realistic density for a rocky planet. If, on the other hand, you assume 0.9 is the volume, then you get a radius of 0.965 earth radii, which after all the calculation leads to 0.65 earth's mass, which leads to 72% the density for earth - since the planet is more massive than in the previous calculation, but also bigger. The point is, the two values are almost identical, and they fall comfortably within the extremes of the sample of rocky planets we know. How can one be more realistic than the other?

I don't know about programming, but all the data seems fine. roshar is about 55% the mass of earth, which makes sense for a slightly smaller and less dense planet. its sun is a bit bigger, hence the longest year. I wouldn't expect different values

Ok, let's have this tought experiment. take a society 300 years older than us, and give them a manual to operate a spacecraft a few centuries more advanced than ours. they don't have the machines to make the pieces they need, they don't have the machines to make those machines, they don't have the machines to make the machines to make the machines, they don't have the capacity to extract the resources to make those machines, and they don't even know how to make the machines needed to extract said resources. it's like you were trying to make a fully working computer starting with sand and a book of instructions.

the spaceships would have broken down midvoyage because nobody had any idea how to operate them or make spare parts. barring that, he could have easily conquered another planet. I wonder if ruin would have followed.

I tried to reason along similar lines to figure out how pure allomantic metals really need to be, but it's of little use because several metals can be obtained very pure even with ancient technology. Some 20 years ago they found the mummified body of a man from 5000 years ago in a glacier, and he had with him a copper axe that was 99.7% pure. If it was possible to obtain copper 99.7% pure in the stone age, then probably in the final empire they can get all allomantic metals at least 99.5%, and some of them over 99.9%. Unless we found as expert in preindustrial and early industrial metallurgy, those are the best estimates we can have for how pure those metals could be obtained. Note that while they place a higher boundary for how pure allomantic metals need to be in order to not get the allomancer sick, they place no lower boundary on how impure they can be.

yeah, it is possible that if you store wheight into a piece of impure iron, that metalmind will become iron as far as the cognitive realm is concerned, and therefore won't be able to be burned as steel. or it may be that it would require an extra effort to convince youself that it is actually steel. It is even possible that if you take iron with some carbon, whether you can burn it as iron or steel depends on how the piece of metal sees itself. On the other hand... The boldened part make me think it is possible. Some of it will work for the new investiture, though you won't get as much as you could have otherwise. And the underlined part hints that there are uses that we haven't seen yet. maybe this kind of trick is possible not only for steel and iron, but also for other alloys.

that paper was wildly speculative, though. "according to some prediction", it may be metastable. According to others, it may be a superconductor at room temperature. Yet others claimed that after they eat it, they lost body fat and built muscles. Seems to me a lot of fluff that people uused to try to make the paper more interesting (aka more read, aka it boosts their career better). On the other hand, the paper used the term "holy grail of [paeticular branch of science]", which is an awfully abused term. You can't read an article of divulgative science without a claim that X is the holy grail of its field. So I am deeply mistrustful of any article using that term. Well, I won't believe that some material is a room temperature superconductor based just on some calculations, especially since - at least the last time I asked a phd in physics about it, which is no later than two years ago - superconduction is not yet fully understood, and especially high temperature superconduction (here for high temperature we mean liquid nitrogen rather than liquid helium), which appears to be a different thing from supercold superconduction. Well, either way. If it actually is metastable, it still burns with oxygen to make water, just like a piece of coal would burn. No idea how easy or difficult it would be to ignite, though it can't be too hard if it must be used as rocket fuel. And since metallic hydrogen is at a higher energy than molecular hydrogen, it would release more energy when burning, just like a falling rock would release more energy if it falls from a hugher point. No idea how much more, but that at least should be prediictable with some degree of accuracy. with diamond it's only a few % more than graphite, if they expect a specific impulse of 1700 seconds it would need to be a lot of energy. And finally, as difficult as it can be to make metallic hydrogen in a lab, it's certainly much easier than mining a gas giant. especially because at the depth at which metalllic hydrogen is predicted to form there is no mining equipment that would not be crushed by the pressure, nor melted by the temperature. And I doubt even the lord ruler could pull enough to affect it from orbit, with hundreds of kilometers of clouds in between

interesting idea. since iron and steel have very similar compositions, maybe some partial compounding would be possible. We'd have to ask brandon, but my money is on "yes, but with great difficulty" either that, or the requisites for allomantic purity are much more stringent than we assume

I wonder, on the other hand: it was mentioned somewhere that the 1024 years cycle had been going for a while before, and several people had held the power of the well, used it, and kept ruin trapped for another thousand years. If the shattring of adonalsium is roughly 10000 years old (something I remember reading somewhere) then we can expect 8-9 slivers before rashek. Unfortunately i cannot produce the quotes