king of nowhere

remember three quarters of our planet are literally covered in hydrogen oxyde, for a depth of kilometers. there's no shortage of hydrogen for fusion. let's make the generous assumption that it takes 100 hydrogen fusions to power up the formation of a gold nucleus. one liter of water is 55 mols, which make 110 mols of hydrogen, with which you make 1 mol of gold. which is 200 grams, because gold is heavy. so, under that assumption of 100 hydrogens for 1 gold, you can make 200 grams of gold for a liter of water. if you can also recycle the oxygens, you make more. really, how much gold can you really need? that's unlimited for all practical purposes.

There's also some deeper stuff that's only said by brandon in questions from fans. This book should give you all the pieces, but it's quite hard to make out unless you are keeping notes or unless you go look in the coppermind

the fact is, it's not a technological machine. I'm not sure we ourselves could build one like that. It was a machine made by magic. specifically, hoid mentions that the machine was awakened, which refers to a specific type of creation, mostly used in warbreaker. can't spoiler it in this thread. suffice to say that made it possible without any sensor and motor, because the magic was providing that. the machine only needed to be able to bend in the proper ways, the investiture would take care of the rest. anyway, we see no other instance of awakening in yumi's world, so it is pretty clear those scholars were advanced in manipulating investiture and had access to magic yumi had never seen. so, yumi had a limited perspective on her world. she never saw the capital, where probably was the most advanced stuff. it's also possible those scholars got their extra knowlege from a passing worldhopper, or from a spirit

yes, please! all foreign english speakers would definitely love being able to forget pronunciation

I don't know how viable those are. the problem with many technologies is that they require certain other prerequisites in society that are not obvious. for printing press, I think some early idea of printing - engraving a page in wood, inking the wood, then making multiple copies of the page - already exhisted. mobile letters easily interchangable are probably the most key idea, however the whole machinery is going to require some level of mechanical proficiency. and a major problem is that for the whole thing to be worthwhile you need some scale economy. you need to make many hundreds of copies of a book. with paper being made of animal skin, rare and expensive, and with low literacy, it's hard to reach that scale economy. printing made possible an increase in literacy, but it was first an increase in literacy - and mechanical technology, and cheap paper - that made printing possible in the first place. as for the steam engine, you yourself said it, they had some prototipes already in anciet rome. the problem is that those machines were very inefficient, and ultimately much more expensive than horses or slaves. the steam engine was made possible by further advances in mechanical technology, and by the availability of cheap coal. without massive coal mines digging up cheap coal, the steam engine is just not convenient. not saying it cannot be done, but it's hard to accelerate progress. heck, even my idea of hygiene can backfire spectacularly; with lower mortality from disease, population would grow unchecked, until there is either some massive famine, or some massive war over food resources, or the higher population density overcomes hygiene and gives rise to a new pandemics.

no, not really. sure, gold prices would go way down, because gold would no longer be so rare. on the other hand, oil prices would stay the same. because there is plenty of oil in our world too, the problem is digging it up from deep underground and transporting it. those costs don't go down with parallel earths. same with iron, aluminium, timber, agricultural products... by the way, we already have a society that's post scarcity in some areas: most notably, digital entertainment. we already have more books than anyone can possibly read, more movies than anyone can possibly watch, more videogames than anyone can possibly play, all available completely for free because they are a couple decades old. and guess what? people keep paying good money for those things.

why would someone decide to use painting against a nightmare in the first place? I wonder how they discovered painting was effective; who was the first person who, confronted with a nightmare, decided to try and paint it. on the other hand, someone trashing and hitting a nightmare with the first object available, and that object being silver, is a lot more likely to happen. if there is silver around. but that's a tangent.

we know silver works against the cognitive shadows on threnody. silver generally has good properties against a lot of invested entities. would silver have worked against nightmares? there are strong similarities between the shades on threnody and the nightmares of komashi we don't know what aluminium does to the shades of threnody, but it does affect investiture, blocking or negating it. would a wall of aluminium be able to keep the nightmares out? mind you, it is fully possible that the nation of kilahito had no access to either. many rare metals are only available in a handful of places on the whole earth, and with kilahito only consisting of a few cities surrounded by the shroud, i'd bet they totally lacked a good half of the periodic table. silver is not too rare, but it is fully possible they just had no silver ores anywhere in their land and didn't even knew the element. there is no reference to silver anywhere in the novel, except in the end with silverware, and I doubt it means the eating implements were made of actual silver - it wasn't that posh of a restaurant anyway. as for aluminium, while aluminium ores are ubiquitous in planetary crusts, kilahito derives all its advanced technology from hion. even though it mostly resembles 1950s, they could absolutely not have discovered aluminium smelting.

By the way, i'm wondering how the nightmare painters started. As the survivors of the shroud started rebuilding civilization, nightmares started to manifest. And somebody first had the idea to paint them. Imagine the scene. There is this eldritch horror. Weapons pass through it. And somebody painted it. It must have taken a very unusual person.

weird. off the top of my head, I can't name a single one in a cosmere book - ok, my last point if you consider it as such. after checking book by book, I can list a handful, but still rather rare considering the sheer amount of books he's written. like, I can list it once every 3-4 books. also, there's a strong dependence on the amount of foreshadowing involved; I mean, in most fake deaths you have enough details that will let you know it was fake. As I said, I never expected yumi could possibly die for real in this book. If you catch the hints, does it count as a fake death? and if you don't, but after the fact it makes sense? I'll bring a couple of examples from the reckoners trilogy because I'm rereading it right now and it's fresher in my memory: reckoners big spoilers so the question is, do those count as fake deaths, or not? for me, they don't. if for you they do, I can see why you'd be annoyed. sorry about that

I never bought into the fake death, because at some point near the beginning hoid says that yumi and nikaro narrated the story together (can't find the exact point). meaning they are together when hoid is "defrosted". so i never felt that kind of emotional whiplash from that. i always knew yumi was not gone for good. ! Cosmere spoilers !

well, it is a bit more complicated than that. having been wronged in the past does not make one right. you will see.

well, for once, answers will be forthcoming. although I'm sure the answer will leave you with more questions. my take is that she wanted to practice acting like a though action woman. everyone knows roguelike action heroes always meet in pubs and have hard drinks, and never go beyond tipsy for that. she underestimated how difficult it is. surgebinders do NOT feel less pain. though knowing that you will get better immediately helps a lot in dealing with pain. and after a while, i suppose you'd get used to it. more tehcnically, it seems like the healing process reduces pain; I remember other characters in the middle of magical healing feeling less pain once they start. Finally, shallan is crazy. she can do that kind of stuff.

hemalurgy requires driving a spike into a person. the nightmare draining nikaro was stabbing him with claws or something similar. nikaro and yumi were touching. this soul draining effect seem to always require touch. it's not the "turning souls into investitures" part that leaves me puzzled, but the fact that it worked at distance over an entire planet. the fact that they made it work at a distance over an entire planet by accident. it's a bit like trying to assembled a toaster in a workshop and accidentally producing a fighter jet.

Can't help wondering though: why it's yumi and the nightmare painter instead of nikaro and the girl of commanding primal spirits?

it's a disputed theory, apparently not very consistent with the most recent climate models. furthermore, back at the time humans only lived in east africa as hunter gatherers. not something that would give high population density; I would be surprised if there had been one million humans total at the time

although none of them is nowhere near on the scale of fantasy apocalipses. the balck death was the most lethal and it killed one third of the global population. on scadrial and komashi, we're talking 1% survival rate

I also wonder why hoid was hit, but design wasn't. perhaps because design is connected to hoid? where did you find that word of brandon? the coppermind arcanum has not been updated in months

there were histories about AI and machines rebelling since before there were AI. even the bible has a history about an AI, and it's 3000 years old. personally, i see dystopian stories as a subconscious way to express warnings. beware sentient machines, because it can lead to this. beware mass surveillance, because it can lead to that. and those warnings form the inspiration for a story about that happening. and potentially help us create safeguards to make sure it doesn't happen for real.

I wasn't excited at the beginning, but I ended up liking it a lot. I liked a lot Yumi and her take on the "powered by a forsaken child" trope. I mean, every time i've seen that trope used, it's to show that something is incredibly evil, because they are exploiting some innocent. or to show how grimdark the setting is, that it requires constant sacrifices to keep going. here a different angle is explored: yes, this world requires that some people live a life of sacrifice. what do you do about it? if it's the only way to ensuyre the survival of everyone else, you can ask this sacrifice. and a lot of people, if they were the only ones who could provide it, would sacrifice freely. and then the reform movement (by the way, was that real or was it invented by the machine to try and play along?). sacrifice is needed, yes, but no more than necessary. and i realized at this point being a yoki-hijo is not really all that different from any other job. yes, we all get torn away from our families and hobbies for 8 hours per day and forced to engage in unpleasant activities so that society keeps functioning. most of us do it spontaneously and considers it a small price to pay to not have to live on trees. painter is a very archetypical sanderson character, but from the beginning where his job was equated to nurses or teachers, it created some deep resonance with me. I can testify that 90% of what is said about nikaro's job also applies to teaching. fantasy stories are still about humans, and sanderson is great at representing people

it's hard to find a fantasy world that didn't have some apocalipse in the past. as others have explained, they are convenient for the plot

the whole worldbuilding point of the machine is that it was made to stack stones and thus attract spirits, but instead it sucked humans too. But how is that possible? the machine worked by stacking stones, an activity that works at attracting spirits. we can also assume - since normal humans cannot attract spirits, and yumi is heavily invested - that the machine also needed to be invested to work. spirits thus attracted then are ready to offer service. This does not work on humans at all. It's not like I see someone stacking stones and I offer them my soul. So, how did the machine sucked human souls in the first place? And if it is possible for a preindustrial society to accidentally build a machine that has the power to kill (almost) every human on a planetary scale... what are the implications for the cosmere?

it is said that utol and komashi form a binary system, meaning they orbit each other, so they are the same average distance from the sun. they can still have different temperatures due to albedo and greenhouse potential of the atmosphere

the hordeling was hiding, and picked a good planet for that. not really. that machine only works on that specific world because of a specific trigger of the spirits.

my understanding is that they developed quarantine after the black death, which is why later plague epidemics were far less deadly. as for the justinian plague, accordiing to my sources it was most likely smallpox, but it's uncertain. with many ancient epidemics, the descriptions of symptoms just aren't good enough to give a sure diagnosis. especially because most of those viruses mutated over time and they were different back then from what they are now. you are, of course, absolutely right in that they just didn't have access to clean water or the technology to clean water on a large scale. even then, there's some additional tips they could have received. even as late as 1800 doctors were dissecting corpses and then helping childbirthing, without washing their hands. actually, the full story is that: they knew they needed fresh food, and they were trying for alternatives. they tried orange juice, that would have worked - it keeps, unlike the fruit itself. however, since the acidic juice would corrode wood, they stored it in copper casks. unfortunately, copper destroys vitamin C. So the juice had no effect, the creww still got scurvy, and they penned out juices as ineffective for another century. however, while I expect the average joe to know the importance of vitamins, the one above is a very obscure bit of knowledge. So I can envision John telling them to bring citrus juice, and it being ineffective, and John being completely stumped. but maybe with somebody with weird - but proven - future knowledge insisting, maybe they'd try again and good point. sucks for the natives, but sooner or later it was doomed to happen, it may as well be sooner - wait, the natives will have a better chance resisting an invasion by people that haven't yet invented gunpowder and full plate armor, so as much as it sounds weird, you're doing them a favor too.