HSuperLee

However for our solar power the main benefit is the light generated by the sun. If Taldain eventually develops a way to collect investiture the main problem they'll run into is that ultimately the amount they get is a lot smaller than you'd expect, considering that it takes the sand several hours to "recharge" despite constant exposure, meanwhile, OB spoilers, If this is the case, the main advantage a dyson sphere or dyson ring would provide is a significant increase as to the amount of investiture able to be collected.

My understanding is that feruchemy stores by percents, and since you can only store a trait you actually possess (thus humans not being able to store electroreception in a tinmind) if you actually hit 100% you'd have no trait to store and thus couldn't store it anymore. With that logic, you could theoretically get infinitely close to storing 100% of a trait by storing 99.9...%, but feruchemists likely have both a physical limit of at some point they'd start damaging their bodies from storing plus most probably don't have enough precision to actually store fractions of a percent at will. I also believe that there is a limit (albeit a very high one) where the body has taken in as much investiture as it safely can and trying to tap any more than that results in it being lost via turning into mist, this is what I believe happened when the Bands of Mourning were first used and the users body started giving off mist. I believe that was wasted investiture caused by hitting the body's upper limit.

Hey, Ram, just so you know since you're new, we generally try to avoid making a bunch of posts in a row and limit ourselves to posting one thing at a time. If you want to respond to multiple people directly, you can either use an "@" to address them by their username or you can put multiple quotes into your post. Don't feel bad about it, a lot of people make the same mistake when they show up, but it does help reduce clutter and confusion.

I hope you realize that the image you have permanently affixed in my mind is Kel wearing a Doctor Strange style cloak while being as dramatic as possible and shouting out alliterative names for his various magical abilities, all for the purpose of tricking people into believing his abilities are far more variable and powerful than they actually are. Good on you, Ram, very well done.

I think Jasnah would love hemalurgy. I think she'd see it as a way to take the inevitable meaninglessness that is most peoples' deaths and turn them into something self-sacrificial and meaningful. She'd probably phrase it in some way similar to giving people the ability to spit in the eye of death, even it doesn't let them actually defeat death.

Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. The closer they get to the speed of light, they'd find that the acceleration seems to be decreasing to an outside observer (it wouldn't be, rather time would be slowing down around the radiant as they approach the speed of light), even though to the radiant themself it would seem constant (someone more familiar with higher level physics than me would need to confirm that, as my education unfortunately doesn't reach the 3000 levels of the subject.) Basically to reach the speed of light by purely thrust based methods you need infinite energy, and even having access to stormlight doesn't overcome that limit. But otherwise, you are correct that Windrunners are very well equipped for operating in space. Though based on some comments in RoW, they do need shardplate to so it, as a vacuum is apparently capable of overwhelming their healing. That or it just makes stormlight escape faster or something like that. Either way, shardplate is needed to survive.

Honestly I feel like going FTL in the cognitive realm would be overkill, considering that most of the planets are in walking distance to eachother. Plus, as much as we've tended to see CR physics as similar to PhR physics, I feel like things such as Lasting Integrity show us that they're really not, and as such I fear for what effects getting up to relativistic velocity would do in that realm. I do agree that transportation through the CR would be very useful, but I don't see why anything beyond car or train speeds would be very necessary. Plus a big advantage that the PhR has is the fact that the CR compresses locations without minds, meaning that if you wanted to stop by a moon in an uninhabited solar system to grab a refill of hydrogen for fuel, you kinda can't do that in the CR, as said location doesn't really exist there. I definitely think Scadrians will probably be the first to really discover FTL, since it seems like the temporal metals are going to play a significant role in it. It might even be that the "warp drives" used by all people of the Cosmere end up being metallic-arts technology that gets traded for other resources or equipment. Sanderson has said that there will be a lot of sharing of tech during the space age, so I imagine Scadrian Drives will likely be very common. I am not sure if any other magic systems will also be able to develop FTL or not though. However, I do agree that the Rosharan magics will be very significant in terms of power supply, since the Bondsmiths seem to be able to just conjure their respective lights and infuse them into gemstones or radiants at will, without even doing the whole perpendicular opening thing. I even made a comment at one point about the Sibling unmanifesting Urithuru and then remanifesting in orbit as a massive ship or space station that could then act as a fueling dock for Rosharan ships (assuming that at that point in time getting light and spren off of Roshar will be a well-known and common phenomenon).

So while I am of the rare opinion that Nightblood is already relatively close to being completely saturated with investiture and can't actually eat as much as people think they can (for example I believe they were almost "full" near the end of the battle of Thaylen field) I also think we can't ignore that part of Nightblood's command is to destroy and thus Nightblood seems to be able to do damage outside of just eating investiture. I believe that even if Nightblood was completely full, they'd still turn the three realms into smoke and destroy things, even if they were incapable of the investiture released in that process.

This does raise the question as to what spin (that is the word I'm using, feel free to use your own) Yolish spiritwebs (and maaaybe those descended from them on other planets) have as their spark of life.

I find the phrasing of this question very important. The question isn't "was it justified to kill the men" or "was it wrong for her to kill the men" or even, "was it ethical to kill the men?" The question we are given is, "should she have killed the men" which is the question I answered. No, she should have not killed them. While the external ethics of the situation would lead me to say Jasnah had every right to kill them, and I think she was completely justified in doing so, I also believe in the eternality of personhood, and assume that to be the case in the Cosmere. In other words, every decision you make impacts both the world around you and yourself. Every decision you make shapes you in one way or another and influences the decisions you will make in the future. And when I look at the internal consequences of what Jasnah did, of treating life so coldly as to throw it away to make a point, then i fear for what that says about the decisions she's made so far, and how that decision will impact her person in the future. I believe that the act itself is not the only importance, but motivation and reaction to an action taken do matter. So, to defend my point a bit, I don't think there should be any legal or moral external consequences for what Jasnah did. Because what she did wasn't externally wrong. But I do believe she should not have done it, or if she did, she shouldn't have done it with the intent (lowercase "I", though with the potentially to be uppercase) that she did. I do recognize though that it is a complex question, and that I may be incorrect on this issue if I'm not fully understanding Jasnah's thinking at this point. Edit: It occurs to me that while the poll question is "Should Jasnah have killed the men in the alleyway in Kharbranth?" the actual name of this discussion is, "Did Jasnah do the right thing?" So to complicate my answer: Yes, she did the right thing. No, she should not have done it.

I'm going to push back on this not necessarily because I think you're wrong, but more on the principle of the thing. We don't know that one divine breath is the invested equivalent of 2,000 breaths (in part because there's variations as to exactly how invested each breath is). For all we know, they might be closer to or even exceeding the investiture of 3,000 breaths, as all we know is they don't reach the sixth heightening. For that reason it is highly possible that the hemalurgic decay, especially if you manage to get it going directly from body to body like Inquisitors do, wouldn't be enough to lose the fifth heightening.

Ten-thousand is a lot, to say the least. And the best option I can think of is absurdly risky, and not easy to pull off without time and resource for experimentation. But, it is theoretically possible that you could form a hemalurgic spike (getting the metal might be difficult, but if you can contact world hoppers it might be possible) and then sneak into the court of the gods and steal the divine breath from one of the Returned. Once you have that, the biggest thing you want to do is lay low for a bit until the panic of a god being murdered calms down. But once it does, you use your divine breath to impersonate a Returned and enter the court of the gods as a foreign Returned looking for sanctuary and breath for sustenance. You now have a salary of one breath a week that you will not consume, not being a cognitive shadow but only a fake Returned, which you can use to build up a stash over time. It doesn't get you all 10,000 very fast, but it at least ensures a regular income of new breaths. Relevant WoB: Edit: I just saw you made another post where you suggest exactly this. Disregard my post in that case.

If you've read Dawnshard you know there might be a bit of an issue with that.

Considering the interaction we've seen with Nightblood and cognitive entities, I assume a leecher has the ability to destroy spren and shardblades by draining them completely. However, they are so high investiture that they may have some ability to resist it, and even if they don't, they'd take a very long time to drain. Presumably though, it would be relatively easy to turn them into deadeyes, and then draining them more would reduce them to something more damaged than that.

I agree with most of y'all. The Fused are definitely a let down after all the hype they've been given. One of the biggest issues I have with Cosmere healing is that its really just temporary immortality until you run out of investiture. I remember initially being extremely excited in RoW when Lezian first appears and fights Kaladin by repeatedly severing his spine as Kal tries to heal, making him unable to take breath. I had a sudden thought of, "Oh, of course, the Fused have been fighting Radiants for thousands of years, they'll have specialized strategies to get around Radiant healing, which makes them actually a threat!" Obviously that feeling didn't last long. Frankly, I think that it would be better if most of the Fused had something like Herald level fighting skills, especially considering they're of comparable age, and have most of the "canon fodder" be the insane Fused, who can be directed just enough to be a swarm of destruction, but still killed by sane and competent Radiants. It could have been where the moment a sane Fused stepped on the battlefield, every Radiant knew it, because they fought like an army unto themself and had to be swarmed by multiple Radiants to be put down, and even then both the Radiants and readers would know it would only be a temporary solution. That would have made them truly terrifying, especially if we got to see more anti-Radiant strategies, like targeting the head and lungs, and using barbed weaponry that's harder for Stormlight healing to push out on its own and wastes the Radiant's reserves.

I assume regrowth can heal the spiritweb. But as Tglassy said, healing the spiritweb doesn't guarantee healing of the body. That said, I disagree that you couldn't heal a person's spiritweb based on how they see themself, since most people don't observe their spirit anyway to even be able to control how is works. Nevermind that the cognitive filter shouldn't go backwards into affecting the spiritual realm in the first place.

Granted the whole ability to see souls thing could be hinting that at their highest level, the metallic arts do present a heightened level of realmatic awareness. And the fact that some people (granted they were mad) were able to hear Kelsier when he was a cognitive shadow in the CR might suggest that people in the Cosmere do have some very weak sense of awareness of the CR, and perhaps via tin compounding that could be increased and extended. Am I reaching? Yes. But I do think we shouldn't underestimate the realmatic potential of any magic system, including the metallic arts.

At this point y'all are just trying to get me to say it. I should put it in my signature. But, anyway: Fullborn are the Kryptonians of the Cosmere. Now that that's done, I agree that there's not much that can compete with a fullborn with a decent metal supply. However, I do believe there is an upper limit to feruchemy, and that we've actually begun to see something close to it. I believe that when we see Marasi starting to leak mist while using the Bands of Mourning, that the mist indicates she's at about the limit of feruchemy that her body could hold, and so it begins to leak, much like stormlight. I think trying to tap more from a metalmind beyond that wouldn't actually improve the fullbor's traits any more but would merely cause more of it to leak as mist. Granted, that's just a theory, but I do think we will eventually see an upper limit to the magic. Especially as compounding becomes more common with the use of medallions to provide temporary access to metalborn powers.

Well, the UrDail build cities in massive trees, and if humans were only interacting with cytonic UrDail, then they may all have had massively expanded lifespans (since in Defending Elysium that seems to be something achievable via cytonics,) so yeah, seems fairly likely.

Honestly, I think part of the thing is that the mysticism that is associated with Allomancy in Era 1 has really become more apart of Feruchemy in Era 2. We didn't really see a ton of Feruchemy in Era 1, and I think Sanderson's decision to make two of the main characters of Era 2 twinborn is very intentional in making Feruchemy part of more viewpoint chapters and getting the audience more familiar with it, and Era 1 is all about presenting Allomancy. So yeah, Allomancy feels less mystical, but the mysticism hasn't gone away, its just shifted focus. I guess this means Era 3 will have Hemalurgy as the main mystical element.

To my understanding (which means everything I'm about to say could be wrong), Rand's madness was hearing and gaining the memories of Lews Therrin. When he achieved some form of enlightenment on the Dragonmount and embraced his identity as both Rand and Lews Therrin, the madness essentially stopped having a negative consequence, but didn't technically go away. Thus, I assume the light stuff in his mind was the thing that made his madness factual and therefore useful. Basically, I think Rand's madness was delusions of being Lews Therrin and hallucinating memories, but then the light stuff was making it so that the delusions and hallucinations were completely accurate. Where did that light stuff come from? I'm not sure, but it probably has to do with whatever that weird ability Rand has at the end where he can just imagine things into existence is. I assume that had to affect his soul going forward, and thus it also affected him retroactively (gosh I love how that makes sense in the Wheel of Time.) But again, that's all just my theories. Maybe he just imagined the taint away after switching bodies.

Apparently my little thread has been seeing more and more activity as of late. I don't know why, as it has revealed most people (myself included) hold their respective passions about Jasnah quite strongly. So I guess at this time I'll just ask that everyone try to be respectful if this discussion is going to continue. I understand people genuinely care about this issue for different reasons, and some of them deeply personal ones, so I won't ridicule anyone for mounting an emotional defense of their position, and I ask others do the same. But that said, I also want to clarify, there are technically two different discussions that could occur here: do people like Jasnah or do they think she's a well-written character. The two have some overlap, but the thread was started more with the former in mind, as the latter seems like little more than seeds for bitter and viscous argument. Granted, I'm not actually in-charge of this thread, and it will go where it goes, but that was the original intent of the discussion. All that said, I don't really intend to say much more, as I've said as much about my opinion on Jasnah as I'm publicly willing to say already, but I will be keeping tabs on this thread, since I bear at least a little responsibility for it as its creator. Have fun in the discussion y'all. May it be intelligent, sober-minded, and valuable.

My initial instinct is that the aluminum might help "smooth" your spiritweb, but it would do so by rejecting the spikes, which probably would kill you if you still have the spike in when you do it, since now you have a giant piece of metal puncturing your organs without any magic keeping them from harming you. So yeah, while it might fix your spiritweb, I'm not convinced it would fix the grafted pieces from the spike into your soul. Though oddly, I have to wonder if tapping gold as the savant is burning aluminum might be more what you're looking for. Granted, you'd need to be tapping a lot of gold to overcome the effect of the aluminum.

I don't think the limit is human intelligence, I think its imagination and understanding. Try to think of everything that goes into yourself. Not just your likes and dislikes or habits, but the motivations and history that led you to become who you are. All the people who's separate individual influences to whom you are the only connection that all poured into you. You hopes, fears, dreams, loves, and the interplay between them. Now hold that picture long enough to say, "be me." That's why I think this command would be so difficult. A person is complicated and you'd have to try and hold a mental simulation of yourself to fulfill the intent of the command.

I agree with you that this command could theoretically exist, but I feel like you'd need to pull off some singularity type stuff where first you do some special new awakening that helps you improve the intent of your commands, which might then have to go through several generations of making better and better intent-boosters, until finally you can use the command "be me." Maybe Endowment can do it though. If more breaths makes awakening easier, then the source of breaths must have an instinct for awakening that's off all the charts. Now, interestingly, we do seem to see the beginnings of commands moving this direction in some of Vasher's equipment. Namely, "Fight for me as if you were me," "Upon call become my fingers and grip that which I must," and "Become as my legs and give them strength." With each of these, the breath is somehow able to interpret Vasher's wishes even after the command had been given, which definitely seems to be steps towards what you're talking about. It actually makes me wonder if your command, "be me" wouldn't create a clone, but rather a full extension of you, almost as if you were in possession of a second body. Now, I don't know how that would work with senses, but awakened object do seem to have some capacity to perceive the world around them. Though I definitely worry about the possibility of creating a lifeless with the command "be me." That's the seeds of some evil AI that wants to kill and replace the original stuff right there.