heliovox

For the purpose, this would be fine too. I was just suggesting a different, longer range means. It seems to me that your method has a slightly increased chance of rebellion/your breeding stock doing dangerous and stupid things if they see behind the curtain (soylent green, for example). I am absolutely not saying that breeding humans who would be just smart enough to meet the cosmere requirement of being sapient while being so stupid that they couldn't rebel if they want to would be easy, exactly, but there are plenty of people around the cosmere with lots of time on their hands. I *do* think that, in cosmere, a shard/something similar (in this case probably edgli) would step in to prevent something like this from happening, but I don't think it would be unprecedented for sci-fi/fantasy. What I suggested was basically the background for the Eloi and the Morlocks in 'The Time Machine'.

As hard as it might be to believe, I actually think we might be able to go darker with this. Humans are already kind of neotenizing themselves (making themselves more childlike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny_in_humans) through natural genetic drift. This is similar but not identical to what we did by domesticating animals with artificial selection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_domestic_animals). There are estimates that one could achieve domestication like effects in ~10-12 generations. For humans, this is a lot of time (probably a little more than 1000 years), but, over the course of the cosmere timeline, a focused enough force could almost certainly achieve a breeding group of breathed humans somewhat comparable to modern earth's cattle farms (https://xkcd.com/1338/) which actually outweigh humans by mass. My *suspicion* is that Edgli would probably step in to prevent this (/possibly already has stepped in to prevent this through returned?), but breath is just so danged useful, and producing it quickly is annoyingly hard. I also have a really hard time picturing Brandon writing something this dark... now.... Dan.....?

uhhhhh, well, that is sort of what I was saying, I guess? Moonlight says that Autonomy is creating perpendicularities 'unexpectedly, and against all understood mechanics.' I'm saying maybe those aren't perpendicularities at all, but the far end of a wormhole. That was sorta what I was hinting at when I said It might look identical to or enough like a perpendicularity that you wouldn't know unless your *really* know.

Ok, I'm back. I was thinking about the mechanics of space around Taldain and I think I may have come up with another possible use for AisDa/the alignment of the Taldain system. It's even consistent with some of the other stuff Autonomy has been doing. Bavadin could be using it to make/maintain a traversable wormhole. This one is gonna be pretty rough for me, because, since we've never.... looked in a black hole/seen a naked singularity, this is pretty firmly in the 'this is really science fiction, not science fact' area of speculation, so I'm not really going to be able to throw math at it, but I do think some standard sci-fi predictions work out in this particular case, so I am going to describe what I think that could look like, and see if anyone has any thoughts. I also refer people to this thread: And particularly @therunner "Under this, the perpendicularity works quite well as ER-wormhole connecting two subspaces." Most of the stuff in that thread is actually more complicated than I want or need here, mostly because I am trying to leap to gross conclusions rather than make precise models, but I think there is a... 'useful' statement here that a perpendicularity and a wormhole can look.... *really* similar. Real world Baseline: The way a traversable wormhole would work in this case is that AisDa would be spun up and then collapsed into a singularity. It needs to be spun up, because otherwise you can't interact with the... *material* of the black hole without being ripped apart. There is a lot of angular momentum here, but there is already some evidence that the spins of things in this system have been messed with, and Bavadin could have started with a star that was already spinning quite fast, then moved all the other, smaller stuff to make that easier to deal with. Absolute speculation: The reason this could work is because black holes/wormholes already kinda work like the spiritual realm (discussed earlier). The spin/distortion of the black hole (it would be toroidal/kinda doughnut shaped) might even allow Bavadin to aim the wormhole to some extent, by inducing wobbles into the spin of the black hole. This is pretty wild theorization, but nothing that wouldn't fit in a Niven book, and I like Niven. Whether a wormhole would look exactly like a perpendicularity or now would just be a perpendicularity, I am absolutely not going to guess, but it wouldn't be a stretch at all for Brandon to say 'yup, to people who don't know better/'new' shardholders, it just looks like a perpendicularity.' I'm going to keep digging into other possible megastructures that would fit the configuration of the Taldain system, but part of what made me think about this is that you might be able to use 'Wombear's Saddle' as a focal point for the wormhole, thus allowing you to attach random bits of Taldain to... almost anywhere else in the cosmere. Sound familiar?

It is complicated, Avatar is a part of Autonomy - only a semi-autonomous part: In the end if that's not enough to convince you, we won't convince each other. It's better to agree to disagree than repeating the same thing over again. I guess I can agree to disagree, I actually thought your argument was circular and was trying to point that out, but I guess you thought my argument was circular? It seems to me, however, that there was something representing itself as Trell (we had heard of trell doing things) before Telsin was being Trell, and Bavadin 'being aware' of what all of her pieces were doing does not actually suggest volition. I'll keep working on this and try and come back with something concrete, I do have an idea I want to workshop, but it is almost completely disconnected with this other than still having to do with AisDa. Ok.... so it won't let me unmerge these.... so I guess I'm just doing it this way. Mostly disconnected from the above, but connected to the overall discussion: I did think of a way Bavadin could use AisDa as a pretty horrifying weapon, but I'm not sure why/how one would actually use it against most of the targets autonomy would actually have, so I figured I would just mention it as a possibility and see what y'all thought. It probably wouldn't be... too hard, in comparison to some of the other things I have suggested, to turn AisDa into a supernova that focuses most of its energy into a Gamma ray burst which.... could be targeted (to be very transparent, targeting it would be extremely hard, but probably not impossible... you would not need to target it very precisely). The reason I am not married to this idea at all is that such a thing would almost certainly not really be a threat to shards. It would absolutely let you sterilize a planet or 3, and possibly mess up some other stars, depending on how you did it, but that... probably wouldn't do anything to another shard, and definitely would make everyone very angry with autonomy.

Sure, but my original point was that even the initial attack on autonomy could have been carried out by an avatar or some similar thing. In the long quote you posted, Brandon refers to Patji as being 'a shard' he doesn't mean Patji *is* a shard, and I am super onboard with that, but I think there is room for him to quite easily wriggle around Trell or a Trell related thing doing the attack on Harmony, and Harmony recognizing that attack as coming from Autonomy. i.e. That attack did not come from Bavadin herself, specifically and directly, but from an Avatar of Autonomy, acting independently, but recognized as Autonomy, because 'it's complicated;.

I am going to very gently repeat my caveat here, which I did, luckily say at the outset. I usually try to spend some time thinking through how I think the mechanics of a particular system before I make too many predictions. I don't really know what Bavadin would specifically be doing with AisDa aside from a slight inkling that it might be a trap for other/another shard, but it seems to me that you could definitely use investiture to set up a weapon (superstructure) that you then did not have to directly manage all the pieces of. That could pretty easily be what is going on here. The way Autonomy is approaching this may be kinda weird though. Outwardly directed should suggest that autonomy's goal is to make it so others can govern themselves, but the evidence seems to be that what Autonomy is doing is setting things up so that people govern themselves using Autonomy's own (autonomous?) system. I don't think it takes a lot of stretching to make Autonomy's actions about making, for instance, itself everything, and then having all of those 'itselves' self governing. Probably less stretching than making 'hatred' into 'passion' (which I know either mostly or entirely didn't work, but the fact that anyone thought it might be possible is kinda my point.)

It can be used for stuff though, arguably it needs longer to be set up? Preservations mists are an example of this for me, maybe preservation couldn't use them immediately, but they could be set up to serve a purpose. I don't know what that purpose is, but it seem likely that Bavadin isn't just set there, there is some long term goal. Bah, easy. My brain does stuff without me willing it all the time, that is why there is such a thing as an *autonomous* nervous system. What I am saying is that this is part of the nature of autonomy, to act without necessarily paying attention to all of the things you are doing, automatically. The combination of the shard and the vessel *is* important, in this case, it allows the totality to focus on one thing while doing a bunch of other things at the same time.

This is definitely possible, but I think the lower bound of 1:3 is, at the very least, reasonable. I don't think Brandon would have mentioned it if it was, like, 1:1.5, and I don't think the Ire act or look the way they do if they can avoid it. Elantrian's have a ton of abilities, those abilities may be attenuated by being away from Sel, but I don't think they let themselves look like they do in AU unless there is something going really wrong with how they are operating away from Sel. Riino doesn't look like they look and if Riino is hanging out in Shadesmar at the same time they are, I think he is there for too long to fit the other stuff we see. Part of my points about Taldain is that I think she is setting it up specifically so that she has the advantage on defense. If someone were to attack Patji for some reason. Autonomy might not be able to defend there, but I'm also not sure she cares. I think the point of sinking investiture into AisDa is to make it usable quickly if necessary. I think this is autonomy working as intended. The quote above says to be more afraid of the shard. I think Bavadin has plans, but I also think Autonomy is acting Autonomously of Bavadin/it's own plans. I think there is a reasonably good chance that Bavadin didn't withdraw Telsin's power, Autonomy did, as a natural result of Telsin's failure. Autonomy doesn't even have to be thinking about this, Telsin thinks 'I've definitely failed' the power goes away. Autonomy, not Bavadin again. We don't know Bavadin yet, we don't know if Bavadin is controlling Autonomy 'well' or at all. The *shard* could be putting on many masks, and Bavadin just happens to be the biggest one. The power could be taking the mind from whatever or whoever the current Avatar is. I (somewhat) return to the idea that the reason Patji responded to Hoid rather than Bavadin being because Bavadin wasn't *available*.

That is sort of what I am saying though, the Sellish haven't been crushed... or... like, thrown off the planet because it started spinning so fast, so the actual gravitational effects have to be, at the very least, damped aggressively. This actually may create problems for some later theories I have about interacting with the cognitive, because my thumbnail for the cognitive is basically 'it works the way the majority of people think of it as working, and I very much doubt people are thinking time dilation is a thing, but some effects go both ways, I imagine attempting to murder a shard badly is going to have some unique effects. I was more focused on how much actual energy Autonomy had put into that investing though, and I think it could still be very small. I was thinking of it like an EM 'tag' or radiosource that could be used for messing with someone else's missile targeting or establishing your own missile lock. If your opponent doesn't know what you are doing, you don't have to put a lot of work into it. I actually also think that it is really telling that Brandon always uses the word Autonomy in that big WoB and not Bavadin. I have no doubt that Autonomy is doing all of these things, but I'm not sure Bavadin is specifically paying attention to them. In the Harmony quote: Harmony doesn't say Bavadin, he says Autonomy. This could just be a conflation, because that happens a lot, but, for instance, though the long WoB says that Patji is not a shard.... Patji sure did respond to Hoid on Autonomy's behalf. Autonomy is all over the place, but I don't think it is focusing its power everywhere, it is mostly using power that is already there. I think Bavadin is putting most of her energy into AisDa.

Oh man you guys are so fast. You replied while I was still writing my Sel response. I *think* (this is very much not as based on data as a lot of my stuff) that Autonomy (that I am intentionally separating from Bavadin here, because I think that is part of Autonomy's ploy) didn't actually devote much in the way of resources to the attack on Harmony. I think the attack on Harmony was sort of an attack of opportunity because whatever part of Autonomy happens to be doing the Trell thing went 'well, Harmony may have a bunch of power, but he is either incompetent or so badly bound up in himself that he might be really easy to tip over, and I might as well try that. I'm not even sure Autonomy thinks that attack failed, exactly, it is possible it was a win/win, with Discord being the point, and people having to deal with Discord instead of paying attention to all the stuff Autonomy is doing. I also think that Autonomy has intentionally 'distributed' her/it's mind in an effort to increase the number of things it/she can pay attention to, thus, all the avatars. The ghostbloods might actually.... kinda be a foreshadowing of this? The benefit of distributing yourself is that you have more *capacity* but the right hand might not necessarily know what the left hand is doing. Taldain is Autonomy's big gambit, but Autonomy is doing all sorts of... autonomous things on the side. This might weaken Autonomy against a *focused* opponent like Odium but Odium is currently nailed down, and most of the other forces it/she might consider to be real opponents are either dead or very much not focused on Autonomy.

The problem is that your assumptions of "the Dor being 10/1000 m away from any point of PR," doesn't correspond to how CR works. CR is location dependent, each point in CR corresponds to real location in PR. That's why you can't take the entire mass of the Dor in CR and stick it to a single point in PR over and over again. To make this work you would have to consider that each region of PR is affected by a different "pocket" of the Dor in CR, so you would have to separate the Dor into multiple singular "Dors" to calculate this correctly. But that would cause a whole bunch of other problems. If you want to calculate time dilation for the entire planet it's better to consider that the Dor is overlaid over the entire planet, so you can just simply assume a common center of mass, ignoring problems that come with it (because either way gravitational effects of the Dor CAN'T be happening, otherwise the entire system would be gone). I basically misunderstood what you were saying here originally, I think I got it now. I think you are saying that, if we are treating the system as though only the time distortion is leaking through, not the gravitational effects, it also makes sense to treat the 'center of mass' of that effect as being in the center of the planet. That makes a *lot* of sense to me. It does introduce some *very* weird problems that the time dilation would decrease as you moved away from the core, so the center of the planet would be travelling through *time* slower than the outer layers of the planet... and.... like.... you would experience more time dilation if you were in a valley than on a mountain? I think that can probably be handwaved though. The equations for that would be: For a 3-1 ratio ((3-1)*9*10^16)/9000=2*10^13 m/s^2 m =(10^14/(6.67*10^-11))*81,000,000 = 1.21 *10^31 kg For 10-1 ((10-1)*9*10^16)/9000 =9*10^13 m/s^2 m =(10^14/(6.67*10^-11))*81,000,000= 1.21*10^32 kg Still not quite supermassive class, but definitely not small. It very much does matter. You've literally calculated the gravitational acceleration of a black hole in a given distance from it. So unless the Dor doesn't affect gravity, they would feel that, or rather they would be dead. But here it is a conversion factor for how much that acceleration would affect spacetime. The *reason* the acceleration of things on Sel would be that fast would be because they are maintaining that velocity to avoid falling 'into' the Dor. Because the Dor is in the cognitive, they don't actually need to do that. This is the place where real world math stops working because we are not in the real world, but one of the things I have said from the beginning is that I am not trying to calculate how investiture flows between realms, I'm trying to calculate what it's *effects* are in the physical realm. We have been told there is time dilation here, but either Sel is not orbiting at insane speeds *or* the entirety of Sel is moving with a consistent reference frame, in either case, the normal people of Sel would not notice until they tried to leave Sel. Yeah, I sometimes forget that 'fast' from a cosmological point of view and 'fast' from a real world point of view isn't the same. This means that the 'black hole' effects of the Dor could be much smaller, but the evidence seems to be pulling the other direction.

I think the distinction drawn here is between things that 'actors' directly did (put pressure directly on a perpendicularity) and things that might be results or side effects of those things (a perpendicularity being 'closed' because an earthquake dropped 5000 kg of rock on it). From this point of view, the perpendicularity being held closed would be artificial/magical, but the perpendicularity being impassible because of slowed time would be natural. I don't think Bavadin being invested in the whole system either helps or hurts my theory too much. It might make it easier to control orbits finely to shield the planet and increase or decrease the passage of time there? I am willing to speculate, but I need to do more analysis before I make a strong statement on this, the fact that Ridos is (presumably) creating some additional tidal effects means that the distortion might be variable (i.e. more intense on the brightside than the darkside). It's possible that Bavadin is trying to make a planet shaped bridge or ... space elevator counterweight for AisDa? I need to think about this a lot more. My assumption is that she is directly manipulating the actions of the fusing shells of the star, so she basically has whatever amount of time she wants. What I picture is her using AisDa as a place to dump investiture. There is some evidence/argument that one of the restrictions on shards is that it is hard to do a lot of stuff quickly, not because they can't but because they need time to bring in and focus the power at the location they want. So maybe she could be using AisDa as a massive mana battery? I don't have specific guesses on this, I just know it is much easier to make something into a black hole if it already has all the components in place, and AisDa does. Basically, I picture it being relatively easy for Bavadin to pull that investiture out and put it back because she is invested there and the Spiritual realm doesn't have time and space (like a black hole) so when she wants/needs the investiture, she just walks in, uses it, and walks back out. So what I mean by core is... 'largest store of investiture'/'body' the same way that Leras sometimes refers to atium as being ruin's 'body'.

Sel: This would align with the original timeline of Cosmere, when thousands of years were separating Elantris from SA. But a lot of things have changed since then so I simply want to point out that it's really hard to guesstimate anything because it all can be explained in multiple different ways. This is why my starting window is so large. It doesn't matter that much, though, because the time window we are dealing with is still pretty short in terms of both the cosmere and how time dilation works. Riino having been there for several hundred years fits my timeline pretty well. Riino being there for several *thousand* years... may not be possible if Brandon actually wants Sel to be experiencing real time dilation. Maybe he has just read up a lot in his hundreds of years there. I actually think this is worse. Having the 'mass' of the door in the center of Sel causes all sorts of problems. The speed thing you reference below is only one of them. If we treat this as a real gravitational mass, Sel... probably doesn't exist anymore for a number of reasons, and also this doesn't really fit the 'Dor moving around' thing I was discussing earlier, whiiiich, it may not work the way I describe it, but if the Dor is moving at all in the 'core' of the planet, the planet either starts wobbling, or different pieces of the planet suffer *wildly* different dilation ratios (regardless of the size of the black hole, time dilation effectively goes to infinity at the event horizon. It seems really likely to me that Brandon is treating this as a 'time effects bleed across between the cognitive and physical, but gravitational effects don't' because otherwise you don't get time dilation without wrecking a bunch of other stuff too. I'm not sure this matters in the description I gave above. The acceleration ends up being kind of a conversion factor. The way acceleration usually works in these equations is that it defines how quickly the object has to be orbiting around the black hole in order to not just fall in, and then that speed gives the time dilation. But the physical realm doesn't really *fall* toward the cognitive realm (though it would be really cool if... like, this is happening, and the cognitive and physical are *twisted* here because they are 'orbiting' each other, this could potentially explain some stuff). I think this probably means that 'space-time' to the extent that it exists in the cosmere, is being distorted *as though* Sel was falling perpendicular to space (I wonder if... perpendicular/perpendicularity, the cognitive and spiritual are really supposed to be other 'physical' dimensions). Since the entirety of Sel would be moving like this, the whole planet would still be in the same reference frame, so individual people wouldn't notice. Every black hole evaporates. That's the smallest black hole we know of, only because stellar mass black holes are made from a star's core collapsing. So it's not like you can't have a smaller black hole because of evaporation (that's what your text sounds like), you can't have a smaller stellar mass black hole because you would need a smaller star and a supernova of a smaller star would produce a neutron star instead of a black hole because it wouldn't be massive enough. A hypothetical primordial black hole can be much smaller than that, but those would be made shortly after the Big Bang, pre-dating stars. Sorry, this definitely needed clarifying. Smaller black holes evaporate faster, so much smaller than this would become irrelevant very fast, which is not what we have been told.... Also, this was more an explanation of 'real world' stellar black holes. Presumably the Dor isn't evaporating. Well, yeah... it just isn't inconsistent with black hole dilation here. The Dor definitely could work differently, it is giant, semi-conscious magic, but it *could* be acting like a black hole, and that is good enough for wild speculation.

I'm going to split my reply to these into Taldain and Sel replies, because otherwise I will lose my train of thought. Taldain Especially as that ignores the other part, where he says "'how' is the wrong term". If you were to ask how Kell destroyed the Pits, there's a clear answer: he went and destroyed all the crystals. But apparently if you were to ask how Autonomy isolated Taldain it just doesn't make sense as a question. I have to admit, I have always disliked the use of the word 'natural' for this sort of things. Humans are natural, so the results of humans actions are also natural. In the cosmere, shards are 'natural' they were part of how the universe works. Buuuuut, I do agree that Brandon probably means here that Taldain would have been shut off anyway/it may have only required a bit of monkeying from Bavadin. I'm not quite ready to do a deep dive on AisDa, but I have a really hard time thinking that Bavadin would want to invest in a blue white supergiant without wanting to muck about with its potential future black holishness and time distorting properties. I think there are several other things that also might either point to this, or that Bavadin would find particularly useful. It would provide a pretty good protection/trap for Bavadin against people that want to mess with the core of autonomy. Theoretically, it would be inside a black hole, not impossible for other shards to approach, but pretty impossible for any of a shards tools to approach. This might also explain why Hoid's letter didn't reach Bavadin, Bavadin was *unreachable* by anyone but a shard. It may also be able to generate a new 'universe'/simulacra universe for Bavadin to screw around in. It would allow Bavadin to cut taldain off for a long time in a way that didn't require any additional energy. Destroying a perpendicularity doesn't seem to last very long (citation needed), and holding one closed, while I think a shard would be capable of it, probably requires both attention and continuous effort. Control the formation of a black hole, stick the perpendicularity near it, problem fixed. I'm actually not entirely sure why bavadin didn't just put the perpendicularity *in* AisDa, but... probably there are rules against that?