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?

Good, good, this means I can start working on how a blue supergiants behave when you screw with their mass. The biggest problem there is that it is way easier to effectively *stop* time with relativity than it is to speed things up (possibly impossible to speed things up with normal physics, you would need negative mass), and I kinda can't think of a reason why Bavadin would want to stop time except as a trap (maybe?).

Ok, I'm going to try and line some stuff up with the potential time distortion on Sel. tl;dr: I think the Dor's time distortion is consistent with dense enough investiture behaving like a black hole, but also... I predict that the physical and cognitive realms are actually... kinda far away from each other? (I'm not entirely sure what that means.) Baseline: I am going to use this as ~ detail timeline, there may be some small inconsistencies, but at the time scales we are talking about, they won't matter that much. Amount of time we 'know' has passed on Sel: The rose empire has existed for 1000-3500 years. Both because we don't know how long a year is on Sel and for good approximation, I am going to assume 1000. Elantris was built, at the least ~1000 years before the Reod (probably more, since it 'probably' predates the splintering of devotion and dominion) but it doesn't matter that much, because this basically just means I am going to use ~1000 years as a baseline for the minimum amount of time the Dor could have existed, and from a time dilation point of view, that still isn't very long. Since this definitely took place after the shattering, this gives us a pretty strong upper limit for the time dilation of 1:10 (if only 1000 years have passed on, and this means 10,000 years have passed everywhere else in the cosmere, that barely leaves any time for anything else to have happened). There are several things that we know bridge from Sel to the outside cosmere: Roshar: Ala and Galladon are seen on Roshar around ~11,000 years after the shattering. Riino is seen in the rosharan cognitive around the same time as these, and seems to have been there for awhile (we don't have a good measure of this, but we do know almost exactly when he left Sel. Of these, Ala and Galladon are somewhat useful as reference points, but Riino is probably the most useful, since we can be pretty sure he left Sel right after getting thrown into the perpendicularity (he *probably* didn't hang around the Dor for long), and though we do not know exactly how long he took getting to Roshar, he at the very least seems to have gotten in touch with the Ire, and then made his way to Roshar. I think this can set the minimum time between him leaving Sel and when Kaladin meets him as ~100 years (it is probably more than this, but I am trying to set bounds). Scadrial: Dao, Kaise and Shai are all members or otherwise attached to the Ghostbloods on Scadrial. Of these, Kaise is probably the most important, because they would probably have to take the most significant action to extend their life (Dao is an Aon, and who knows what Shai can do). Unfortunately, this doesn't let us limit stuff much more than Riino. If anything, it suggests an even shorter time frame between Elantris and era 2 mistborn, if we have a 10:1 time dilation) Kaise could have left Sel 20 years after the events of Elantris, and had the time in the rest of the cosmere be ~100 years again with no additional ill effects. The Ire fortress is also in the Scadrial cognitive. This provides us with a lot of useful information, but unfortunately, we don't know when they *got* there. Despite this, there are a couple of things to note: The Ire at the fortress appear Reod (it is possible that this is just an effect of being so far away from Sel, but Riina does not appear Reod, so probably not?), and this may be why they were willing to take the risk of making an attempt on Preservation. This fits the limits of our timeline just fine, because era 1 and era 2 are ~300 years apart, even a 3:1 ratio would cause the Reod to be in effect for 30 years for the rest of the cosmere, scaling up to 10:1 would get us 100 years. This does actually raise some other problems, however, because the effects of dilation on time effect the flow of things out of the location being dilated as well. The conduit that the Ire are using to feed them energy from the Dor should have dropped in efficiency by the same scale as the time dilation. This would probably mean that the events between Kelsier and the Ire at the fortress had to take place very early after the Reod took hold. I wonder if they had to stop supporting the fortress shortly after failing to take up preservation. This gives us our minimum possible time dilation. If it is much less than 1:3, because otherwise we don't have the time to get between when the Ire are doing there thing in Era 1 and when Shai and company take their actions in Era 2. How does the cosmere treat time dilation due to investiture: We are going to have to do some pretty wild guessing here, but the fact that we have our baseline numbers above means we have a pretty good idea what the maximum and minimum time dilations can be: Minimum: 3:1, Maximum: 10:1. Our equation for ~time dilation is: Gamma (the weird symbol) is the ratio of dilation, g is the effective gravitational acceleration of the object (I will be converting this into the mass of the black hole necessary to have this force), h is how far you are away from the source of the acceleration and c^2 is the speed of light squared (9x10^16). I am going to be solving for the 'mass' of the Dor using it's effective gravitational acceleration (I don't think it actually works this way, exactly, but objects in the same reference frame as a black hole kinda don't notice their acceleration anyway, the acceleration is actually the reason their time slows down so much). h is the biggest problem for me. I am actually going to solve this two different ways, one, assuming that dilation effects leak through from the cognitive with almost no weakening (10m, which is somewhat suggested by how spren project onto the physical) and one with significant weakening (1000 m, this would make the Dor much more 'massive' which I think is suggested by what we know of Investiture. Shards can make planets, which suggests a pretty silly amount of energy). So, with our minimum assumptions, we end up with g = ((γ-1)*c^2)/h = ((3-1)*9*10^16)/10 = 1*10^16 m/s^2 Medium assumptions: ((3-1)*9*10^16)/1000 = 1*10^14 m/s^2 ((10-1)*9*10^16)/100 = 8.1*10^16 m/s^2 Maximum assumptions: ((10-1)*9*10^16)/10= 8.1*10^14 m/s^2 Then we calculate how much 'mass' Dor would have to have to exert these affects: Law of universal gravitation, edited to get rid of the mass moving at this acceleration: g =G*m/r^2 (G is the gravitational constant 6.67*10^-11, m= 'mass' of the Dor. m=(g/G)*r^2 Minimum assumptions: m =(10^16/(6.67*10^-11))*100 = 1.49 x 10^28 kg Medium: (8.1*10^16/(6.67*10^-11))*100 = 1.21 x 10^29 kg (10^14/(6.67*10^-11))*1000000 = 1.49 x 10^30 kg Maximum: (8.1*10^14/(6.67*10^-11))*1000000 = 1.21 x 10^31 kg Supermassive black holes have mass in the range of 10^35 kg, so we (unsurprisingly) aren't even close to those with our highest estimate. The smallest 'natural' black hole is ~ 6x10^30 kg (after that, they start naturally evaporating) So, if Dor is causing time dialation the 'way' a black hole would, it is basically the smallest a black hole can be and still be a black hole. I think this is consistent. An open cluster would be expected to have some black holes, but pretty much all of them would have had to form from stars pre-existing in the cluster, so we would expect to see some other things around the cosmere that behave sort of like this. The fact that the Dor would have about the same 'realmatic mass' as a black hole means that the time distortion doesn't *have* to come from magical means. It also means that shards would/could definitely just *make* a real world black hole (well, one that wouldn't radiate all of its energy away immediately) but it would strain their resources some (potentially consistent with some of the other examples of massive expenditure of investiture). Getting in the range of the 'time would act this way without additional magical interference' does require our more aggressive calculations, making it likely that both the cognitive is 'further' from the physical than basic guesses might predict, and also that the time compression is closer to 10:1 than 3:1.

Some chance Brandon changes it, but the way he talks in the original example, suggests it is more of a 'force of nature' thing to me: Which says black hole behavior to me. Magic requires intent. No, its fun! It's science! Gravity waves! oooo!

Yeah, I think we just agree on this, I was just using the Rose Empire vs. Elantris as an example of places time could be moving differently at different times. The age of the scepter doesn't matter that much, it makes a difference between (maybe) 1:7 and 1:8 dilation, it just seemed like a useful example of when the Dor could have started doing weird things. Sorry about the spag, I thought I had fixed it all, and then thought I had fixed it all, and then thought I had fixed it all, but there was always more. I am not brief. Onward to more wacky science based speculation!

I am not one hundred percent committed to the time dilation being different on different parts of Sel, largely because, though we have been told that the Dor (or side effects of the Dor) are causing time dilation, the way *investiture* works in the cognitive and the way *mass* works in the physical absolutely will not be the same, and black holes are the best analog we have to how the Dor would generate time dilation. I am actually not planning to base any of my predictions on the Dor varying in position and density, but I think there is some reason to think that it does, and that most of the WoBs do not preclude it doing this. The time dilation that the Dor is causing actually can't be that strong. The Rose Empire is ~1000-3500 years old, and possibly doesn't perfectly coincide with the creation of the Dor, but the moon scepter is a translation device for things that would not have existed before the Dor existed, and is a piece of the Rose Empires reglia long enough for people to apparently at least *kind* of forget what it does. The Dor would have been created 'shortly' after the shattering (no idea exactly how long, but it basically doesn't matter). This means that, in order for people to have been able to do things on Sel and then *leave* Sel and be able to interact with the rest of the the ~TLM era cosmere, the strongest the time dilations can be is ~7:1 (For every one 'year' on Sel, seven years happen in the rest of the cosmere. I am going to use Miller's planet from Interstellar as an example here, because we don't have many... particularly good real world examples. The time dilation on Miller's planet would have been 1:61300! (One hour on the planet was 7 *years* in the rest of the universe)The black hole there is hilariously big, but Miller's planet isn't actually that close to it. Sel overlaps with Sel's cognitive, so they are arguably closer. I think this makes the best analog for real world time dilation a 'small' black hole. The problem with that is that the time dilation from small black holes vary *wildly* as you actually get close to them, effectively going to infitity:1 when you actually hit the event horizon (kinda what the event horizon is). I am not saying the Dor behaves exactly like this, but if the Dor is under enough pressure that it starts squeezing out of cracks when they are opened into the real world, that suggests that, as a plasma (like lightning) it is also constantly looking for step leaders out into other nearby locations, and as a result is probably sort of surging about. I think this is part of what makes the Sel cognitive so dangerous. Since just about the biggest ratio we can get is 1:7, I don't think that there would be huge differences here, but it would not surprise me at all if there are times on Sel where an hour on one part of the planet is not the same length as an hour on another part, and they kinda rubberband back and forth a bit. If one was really careful, one might be able to use this to their advantage, but it would be quite hard. I don't think the conduit here matters at all... maybe it could be made into some sort of investiture faraday cage? That would not be affected by whether the Dor has different densities in different places. The Dor looking like a storm possibly reinforces my point, a storm has gradiations, if it was a uniform, it would just look like... frozen lightning? Pressurized plasma is... almost an oxymoron. So there is something weird going on there, it would be trying to escape in every direction. What makes plasma plasma is that it is so energetic that all the electrons have been stripped off the gas. Pressurizing that would usually force the electrons back on. I almost can't think of any way for plasma to be uniform, and in order to avoid gradations in the dilation, it would have to be.

I'm actually working on the Selish time dialation right now. As we have seen, I am far from perfect on these things, but I think we can set some reasonable bounds to how aggressive the time dialation is on Sel based on what we know about when how much time has to have passed between the shattering and when Grump and Moonlight left Sel. One of the things I think I have successfully established in other places is that investiture is pretty dense, and the remnants of two shards would have a *lot* of it, so I don't think it is impossible to have localized time dialation like this, particularly since investiture has a level of handwavium to it. My biggest problem is actually that I think different pieces of sel would actually have different *amounts* of time dialation, since the cognitive does have locations, and the bulk of the Dor is not everywhere in the cognitive, otherwise no one would be able to get in or out. These differing amounts of time dialation would be noticible, I think, so, for instance, time would travel 'faster' in the rose empire than Elantris (maybe?). I'm still working on this, I'll try to have better detail on friday.

The equation that calculates for the energy released by an earthquake is: Log E = 11.8 + 1.5 M. Annoyingly, I apparently dropped a term when calculating this, as I wrote it into the equation as Log E = 4.4 + 1.5 M, so your numbers are right. This makes using plutonium to destroy the planet much harder, so I withdraw that position. Definitely still works on a city size scale, definitely doesn't at a planet size scale. This also means my anti-matter equations are wrong, I will attempt to fix them below. People who were otherwise fairly upright in the real world have convinced themselves of such things in the past. It was usually quite tribal, and might not jibe with what the spren thinks, but I don't think it is wildly improbable. Tecumseh Sherman is the best example of this I can think of. He hated almost all of the actions he took during the civil war, but thought they were necessary to *decrease* the possible number of deaths. That is definitely more of a windrunner motivation than a skybreaker, but the evidence is that Sherman *cared* a lot and was quite broken by the end of the civil war, he probably could have found a spren. I don't think a tyrant would *have* to lie. Authoritarianism *usually* means abuse, but doesn't always. France-Albert Benet was *probably* actually well intentioned. This absolutely cuts both ways, Anarchism doesn't automatically descend into chaos (Makhnovschina). If Dalinar (or possibly Taln, some other stuff would have to happen there) is the autocrat, for example (and it could be someone else, but Dalinar is the most likely, at some point he gets convinced that the only way to keep roshar safe is top down power, and almost all of the orders trust Dalinar, then most of these other problems go away. Some bad things happen, but the intention that causes those bad things is generally for the good of people. Dalinar isn't treating people cruelly, but sometimes some of Sadeas' soldiers die because they gave their loyalty to a bad master. I actually think this is likely, and said so at the top. I just think making anti-investiture is also a *little* bit too easy. The Jasnah example works for this. She tried to make strawberry jam and made.... something else, because she didn't know what strawberry jam was. Blind soulcasting is possible, it might be harder, but that is what I am talking about. It is flammable in contact with.... effectively any other substance. Flourine is a strong oxidizer, to the extent that it can rip electrons off oxygen, which is where the word oxidizer comes from. Ripping the electrons off stuff is what sets it on fire. Saying that it is not flammable by itself is saying 'flourine doesn't burst into flame if everything else is flourine'. I don't want to underweight this at all and very much accept your suggestion that authoritarianism would not fulfill the goals I am describing. I am very much not saying authoritarianism is good, or even that it necessarily accomplishes its goals. Possibly the opposite. I am very much suggesting that some of this stuff could terrify people (what happened to Ashyn is still having effects) and terrified people are much easier to convince to accept authoritarian governance if it makes them feel safe (see, for instance the TSA in the US, that almost everyone involved has described as 'security theatre'. Updated anti-matter equations: If I was to make 8000 kg of antimatter, it would react with the surrounding matter, and release 1.44x10^21 Joules of energy. More than enough to crack the earth. We damp this to account for cosmere protections, and just... make 16,000 kg instead. ((8000 kg + 8000 kg)*9*10^16)) <- for 8000 kg of antimatter and 8000 kg of normal matter.

@alder24 I missed an entire section of your post somehow, I am going to blame it on not being used to the quote system. I really don't understand what you mean here. Sure, if you know what you're doing, have a lot of Stormlight, and have a Soulcaster that can create everything, you might be able to create a big boom. Would it be as big as you propose? Probably not. Setting the atmosphere is really, really, really hard in real life and requires a huge amount of energy concentrated in a very small place - even with today's nuclear stockpile we aren't able to achieve that. Part of my goal in using flourine as an example is that I think it would be relatively easy to do by accident. Flouride is *really* common (it is in a bunch of food, among other things, as a pretty common component of many types of salt). It does not stretch the imagination too much that someone trying to figure out chemistry for the first time (something real world humans started doing ~3000 years ago, easily in a time period that could match RoW roshar) might mess up and make flourine while trying to make *salt*. That's 43.4 tons of tnt. That's really, really not much. It's a tiny amount compared to modern nukes, which can release nearly 1,000,000 times more energy with much less mass. How is 43.4 tons of tnt gonna ignite the atmosphere? I didn't actually think it would set the atmosphere on fire, exactly, but it certainly would look like that, part of the problem with flourine is that it is both a gas and *wildly* flammable, so it would both be catching on fire and moving in all directions really quickly. I almost certainly should have been clearer on this, but there were legitimate scientists that thought the first nuclear bomb would set the atmosphere on fire. We accidentally set ourselves on fire with napalm all the time, and this would be much worse.

You are a splendid, splendid human being. Buuuut, I don't think it takes that much energy to crack the planet. Maybe if I wanted to pulverize it and send its dust in all directions, but if I put the amount of energy necessary to make a richter 11 earthquake, and compare it to the energy produced by the fat man, I get ~200,000 times... the *fat man* (1.8e+19/8.83e+13=203850). I only need to turn 12,800,000 kg into plutonium. That is 1/63281250ths of everest, and that isn't even accounting for the fact that roshar actually has less mass than the earth. Hard, yes, but something that people could do if they were trying? Yes. One of my original points here was that all of the examples I was giving were either accidental, or things that people did that *could* have unleased massive destruction if they were trying to do that. The soulcasting example has since gotten a bit away from me, but my point was that, if you were to intentionally scale them up, they could destroy a lot of things really fast. I will try to do some of the 'extreme' versions of these equations later today, but that was not my original goal. I wasn't specifically picturing Kaladin doing this, but we *could* assume that all windrunners are basically Kaladin. They still don't really need to do math. With a big enough projectile, you would really only have to do this two or three times to be able to 'walk your shot' into the thing you wanted to hit. It would be hard to justify this as 'protecting' something, but I could really easily see a skybreaker using this to punish a *city* that their particular oaths think has committed a crime, once the fact that you can do this is commonly known. So these orders either get marginalized or co-opted. I could see (medium difficulty) convincing willshapers and truthwatchers that my rule is preferrable to the planet being destroyed (or similarly messed up) as long as *I* wasn't specifically the person threatening to do that. The edgedancers might cry over those harmed, and listen to them, but Lift isn't personally fixing every wrong, and neither will the average edgedancer. There is a slippery slope here, I am simply suggesting that it might be easier to slip under these circumstances. Windrunners will be protecting.... everyone by consenting to benign autocracy. We haven't seen that judgement yet. I don't think it is impossible that it turns out the corruption runs deep, and a significant number of the shin are complicit and must be purged. Even assuming they aren't, the way the high spren talks suggests to me that they might not take action until the damage is already done, assuming Szeth were to go axe crazy (not impossible). First more extreme example (because it is the easy one) if I was to make 1000 kg of antimatter, it would react with the surrounding matter, and release 1.8x10^20 Joules of energy. More than enough to crack the earth. We damp this to account for cosmere protections, and just... make 2000 kg instead. Easy. ((1000 kg + 1000 kg)*9*10^16)) <- for 1000 kg of antimatter and 1000 kg of normal matter.

I was using bread as an example of the fact that investiture can just make energy disappear. alder actually already corrected this point, which is why I moved on to flourine and uranium, because instead of making energy disappear, those two make energy *appear*. It shouldn't matter too much unless physics is wildly different outside of investiture interactions, which is something I think Brandon is trying to avoid. I also, actually already cut the energy predictions for both flourine and uranium in half to account for 'cosmere weirdness' because I definitely don't know what is going on with that. What it is called doesn't really matter to me, it would work the same way. Annnnnd unless the second Szeth/Kaladin (Words of radiance ch. 85) fight has been retconned, what I described is exactly how Szeth tries to kill Dalinar and Roion by lashing them to the sky and just waiting for their stormlight to wear off so they will fall to their deaths. I would just do it with more stormlight. I was trying to answer my own question here, sort of. I think the oaths are part of what would make autoritarianism easier on roshar. But also.... we have not seen all the oaths and we have seen them be bent to some extent before breaking. One of the later things I want to make a post on is how oaths interact with insanity. I think it would be fairly easy for a group of, for instance, skybreakers, to decide that all of roshar needs to be cleansed... and their oaths providing little to no stoppage. Still much easier than scadrial. I'll try, but I find the quoting structure of this site very unintuitive. What I really want to do is respond to specific pieces of your post, and the quote feature locks them all together in ways I don't like.