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Old 08-28-2016, 05:30 PM   #71
Flyndaran
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
A blight that targeted all grasses on a family-wide scale would wreck terror on the human diet. It'd be a big deal, but it actually wouldn't kill as many people outright as you'd think. We actually have a number of crops that could feed the human race... we just don't use them heavily at the moment.

The resulting panic would do as much damage as actually loosing next years crop. We could switch over to other crops, and if everyone was rational and worked together we'd probably have few deaths... but that's not going to happen.

Long story short: we could live off other stuff, but we don't, and when the grass dies society will far apart out of worry if for no other reason.

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I never meant to imply that destruction of grass would signal the extinction of our species. But negating the vast majority of our food would have a greater effect than any real world disaster since our genetic great bottle necking of 70k or so years ago.
If grass never existed, then most of the world would be unable to develop agriculture. But a few starchy mass produceable crops are possible; potatoes and quinoa being the ones that spring to mind first. So onward Incan empire!
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Old 08-28-2016, 05:35 PM   #72
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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...
Yeah, it is more like hibernation, but even more extreme than that. For one thing, it is impossible to wake someone up, even with pain.

It kind of resembles theoretical 'deep sleep' for space travel. Which would make it interesting to some people on Homeline (even with infinite worlds, there are going to be people who want to travel the stars).
...
Cryptobiosis literally hidden life. When an organism is so "on hold" as to appear dead. Usually in simple seed/spore/egg form, but a few hardy critters handle freezing solid or desiccation like the now famous tardigrades aka water bears. It would be a nice mysterious but sought after research subject for cross-timers.
Not just long distance travel in space. But imagine putting the injured or sick into suspension until reaching the hospital or develop a cure for X. Or just safer surgeries without risky drugs; poor anesthesiologists out of a job though.
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Old 08-29-2016, 07:59 AM   #73
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Psi exists, and it's very strong in this worldline. It appears the awakening occurred in 1844, at which point this otherwise ordinary, no-mana parallel suddenly underwent some kind of psionic transformation. All human beings, several cetean species, and several great apes joined into an overmind. This did not bring about the end of technology or even society; the overmind cultivates its constituent parts with utterly ruthless efficiency, as it seeks for other minds in the universe. The only scout to go there actually resisted the overmind long enough to jump back and warn of the danger to the secret....
That's scary. I suppose dystopias are just as much hell worlds as anywhere else, though they are a different can of worms.

I had one world in which the invention of Nuclear Dampers just makes people willing to use nuclear bombs, and now a few heavily defended cities pump out war machines across eternally devastated landscape. I can't remember how I was doing food in that setting.

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This is a really cool idea, and could apply to any time period. It could stretch from medieval villages where each month they go to war, to high-tech worlds where it's a like a big violent party each month (think The Purge), recorded for playback and mass viewing afterwards.

Or if the virus isn't as widespread, maybe it's just this great fear among medieval townsfolk, who ostracize/kill suspected lycanthropes (in human state or wolf), but still are terrified once a month. Or in a high-tech media world, lycanthropes are the new slave gladiators, second-class citizens (at best) who once a month become celebrities on the biggest night for watching.

Indeed, it could stretch across various worlds, like the gotha virus. Call them 'Lycan' worlds, and Infinity wants to know how this condition spread across the multiverse.
Thanks. The thought was inspired by the Bob from the Dresden Files when he talks about how werewolves aren't infectious or everyone would be a werewolf. I was thinking about the world where that got out of hand.

But many of these ideas interact very differently with different tech levels.

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I never meant to imply that destruction of grass would signal the extinction of our species. But negating the vast majority of our food would have a greater effect than any real world disaster since our genetic great bottle necking of 70k or so years ago.
If grass never existed, then most of the world would be unable to develop agriculture. But a few starchy mass produceable crops are possible; potatoes and quinoa being the ones that spring to mind first. So onward Incan empire!
I once lived with a guy from Tonga who informed me that rice was "White Man Food" and it made him sick. His idea of food has four or five different kinds of roots boiled in a pot with chicken.

We'd also have beans left over, and while historically we couldn't live off of them, modern science may have changed that.
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Old 08-29-2016, 08:20 AM   #74
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I once lived with a guy from Tonga who informed me that rice was "White Man Food" and it made him sick. His idea of food has four or five different kinds of roots boiled in a pot with chicken.

We'd also have beans left over, and while historically we couldn't live off of them, modern science may have changed that.
Roots and tubers, fruits and vegetables, fungi, legumes, nuts, and non-grazing animals. Plus, depending on how long ago the grains and grasses were wiped out, micro-evolutionary adaptation not unlike the Tongan example you provide. A different world, to be sure, but perhaps not a hell world at all.
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Old 08-29-2016, 08:24 AM   #75
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Roots and tubers, fruits and vegetables, fungi, legumes, nuts, and non-grazing animals. Plus, depending on how long ago the grains and grasses were wiped out, micro-evolutionary adaptation not unlike the Tongan example you provide. A different world, to be sure, but perhaps not a hell world at all.
Most "hell worlds" are rather temporary. They're hellish while huge segments of the population are in the process of dying. If that happened a while ago though, they're "post-apocalyptic" and/or "uninhabited" but not necessarily particularly hellish.
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Old 08-29-2016, 08:30 AM   #76
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Most "hell worlds" are rather temporary. They're hellish while huge segments of the population are in the process of dying. If that happened a while ago though, they're "post-apocalyptic" and/or "uninhabited" but not necessarily particularly hellish.
Good clarification. Thanks!

I don't think an "extinction of the grasses" world would ever reach "uninhabited" status except in the most relative of terms. It would be a Hell World while food supplies were scarce. As a post-apocalyptic scenario, the main issue would be the re-establishment of food supplies using the surviving foodstuffs; the longer it takes to re-establish food supplies, the more P/A the scenario. Much later, the re-established food supply would support growing populations once again.
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Old 08-29-2016, 08:42 AM   #77
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Most "hell worlds" are rather temporary. They're hellish while huge segments of the population are in the process of dying. If that happened a while ago though, they're "post-apocalyptic" and/or "uninhabited" but not necessarily particularly hellish.
Not really... I'm thinking of canonnical hell worlds, like Lenin-2, the Gothas, and classic Lucifers ... and they all have pretty bleak long term outlooks. Sure, things might look different in a thousand years, but that's a thousand years!
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Old 08-29-2016, 09:54 AM   #78
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Not really... I'm thinking of canonnical hell worlds, like Lenin-2, the Gothas, and classic Lucifers ... and they all have pretty bleak long term outlooks. Sure, things might look different in a thousand years, but that's a thousand years!
I believe a hell world is about me, you, and now, not our great grand children or ten generations down the line.
End of the world as we know it, not necessarily the literal end of the world or all life on it.
A dinosaur killing asteroid would count even though it wouldn't come close to killing all life.
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Old 08-29-2016, 10:03 AM   #79
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Not really... I'm thinking of canonnical hell worlds, like Lenin-2, the Gothas, and classic Lucifers ... and they all have pretty bleak long term outlooks. Sure, things might look different in a thousand years, but that's a thousand years!
Lenin-2 is one of the less believable more exaggerated worlds based on a scrap of fact (that the Communist nations were far more ecologically irresponsible since the body controlling industry was not answerable to anyone except itself.) It's not at all likely that the described catatrophe would wipe out the plankton. Without WOG to tell me that they're all going to die, I'd expect the situation to stabilize in some fifty years.
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Old 08-29-2016, 10:17 AM   #80
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Then it would rain fish and lots of invertebrates. No one mentions the horrific odor of the deluge. I guess you had to be there.
The British TV series involving portals through time had one linked to pre-oxygen earth where the affected building started to flood with the noxious gases prevalent then... along with invertebrate life forms that never existed... on our earth.

But unblockable holes between disparate worlds would be apocalyptic to both. Sure, we're getting so much choking chlorine, but they have to do with the horrifically oxidizing oxygen.
I saw the first couple of seasons of that series. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad, and it had some interesting ideas. I may go back and watch more of it, at some point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primeval
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