[Infinite Worlds] Microworld-2: Earth at 1/50th scale

[Michael Thayne]

In the first worldline to be given the Microworld designation, something happened in 1892 to shrink everyone down by a factor of about 70. In Microworld-2, by contrast, the people are normal-sized, and it's the Earth, indeed the entire solar system, that's 1/50th the size of their Homeline counterparts.

Unlike Microworld-1, the point of divergence for Microworld-2 is difficult to determine, but appears to predate the invention of writing at a minimum. In spite of this, Microworld for the most part has the same nation-states, major languages, and major religions as Homeline, making it a high-inertia parallel on par with the United States of Lizardia. For example, the membership of Microworld-2's United Nations is almost identical to that of Homeline in 1998, with the sole exception of Palau. The Vatican is still legally a sovereign state, though it essentially consists of St. Paul's Chapel and the attached priory, where the Pope lives with his (single) Swiss Guard. The dominant calendar system numbers years as AD or CE (depending on personal taste), but thanks to Microworld-2's much shorter years, the current date is reckoned to be in the 142nd century.

Though Microworld-2's population has been estimated at just under 2.4 million, and it appears to have had a proportionately smaller population throughout its history, the number of famous historical figures with Microworld-2 counterparts is much higher than 1 in 2500. The same seems to apply to famous works of literature, though it also appears that with fewer scribes to preserve them, many texts survived only in fragments. In fact, the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity are the only texts from the ancient Mediterranean that survive in full, though a nearly-complete copy of the Iliad was discovered in the previous millennium in Egypt. Such texts as do survive tend to be very close to their Homeline counterparts, with some peculiarities. For example, the Microworld-2 counterpart of The Book of Numbers is known in English as The Book of Eremos (from the Greek word for "desert"), and opens by purporting to give a complete list of every individual military-age male among the Israelites at the time.

Many details of Microworld-2's history are murky. In fact, during the early modern period, it became fashionable for European scholars to dismiss any events from before the reign Charlemagne as "semilegendary" if not outright mythical. In France, it was denied that the Romans had ever conquered Gaul, and the surviving fragments of Caesar's Commentaries were dismissed as forgeries intended to help justify Charlemagne's claim that his empire was a continuation of Rome's. Meanwhile in Spain it was argued that there was no reason to think the bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar was built by the same people who built the one spanning the Strait of Messina, and that in fact the Gibraltar bridge had in fact been built by (pre-Arab) Spaniards. While such notions are now considered fringe thanks to the work of Microworld-2 archaeologists, they reflect a paucity of literary sources which is proving very frustrating for Homeline researchers trying to make sense of Microworld-2.

At first glance, timeline of technological development on Microworld-2 also seems to closely mirror Homeline's, in spite of Microworld-2 having far fewer people to work on research and development. In GURPS terms, this may reflect a high proportion of individuals with the Gadgeteer advantage. On closer examination, Microworld-2 often seems to lag Homeline slightly, though this may simply be due to its inhabitants having less reason to want certain technologies. For example, the first test of a nuclear weapon on Microworld-2 wasn't until 50 local years after the end of WWII, and the hydrogen bomb was never developed. The Pacific theater of that war was conducted largely in the air, without aircraft carriers, and to most people the term "aircraft carrier" refers to the helicopter carriers that played a prominent role in the Vietnam War. "Jet carriers" are a post-Vietnam War development which have only ever been deployed by the United States, and they're mostly known as a favorite target for attacks on wasteful military spending.

Perhaps the most interesting case of Microworld-2's technological development is in spaceflight. While budgets are proportionately smaller, Microworld-2's earth has an escape velocity of less than 1 mile per second, making space travel much easier. It's this fact allowed Microworld-2's Neil Armstrong to land on the Moon in a single-seat, single-stage-to-orbit rocket plane. And the divergence between Microworld-2 and Homeline in the area of spaceflight appear to have grown over the last two local centuries...

TO BE CONTINUED

(Or, ya know, chime in with your own contributions.)

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

In the first worldline to be given the Microworld designation, something happened in 1892 to shrink everyone down by a factor of about 70. In Microworld-2, by contrast, the people are normal-sized, and it's the Earth, indeed the entire solar system, that's 1/50th the size of their Homeline counterparts.

The dominant calendar system numbers years as AD or CE (depending on personal taste), but thanks to Microworld-2's much shorter years, the current date is reckoned to be in the 142nd century.

OK, so that places the current year at something like 14100-14199. With a 50x smaller solar system, the year is 50 times shorter, which makes the effective current year something like 282...? What?

Adding to that, would they even have the same relationship to a year that regular humans do? Everything else about them is normal; surely that means that their lifespans are measured in centuries or millennia (one micro century is two years in homeline time), not years.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by TGLS

OK, so that places the current year at something like 14100-14199. With a 50x smaller solar system, the year is 50 times shorter, which makes the effective current year something like 282...? What?

Adding to that, would they even have the same relationship to a year that regular humans do? Everything else about them is normal; surely that means that their lifespans are measured in centuries or millennia (one micro century is two years in homeline time), not years.

I assumed surface gravity is held constant for all solar system bodies, including the sun, which if you do the orbital mechanics implies orbital periods sqrt(50) ~= 7 times shorter across the board. This is because while the distance traveled in one orbit is reduced by a factor of 50, the velocity to maintain a stable orbit is reduced by sqrt(50). So, for example, I decided to have Microworld-2's atomic bomb correspond to Homeline's hydrogen bomb, which was a little over 7 years after WWII on Homeline, so that translates to "50 local years" on Microworld-2.

This does raise some questions about how agriculture works, admittedly, but it's not quite as ridiculous as years lasting only about 7 days.

[ericthered]

Fun facts about Microworld-2:

• The United States is about 60 miles across
• The English channel is about half a mile across
• Great Britain is about 12 miles long

Makes everything feel nice and cozy, doesn't it?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

I assumed surface gravity is held constant for all solar system bodies, including the sun . . .

OK, that means Earth can retain an atmosphere. It does raise questions as to what the planets are made of, which need to be added to the questions about what sizes animals and plants are, where the coal and oil came from, and many other things.

This is the kind of place that made Infinite Cabal's instance of Infinity mutter darkly about "postmodern explanations." and leave the worldline alone.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by johndallman

OK, that means Earth can retain an atmosphere. It does raise questions as to what the planets are made of, which need to be added to the questions about what sizes animals and plants are, where the coal and oil came from, and many other things.

This is the kind of place that made Infinite Cabal's instance of Infinity mutter darkly about "postmodern explanations." and leave the worldline alone.

The simplest explanation is probably a gravitational constant 50x Homeline's. That probably doesn't explain why a ball of hydrogen gas with 1/125,000th of the mass of Homeline's sun would stabilize at 1/50th of its radius while giving off the right amount of heat and light to make a planet 0.02 Homeline AUs away habitable, but there are already canonical worldlines with comparable weirdness.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

The simplest explanation is probably a gravitational constant 50x Homeline's. That probably doesn't explain why a ball of hydrogen gas with 1/125,000th of the mass of Homeline's sun would stabilize at 1/50th of its radius while giving off the right amount of heat and light to make a planet 0.02 Homeline AUs away habitable, but there are already canonical worldlines with comparable weirdness.

Of course if you are going to adjust physics so changes in scale don't render the Earth inhabitable (by putting out the sun, lowering the escape velocity to the point atmosphere bleeds away, causing the moon to disintegrate because it's inside the roche limit for whatever you've adjusted the gravity to so that doesn't happen...) then you might as well say the adjustments also cause the lengths of the day, month and year to remain the same too. Never mind whether there is a way to make the math work out under Newtonian gravitation, that's a [minor] change compared to your rules of new nuclear physics or thermal radiation or....

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Of course if you are going to adjust physics so changes in scale don't render the Earth inhabitable (by putting out the sun, lowering the escape velocity to the point atmosphere bleeds away, causing the moon to disintegrate because it's inside the roche limit for whatever you've adjusted the gravity to so that doesn't happen...) then you might as well say the adjustments also cause the lengths of the day, month and year to remain the same too. Never mind whether there is a way to make the math work out under Newtonian gravitation, that's a [minor] change compared to your rules of new nuclear physics or thermal radiation or....

Day length is largely independent of other parameters as long as you don't end up tidally locked or something, so yeah I would be inclined to assume a 24h day, specifically a 24 hour solar day. Of course with different year lengths you need to adjust the length of the sidereal day to keep the solar day the same, my notes say the sidereal rotation period needs to be "0.981d (23h 32m 39s)".

However, I want to keep inverse square universal gravitation. In a pre-rocketry worldline throwing out Newtonian physics and handwaving what's replacing it might be fine, but I want to be able to do the math on things like Neil Armstrong's much-easier trip to the Moon.

[David Johnston2]

Hydroelectricity and water mills are off the table. Wait...does it still have the same temperature bands or is the whole world temperate?

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Hydroelectricity and water mills are off the table. Wait...does it still have the same temperature bands or is the whole world temperate?

I'm not sure I follow? As long as Earth remains spherical, sunlight will hit the poles at a different angles than it hits the equator. Realistically the climate dynamics might not be exactly the same but I don't know that it would result in the whole world being temperate. And absent greatly reduced rainfall on land I don't know how you end up without any hydropower at all, though you'd certainly have far fewer good locations for it.