Earth and Sky Worlds
Dec. 30th, 2018 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fibonacci_reminderHere is a rather half-baked world idea I had while chatting with friends on discord. The discussion was too brief and scattered to log directly, so instead I'll simply provide a summary.
The universe is composed of two spherical worlds on opposite ends of the surface of a hyper-sphere, which in practice means that when you are standing on the surface of one world, the surface of the other world appears stretched across the 'sky'.
One of these worlds is, familiar, if not exactly the same the as our world. It's populated with humans and the ordinary animals and plants, it has continents and oceans, nations and empires, which could be considered skewed echoes and parallels to the nations and empires of our own history. Efficient coal-burning engines are all the rage, but technology is somewhat estranged from similar periods of time in our history, in part because of simple divergence and in part because of the odd interactions between substances from this familiar world and the less familiar one.
If you go way, way up, the air gets thinner, and eventually it gets pretty close to vacuum. The gravity also gets weaker, and eventually you're at the point where the gravity between the two world's balances out. Then, you're in the grip of the other world, the Sky.
The world of the Sky is rocky and jagged, made mostly of black stone, stone so dark that it has no shine, not even underneath the brightest lights. Beyond the rocky ground, I also know that there are great, metal spheres that are bright and hot, which form the sun, moon, and stars as seen from the Earth world. Most of those spheres are station, embedded in boiling pits produced by their own incredible heat, with their apparent movement across the sky just being a symptom of the two world's differing rotation. However, some do move, either in a simple straight line across the Sky world, like the Moon, or in smaller circles, like most 'planets'. Why these spheres are glowing hot, and why some roll seemingly without end, isn't something I've exactly figured out, but I do know that it is something inherent to their material. And that strangeness to the very substances of the Sky is what allows whatever amount of 'magic' you might say is part of the setting. The worlds on their own are semi-stable, but when you let materials from one mix with the other, especially in the context of biology and evolution, you can some interesting effects, the exact details of which I haven't actually managed to completely work out, but which I do know include things like various forms of weird weather.
The universe is composed of two spherical worlds on opposite ends of the surface of a hyper-sphere, which in practice means that when you are standing on the surface of one world, the surface of the other world appears stretched across the 'sky'.
One of these worlds is, familiar, if not exactly the same the as our world. It's populated with humans and the ordinary animals and plants, it has continents and oceans, nations and empires, which could be considered skewed echoes and parallels to the nations and empires of our own history. Efficient coal-burning engines are all the rage, but technology is somewhat estranged from similar periods of time in our history, in part because of simple divergence and in part because of the odd interactions between substances from this familiar world and the less familiar one.
If you go way, way up, the air gets thinner, and eventually it gets pretty close to vacuum. The gravity also gets weaker, and eventually you're at the point where the gravity between the two world's balances out. Then, you're in the grip of the other world, the Sky.
The world of the Sky is rocky and jagged, made mostly of black stone, stone so dark that it has no shine, not even underneath the brightest lights. Beyond the rocky ground, I also know that there are great, metal spheres that are bright and hot, which form the sun, moon, and stars as seen from the Earth world. Most of those spheres are station, embedded in boiling pits produced by their own incredible heat, with their apparent movement across the sky just being a symptom of the two world's differing rotation. However, some do move, either in a simple straight line across the Sky world, like the Moon, or in smaller circles, like most 'planets'. Why these spheres are glowing hot, and why some roll seemingly without end, isn't something I've exactly figured out, but I do know that it is something inherent to their material. And that strangeness to the very substances of the Sky is what allows whatever amount of 'magic' you might say is part of the setting. The worlds on their own are semi-stable, but when you let materials from one mix with the other, especially in the context of biology and evolution, you can some interesting effects, the exact details of which I haven't actually managed to completely work out, but which I do know include things like various forms of weird weather.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 01:30 pm (UTC)Ooo, that's a concept with a neat aesthetic! Are there people living on the Sky? If yes, I'm curious what they're like. I'm guessing their culture would be a lot more foreign and fundamentally magic-based, since they're surrounded by magical substances, instead of having only incidental contact with them like the humans? Also they'd need to either have bodies that are inherently able to withstand the heat and stuff, or constantly be using magic for that.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:07 am (UTC)(Because who'd give up the chance to have flying islands)
(Also because they'd be a good place to put a more-magical-than-usual faction of humans who are nonetheless not fully affected by the strangeness of sky.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:24 am (UTC)epistemic status: fanfic
Date: 2019-01-01 03:34 am (UTC)This works better with a solid chunk of Sky metal, as the force is attenuated when passing through a narrow bottleneck of Sky matter, similarly to how IRL electrical current experiences greater resistance when passing through a thinner wire; this means that the process of accretion more closely resembles crystal growth than IRL gravitational planetary accretion, which accounts for the resulting body being a solid metal sphere rather than looking more like a cluster of iron filings surrounding a magnet. (It also helps that the heat of the sphere makes the metal softer.)
Even conducted, the attractive force diminishes with the radius, and so at a certain size (proportional to the size of the core) the forces causing bits to break off as the sphere moves balance out with the conducted attraction at the surface, causing the size of the sphere to eventually settle at a stable equilibrium.
Due to some interactions¹ between different forces in the context of moving objects², motion of Earth matter near the Sky world tends to gradually accelerate. Not indefinitely, of course; either the motion takes the body away from the surface (and therefore out of range of the effect), or it pushes the body into the (Sky) ground, causing it to become embedded. The equilibrium point occurs when the force pushing the body into the ground balances with the structural integrity of the ground preventing further progress.³ The mechanical stresses (mostly compression) resulting from an embedded body straining against the ground result in it heating up until it glows white-hot; equilibrium occurs when heat production is balanced by the energy loss from this blackbody radiation.
In rare cases, however – specifically, when the central piece of Earth matter is topologically a torus, a circuit – the resulting pattern of interacting forces will cause the acceleration to apply more strongly to rotation than to linear motion. This results in the metal sphere tending to roll across the surface of the Sky-ground, reaching equilibrium speed when friction and such from the uneven surface counterbalances the acceleration.⁴ This rolling body is a planet. (Planets are mostly heated by friction rather than compression.)
Re: epistemic status: fanfic
Date: 2019-01-01 03:58 am (UTC)I am tentatively declaring this canon. If I'm thinking about it right, the toroid of Earth-matter inside of planets is aligned with the plane of rotation of the planet, right? Also, chirokymatics seems like it'd very seriously threaten any Earthling that ended up on the Sky.
Re: epistemic status: fanfic
Date: 2019-01-01 05:44 am (UTC)I was imagining that the acceleration effect takes a long gradual time to accumulate, and a living thing changes direction too much to accumulate any significant chirokymatism. It might become relevant if you wanted to build a railway.
On the other hand, you (the author) can easily tweak the threshold of significance, if you want to enable ridiculous wire-fu shenanigans.
Re: epistemic status: fanfic
Date: 2019-01-01 02:02 pm (UTC)(Esp wire-fu shenanigans due to unnatural momentum/acceleration abilities; this seems like one of the most awesome ways to die painfully while doing parkour)
Re: epistemic status: fanfic
Date: 2019-01-01 02:30 pm (UTC)