What If? The Sietch has to evacuate Earth in 1800.

Rhyse

Rhyse

Well-known member
An angry and hungry Alien Space Bat has accidentally eaten the Sietch servers. To pay for this, he has made everyone who is a member of The Sietch into a wizard. Yay. He has also sent us all on holiday to the 1800's. Yay? And forgot to give us return tickets. Boo!


The catch is this: In the year 1850, the asteroid 99942 Apophis is going to hit the Earth. Unless a structure is several miles underground it will be largely leveled. The immediate dust storms will cause a global cooling event. Human population will be reduced to under half what it was in the 1800's. Further to that, deposits of the extra-solar material Feltrite will be spread around the planet, causing hideous mutations in both plant and animal life. Because it impacted the moon before striking Earth, space around Earths orbit will be nonviable for anything but heavily armoured space launches even a hundred years after impact.

Every member of The Sietch will be given a wand, an understanding of Harry Potter magic to the same level as - a good - Hogwarts professor, specializing in a single subject of choice, and having very good but not perfect knowledge in every other subject. On each continent, there will be a hundred mile area secluded away from muggles containing enclosed habitats and greenhouses for every magical beast, plant, and fungi that exists. Along with fifty House Elves for every member, to maintain the habitats, and tend to daily needs. There will also be a vast library of material on the planet Proxima B in the Proxima Centauri system. Maps, wildlife and a multitude of other informative documents. It paints a picture of an Earth homologue during the Permian period. You will all initially appear in the middle of the North American secluded area with this information at hand.

Notes on Proxima B.
- It has a strong magnetosphere and receives 65% of the solar radiation Earth does.
- It has an 11 day orbital period.
- It completes a full rotation every 27 hours
- It is not tidally locked.
- The atmosphere is similar to Earths, but with a higher (40-50% atmospheric composition) Oxygen level.
- There is more surface water than on Earth, with deeper seas, and very few deserts.
- Most of the planets landmass consists of relatively tropical environments, with high humidity and large 'jungles' stretching across the three continents.
- There are no 'trees', but large structures similar to fungi fill that niche. There is an abundance of leafy ferns, and land-based algae.
- Most animals there resemble Permian era lifeforms, with very few mammals.
- Close to none of the plant/animal life is edible for humans, and will have to be modified, or you will need to bring foodstocks from Earth.
- The soil is fertile for the Proximan plants, but has a relatively high abundance of percolate salts when compared to Earth.


The task is simple and not so simple at the same time: The Sietch needs to transport at least a hundred thousand settlers to Proxima B. They don't need to get there before Apophis hits, but they certainly need to be on their way. There are some basic rules.

- You can't use Time Travel. None of you know the hour reversal charm that makes it work.
- Apparition cannot transport you more than 3-600 miles without serious risk of lethal splinching.
- Portkeys cannot be used for groups larger than 10-20 people/animals without lethally injuring some of the users. The amount of people/animals injured rises exponentially with each addition. The maximum range is between 40-80'000Km.
- Floor networks can only make a stable connection between two - relatively - stationary objects, and only within the same solar system. Floo travel does not exceed the speed of light.
- Vanishing cabinets cannot be larger than a standard 20ft shipping container. They only work within 1-5 AU of each other (depending on the skill of the wizard making one.)
- You can't kill all but 1 of the magical species to cheese the percentile requirements.
- There is no magical method of large scale FTL. Apparition, portkeys, and vanishing cabinets do occur 'instantly' relative to the outside observer, but take between 1-2 seconds from the perspective of the wizard using them.

Bonuses!
The Alien Space Bat will be back eventually (100 years) to pick you up either from Earth, Proxima B, or wherever else you may have settled, and he's going to be handing out prizes based on degree of success. Settlers/magical species count as moved as long as they are further away from Earth than the Moon. As the moon was also grazed by Apophis.
- 100'000 settlers moved: You get to go home!
- 100'000 settlers + 25% of magical species moved: You get to go home at the age you are now, rather than at one hundred years old.
- 500'000 settlers + 50% of magical species moved: ^ + a spell that lets you return to the 1800's timeline at will.
- 1 Million settlers + 75% of magical species moved: ^ + A working Galaxy Class Starship complete with Federation databases for each Sietch member.
- 10 Million settlers + 100% of magical species: ^ + A spell that lets you freely travel to any alternative timeline/fictional world.


Can it be done? Or are we doomed to eat a big fat L from an asteroid?
 
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Simonbob said:
Sure, it can be done.

Portkeys to place vanishing cabinets, heaps of.

Not easy, and there'd have to be teams, but sure.
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You'd need two hundred and eighty four thousand vanishing cabinets at the minimum to send 20 x 8 x 8 foot worth of material to the Proxima Centauri system. That's five thousand you need to build every year; and it took a year for a fairly gifted wizard to just repair one. Assuming you manage that, if it takes even just 60 seconds to move everything from one vanishing cabinet, to another vanishing cabinet every time you need to switch to the next linked pair; that's a lag time of 138 days to transfer 1200 cubic feet of material per trip. If you were just interested in taking only people with you sans any materials. You could squeeze maybe 80 people into each cabinet.

That's 1250 trips to get 100'000 people through sans any belongings. At a lag of 138 days each trip, it'll take you 475 years to get them to Proxima Centauri. You only get fifty.
 
That's why you have teams. It'll take time, and skill, but mass production of vanishing cabinets is the only way I can see.


Either that, or you work out the gravity manipulation so we could warp over, creating our own FTL, but that's outside the base rules.
 
Hmm, seems doable.

However, 99942 Apophis is only 370 meters long. Yeah, I realize that's not exactly tiny but nudging it off course enough to miss the Earth, with a 50 year lead time, is going to be significantly easier than colonizing another solar system. If the ASB didn't plan on us moving it... well. We can't blow it up due to the mutagenic effect, since its dust would still hit earth, but we can certainly cause it to go elsewhere.

Ignoring that, as far as colonizing it's likely to be easier to Terraform Mars or Venus than travel all the way to Proxima B. With no FTL it will take forever to get there and we don't have forever.

As far as building ships, relatively easily done.

Build the hull (This will be the hard part as none of us have likely built a rocket so there will be some trial and error getting the shape right).
Unbreakable charm to make the hull indestructible.

The Bubble-Head Charm can supply all the oxygen needed. Investigate creating a bubble-head necklace or other item to avoid the possibility of accidents due to time limits running out. Ideally, we can make space suits with built-in unbreakable and bubblehead charms, along with a few more charms for increased survival.

Shrinking/Engorging charms can be used to make fuel and food extremely tiny, and alternately multiply the available amounts. Gemino charms to multiply objects can help if needed. This means the ship needs to carry relatively little fuel or food compared to a modern rocket. A tiny Vanishing Cabinet could be connected directly to the engine to simply pump fuel directly from Earth to the ship,

That leaves navigating and radiation as the big threats. Radiation has no existing protective charm, so research will be needed to invent one. Figuring out where we're going is a matter of sufficiently accurate clocks, charts, and rigorous math, which we can do with some work but it will take a bit.

Daisy-chain together space stations with Vanishing Cabinets to eventually get a path there, though again, I suspect it would be faster and easier to terraform Mars and drastically easier to move the asteroid onto a different path.
 
What happens if you mass-produce Mad-Eye Moody's bigger-on-the-inside chests and place them inside one another? Could we build a pseudo-TARDIS?
 
Could we instead unite to destroy Apophis? or,at least ,derail it? engine made on it year before impact would save our planet.
And later start fighting over who get bigger harem on Earth,of course !
 
The biggest issue on Proxima B is none of the local life being edible to humans, or presumably other Earth life. We'd basically have to destroy and replace the entire ecosystem, it's possible it's made of dextro-handed proteins or some such. So colonizing Mars or Venus might be easier even without taking travel times into account.


MARS

We can readily replace Mars' oceans and atmosphere with the Gemino curse.



It's specifically called out in the books, the movies, and the supplements as not having any limit. So if we send a single cubic meter of water (We're stingy that way), perhaps in a biodegradable balloon made of seaweed or some other useful organic material we need a lot of decaying in the oceans, or one that may vanish in a few minutes for convenience, we can start it duplicating. How long, says you, will it take to fill the oceans?

Our oceans contain 1.37 billion cubic kilometers of water. Each cubic kilometer is a billion cubic meters. That's 1,370,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters. Assume the Gemino curse doubles things once every five seconds (In the video it went from one cup and plate to filling the vault with a huge mound of them in about twenty seconds, and they doubled a bit faster than that). In 60 doublings, five minutes, we'd have 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 cubic meters of water, Mars being quite a bit smaller than Earth, this would be enough, possibly too much. However, the smart money would be on stopping the process at around an eighth of that, 4 minutes and 45 seconds, to give enough time for the water to flow properly into the seabed, otherwise you generate half the ocean in the last five seconds of the process and that risks some slight water damage. Doing it that way, despite meaning it might take a couple of hours to fill the oceans, this also ensures we don't overdo it and get too much water by leaving the spell going a second too long.

Of course, the atmosphere will be supplied in the same way, probably well before the oceans since we don't want them freezing on us.

Mars may be missing certain specific minerals, like phosphorus, in sufficient quantities. Guess which spell will be used to solve that deficiency?

Of course, that doesn't deal with the problem of Mars having significantly lower amounts of gravity than Earth. We'd maybe be able to survive that but we're HP Wizards, why put up with discomfort when we can instead... use the Gemino charm to produce billions of cubic kilometers of rich alluvial topsoil of various kinds, thus guaranteeing millennia of growing seasons and also boosting Mar's mass up to what we want?

Now Mars has no magnetic field, which might be inconvenient. Though the atmosphere will blow away, this is a process that takes centuries and we'll have no problem creating new air faster than that. However, there are other benefits to a magnetic field we may need. So how do we fix that? This will require setting up Mars with a nickel-iron core but HP Wizards don't have a particularly good way to just teleport one into the center of Mars. We could, in theory, Gemino a sufficiently large block of iron onto the surface (we'll want to do this in a deep pit we've excavated), then fiendfyre the location to melt the crust and let the liquid iron flow all the way down to the center where it will form into a new core. However, Fiendfyre isn't really the very safest spell in the world so we may want to research other options.

Mars' temperature will be a bitch to fix. Even for ridiculous wizardly upping the power of the sun won't be an easy task, so we won't do that. There are spells, like Fiendfyre, that produce heat without needing any fuel. Huge honking balls of Fiendfyre at the L1 and L2 Lagrange points will generate a pair of extra "suns" at close range to produce more heat and light. On the other hand, while I don't think Fiendfyre can escape that much gravity and travel through space on its own, ideally we can research some less sentient, less malevolent fire-without-fuel spell we can call upon for the task. If we create a larger moon for Mars (A good idea to get tides anyway, which are good for Earth life, also for keeping Grunion alive since they only lay eggs during the full moon, because there's no way Grunion aren't magical), we can place further balls of infinite fire at its L1, L3, and L4 points if needed.

All these balls of orbital fire will, unfortunately, make astronomy much harder so we'll put a permanent set of vanishing cabinet transports to Mars' moons where we'll set up comfortable bases for stargazing purposes.

Life will take longer since the charm may not work on living things, we'll presume it won't. First, we'll move a few shipping containers of phytoplankton from various areas to Mars and release them to be fruitful and multiply. Everything won't make it but some creatures will like Mars and multiply rapidly and taking containers from every ocean and beach in the world will give us better odds of getting a solid variety. We'll do the same thing with the land by transporting in containers of sewage, swamp muck, loam, every kind of soil we can find in order to get as many microorganisms as we can to the task of multiplying. Zooplankton will follow, next land vegetation, invertebrates, fish, birds, and finally land animals, starting small and moving up to Megafauna once there's a proper base of prey in place. In order to obtain rare and elusive creatures we may device vanishing cabinet traps we can leave in their territory that bait creatures in and then automatically send them to Mars, allowing us to colonize it with stuff we perhaps didn't even know existed. This process will actually take... probably longer than we have to be sure but we don't have to be completely finished before the asteroid hits and we can probably move in well before every creature has been transported.

VENUS

Venus might be a touch more difficult since we'd need to vanish its atmosphere and there's no doubling vanishment spell. Venus is smaller than Earth, we have around 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of air (I wasn't aware that the atmosphere and ocean had such similar volumes before now). However, Venus also has a much bigger atmosphere than Earth does. Even if we could vanish a cubic kilometer per minute, it would take over 2500 years to get rid of it all. Granted, we may not need to get rid of all of it but we'll need to handle most since it's not exactly rich in oxygen and nitrogen.

Consequently, the winning strategy isn't to vanish the atmosphere but to drain it away. We need to parachute down acid-resistant unbreakable heat-proof Vanishing Cabinets that are always open in order to create gateways into deep space and suck the atmosphere away. Even then we'd need several years, it simply isn't possible to match the ridiculous power of things that continually double themselves. Once that's taken care of we can populate it with an atmosphere, oceans, and life just as we did Mars.

Venus' closeness to the sun could be problematic but there's an easy solution, we'll send the escaping atmosphere to the L1 Lagrange point, where it will form a nebula tidally locked right in between the sun and the planet, soaking much of the incoming radiation and leaving us a more pleasant Venus. If needed we can send some rocks into the same area and grow or duplicate them to produce a moon within the atmosphere, permanently partially eclipsing the sun and producing a milder amount of incoming radiation. Venus already has a magnetic field, a strong one, so we'll have no problems there.
 
The world will be a lifeless post-apocalyptic wasteland in the aftermath of the Wizarding Wars long before the asteroid arrives.

Potential goals.
  • Deflect Apophis so it doesn't destroy earth.
  • Deflect Apophis so it lands right on top of our enemies.
  • Build bunker-arcologies capable of surviving post-Apophis earth. Possibly inside Mad-Eye-style bigger-on-the-inside trunks, possibly living inside pensieves of suitable memories.
  • Get our hands upon and perform horrible mad science shit with Feltrite.
  • Colonize Proxima B.
  • Preserve the Proxima B biosphere as unique.
  • Terraform Proxima B to terrestrial standards.
  • Terraform and colonize Mars and Venus.
  • Stop whatever von neumann apocalypse-in-the-making someone concocted with gemino curses and/or fiendfyre, accidentally or otherwise.
  • We're not a self-sustaining population. Most of our userbase is male and we can't make new wands for our future children assuming we have some, so we'll eventually die out. Probably ends in various attempts at attaining immortality and families with muggles passing on irreplaceablly precious wands as heirlooms.
  • Subjugate the muggles of Earth, thereby avoiding all the disasters history had scheduled since eighteenth century under our rule.
  • Stop whatever cockamamie world domination scheme our more imperialistic members brewed up before they either destroy our secrecy or succeed.
  • Organize a proper ambush with invisibility cloaks and imperius curses telling it to "give us all of your power" for ROB when it shows up to reward us for our success.
  • Stop those idiots before they get a ROB pissed off at us and/or personally acquire ultimate power and have no need of the rest of us.
 
ATP said:
Could we instead unite to destroy Apophis? or,at least ,derail it? engine made on it year before impact would save our planet.
And later start fighting over who get bigger harem on Earth,of course !
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Afraid not. This isn't this universes Apophis, it's Rages Apophis, which is significantly larger, faster and contains Feltrite. You're not allowed to destroy it, interfere with it's trajectory or try and slow it down. It's actual trajectory is the same as the Rage novels. A fragmentation when it grazes the moon, then a scattershot across the North American/South American/Atlantic ocean.

Bassoe said:
The world will be a lifeless post-apocalyptic wasteland in the aftermath of the Wizarding Wars long before the asteroid arrives.

Potential goals.
  • Deflect Apophis so it doesn't destroy earth.
  • Deflect Apophis so it lands right on top of our enemies.
Click to expand...


  • See above.
    [*]We're not a self-sustaining population. Most of our userbase is male and we can't make new wands for our future children assuming we have some, so we'll eventually die out. Probably ends in various attempts at attaining immortality and families with muggles passing on irreplaceablly precious wands as heirlooms.
    Click to expand...
Part of the secluded away areas include trees suitable for making new wand wood, and creatures good for making it. You all have a basic knowledge of how to make a wand, and could choose to specialise into wand making if you wanted.
 
We'll need to do something about that Oxgen level when we get there. That is, we'll need to get it *down* to about 20-22% so 19th century muggle tech isn't a fire hazard.

That light level is also a problem we'll need to address when selecting which plants and animals to bring along. 65% Earth (at the equator) is about what London gets during a summer solstice in late June.

The 11-day orbit shouldn't be too much of a problem because seasonal average temperature swings won't be very severe (thermal lag, yay!) provided the Axial tilt isn't extreme.

Axial tilt may be more of a problem we'll have to address:
- 0° and there are no seasons.
- 90° and 5.5days of sun with 5.5days of night at the poles with very severe temperature swings between sunrise and sunset.

We're basically being asked to build Biosphere 2, writ large.
 
bintananth said:
We'll need to do something about that Oxgen level when we get there. That is, we'll need to get it *down* to about 20-22% so 19th century muggle tech isn't a fire hazard.
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Never mind fire hazards, 50% oxygen is well past the point of causing long-term Oxygen Toxicity. Staying there will be lethal for humans and, I imagine, most other earth life. There's a reason I'm promoting terraforming Mars and Venus via Gemino charm instead, Proxima B is actually going to be harder to make survivable than Mars is, and slightly less difficult than Venus. Even Venus' crazy day cycle can be solved via atmosphere replacement shenanigans, since Venus' atmosphere rotates at a much faster pace than the planet and appears to have siphoned off the planetary rotation for itself.
 
Ok, stupid question, but somebody has to ask it.
Why care about Mars, Venus or any other planet.
IIRC and please correct me if I am wrong, since I am not a HP fan, but didn't they have reversible conversion to stone?

Why not just turn all people into statues, then ship them over to the bottom of the Marianas trench, then wait a few hundred or more years and revive them.
Or, alternately stick all the statues in some magical underground vault.
Obviously we'd need to preserve bits of the ecosystem and release them gradually, but IMHO fixing the Earth and "unfreezing" all the normies would probably be easier than space colonization.
 
Agent23 said:
Ok, stupid question, but somebody has to ask it.
Why care about Mars, Venus or any other planet.
IIRC and please correct me if I am wrong, since I am not a HP fan, but didn't they have reversible conversion to stone?

Why not just turn all people into statues, then ship them over to the bottom of the Marianas trench, then wait a few hundred or more years and revive them.
Or, alternately stick all the statues in some magical underground vault.
Obviously we'd need to preserve bits of the ecosystem and release them gradually, but IMHO fixing the Earth and "unfreezing" all the normies would probably be easier than space colonization.
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Well mostly because the ROB in the story wants to see results in 100 years and we'll be hosed if everything is just turned to stone at that point instead of moved off-planet.

Robovski said:
Can we use the moon Space: 1999 style and escape destruction that way?
Click to expand...
Check the OP's video at, oh, around 0:53 to see why that won't work.
 
Bear Ribs said:
Well mostly because the ROB in the story wants to see results in 100 years and we'll be hosed if everything is just turned to stone at that point instead of moved off-planet.
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Um, there is an absolute limit to how much Harry Potter-related stuff I am willing to stomach.
And while @Rhyse needs to be commended for the autism, I am not reading through that massive wall of text.
 
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