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

Rhyse said:
Brooms are reactionless drives. Even assuming that the firebolt if the absolute pinnacle of speed, and you can never improve on it ever. To accelerate the entire Titanic at 0.6G's, you'd only need six hundred thousand broomsticks worth of spells to reach the speed of light in half a year. (Just a raw calc, not accounting for relatively and whatnot). You don't even need fuel for that.
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Why don't they have flying cities that are invisible/unplottable yet?
 
Agent23 said:
Flying houses and shopping malls then.
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Probably because it'd be effort. Most wizards like creature comforts, and 'comfy' looking houses, with a rustic appearance. From what we see of Gringotts, I'd say that most of Diagon Alley - and most of London actually - is in fact floating. Since there's giant arse chasms that stretch down for what seem like miles underneath the whole city. The wizard houses we do see, are sprawling oppulant manor houses, or comfy scenic cottages. So they certainly have a certain style down. Oh, except for Snape, he's living in an old miners house - bizarrely having Wormtail as a housemate. - in a Muggle area. The charms to make flying buildings are probably difficult for the average wizard. Most wizards are typically only good at spells they need for work and leisure. Most can't even cast a shielding charm for example.

Spells also can wear off. We're not told how this actually works. I assume, that spells that are cast to be permanent - like the curses on tombs, the permanent sticking charm in Grimmauld Place, etc - are much harder to perform than the spells that will fade. Dumbledore created an eternal flame which burns without fuel, and it was seen as a high end piece of wizardry that shows off just how skilled the man is, Harry learned to make bluebell flames, and cast incendio in the 3rd year. So I imagine that a 'meh' wizard could make a house that really isn't structurally stable (The Burrow) stay up just fine, a skilled wizard could make a flying house and keep the spells maintained, and a very skilled wizard could make a flying house that lasted forever. But the ministry bans even things like flying carpets, so they'd probably sperg out at you if you make a flying house.

Also, they could make teleporting, floating houses as well. The Durmstrang boat could teleport to various watery locations by diving. The Knight Bus also springs to mind, since it's either extremely fucking terrifying, or kinda fucking terrifying. In the book objects move out of the way of the Bus, implying that wizards can make a house sized object that can teleport, turn invisible, and literally cannot be interdicted in any way by us; that we also cannot perceive even if it's barreling down on us at 90Mph. In the movie it can just compress space, accelerate like a race-car, and has the handling to turn on a dime. Oh, and it can fucking slow down time!
 
Hmmm, couldn't we just magic some of the places that don't seem as nice in order to make them nicer? Like what's wrong with using Mars if we just transfigure the sand into rocky terrain? or Venus, but we transfigure the gases into breathable ones?
 
Abhorsen said:
Hmmm, couldn't we just magic some of the places that don't seem as nice in order to make them nicer? Like what's wrong with using Mars if we just transfigure the sand into rocky terrain? or Venus, but we transfigure the gases into breathable ones?
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Volume, probably, that is a lot of stuff to magic into less dangerous stuff.
 
Abhorsen said:
Hmmm, couldn't we just magic some of the places that don't seem as nice in order to make them nicer? Like what's wrong with using Mars if we just transfigure the sand into rocky terrain? or Venus, but we transfigure the gases into breathable ones?
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Theoretically possible of course, there's just lots and lots of it and we're on a limited time schedule. That's why my plan depends on using the "explicitly no limits" gemino curse to just clad mars in miles of topsoil and give it air and an ocean instead.
 
Bear Ribs said:
Theoretically possible of course, there's just lots and lots of it and we're on a limited time schedule. That's why my plan depends on using the "explicitly no limits" gemino curse to just clad mars in miles of topsoil and give it air and an ocean instead.
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How do we fix the low gravity that can't sustain an atmosphere?
 
Agent23 said:
How do we fix the low gravity that can't sustain an atmosphere?
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To quote my previous post that covered that...
Bear Ribs said:
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.
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Rhyse said:
On the topic of Vanishing cabinets. They need to open and shut to work. You enter one side, close the door, you open the door again and you're on the other side. Like an airlock, not an open pipe.
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Revolving doors, driven by pressure differences between the environments at either end of the cabinet link?
 
Those will all take too long to be effective. We're removing billions of cubic kilometers of atmosphere, open-and-close scoops won't cut it, and we can't build enough of them to make up for the inefficiency. If we can't have a continuous massive river of atmosphere flowing away we're not going to get rid of Venus' atmosphere in any reasonable timeframe.

I'm leaning more and more towards the Antichthon at this point though I think Mars is still viable.
 
IIRC, in regards to brooms, there was some mention in Qwidditch through the Ages of someone trying to fly a broom to the moon, which could be informative.

Second, from this:
And its reference to its ability to fly higher than other brooms, I'd say that brooms might not work in space all that well, if at all

Third, this is 1800, at which point broom development isn't advanced.
 
Bear Ribs said:
Those will all take too long to be effective. We're removing billions of cubic kilometers of atmosphere, open-and-close scoops won't cut it, and we can't build enough of them to make up for the inefficiency. If we can't have a continuous massive river of atmosphere flowing away we're not going to get rid of Venus' atmosphere in any reasonable timeframe.

I'm leaning more and more towards the Antichthon at this point though I think Mars is still viable.
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Venus cloud cities would be cool, but IMHO arcologies on Mercury and underwater cities on Europa are probably our best bets.
Lots of resources we'd need on both, and it will be easier to set up than Mars terraforming, IMHO.
 
Agent23 said:
Venus cloud cities would be cool, but IMHO arcologies on Mercury and underwater cities on Europa are probably our best bets.
Lots of resources we'd need on both, and it will be easier to set up than Mars terraforming, IMHO.
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We have to save not just people, but as many magical species as possible. An arcology on Mercury or underwater city on Europa are deeply, deeply at risk of losing everybody if a PO'd dragon or army of giants goes on a rampage, or a nundu escapes containment and spreads its horrifying disease through the tightly packed populace. I'm of the opinion that only a functional biosphere will do, if the habitat can be killed by a hull breach or something hitting life support, it's not sufficient for the creatures we need to keep alive in it. Remember also we're saving a population of muggles with 1800s knowledge so they're not going to be able to maintain anything we make, thus a self-sustaining biosphere is much, much safer than something that will die if the odd wizard kicks the bucket and the spellwork they maintained is lost or fails.
 
Bear Ribs said:
We have to save not just people, but as many magical species as possible. An arcology on Mercury or underwater city on Europa are deeply, deeply at risk of losing everybody if a PO'd dragon or army of giants goes on a rampage, or a nundu escapes containment and spreads its horrifying disease through the tightly packed populace. I'm of the opinion that only a functional biosphere will do, if the habitat can be killed by a hull breach or something hitting life support, it's not sufficient for the creatures we need to keep alive in it. Remember also we're saving a population of muggles with 1800s knowledge so they're not going to be able to maintain anything we make, thus a self-sustaining biosphere is much, much safer than something that will die if the odd wizard kicks the bucket and the spellwork they maintained is lost or fails.
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The question is if that spell will actually be able to do what you want it to do, though.
IMHO if something like that was easy and world encompassing, somebody would have tried to use it to off all the Muggles IMHO.
And if we will be able to sustain Mars in its modified state.
That doesn't account for the lack of resources and the fact we will need to create a planet-sized ecosystem/biosphere from scratch.

As to the magical species, I have been thinking, how about we just find a large enough asteroid and remove its insides, make it rotate, and build a small, controllable ecosystem inside.
Think a gigantic space zoo for specimens from all magic animal species.
And of course we won't be taking more than the number absolutely required to support the species, with some "frozen" spares.
 
Alternate idea: why not just shift the earth's orbit slightly? The difficulty will be in calculating how much to do it and getting enough momentum, but with wands, it does seem like it might be possible.

The asteroid isn't that big, and the earth's diameter is 7,926 miles (call it 8k miles to make this math easer).

So we need to shove the earth about 8,000 miles in one direction.

8000 miles/50 years = 8.165 m/s needs to be our average delta velocity of earth over the next 50 years.

Saying we got a constant acceleration over the next 50 years, we'd need it to be at
1.0356*10^-11 m/s^2, which means we'd need about...

6.183×10^13 kilogram meters per second squared force applied at a constant rate. Which isn't doable, so never mind.
 
Abhorsen said:
Alternate idea: why not just shift the earth's orbit slightly? The difficulty will be in calculating how much to do it and getting enough momentum, but with wands, it does seem like it might be possible.

The asteroid isn't that big, and the earth's diameter is 7,926 miles (call it 8k miles to make this math easer).

So we need to shove the earth about 8,000 miles in one direction.

8000 miles/50 years = 8.165 m/s needs to be our average delta velocity of earth over the next 50 years.

Saying we got a constant acceleration over the next 50 years, we'd need it to be at
1.0356*10^-11 m/s^2, which means we'd need about...

6.183×10^13 kilogram meters per second squared force applied at a constant rate. Which isn't doable, so never mind.
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Um, problem is that we need to get stuff off Earth to get the rewards.
 
Abhorsen said:
Living is a reward in and of itself.
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I think that the various arcologies we got provided with in the OP could keep us alive for the 150 years the ROB wants to give us.
However if we fail we get sent hole physically aged to current age + 150, so if we don't jump through hoops we don't get massively extended lifespans and all the nice goodies.
 
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