The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Satori]

"Let us leave legal matters to the Supreme Court." Obama spoke decisively. "Let them interpret existing law first before we start making new ones. That's what they get paid for."

*snicker*
I knew those old farts had to be good for *something*.

[MarshalPurnell]

I think it is probably accurate to say that anyone who died before, roughly, the 1890s is right now in a hopeless position vis-a-vis modern humanity or the "recent dead" in a lot of areas.

On the other hand, it is probably not entirely accurate to say that everyone is "equal" in Hell, and that with a level playing field none of the people who were famous in the past would ever rise to prominence. There are of course a lot of historical geniuses who simply are smarter than most people and who, with a period of strenuous education to catch up on modern knowledge, might very well be able to contribute in the future to the continued understanding of the universe. Obviously recently dead (IE, anyone who died in the 20th century) physicists would probably be able to start contributing within a decade if measures are taken to establish a University of Hell, or possibly even earlier in the case of, say, Richard Feynman. And while some older "geniuses" like Newton may now be completely insane, there are an enormous number of gifted mathematicians in past eras who are likely to be capable of contributing well above the weight of any average person once brought up to speed.

The other exception is matters of administration among the "old dead." Among their own people historical rulers are likely to carry a good deal of weight, being recognizable and used to handling and organizing large numbers of poorly educated people. In the vacuum of the demons and an administrative structure that the Earth powers are capable of delivering to them, I suspect the old dead would tend to fall back on their old social and administrative structures. The aristocracy and royalty are still the only people who are used to ruling and would probably be deferred to by the 90%+ of the old dead that are basically illiterate peasants. The alternative is probably rampant chaos or everyone having been brutalized into a uncomprehending stupor, not spontaneous self-organization into village-based communes or whatever more idealistic options might be imagined. So I think the "old dead" are liable to fall into patchwork territories ruled by the old earthly elite, whom the occupying powers are going to have to interface to deal with the masses of the older dead. Also possible some of the more talented rulers in life might manage to consolidate together large swathes of basically undeveloped land populated with "old dead," unless the Earth governments do something to stop it. That means when the Earth powers get around to consolidating their influence over the old dead, and trying to bring them up to speed, the education, technical equipment, supplies, and so on will still be distributed in ways that favor the older elite.

Now anything coming of that might take a century or longer, though possibly somewhat shorter periods of time if you're dealing with Early Modern populations who have some kind of ability to attract new-dead settlers like Caesar has. By the 18th century at least the ruling European elites were familiar with the idea of scientific progress and had good levels of basic education, and in the 17th century they were already groping their way there. If the Earth governments do maintain their commitment to bringing the dead up to modern standards of education and living, and prevent their recent-dead proxies from just swallowing up the entirety of hell (and they have good reasons to do just that) then some of those self-organized states among the old-dead will eventually catch up and there may be quite a few notable personalities at their head. For the time being they are irrelevant, completely, and most will probably remain just that, but in the long run those rulers who were seemingly exceptional and capable of cultivating ties to the outside world (like Peter the Great) may very well emerge as political forces among the old dead in Hell.

[CypherLH]

I think it is probably accurate to say that anyone who died before, roughly, the 1890s is right now in a hopeless position vis-a-vis modern humanity or the "recent dead" in a lot of areas.

On the other hand, it is probably not entirely accurate to say that everyone is "equal" in Hell, and that with a level playing field none of the people who were famous in the past would ever rise to prominence. There are of course a lot of historical geniuses who simply are smarter than most people and who, with a period of strenuous education to catch up on modern knowledge, might very well be able to contribute in the future to the continued understanding of the universe. Obviously recently dead (IE, anyone who died in the 20th century) physicists would probably be able to start contributing within a decade if measures are taken to establish a University of Hell, or possibly even earlier in the case of, say, Richard Feynman. And while some older "geniuses" like Newton may now be completely insane, there are an enormous number of gifted mathematicians in past eras who are likely to be capable of contributing well above the weight of any average person once brought up to speed.

The other exception is matters of administration among the "old dead." Among their own people historical rulers are likely to carry a good deal of weight, being recognizable and used to handling and organizing large numbers of poorly educated people. In the vacuum of the demons and an administrative structure that the Earth powers are capable of delivering to them, I suspect the old dead would tend to fall back on their old social and administrative structures. The aristocracy and royalty are still the only people who are used to ruling and would probably be deferred to by the 90%+ of the old dead that are basically illiterate peasants. The alternative is probably rampant chaos or everyone having been brutalized into a uncomprehending stupor, not spontaneous self-organization into village-based communes or whatever more idealistic options might be imagined. So I think the "old dead" are liable to fall into patchwork territories ruled by the old earthly elite, whom the occupying powers are going to have to interface to deal with the masses of the older dead. Also possible some of the more talented rulers in life might manage to consolidate together large swathes of basically undeveloped land populated with "old dead," unless the Earth governments do something to stop it. That means when the Earth powers get around to consolidating their influence over the old dead, and trying to bring them up to speed, the education, technical equipment, supplies, and so on will still be distributed in ways that favor the older elite.

Now anything coming of that might take a century or longer, though possibly somewhat shorter periods of time if you're dealing with Early Modern populations who have some kind of ability to attract new-dead settlers like Caesar has. By the 18th century at least the ruling European elites were familiar with the idea of scientific progress and had good levels of basic education, and in the 17th century they were already groping their way there. If the Earth governments do maintain their commitment to bringing the dead up to modern standards of education and living, and prevent their recent-dead proxies from just swallowing up the entirety of hell (and they have good reasons to do just that) then some of those self-organized states among the old-dead will eventually catch up and there may be quite a few notable personalities at their head. For the time being they are irrelevant, completely, and most will probably remain just that, but in the long run those rulers who were seemingly exceptional and capable of cultivating ties to the outside world (like Peter the Great) may very well emerge as political forces among the old dead in Hell.

Lets remember that there are 90 _billion_ souls to be rescued, and the vast majority of these people are going to be from the pre-modern world. And 99% of these rescued souls aren't going to get any kind of counseling or much of any aid - just rescued from the pitt and then dumped into huge sprawling refugee camps probably. Plus, Hell's land area is _twice_ that of Earth.
I'd wager that most of Hell is going to look about like sub-Saharan Africa. Anarchy, violence, tribal warfare, etc - with a thin veneer of some modern technology and ideas slapped on top of the more orderly areas. We're talking fourth-world hellhole here, for a long long time. (ironically)
The areas of Hell that come under direct Earth occupation will be a few pockets and those will be the very luck places, where most of the recent dead will live. You'll also have a few well organized native-Hell states like Ceasar's 'New Rome' and whatnot - but those will be a minority IMHO.

And then there will still be areas controlled by independent demon groups, and who knows how many Orks are out there. There may be entire independent nations and empires of Demons or Orks still out there - given the sheer size of the place.

[Samuel]

I doubt it. As Stas said, the majority of the population has a strong incentive not to die again, the demons are only alive because Earth forces are protecting them and there isn't food, water, sanitation or other issues that made Africa a mess. It is just a desolate wasteland with billions of people trying to make better lives for themselves. Of course, they probably have rather low standards so it won't be too hard.

[MarshalPurnell]

Sub-Saharan Africa is going a bit far, except where circumstances really resemble sub-Saharan Africa, which is to say with outright tribal societies. More civilized and settled societies like ancient Egypt or the Chinese and so on would probably make up a majority of the really old dead and while they did lapse into anarchy from time to time they never stayed there for that long. Those statelets that do self-organized from the ancient dead may exist on a level that is almost unchanged from their historical circumstances, which makes them totally irrelevant to any consideration of the war or Earth policy for the time being, but they probably would be able to establish a degree of order over their populations. And when Earth does get around to interacting with them the order that the established statelets provide would offer a relatively low-investment means to do so, compared to restructuring the old dead into extensions of a modern nation.

Hell probably does wind up highly stratified, of course. The recent dead and their states (20th century leadership but also including 19th century populations) can probably modernize relatively quickly, establish elaborate modern institutions, and become "important" after a fashion in a time frame measured in decades and probably not too many of those. The old dead (from roughly the Early Modern period with early 19th century, 18th century leadership over populations stretching back perhaps as far as the 16th century) could probably start aping modern institutions and pick up on ideas like science in a period of decades, albeit stretching out to a century or a bit later in many cases. The ancient dead (anything before the 16th century) are for the most part on an equal footing as far as education, understanding of the world, etc goes before death and would probably be ignored by the Earth authorities for a long time. They'll probably just recreate their old social institutions in miniature (or perhaps on the same scale or larger, as competition sees stronger statelets swallow weaker ones) and stay at that level of development until the Earth powers get around to noticing them. Bringing them up to date after that point would, of course, probably still take well over a century.

[CypherLH]

I doubt it. As Stas said, the majority of the population has a strong incentive not to die again, the demons are only alive because Earth forces are protecting them and there isn't food, water, sanitation or other issues that made Africa a mess. It is just a desolate wasteland with billions of people trying to make better lives for themselves. Of course, they probably have rather low standards so it won't be too hard.

But they'll also have new, youthful, bodies that are extremely resilient. Even in war, actual second-death would be kinda rare. Especially with the sorts of more primitive weapons they'll be using.

Again, there will simply be not nearly enough infrastructure to handle the incoming saved souls. They must just be getting dumped into refugee camps and from there they'll wander out into the wider world of Hell - with twice the land mass of Earth.
Humans still being humans, these people are gonna congregate into groups based around race and nationality and then set out to stake claims on places - and they'll have very very little in the way of modern technology or methodology.

The only way to prevent this would be the rescue the souls from the pitt at a slow pace IMHO...but then your condemning billions of souls to continued pro-longed horrific torture.

[Darth Wong]

But they'll also have new, youthful, bodies that are extremely resilient. Even in war, actual second-death would be kinda rare. Especially with the sorts of more primitive weapons they'll be using.

Not really. You just need to do severe damage to the skull (ie- crush the brain), and plenty of primitive weapons are capable of that. The primitive club can be used to conclusively crush someone's skull if you just keep using it on him after he's fallen.

[Samuel]

I doubt it. As Stas said, the majority of the population has a strong incentive not to die again, the demons are only alive because Earth forces are protecting them and there isn't food, water, sanitation or other issues that made Africa a mess. It is just a desolate wasteland with billions of people trying to make better lives for themselves. Of course, they probably have rather low standards so it won't be too hard.

But they'll also have new, youthful, bodies that are extremely resilient. Even in war, actual second-death would be kinda rare. Especially with the sorts of more primitive weapons they'll be using.

Again, there will simply be not nearly enough infrastructure to handle the incoming saved souls. They must just be getting dumped into refugee camps and from there they'll wander out into the wider world of Hell - with twice the land mass of Earth.
Humans still being humans, these people are gonna congregate into groups based around race and nationality and then set out to stake claims on places - and they'll have very very little in the way of modern technology or methodology.

The only way to prevent this would be the rescue the souls from the pitt at a slow pace IMHO...but then your condemning billions of souls to continued pro-longed horrific torture.

Unless we take advantage of the current dead to handle the problem. This isn't hard- not everything has to be done by the living. And it grows exponentially until we can meet demand.

As for forming ethnic/ideological/national enclaves in hell, that isn't going to be a major problem. For the most part you need to remember that if you want to you can just sit around and daydream- you don't need to worry about eating, sleeping, drinking, etc. Hell is going to be much slower than Earth given that there is no need to actually do anything unless you want to. You won't get truly stratified societies- there will be people will more stuff and power, but it won't be like on Earth. If you want to join them all you have to do is work 24/7 for x number of years.

Not to mention that people who lived and died doing back breaking labor will find hell relatively pleasent in comparison now that the torture is gone. I don't see hell disintegrating into anarchy and feuding states anytime soon- many of its inhabitants may be barbarians, but they are going to have problems getting back to their group and new organizations are going to have to form.

[Baughn]

I find I'm having trouble visualizing the exact resilience of these undead.

We've been told they can survive indefinitly in lava. Lava, of all things.. the continuous damage from merely being in contact with that, never mind being submerged, should outstrip even repeated club-bashings, and unless the laws of thermodynamics have been sidelined it'd also heat up your insides to the temperature of the lava and then some.

Ordinary proteins can't survive that.. not in the least. And the sort of structures that are sufficiently stable to survive, would be fairly immune to the sort of power a normal human could exert. On the other hand, they're still edible.

Well, I'm confused. Stuart, help?

[Darth Wong]

I find I'm having trouble visualizing the exact resilience of these undead.

We've been told they can survive indefinitly in lava. Lava, of all things.. the continuous damage from merely being in contact with that, never mind being submerged, should outstrip even repeated club-bashings, and unless the laws of thermodynamics have been sidelined it'd also heat up your insides to the temperature of the lava and then some.

That is indeed a problem, but dead humans were clubbed to a second death in the first story. For whatever reason, heat and fire seem to be less of a problem in Hell than they would ordinarily be.

[MarshalPurnell]

It's possible the regeneration effect is quick enough for exterior injuries to keep the lava from inflicting any severe internal damage. Clearly some injuries are just too much for it, and smashing the brain into a slurry after cracking through the skull is probably one of those injuries. And I expect humans would probably rapidly discover the other ways that someone can be killed for good in Hell.

Good point on the lack of need for agriculture, though people in Hell can eat and probably do enjoy it. The production of alcohol, clothing, elaborate shelters, various other luxuries would also require group efforts needing some degree of social organization. There's also demand for company and the general impulse toward safety in numbers driving people to aggregate, and for lack of many other models I suspect the "do what we did back in life, except a bit different" will be the most popular way of going about things. The more recently dead, and the future dead, may wind up forming free associations of individuals within vaguely consensual societies, libertarian in the sense of being freely entered and exited from, a bit like the "phyles" from The Diamond Age. I'm not sure how maintaining citizenship in Earth based countries would work, save a suspicion that it will be tried and in the long run found wanting due to a divergence of interests between Earth and Hell based humanity.

[GrayAnderson]

Three main points to the above:
First, I agree that rulers, particularly benevolent/good ones, will have an "edge" in getting into positions of power. Many "great" people became great because they were in the right place at the right time (Churchill), but a lot of them would still have been of substantial substance (for lack of a better way to put it) in many times and places. I guess the best way to put it is that you may become great because of circumstances, but you get in a position to become great because of skills and resources. In this regard, absent the World Wars Churchill would likely never have become PM. However, he would still have been a long-careered MP with a substantial academic repitoire without ever achieving high office. These people will likely end up "on top" of the structure in Hell.

One can take Cicero as a good example here (assuming he's still around). Cicero is a lot like Caesar in that his reputation precedes him. For lack of a way to put it, he could walk into a dinner party in Hell and, assuming that the crowd was of European extraction, he'd likely be decently well-known among those who had an education. Hell levels many things, but it does not level a reputation built up over a long time. Also important, Cicero has many skills which are not particularly tied to technology (writing is one, philosophy is another, and I'm presuming schmoozing falls in this category as well).

Second, as to the "important dead", there is the "seemed like a good idea at the time" principle. To use an example from earlier: "It seemed like a good idea at the time to bring back JP Morgan. No, we didn't know he'd run afoul of more laws than our attorneys can believe. No, it didn't work out so well." Walt Disney, the particular example I had in mind before, is a nutty case in that the generation that grew up with him on TV is still alive. If he was interested, he'd be able to slip into TV performances without trouble; that said, I tend to agree that putting him back on the board would turn into a well-intentioned train wreck.

Third, I think I would mentally stratify the dead based on when they were "active" in life and what their educational qualifications were. Someone who died in 2000 at the age of 110 and who retired at 65 ceased being in the work force in 1955. Someone who died at the age of 70 in 1980 and who hadn't retired was in still in the work force a quarter century after the first person.

The Feynman example from above is a good point. Feynman and Einstein would probably, once extracted, be able to at least "keep pace" with modern physics (esp. Feynman, who was active until only 20 years ago). They wouldn't be on the cutting edge, no, but the flipside is this: Regardless of their actual skills, they're damn good names to put on the letterhead. A lot of people will assume that 20th Century "greats" are still useful. There's a reason that more than one Professor Emeritus has come back to teach a class, and Feynman is at no more of a disadvantage than such a professor. Later-century greats are (Feynman), yes, but people will assume the earlier ones are as well (Einstein)...and there's something to be said for "promotional purposes only".

Finally, as a footnote, I do have an inquiry: What are the mental limitations of someone who dies in their teens (let's call them the "forever young")? I ask because even in earlier discussion, the assumption tended to be that those who were over about the age of 10 wouldn't go immediately to the snack buffet. This leaves those between 10 and (between 13 and 21 depending on the society) who are not yet adults.

As an aside on this, what would the custody situation be on a teenager who dies post-Liberation? Things like this happen all the time (disease, accidents, etc.), and where there are grandparents around and liberated it becomes relatively easy (much like when my parents died I went to live with my grandmother), but absent there being liberated relatives...ick. This mainly comes up because while we've seen a lot of dead people, we've mainly seen dead old people or dead soldiers (both of whom lack this little problem).

[Valiran]

I fully agree with the premise of TSW because it makes perfect sense; and I'd actually ask Stuart to throw out some of the more famous names from my story when he gets to integrate it into LoW...

Will be done. In fact, I'd already been thinking along those lines. One possible story line for TSW:LoW is to haev somebody who considers himself to be one of the greats (just to add irony, somebody who isn't actually great, just thought he was) slowly discovering how little he knows and how unimportant he truly was/is.

Since you want to have most of the famous historical figures working in the background, John Moses Browning or Nikola Tesla would be someone perfect for the role. A sort of "Chekhov's Inventor", if you will. Those men were geniuses in every sense of the word, and due to their areas of expertise, they probably won't have as difficult a time adjusting to the modern world.

As for long term projects, hell's chief export would probably be ore and valuable minerals. Nobody would have many problems with strip-mining a wasteland. Once the strip-mines have been exhausted, you could use the hole as a foundation for a pyramid city.

[Baughn]

It's possible the regeneration effect is quick enough for exterior injuries to keep the lava from inflicting any severe internal damage. Clearly some injuries are just too much for it, and smashing the brain into a slurry after cracking through the skull is probably one of those injuries. And I expect humans would probably rapidly discover the other ways that someone can be killed for good in Hell.

I don't buy it.

If it was just external damage, you could be right, but lava doesn't work that way. In retrospect, I should have put more emphasis on this: According to thermodynamics (and, well, conservation of energy), a closed system can't cool itself down, and an open one will have a hell of a time cooling itself down to below ambient; that would require getting rid of particles that are above ambient, which is doable for hot weather with sweat, but a bit of an issue with lava.

The point is, those submerged would reach a body temperature around ambient (lava) temperature in short order. As the damage from the lava is mostly thermal anyway, that implies the same level of damage being inflicted to their entire body, internally as well as externally, continuously.

Edit: There are structures that could take this level of heat, but now we're talking diamondoid nanomachines; blatant engineering of the sort that would be direct evidence of high-tech intervention.

Besides, then demons wouldn't be able to hurt them. They might be programmed to get "hurt", but it wouldn't be inherent.. the nutritional value would also be zero. If the demons were made of the same stuff, you'd have the different issue that even a medieval army of demons could cause serious trouble for a modern army through sheer durability; we're talking skin several thousand times tougher than steel, here. (And it can't even be helped. Thermal resistance is a lot harder than mere toughness, requiring such stability.)

Eh. I believe I'd better just not think too much about this.

Edit 2: A possible solution would be to retcon the story from "rivers of lava" to "rivers of kinda hot tar-like stuff that scalds". Some regeneration factor allowing traditional proteins to survive at a hundred degrees is a lot more believable than at 1,200 degrees; we have actual examples of the former, while in the latter case there's enough kinetic energy around to break the occasional covalent bond - and proteins don't rely on the comparatively strong covalent bonds for functionality.

[Baughn]

Since you want to have most of the famous historical figures working in the background, John Moses Browning or Nikola Tesla would be someone perfect for the role. A sort of "Chekhov's Inventor", if you will. Those men were geniuses in every sense of the word, and due to their areas of expertise, they probably won't have as difficult a time adjusting to the modern world.

You might find, if you actually meet them, that many of the historical geniuses were teetering on the edge of sheer lunacy. Newton's a classic case; Tesla is, (not so) arguably, a case of someone who went straight over the edge a good while before dying.

I don't think you should rely on them to do you any good, even PR-wise. After being in hell for decades or centuries, and then being exposed to modern society.. they're not going to be very mentally healthy.

[Samuel]

To be fair about the lava, a demon comments that he remembers enjoying the pain and suffering emanating below while walking on a bridge, so it obviously wasn't hot enough to kill individuals who are outside of it. What is the coolest lava can be?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I fully agree with the premise of TSW because it makes perfect sense; and I'd actually ask Stuart to throw out some of the more famous names from my story when he gets to integrate it into LoW...

Will be done. In fact, I'd already been thinking along those lines. One possible story line for TSW:LoW is to haev somebody who considers himself to be one of the greats (just to add irony, somebody who isn't actually great, just thought he was) slowly discovering how little he knows and how unimportant he truly was/is.

I would suggest a scale of the importance of individuals in the new society starting with a bottom being at a birth (not death) date of 1700 and rising slowly until about 1850, then exploding sharply upwards until it intersects at about people born in 1950--anyone born after that date who is in hell will be largely indistinguishable from later humans as long as they died an adult. Short of anyone who was preserved like Caesar, anyone before 1700 will essentially be a nobody, unless like Peter the Great (I think that's awesome enough to get kept) they get a contract showing up in TV commercials. Perhaps Cleopatra can do radio advertisements for perfume?

Though there is one interesting issue which is going to be very squicky indeed--adolescents who have been in hell for substantial lengths of time. They're probably going to function like adults in terms of social roles, and it raises a somewhat ugly issue of things like age of consent laws and the actual mental capabilities of such individuals and so on.

Oh, and the soldiers in the occupying armies WILL have sex with the undead women. That simply cannot be ignored--they look and act human and have human personalities, and can communicate. The only squickiness possible will be over not sleeping with some distant ancestor, beyond that there will be no way to stop men from most of these armies from sleeping with the women they encounter. And prostitution / becoming a campaign wife will be a trivial suffering for someone who's spent thousands of years in hell--probably in fact a welcome opportunity without a single pang of regret, when it means some degree of comfort.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I find I'm having trouble visualizing the exact resilience of these undead.

We've been told they can survive indefinitly in lava. Lava, of all things.. the continuous damage from merely being in contact with that, never mind being submerged, should outstrip even repeated club-bashings, and unless the laws of thermodynamics have been sidelined it'd also heat up your insides to the temperature of the lava and then some.

That is indeed a problem, but dead humans were clubbed to a second death in the first story. For whatever reason, heat and fire seem to be less of a problem in Hell than they would ordinarily be.

I just assume they have the same resilience as the Immortals from Highlander, Mike. Nothing kills them, period, except for the severing of the head from the body, or its complete crushing and the destruction of the brain. As long as their brains remain intact, they will keep recovering from anything.

[Baughn]

To be fair about the lava, a demon comments that he remembers enjoying the pain and suffering emanating below while walking on a bridge, so it obviously wasn't hot enough to kill individuals who are outside of it. What is the coolest lava can be?

Seven hundred degrees.

Well. Unless that's a really wide bridge, this implies the lava is not, in fact, molten rock.

[Bayonet]

this implies the lava is not, in fact, molten rock.

I think this conclusion is inescapable.

In addition to the thermal problem, the density of lava is so high that a person would not be able to submerge in it. Solid basalt has a specific gravity about 3. Drop that a little because it's hot. The human body has a SpG of about 1.

Saturated brine has a SpG of about 1.2. It's almost impossible to submerge yourself in the stuff.

I think we have to agree that the "rivers of lava" are something that perhaps resembles lava superficially, and is locally described as "Lava," but is mostly aqueous. Remember, there's a lot of misconceptions about Hell, even by its residents.

This resolves the problems without having to consume toxic amounts of Handwavium.

[Guardsman Bass]

I doubt it. As Stas said, the majority of the population has a strong incentive not to die again, the demons are only alive because Earth forces are protecting them and there isn't food, water, sanitation or other issues that made Africa a mess. It is just a desolate wasteland with billions of people trying to make better lives for themselves. Of course, they probably have rather low standards so it won't be too hard.

But they'll also have new, youthful, bodies that are extremely resilient. Even in war, actual second-death would be kinda rare. Especially with the sorts of more primitive weapons they'll be using.

Again, there will simply be not nearly enough infrastructure to handle the incoming saved souls. They must just be getting dumped into refugee camps and from there they'll wander out into the wider world of Hell - with twice the land mass of Earth.
Humans still being humans, these people are gonna congregate into groups based around race and nationality and then set out to stake claims on places - and they'll have very very little in the way of modern technology or methodology.

The only way to prevent this would be the rescue the souls from the pitt at a slow pace IMHO...but then your condemning billions of souls to continued pro-longed horrific torture.

Unless we take advantage of the current dead to handle the problem. This isn't hard- not everything has to be done by the living. And it grows exponentially until we can meet demand. [/quote]

Good point. I bet you could probably get a lot of the free dead to help out the still-bound dead simply because they have nothing better to do except sit around and do whatever their time period's equivalent of playing cards or dice was.

As for forming ethnic/ideological/national enclaves in hell, that isn't going to be a major problem. For the most part you need to remember that if you want to you can just sit around and daydream- you don't need to worry about eating, sleeping, drinking, etc. Hell is going to be much slower than Earth given that there is no need to actually do anything unless you want to. You won't get truly stratified societies- there will be people will more stuff and power, but it won't be like on Earth. If you want to join them all you have to do is work 24/7 for x number of years.

That's definitely one of the major differences. Most of the incentives for human-on-human conflict - land, food, and so forth - simply don't apply, since the dead don't need to eat or drink. There are obviously some privileges that they might want access to (like technology and power), but theoretically they could just wile away their tens of millenia doing nothing on the far corners of Hell's super-continent.

Not to mention that people who lived and died doing back breaking labor will find hell relatively pleasent in comparison now that the torture is gone. I don't see hell disintegrating into anarchy and feuding states anytime soon- many of its inhabitants may be barbarians, but they are going to have problems getting back to their group and new organizations are going to have to form.

Not to mention that many of the barriers - such as communication - have gone down, and most of the older dead have the common experience of suffering through Hell's torments.

[Guardsman Bass]

Oh, and the soldiers in the occupying armies WILL have sex with the undead women. That simply cannot be ignored--they look and act human and have human personalities, and can communicate. The only squickiness possible will be over not sleeping with some distant ancestor, beyond that there will be no way to stop men from most of these armies from sleeping with the women they encounter. And prostitution / becoming a campaign wife will be a trivial suffering for someone who's spent thousands of years in hell--probably in fact a welcome opportunity without a single pang of regret, when it means some degree of comfort.

At least some of the issues with living women being prostitutes aren't there. Dead-women pregnancy by living men (or even un-dead men) doesn't seem to be possible, and we haven't had any instances of sexual diseases either among the dead, or passing between the living and dead. Assuming it stays that way, I'm guessing that this type of thing would probably turn into a way to get access to certain things and favors.

[EdBecerra]

Oh, and the soldiers in the occupying armies WILL have sex with the undead women. That simply cannot be ignored--they look and act human and have human personalities, and can communicate. The only squickiness possible will be over not sleeping with some distant ancestor, beyond that there will be no way to stop men from most of these armies from sleeping with the women they encounter. And prostitution / becoming a campaign wife will be a trivial suffering for someone who's spent thousands of years in hell--probably in fact a welcome opportunity without a single pang of regret, when it means some degree of comfort.

This gives whole new meaning to the phrase "Oedipal complex"...

Hmm. Wonder if Oeddie boy himself can be found down there?

Y'know, now THERE'S something that some of the ancient dead can do to earn credit in modern society - eye witnesses to history's mysteries.

"How DID you manage to drag those damned statues all the way from the quarry to the hills around Rapa Nui?"

"Y'know, just for the record, we'd like to know WHY you went to all the trouble of carving an anatomically correct human skull from a solid mass of rock crystal..."

"Those lines in the Nazca desert -- what the F*** were they for? Can you tell us?"

Ed.

[Adrian Laguna]

I just assume they have the same resilience as the Immortals from Highlander, Mike. Nothing kills them, period, except for the severing of the head from the body, or its complete crushing and the destruction of the brain. As long as their brains remain intact, they will keep recovering from anything.

I would not use the word "intact" to describe the brain of someone immersed in molten rock. We know that the flesh of the undead humans is susceptible to heat-induced chemical and physical changes; because the skins of those in the lava are burnt and their eyes melted. There has to be something screwy with the thermodynamics, if not in Hell as a whole then in the undead bodies. Else the gray lump of fat between their ears should by all rights have boiled.

[GrayAnderson]

The point about the dead handling many of these functions is a good one. Simply put, I think our "processing" capabilities will steadily expand over the course of a few years to the point that we can extract people at a rate that is obscenely high. Think of it this way: Right now, we might be able to process 10,000 people per day. As more people die and more people get rescued, our capabilities will increase. It's sort of like the DMV: A single clerk can only handle one person at a time, but each additional clerk can handle one more person at a time. Thus, the more "clerks" we have, the more people we can process.

As much as rescuing a person every three seconds seems like a lot (and it is a non-trivial number), it's only a lot if you only have one team working on it. Eventually I can see a situation wherein you have a few dozen engineering teams working on re-routing the rivers temporarily while an army of "rescue" teams get people out of the river. These teams will likely expand pretty steadily; I think we'll eventually get to the point where a million people per day can be rescued (which would still give about 250-300 years to get everyone out of the pit), but that will take some time.

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As to the "lava rivers", I would also raise the point that in order for the rivers to remain molten, you would need a steady source of "new" lava (or at least new heat), as well as somewhere for the "old" lava to go (even if it just recycles through a proverbial furnace). Based on the arguments offered, my inclination is that the lava isn't what we'd consider lava to be.

A water-based solution is possible; another option is some "oil" (as in a type of fluid which can be readily heated up). Another idea I would offer is that it's something the demons mixed up with some funky physics (hell, maybe Yahweh tossed it down there and said "Here, use this. Very effective torture device."), but note that these two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. I know some fluids don't boil until a fairly high temperature (particularly if there are enough impurities in a solution...do remember that seawater boils at a higher temperature than does normal water), so there are plenty of options.