The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Eulogy]

One thing's for certain: neither Mikey nor Urinal is getting out of this unscathed. Urinal is trapped and worsening, and from the looks of it Mikey's planning on opening a huge portal, one that will have to fight through interference and the dead humans' own doubts.

He will be able to open his portal. The question is, can he do it fast enough to swoop in, find Urinal, carry a battered and weary Urinal back through the portal, and close it before DIMO(N) picks it up and it promptly gets blasted?

And will his explanation of his plan end up being a Chekov's Gun?

[tim31]

So how quickly do cancerous angel skin cells become malignant?

"Any word from the Civil Air Patrol?" Captain(V) Artemis Gordon spoke to the radio operator with longing in his voice.

Haaaaaaaaa

[CaptainChewbacca]

It'll be interesting to see what happens when we FIND other gods...

*Valhalla, Asgard. Dimensional Realm 1156*

Odin raised a flagon of mead to his lips, enjoying the revelry. Another day of glorious battle had released a flood of energy. Hundreds of thousands of mighty warriors unleashing their rage and fury upon one another in wave after wave of anger and blood... it was a heady brew for any of the Aesir He beckoned for one of his Valkyries to attend him, the comely young thing blushing slightly, trying to cover her revulsion at the thought of her master's touch.

Suddenly, a blinding flash of light erupted in the middle of the room. A great crack shimmered, as though it were a separating fissure in a field of ice. From it, a trio of canisters arced lazily through, and a fraction of a second later exploded in a thunder of light and noise. "MOVE MOVE MOVE!" Came the cries of the attackers, in an oddly corrupted dialect of the Anglish. Men with curious looking steel implements poured through the fissure, fanning out through the room. At the same time, smaller portals winked around the edges of the great hall as giant, nightmarish creatures appeared, dressed the same as the humans but with MUCH bigger guns.

As suddenly as the noise began, the room was covered in a blanket of silence. From the portal strode a single man, slight and gangly, but with great presence about him. He bore no weapon, but was flanked by a quartet of armed humans. He stood before the dais where Odin and the rest of the Aesir stood dumbfounded. "Odin, king of the Aesir. I am General David Petraeus of Earth's Dimensional Exploration Directorate. We have much to discuss."

[Baughn]

How far into the future are you setting that scene, Chewbacca?

Only, by the time the Pantheocide War started (eg. when it diverged from our reality), drexlerian nanofactories were already considered to be about a manhattan project away from reality. Obviously we haven't had such a project, but they probably would.

(Now, of course, it's rather closer. IBM made an announcement a few days ago; they're working on a new manufacturing system for chips that is, strictly speaking, more demanding than mere nanofactories, though not quite as general.)

My point is, I would not be expecting Odin to see men, as such; adding nanotech to the mix makes powered armor a very reasonable proposition, especially as it'd make the soldiers essentially immune to most of these gods.

Meanwhile, of course, there's always the risk of running into whoever set up this system in the first place; you'd want to limit your exploration speed to prevent that from happening too soon.

[Simon_Jester]

It was time to move again. Once again, he looked upwards, peering through his fogged vision to try and detect the little aircraft. For once, the sky was empty, the latest of the aircraft had dropped behind a ridgeline, probably to scan the ground in another one of the canyons. Uriel sensed something else though, an aircraft high up, so high that even with his vision perfect he would not have been able to see it. It was moving fast, so fast that it seemed silent as it passed, the sound of its passage only arriving later in a dull boom.

OK, so angels have at least some 'sixth sense' capability of some kind, though we have precious little information to guess what.

"Not from what I hear." Allansen looked around and dropped his voice. "From what the wind says, the really big brass at Yamantau have decided that these so-called gods are more trouble than they’re worth. After we've dealt with Yahweh, we're going hunting for the rest of them. If they want to live peacefully with us, fine. If they want to throw their weight around. . . . ." Allansen pointed at the laser in the nose of the YAL-1A.

"It'll be slice and dice time – again."

...can anyone spell "strategic overreach?"

This strikes me as a risky decision. If they weren't making trouble before, pointing laser cannons at them and demanding to know their intentions is a good way to get them thinking about how to do it. And we don't have enough information to make reliable guesses on the upper bound of what we're dealing with.

The fact that we appear to be quite capable of knocking over the local alien overlords doesn't mean we're capable of knocking over the random strangers we run into by poking our noses where they weren't invited. What if we come across a culture that has "mythic" capabilities thanks to its kooky laws of physics and high technology with which to exploit those laws? Or if we tick off a civilization at such a high energy gradient relative to us that even knowing exactly where they are in hyperspace, punching portals "up" to them is almost prohibitively difficult while punching them "down" to us is trivially easy?

Or, in short form, what happens if we run into Cthulhu out there?

[Baughn]

Agreed.

It's the sort of statement that sounds good at the time, but I'd hope cooler heads will prevail. For the time being, there is no real benefit in exploring further; it's going to take decades to digest our new territorial acquisitions as-is, and I can't help but think it'd be a good idea to grab at least the low-hanging technological fruit first.

That is to say - nanotechnology, biotechnology, at least some degree of dimensional manipulation - and if we're really lucky we'll figure out AI meanwhile, and have a singularity. Then we can go after Cthulhu and have a chance of winning.

[Guardsman Bass]

It'll be interesting to see what happens when we FIND other gods...

*Valhalla, Asgard. Dimensional Realm 1156*

Odin raised a flagon of mead to his lips, enjoying the revelry. Another day of glorious battle had released a flood of energy. Hundreds of thousands of mighty warriors unleashing their rage and fury upon one another in wave after wave of anger and blood... it was a heady brew for any of the Aesir He beckoned for one of his Valkyries to attend him, the comely young thing blushing slightly, trying to cover her revulsion at the thought of her master's touch.

Suddenly, a blinding flash of light erupted in the middle of the room. A great crack shimmered, as though it were a separating fissure in a field of ice. From it, a trio of canisters arced lazily through, and a fraction of a second later exploded in a thunder of light and noise. "MOVE MOVE MOVE!" Came the cries of the attackers, in an oddly corrupted dialect of the Anglish. Men with curious looking steel implements poured through the fissure, fanning out through the room. At the same time, smaller portals winked around the edges of the great hall as giant, nightmarish creatures appeared, dressed the same as the humans but with MUCH bigger guns.

As suddenly as the noise began, the room was covered in a blanket of silence. From the portal strode a single man, slight and gangly, but with great presence about him. He bore no weapon, but was flanked by a quartet of armed humans. He stood before the dais where Odin and the rest of the Aesir stood dumbfounded. "Odin, king of the Aesir. I am General David Petraeus of Earth's Dimensional Exploration Directorate. We have much to discuss."

You know, that makes me wonder - we know that Satan and Yahweh basically drove off the rest of the Gods a while back, although part of the agreement for their departure was that all their surviving followers would be shielded from torment in Hell. I'm guessing they probably took or kept any undead followers - did they grab any of their living followers as well?

In any case, it'd be interesting to see some other realms occupied by gods. Speaking of which, I'm guessing a couple of them have long-standing grievances against Yahweh. I wonder if any of them know the way into Heaven . . .

[CaptainChewbacca]

How far into the future are you setting that scene, Chewbacca?

Only, by the time the Pantheocide War started (eg. when it diverged from our reality), drexlerian nanofactories were already considered to be about a manhattan project away from reality. Obviously we haven't had such a project, but they probably would.
... burble blurp!...

I have no goddamn idea what you're talking about.

[Simon_Jester]

I infer that he means "why aren't your soldiers in power armor?" and chose a very strange way of leading up to it.

[tortieconspiracy]

The Aesir do have worshippers even in the present day. Chewie's post brings up the question of what happens to modern day Asatruar when they die, especially in combat? I figure some of the them must've died in the Gulf Wars or Afghanistan.

[Ilya Muromets]

Again, I have to show my appreciation for the brief look at the dogs' point of view in this story. It always appeals to my inner dog lover.

And, speaking of animals, I like the nice touch of Uriel showing disdain for the rattlesnake that bit him as being "one of the servants of Satan." I think it really accentuates how much he buys into all of the bullshit espoused by Yah Yah.

oh, and more hints that the Aurora is actually a new aircraft in this story and not just the call sign for a preexisting on. That gets a big yay from me.

[Buritot]

The last bit about other deities doesn't change much. Except pluralizing the title of the current book.
Pantheocides, heh. The second word of pure awesome I never could expect to come to know.

Pantheocide is the plural - the pre-planned systematic extermination of gods. The singular is deicide, the pre-planned systematic extermination of a god.

Huh? Pantheocide is the killing of deities belonging to one pantheon - in the current case juda-christian-islamic. Killing yet another pantheon, for example the Norse Gods, made it plural, in my opinion.

You know, that makes me wonder - we know that Satan and Yahweh basically drove off the rest of the Gods a while back, although part of the agreement for their departure was that all their surviving followers would be shielded from torment in Hell.

Drove them back? Hrm. considering the reaction of the Demons of accused being Devils it seems more in the line of an agreement, or some kind of hasty retreat which the Devils didn't follow. It's speculation, anyway.

[Baughn]

I infer that he means "why aren't your soldiers in power armor?" and chose a very strange way of leading up to it.

Power armor (well, full-body armor anyhow) is merely the most obvious manifestation of this. For a story supposedly set in our own future (or close enough), technological progress can't be ignored; not when it's this inevitable.

So, nanotechnology. Setting the hype aside, it provides a mechanism for two things: Fast, mostly automated production (1) of products for which complexity does not noticably add to the construction cost (2).

1: Well, it's production by moving single atoms in place. If it wasn't automated, it wouldn't be feasible. You still need to provide the feedstock, but I can see that being automated too, over time.

2: The nanofactory cares not a whit whether the structure it's building is a solid block of diamond, or a ten million horse-power array of molecule-sized electrostatic motors. The latter would admittedly take slightly more electricity to build, since the final product is in a higher energy state than a simple block of carbon, but electricity is cheap and will get cheaper.

Applied to warfare, this implies smart bullets, likely powered armor, drones, drones and more drones (possibly insect-sized, in insect-like swarms), and presumably a million other things I'd never think of. I'm deathly afraid of it being used for that purpose, but that's a different story; in the pantheocide universe, it obviously would be.

So, to be clear: This is not science-fiction. It's real-life technology; it just hasn't been fully developed yet, but it's getting closer at an astounding rate. The pantheocide universe is still mostly identical to ours, so they would most certainly have access to the same technology, within decades at worst.

[Simon_Jester]

oh, and more hints that the Aurora is actually a new aircraft in this story and not just the call sign for a preexisting on. That gets a big yay from me.

By now, I think it's very clear that the Aurora is a new aircraft, because it's already been spotted flying faster than anything (unclassified) ever did.* Nothing else has the performance envelope to be it, so it has to be new.

If this is the same aircraft that was talking to the Normandy earlier, (and I suspect so; there can't be that many Auroras**), its call sign is "Habu Zero One." I suspect the pilot is a former Blackbird pilot or Blackbird aficionado, because that was the nickname for the Blackbirds once upon a time.

*Unless you count the Space Shuttle
**Aurorae?
________

Power armor (well, full-body armor anyhow) is merely the most obvious manifestation of this. For a story supposedly set in our own future (or close enough), technological progress can't be ignored; not when it's this inevitable.
...
So, to be clear: This is not science-fiction. It's real-life technology; it just hasn't been fully developed yet, but it's getting closer at an astounding rate. The pantheocide universe is still mostly identical to ours, so they would most certainly have access to the same technology, within decades at worst.

There are some really major catches, though. Darth Wong presented a good sampling of them here, in the context of using nanotech for the relatively simple task of assembling a six-inch ruler:

To borrow his list of problems with nanotech manufacturing:

How do you co-ordinate your activities with the pilots of the other nanobots? Is there a commander nanobot? Are there middle manager nanobots? Who assigns nanobots to which part of the ruler?

How do you know where to start, ie- how do you decide where one end of the ruler is going to be, and where the other end is going to be?

How do you communicate with the other nanobots? Radio transmissions? How do you communicate clearly with tens of thousands of other nanobots simultaneously? How do you align your movements with theirs? How do you plan?

How much fuel do you carry? That little nanobot vehicle of yours doesn't run on the power of positive thinking, so how much work can it do on a full tank? Where and how do you refuel? How long does it take you to refuel?

What is your propulsion system? You're not getting a free ride in someone's bloodstream like the sort of nanobot which looks for cancerous cells (a more sensible application of nanotechnology), so how do you maneuver about on the manufacturing table in order to help assemble this ruler? How do you jet up into the air to get on top of it if you need to? How much power do you have to combat gravity and air currents?

How do you deal with lost nanobots? In a normal manufacturing environment, air currents, static discharge, and other environmental disturbances could easily blow a nanobot out of the group or seriously damage it. Does the plan adjust automatically for worker turnover? Or must this ruler be manufactured in a vacuum-sealed clean-room environment? This is rapidly shaping up to be a ridiculously expensive ruler!

How much payload can you carry? If you're grabbing molecules or tiny particles and attaching them to this ruler, where do you get them from? How many can you carry per trip? How much energy does it take to weld each chunk of metal to the ruler? Do you realize that if you use larger particles per trip, the resulting ruler will have greater porosity? What are you going to do, weld molten metal into the gaps? Consider the energy costs of doing that!

How do you assure dimensional accuracy of the overall ruler? The nanobot working on the other end of the ruler is (as far as you're concerned) more than 30 kilometres away, remember? How do you know he's not higher than you are? Do you set up a laser-based perimeter system in order to confine your activities within simple geometric bounds? If so, how do you make more complex shapes than a flat ruler? Do you use tooling in order to confine your activities? If so, what conceivable advantage does this process have over simple die-casting?

_______________

Speaking for myself, I think that nanotech will turn out to have tremendous applications for biotech (in a real sense, the difference between biotech and nanotech is nothing more than the difference between nature and artifice, and the two can be mixed readily), for industrial chemistry, and for things like that. But I don't think it will prove a cost-effective way of assembling mechanical parts or objects with complex geometry on a scale larger than that of the individual nanites.

[Baughn]

Those are strawman arguments, fortunately.

I'll admit that the original vision of nanotech construction involved nanobots, but that was mostly due to not knowing better. As he (correctly!) points out, there are severe problems with that approach; fortunately, there are better ones.

..rather than explaining, I'll point you at this nice, informative video instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg&fmt=18

[CaptainChewbacca]

Yeah, I was just writing a fun little bit for the hell of it because I like norse mythology. Only on SDN does that turn into a serious nanotech discussion.

[Simon_Jester]

Those are strawman arguments, fortunately.

I'll admit that the original vision of nanotech construction involved nanobots, but that was mostly due to not knowing better. As he (correctly!) points out, there are severe problems with that approach; fortunately, there are better ones.

..rather than explaining, I'll point you at this nice, informative video instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg&fmt=18

I don't think this really solves most of the fundamental problems. Integrating the nanites into a solid fabricator assembly takes care of precision and coordination, but you still have the problem of supplying energy to the machine and replacing broken nanites in the various layers of your assembly. Also, building the fabricator in the first place is going to be tricky; I have this horrible image of having to go over it with an atomic force microscope and build it up one small molecular component at a time.

Again, this is not to say that nanotech is irrelevant. I think industrial nanotech will make a difference, but I don't think it will produce a major discontinuity in the sense of "wow, our economy is totally different now that we've had this stuff for a decade or two." With the notable exception of exotic chemistry, there are few things nanites will be able to do more reliably and efficiently than machine tools.

[Baughn]

If you can come up with an objection, chances are other people can too; since nanotech researchers seem to disagree that there are severe problems, I would suggest looking for solutions to your problems, first thing.

For these particular objections..

- Supplying energy, in a solid fabricator assembly, can be done using torque, eg. on a rotating diamond rod, for the smallest scale tools. Diamond rods have sufficient tensile strength to withstand torques far above the actual power requirements of a nanofactory; indeed, well into "do this on a large scale and your device will vaporize" levels.

For large-scale power distribution, standard electrical supplies will work well enough.

- Building the first fabricator is going to be tricky. There are two saving graces here; first, it does not need to be anywhere near as large or complex as a commercially viable one; second, it may be possible to leverage existing nanomachines (eg. biology) in order to bootstrap (there have been some promising developments lately). However, if we did have to build it atom by atom using a scanning-tunnel microscope (or thereabouts), we could; it'd just take a few years. Well, months now, since they've come up with a highly parallel STM variant for manufacturing purposes.

I can hardly see this not having a major impact on the economy, either. Nanofactories will be able to self-replicate (or they'd be impossible to make in the first place), and even just allowing for the current range of "hard" products - structural material, computer chips, whole computers, solar panels, screens, buttons, etc. etc. etc. - it'll turn a lot of the manufacturing economy into something much more like software.

It might not literally turn the economy upside down, but it's going to increase development speed and hobbyist creativity something fierce, while dropping prices for many products tremendously. I, for one, will want an open-source laptop.

[Baughn]

Oh yeah. "Replacing broken nanites"..

Most design sketches imply that this won't be done. Instead, the design relies on redundancy; the smallest blocks will be made small enough that the chance of anything going wrong on a reasonable time-scale (say, one year) is low; afterwards, functional blocks built from the smaller ones will rely on having multiple copies of the smaller blocks in order to make those larger ones effectively impossible to break, by ordinary spot or track failures such as you'd get from random chance or radiation.

An assumption here is that the nanites are considerably tougher than biological ones. This is a fair assumption, if they are made from diamondoid; biologically inspired ones would be in trouble, reducing the useful lifetime to the point that such nanofactories might only be useful for bootstrapping diamondoid ones, or for specialized manufacturing.

Self-repair and such is cool, and would be handy in the military for obvious reasons, but it isn't really necessary to get most of the benefits. (Personally, I don't consider the military possibilities to be benefits.)

(For early nanofactories, this may mean that you have to replace them once a year, or even once a month. Given that they should be able to replicate themselves in about a day, this is not a big deal.)

[[R_H]]

Baughn, why do you think nanotechnology is needed to build power armour?

[Baughn]

I don't.

Heck, we have some today, don't we? Exoskeletons, at least. I don't see anyone seriously proposing it for warfare, though.


What I do believe is that nanotechnology would make them practical. Electrostatic motors get more efficient the smaller they are; at the molecular scale, you can put a tank's worth of horsepower into a cubic centimeter.

Nanotech fabrics can be smart, for example having the programmable property of hardening when hit by a bullet or shrapnel, while staying soft under normal circumstances. They can be fully articulated, every fiber being able to move under its own power; sensing the movement of the human underneath with no input lag, and amplifying when necessary; and, of course, self-repairing fabrics (at least to the point of redistributing itself to fix weak spots) are possible.

If we're talking about power armor, power requirements are a big deal. Current batteries are big and bulky; nanotech would allow for atomically perfect (and thus much denser) capacitors, batteries, or microscopic gas turbines. Whatever turns out to work best, or a combination of all of the above.

Most importantly, perhaps, it will make building all these incredibly complicated devices a relatively cheap process; limiting marginal expenses will allow for spending more in the design phase.

[NecronLord]

The Aesir do have worshippers even in the present day. Chewie's post brings up the question of what happens to modern day Asatruar when they die, especially in combat? I figure some of the them must've died in the Gulf Wars or Afghanistan.

Preeety sure you go to hell. This ain't D&D - you don't go where you believe in, you go to hell unless Jehovah (or others?) save you. Richard Dawkins isn't the best example, but I don't recall any specifically outlined modern pagans, so he'll do. However, you can bet that the various Spartans, Romans, etc, didn't believe in the jewish religion just to get their asses in Satan's domain.

[Lagmonster]

Well, Uriel's fucked unless Michael get's him out soon. I don't see how Michael could portal through the interference though, unless he's immensely powerful.

He's the number one guy, so if he can't do it then nobody can. I also imagine this would be a good time to bring Uriel into his little cabal, if he wants to.

I would actually enjoy seeing Michael save Uriel, and not only that, do something tremendously shocking to the human forces arrayed to hunt him. Michael is getting through on charisma and guile - a display of incredible telekinetic power would cement his status as the top of the heap.

[NecronLord]

...can anyone spell "strategic overreach?"

This strikes me as a risky decision. If they weren't making trouble before, pointing laser cannons at them and demanding to know their intentions is a good way to get them thinking about how to do it. And we don't have enough information to make reliable guesses on the upper bound of what we're dealing with.

The fact that we appear to be quite capable of knocking over the local alien overlords doesn't mean we're capable of knocking over the random strangers we run into by poking our noses where they weren't invited. What if we come across a culture that has "mythic" capabilities thanks to its kooky laws of physics and high technology with which to exploit those laws? Or if we tick off a civilization at such a high energy gradient relative to us that even knowing exactly where they are in hyperspace, punching portals "up" to them is almost prohibitively difficult while punching them "down" to us is trivially easy?

Remember, this is just rumours. The 'Human High Council' hasn't decided to go out doing this yet - they've made it their interest to learn what else is out there. For which, keeping giant lasers around is a valuable mission. Whether they're going to go around and pick fights with everything that doesn't say it wishes to 'peacefully coexist' on their terms, though... I'd wait until I hear it from them, before assuming they're retards that want to start a war with things of completely unknown power not currently threatening them.

Either that, or they have more information on 'devils' than the audience do, and are duly worried about hostility from there.

Or, in short form, what happens if we run into Cthulhu out there?

Cthulhu really wasn't that impressive. Boat through head and all that. I'd bet on our buddy Archduke Dagon vs him any day.

[NecronLord]

Well, Uriel's fucked unless Michael get's him out soon. I don't see how Michael could portal through the interference though, unless he's immensely powerful.

He's the number one guy, so if he can't do it then nobody can. I also imagine this would be a good time to bring Uriel into his little cabal, if he wants to.

I would actually enjoy seeing Michael save Uriel, and not only that, do something tremendously shocking to the human forces arrayed to hunt him. Michael is getting through on charisma and guile - a display of incredible telekinetic power would cement his status as the top of the heap.

Or telekinetic subtlety. Of the Hat-removing kind.

But yeah. I'd like to see him knock a few planes out of the air and rip open APCs with "pure" sound and liquify everyone in them, or something.