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Not related to the article, but related to Frank Herbert's Dune: The Dune ecosystem is much less thought out than it appears to be. Herbert drops bits and piec
by sampo 1y ago
Not related to the article, but related to Frank Herbert's Dune:
The Dune ecosystem is much less thought out than it appears to be. Herbert drops bits and pieces about the Dune ecology here and there so getting an overall picture is difficult, so we don't realize how silly it is.
* We don't know where sand plankton comes from.
* Sand plankton lives in the top layers of desert sand, eats spice.
* Some of the tiny sand plankton individuals grow larger, migrate deeper down, and become sand trout.
* Sand trout excrement combines with water pockets deep below, is biologically active, grows, releases gases and explodes, transporting it back to surface, becomes spice.
* We don't know what sand trout eats, but it should eat something in order to produce excrement.
* Some sand trouts grow larger, become sand worms.
* Sand worms eat sand plankton.
So the thole ecosystem consists only one species, with 3 life stages: (1) sand plankton, (2) sand trout, (3) sand worm. And stage 1 lives by eating the excrement of stage 2, and stage 3 lives by eating stage 1.
Ecologically and energetically this is silly. The species just eats itself and its own excrement, and there appears to be no energy input to the system.
- zem 1y agoit may indeed be silly, but as far as energy input to the system goes, all you need to do is postulate that one stage can photosynthesise sunlight.
- Terr_ 1y agoYeah, it's been many years, but my impression was that things could be explained as an invasive and engineered all-in-one species that terraforms (arrakiforms?) the environment, partly as a way to eliminate competition. One phase photosynthesizes, one phase sequesters excess water, and one phase... Stirs the lithosphere and eliminates large animals or trespassers?
- gerikson 1y agoIn the last Herbert Dune book, Chapterhouse, Arrakis is destroyed to eliminate the source of spice, but at least one worm is transported to another planet to begin to turn that into desert, thus ensuring a continued supply.
- arkis22 1y agothere are also many species on the ocean floor that do not get their energy from the sun, but from vents of heat from the earth. maybe they dont photosynthesise, they use heat instead
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoHe says that spice causes psychic activation in humans. That's more than enough woowoo to imply they get their energy from another dimension entirely.
- magicalhippo 1y agoThe spice allows creatures to fold spacetime... yet here we are arguing about the finer details of the ecosystem.
- hearsathought 1y agoThe spice that allows a fetus to tap into the consciousness of all its ancestors and communicate with its mother while in the womb. > The spice allows creatures to fold spacetime... Doesn't seems so fantastical now, does it?
- magicalhippo 1y agoI dunno, "tapping into consciousness of all its ancestors" could be a metaphor for a form of DNA memory. Folding spacetime requires incredible amounts of energy. I still think that's the bigger deal.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago>Folding spacetime requires incredible amounts of energy That's unclear. It could easily release incredible amounts of energy, but require very little.
- zem 1y ago
- dmbche 1y agoWhere did you find this? I don't remember reading about it - could it be in his son's books?
- Macha 1y agoPretty sure this is from either Children of Dune or God Emperor of Dune, both by Frank Herbert.
- sampo 1y ago> Where did you find this? I put together the pieces mentioned in various places in the first Dune book. Every step sounds good and plausibly science(-fiction)-esque when presented separately, like the book does. Only when you put all the steps together, the picture starts to look like an M.C. Escher drawing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_%28M._C._Escher%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_%28M._C._Escher%29
- Mobius01 1y agoFrank himself, you can get a clear picture of the ecosystem as outlined here by the end of Children of Dune. One (possible) omission here - the sand trout traps water underground by linking and forming dams around water pockets - that’s the cause of Arrakis’ ultra arid environment, but maybe it’s also the source of nutrition? Anyway, it is a bit silly indeed but in the novel’s context it feels grounded.
- Mistletoe 1y agoThere is a lot of silly stuff in Dune, you just have to roll with it. A still suit would kill you from heat because your sweat is never evaporating.
- actionfromafar 1y agoIf the environment temperature is lower than body temperature and the suit has air cooling with fins or something, it could work.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoThat seems unlikely to be the case on Arrakis.
- arkis22 1y agothere is a lot of silly stuff in Dune, but my understanding is that the still suit recycles the body's water. It's not just that you pee in a tube, it absorbs the sweat and recycles that too
- Ekaros 1y agoSweating works by phase change. Water going from liquid to gas takes lot of energy. Thus removing it from body. On other hand if you then collect that steam and make it liquid again well you have to dump that energy back to the body. Or conduct or radiate it away... But those are inefficient thus we sweat.
- varjag 1y agoYou'd suffocate inside Holtzman shield too as air molecules whizz at ~500m/s.
- magicalhippo 1y agoWhat is precluding it from having a small heat exchanger in there? Similar to a mini-split but integrated?
- tgv 1y agoAnd what happens to the dead trouts and worms? There's got to be a lot of that.
- gamblor956 1y agoOne of the points in the first book is that after several hundred years, they still don't understand how the ecology of Dune works. There are hints that Dune was once a thriving jungle world, before the sand trout encapsulated all the water deep below the surface. So there's plenty of organic matter, and water, and sunlight, to support the sandworm lifecycle.
- chermi 1y agoCould it be that they go deep enough to get heat from a hot core? I never thought about it like this, but it is a little strange that such an eco-centric author/book had a relatively shallow description of one of the main components of the ecosystem. Then again, the mystery may have been intentional. After all, we still don't understand perfectly well how many ecosystems functions, especially in the since of having a causal model sufficient to to predict responses to perturbations. I imagine at the time of writing ecosystems at large seemed even more indiscernible, so it wasn't a stretch to have some part of the many cycles involved that didn't make sense. But overall I lean toward it being kind of silly, as you say.