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I thought Succubus did rather "agressive" oral sex. Still, the ideas of cellphones in hell is pretty funny. Damn, must be hard for people who like to swear now that Hell's not a viable insult.

PS How many chappies are in Patheocide? Armaggedon had 85. Also, how do you plan to fit all the stuff into one book? Must take over 500 pages.

The "absorbed by the portal" option is the problem, see.

Low-energy photons and static fields pass through. Mid-energy photons are absorbed, but don't affect the portal much. High-energy photons.. might destabilize it. The discussion of nukes suggests as much, but Stuart never really explained what part of the nuclear explosion has the described effect.

The reason I'm asking is, if it's re-radiated as a more commonly useful kind of energy (heat, say) later on, portals could be useful as shielding for tokamak-style nuclear reactors, which could promote them from "expensive wastes of money and talent" to "about as promising as the other fusion approaches".

I should've mentioned this, but I was really hoping for a comment from Stuart.

Baughn wrote:The "absorbed by the portal" option is the problem, see.

Low-energy photons and static fields pass through. Mid-energy photons are absorbed, but don't affect the portal much. High-energy photons.. might destabilize it. The discussion of nukes suggests as much, but Stuart never really explained what part of the nuclear explosion has the described effect.

Well, in the very early bits of Armageddon, scientists point out that nuking a portal won't necessarily close it. They might destabilize it, they might cause it to expand greatly in size and stability. Hard to be sure.

Stuart wrote:Actually, the "discussion" on TVtropes TSW Discuss is getting to be fun. I've just rat-trapped a fundie into position where he either admits that gods do not exist or he has to concede the argument.

...ah, where? As in, roughly how far down the page should I start looking? I couldn't find it...

Simon_Jester wrote:

Stuart wrote:Actually, the "discussion" on TVtropes TSW Discuss is getting to be fun. I've just rat-trapped a fundie into position where he either admits that gods do not exist or he has to concede the argument.

...ah, where? As in, roughly how far down the page should I start looking? I couldn't find it...

The current discussion is at the top of the discussion page. (which is actually against TVTropes guidelines; new discussion goes at the bottom, and the discussion should be signed so that we can track everyone's comments)

I've been working to understand boundary conditions. Say, could a person stop part way through a portal, mouth on both sides and talk to people on both sides at the same time?
How long would a fiber have to be to reach from earth to hell through a portal?
Somehow, having electromagnetic radiation go through is just easier to swallow even if it gets a significant increase in the noise to signal ratio. Increase power, and live with the lowered bandwidth. You could always have lots of towers on each side and use massive parallelism to handle your traffic load.

But a wire or fiber spanning the portal, and holding still raises lots of questions. In a living organism, stopped in the portal, what happens to the neurons split in the middle? Do they experience extra noise? What a headache.

So let me take a guess.
Spoiler

Having read through the last few chapters again, why am I getting the feeling that Ceaser is going to be, by far, the biggest long term threat to Earth?

I mean we're already seeing clear capital flow from dead people on Earth to his new Rome to build the infrastructure he needs, we also have a LOT of ex military people, who have been trained by the US to a crack standard, with a lot of experience, who are clearly renouncing their loyalty to the US upon death and heading off to Rome, dito a lot of the people who are dying and becoming citizens.

For that matter, the old people taking their cash with them out of Earth doesn't mean much in the short term, as its probably all coming right back to Earth to buy the things Ceaser despeartly needs, but in the long term I wonder if the 'Death Tax' will get a little more 'real', much the same way if someone left the US and tried to move a huge chunk of cash to another country, they have to pay tax on it.

In the short and medium term its really not a big deal...but in the long term as the Roman Republic increases in size and influence...

Having read through the last few chapters again, why am I getting the feeling that Ceaser is going to be, by far, the biggest long term threat to Earth?

You are off- he can't directly threat Earth. In fact he has no reason to. He needs us to industrialize and even when that is done we provide a steady stream of new recruits for his glorious state.

What he will do is attempt to get as much of Hell under his thumb- who cares about Earth if Hell has a population 5 times larger and the gap will only continue to grow?

Samuel wrote:Hell has a population 5 times larger and the gap will only continue to grow?

I'm not seeing the gap grow. Earth's population is exponentially increasing; if Hell provides good, stable food sources, it will continue to increase. Hell's population, by contrast, grows only as people die. Therefore, eventually there will literally be more people alive on Earth than there have been people in history; at that point, Earth will pass Hell in population. (Mind, if Earth's population stabilizes, all bets are off.)

Surlethe wrote:I'm not seeing the gap grow. Earth's population is exponentially increasing; if Hell provides good, stable food sources, it will continue to increase. Hell's population, by contrast, grows only as people die. Therefore, eventually there will literally be more people alive on Earth than there have been people in history; at that point, Earth will pass Hell in population. (Mind, if Earth's population stabilizes, all bets are off.)

Plus I doubt it'll be more than a couple of centuries at most before we can make Earth humans immortal, and give them bodies superior to Hell humans if they want them. We may also figure out a way to keep Hell humans alive on Earth before that, in which case lots of people will probably opt to stay on Earth after they die. If anything I see Earth starting to close the population gap with Hell before very long (in terms of historical time-scales).

Moment of comedy...

Until I read the appropriate Wikipedia page just now, I thought Metatron was one of the Transformers. Change one letter and you'll understand why. Shows how into Judaic mysticism I am.
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On a somewhat more curious note, what is/was St. Peter? His status in Heaven indicates angel, his traditional position as an Apostle indicates human. One suspects that an angel would be hard-pressed to masquerade as human for three years, let alone the thirty or so that he's supposed to have been traveling and to have been Pope. Of course, I'm not omitting the possibility that, taking the line "Nobody comes to the Father except through me", one could see Jesus having some ability through his status (and the fact that Yahweh doesn't seem to be watching him too closely) to arrange special positions for a handful of people he knew on Earth that aren't that of menial servants.

Until I read the appropriate Wikipedia page just now, I thought Metatron was one of the Transformers. Change one letter and you'll understand why. Shows how into Judaic mysticism I am.

I had the same thought. Optimous Prime makes a better Jesus figure than Jesus anyway.

His status in Heaven indicates angel, his traditional position as an Apostle indicates human. One suspects that an angel would be hard-pressed to masquerade as human for three years, let alone the thirty or so that he's supposed to have been traveling and to have been Pope.

I believe they can manipulate the image they present, or he could have been a human sized angel. As for being pope... I think the position was alot different then.

Of course the big thing would be his crusifiction, but that is what human followers are for.

Samuel wrote:

Having read through the last few chapters again, why am I getting the feeling that Ceaser is going to be, by far, the biggest long term threat to Earth?

You are off- he can't directly threat Earth. In fact he has no reason to. He needs us to industrialize and even when that is done we provide a steady stream of new recruits for his glorious state.

What he will do is attempt to get as much of Hell under his thumb- who cares about Earth if Hell has a population 5 times larger and the gap will only continue to grow?

Think of him as a long-term rival, like China. 100 years ago, the idea that China's industrial economy, let alone its military, could pose a serious threat to any first rate power was the province of serial fiction. Today you have people writing hysterical books with titles like "China: The Sleeping Dragon At Our Doorstep" about how they're going to own everything within the next ten or twenty.

Remember, when you're immortal or dealing with immortals, there's no reason not to think in the long term. And in the long term, Caesar poses a real strategic 'threat', in the economic sense if not in the 'invasion imminent' sense.

Surlethe wrote:

Samuel wrote:Hell has a population 5 times larger and the gap will only continue to grow?

I'm not seeing the gap grow. Earth's population is exponentially increasing; if Hell provides good, stable food sources, it will continue to increase. Hell's population, by contrast, grows only as people die. Therefore, eventually there will literally be more people alive on Earth than there have been people in history; at that point, Earth will pass Hell in population. (Mind, if Earth's population stabilizes, all bets are off.)

The population of Hell already exceeds most estimates for the maximum sustainable population of Earth. The dead in Hell don't need biomass or much of an ecosystem to live even if they like having something to eat; the living on Earth do.

Of course the big thing would be his crusifiction, but that is what human followers are for.

Technically due to the kind of regeneration angels and deamons seem to share would crusifiction even kill an angel? Maybe after a while he just mentally entangled everyone there into thinking he was dead and had them cart him off to the tomb where he waited for a while, used his angelic strength to push aside the boulder and walked out, tah dah!

Think of him as a long-term rival, like China. 100 years ago, the idea that China's industrial economy, let alone its military, could pose a serious threat to any first rate power was the province of serial fiction. Today you have people writing hysterical books with titles like "China: The Sleeping Dragon At Our Doorstep" about how they're going to own everything within the next ten or twenty.

Remember, when you're immortal or dealing with immortals, there's no reason not to think in the long term. And in the long term, Caesar poses a real strategic 'threat', in the economic sense if not in the 'invasion imminent' sense.

Without China the world economy would collapse. If that is the kind of rival we have to deal with, I approve. Hell will eventually be united under one banner and it is better to be on good terms with its ruler than not.

The population of Hell already exceeds most estimates for the maximum sustainable population of Earth. The dead in Hell don't need biomass or much of an ecosystem to live even if they like having something to eat; the living on Earth do.

I think they are considering a future where humanity starts exploiting the rest of the solar system, at which point we can boom into the trillions.

Technically due to the kind of regeneration angels and deamons seem to share would crusifiction even kill an angel? Maybe after a while he just mentally entangled everyone there into thinking he was dead and had them cart him off to the tomb where he waited for a while, used his angelic strength to push aside the boulder and walked out, tah dah!

You are thinking Jesus. I don't think Peter got a fancy burial.

Simon_Jester wrote:The population of Hell already exceeds most estimates for the maximum sustainable population of Earth. The dead in Hell don't need biomass or much of an ecosystem to live even if they like having something to eat; the living on Earth do.

Even if you leave aside technological advances that could dramatically raise Earth's carrying capacity and exploitation of the greater solar system's resources (both of which are very feasible in century timescales) we have the bubble worlds to expand into. I really doubt Earth's carrying capacity is going to remain a limiting factor on our population for very long. This isn't even getting into transhumanism (you could probably sustain a much bigger population of uploads than one of flesh and blood people), or that we may find a way to keep second life humans alive on Earth, in which case moving off Earth after you die would become purely optional.

Samuel wrote:I think they are considering a future where humanity starts exploiting the rest of the solar system, at which point we can boom into the trillions.

Trillions is a low end. Even if we confined our exploitation to the asteroids the asteroid belt has enough material to supply a population of 1 trillion people with several million tons of mass each to play with. Even just with that resource base quadrillions of people is probably quite feasible with plausibly advanced technology for a civilization capable of building such a presence in space. As for energy, a quadrillion people in the solar system would have 386 gigawatts of solar power per person to play with. We could harvest orders of magnitude more matter disassembling one or two of the terrestrial planets for space habitats (admittedly disassembling a world with a liquid mantle would be tricky, but otherwise it's just a matter of scale and should be doable once you have Von Neumann machines). Hell is a pitifully tiny resource base compared to the solar system.

Jamesfirecat wrote:

Of course the big thing would be his crusifiction, but that is what human followers are for.

Technically due to the kind of regeneration angels and deamons seem to share would crusifiction even kill an angel? Maybe after a while he just mentally entangled everyone there into thinking he was dead and had them cart him off to the tomb where he waited for a while, used his angelic strength to push aside the boulder and walked out, tah dah!

That raises a question in my mind: is Stuart picturing Jesus as a member of the angelic species or as a kind of super-Nephilim?

Samuel wrote:Without China the world economy would collapse. If that is the kind of rival we have to deal with, I approve. Hell will eventually be united under one banner and it is better to be on good terms with its ruler than not.

Oh, to be sure; but to the wrong kind of mind any power bloc not under that mind's control is a "threat" and therefore bad news. Like the kind of people who write hysterical books about China taking over everything. Wherever there is an empire, there are people who get so emotionally invested in maintaining the empire that they lose the ability to seriously consider whether there's a better way to arrange things than the empire.

The population of Hell already exceeds most estimates for the maximum sustainable population of Earth. The dead in Hell don't need biomass or much of an ecosystem to live even if they like having something to eat; the living on Earth do.

I think they are considering a future where humanity starts exploiting the rest of the solar system, at which point we can boom into the trillions.

In that case, sure; but that's a prediction and not an inevitability, and one that I suspect Stuart has no real intention of addressing directly in this story. We could equally well end up with the "space travel doesn't pay well enough to get past the initial investment barrier to entry" regime, in which case the sustainability of Earth's environment is going to be a really big deal.

Simon_Jester wrote:In that case, sure; but that's a prediction and not an inevitability, and one that I suspect Stuart has no real intention of addressing directly in this story. We could equally well end up with the "space travel doesn't pay well enough to get past the initial investment barrier to entry" regime, in which case the sustainability of Earth's environment is going to be a really big deal.

Like I said, we also have the bubble worlds, which are easier to expand into. We're already starting to exploit the resources of Hell as I remember, or at least thinking about it. Unless we run into serious armed resistance (of a considerably more formidable sort than what we've hit so far) or there are very few readily exploitable bubble worlds we should be able to dramatically expand our resource base that way.

There's another potential limitation to colonizing other bubble-worlds, or even the other planets...

... what guarantee is there that if you die while not on Earth or in Hell, you'll get /any/ Second Life at all? The only way to find out is to have someone go out there and die, risking Full Death if the Resurrection Machinery doesn't work...

It's not like the Second Life bodies are that much more durable.

Your point is well taken, although I think there will be no shortage of volunteers - of six billion people, there's never a shortage of volunteers for anything - but give it a few decades or centuries, and first-life bodies are likely to be far more durable than anything you get in hell.

No, hell's current status is a strictly temporary thing.

what happens to angels and demons who die? Uriel will probably get oblivion like his victims, but what of Beelzelbub and Asmodeus?

You are thinking Jesus. I don't think Peter got a fancy burial.

Okay sorry my bad, late night posting will do that to you. But the point still stands that Jesus may not have been entirely human in this particular universe, God seems to consider him a sun after all, and I bet miricals would be a lot easier to pull off with angel powers. Don't need to turn water into wine, just make everyone think they're drinking wine, or make everyone think you're walking on water and you job is done!

Of course healing the blind/lame would be a bit trickier to explain as we've already seen that apparently angel's ability to heal their own is now lagging behind humans and that was a trick we never picked up....

not really. Angels can't heal gunshot wounds, and they created anthrax, so it wouldn't be beyond them.

It would be cool if Jesus' virgin birth was explained as something like the facehuggers and chestbursters in the Alien stories.

Demons got succubi and incubi? The Angels have worse.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

Of course speculation about the nature of Jesus is a bit premature. We aren't even sure if Yahweh and Satan are the same sort of being as the angels and demons they command, and the lack of a description of their physical appearance may point to not. Is Jesus then the literal son of Yahweh? Perhaps so and he is something different from an angel/nephilim, perhaps not, but Yahweh and the angels seem to think he is related to Yahweh and he has an obviously highly privileged place in Heaven.

I think it reasonable to suspect Peter and the Apostles and so on, if they have any better deal in heaven at all, was just Jesus pulling strings. The investment of serious resources or time on earthly religion seems at odds with the behavior of Yahweh and Satan, and there are a lot more direct ways to spread a favored religious milieu than to create a despised and blasphemous cult among a despised minority and hope that socio-cultural conditions change to let it win out. If Yahweh cared about the spread of "his" religion sending down a few angels to visit Vespasian after the Julio-Claudians leave the stage makes more sense. One wonders if he did just that with Islam, in terms of the tradition that Gabriel revealed the Qu'ran to Mohammad.