- Julius: Hello, Scarlet!
- Scarlet: Hello, Julius! I brought Abel’s story. And a few of my other favorite books.
- Scarlet: “Differential calculus – Proofs and Examples” – “Introduction to Precision Engineering” – “The Internal Structure of Energy Crystals”
- Scarlet: The last one even comes with a removable poster of the phase transitions!
- Julius: Uuuh…
- Scarlet: Hmm, if you don’t like those, maybe this one: “When Capella Was a Village – The Prehistory of Lavarel”
- Julius: All right, that one sounds interesting!
- Julius: So, what was Lavarel like before Kalil created the Master Crystal?
- Scarlet: No one really knows, but there’s plenty of evidence that humans were already living on Lavarel tens of thousands of years ago.
- Scarlet: The Spire may be almost fifty thousand years old!
- Julius: That old?!
- Scarlet: Yes. The book talks about many other things too. But a lot of it is just speculation.
- Julius: Let’s hear!
A Sky Full of Stars 036
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19 thoughts on “A Sky Full of Stars 036”
Zitchas
Well, people wanted some more detail as to how much people know these days… Her commentary on the various textbooks should provide some good insight. I like her selection, too.
HKMaly
Definitely. People being on Lavarel for 50k years is already surprising. 10k years is enough for getting from stone age to space age. 50k years is VERY long time for civilization – and note that The Spire looks more high-tech than stone age. They had plenty of time for losing their civilization and rebuilding it.
Cyndayn
That spire could be built by a stone age civilization. Egypt was barely out of the stone age when they started building obelisks there. Monuments like Gobekli Tepe and the like are stone age as well. Not to mention all the Mesoamerican monuments built when they didn’t even have access to bronze tools.
Onihikage
Cyndayn, the pyramids are only a few thousand years old and their exteriors are heavily degraded. Stonehenge is about the same age, made of slightly harder stone, and in a milder climate, but you really have to squint to even guess anything was originally carved or painted on them. Gobekli Tepe spent much of the last 10,000 years buried underground and not subject to erosion or daily temperature cycling. I don’t believe a vertical spire of that size which is fully exposed to the elements could be built of normal stone and still have well-defined carved shapes on it after 50,000 years. There’s a good chance it wouldn’t even be standing at all, let alone be recognizably artificial. I think it’s made of much tougher stuff than anything stone-age people could build with.
Brett Bellmore
Too true: While we can artificially make materials that would probably survive 50K years of weathering, (Though probably not 50K years of vandalism!) such materials are pretty rare in nature. If you could take a sped up film of 50K years of weathering on exposed rock, it would look like candy melting in the rain.
Now, if that spire had been buried underground in a dry area with consistent temperatures, and only recently dug up? Yeah, that would be plausible.
HKMaly
Actually, diamonds are not THAT rare in nature and would be still recognizable million years later. However, stone age civilization doesn’t have tools to carve diamonds … and diamonds of THIS size tend to be VERY deep.
Hmmm … maybe obsidian would be better candidate, but still probably impossible to carve like this with stone age technology.
Kazuma Taichi
ah yes, quite a standard collection of favorite literature. you have the classic collection of children’s fables, and then four university textbooks
BlackDragonSlayer
I sense a development of math/science girl + history/language boy 😀
Arthur
Oh! she’s very good at integral and calculus and knows the scientific names of being animalcules. In short in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral she is the very model of a modern major general,
Jim Baerg
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
BookWizard
Maybe humans came to this world from another planet a long time ago, and have forgotten their origins? (Oh, and I love when books have fold-out posters and other extras!)
HKMaly
Seems more and more likely.
Also, let’s be specific: That other planet could’ve easily be EARTH.
Ben
It could also BE earth….. Maybe a post apocalyptic version where some quantum experiment changed the laws of physics creating “Magic” but breaking every other technological system dependent on the old “rules”?
Obojo
Do…do you think they will have the Slay that Spire?
Turrosh Mak
“I attack the gazebo!”
sekhmet
Now we have it. The backstory (the “official” one) of Lavarel.
This one is nicely introduced within the story. 🙂
Opus the Poet
As an example of scale, our written history on Earth starting with the invention of writing only extends roughly 6K years plus or minus 500 or so.
Shelinor
Pretty cool attention to details. Used to study and conduct research in crystallography. Phase transitions’ charts do indeed look something like that.
Clevershitter
Noooo, Scarlet, Nooooo! Don’t do that C++! It ruins your life!
Characters
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