The Long Earth

[Hnau]

I just finished The Long Mars. I'm really digging the series. They cram each book with a lot of world-building and societal development. Some of it is a bit forced (An AI just happens to gain consciousness by 2030, and it attains personhood by claiming to be a reincarnated Tibetan? It just happens that Yellowstone erupts on Datum Earth? The Long Earth just happens to encourage the evolution of humanity into a new species?) but it's all in good fun, entertaining and in my opinion doesn't often ask you to suspend disbelief more than you are comfortable with.

I'm really looking forward to the next book! I wonder what's next. They could just as easily focus it on yet another planet and call it The Long Venus. Actually that would be very interesting.

 

[Hnau]

It starts off with the people emigrating to other earths. The authors make a point of how people step at a rate of 10-15 minutes per earth, yet we meet settling parties in places that would take decades of constant stepping to get to. Clearly, no one thought to work out travel times when stepping, even as they were writing a book about traveling through stepping.

I don't think that's a constant. You can be a natural stepper, or just a "good" stepper, in that you don't get sick from it, and step around once every couple seconds, though you'd still have to stop enough times to find food, rest from carrying supplies, or make camp for the night. Larger groups seem to step at a rate of 10-15 minutes per Earth because the average person gets queasy from it, and the more people you have, the more often you'll run into problems stepping too quickly. And there's also the people who can step through the "soft places"... they can get to millions of Earths away in a single step if they find the right place. I think there's enough variation there in how fast stepping can be done to explain the people and colonies that are found so far out in the Long Earth.

But not getting exponential growth? I mean, just not having heard of the concept? I don't know how long it would take Trolls and Elves to fill up the long earth, but it wouldn't be long. A hundred and twenty thousand years after the first Troll/Elf is born, all the earths are deserts, at a guess.

Homo sapiens before behavioral modernity and before agriculture didn't actually grow their populations so fast. Elves, Kobolds, and Trolls are all hunter-gatherers with few examples of behavioral modernity on the level of homo sapiens, so to me it makes sense their population growth would be very slow, even if resources and space is abundant on the Long Earth.

The stepper town would have been hit with every plague in history, untill they developed a psychotic hatred of strangers. Aslo, Romans on an empty earth with 2000 years to work, and they got a couple of little towns?

Happy Landings seemed to be getting around 25 new arrivals a year from the Datum, so that would only be 50,000 arrivals from 1 CE to 2000 CE. They would be growing that population through natural growth, of course, but it seems the population of that world would still be minimal. Not all humans would want to stay around, I'm sure, especially because the society tolerated Troll inhabitants early on. I'd bet much of the Pacific Northwest was colonized, with settlements elsewhere in at least North America, if not further.

 

[Kaiphranos]

So I ran across a copy of The Long Mars in my local library and read it this weekend. A few thoughts:

On the good side, I continue to enjoy the alternate biologies of the stepwise worlds, even with the minimal detail we get on them. And with the voyage of the Armstrong II, we get even more fascinating worlds. Similarly for the Mars trip. Also, I was glad to see the Yellowstone eruption having a contiuing impact on the plot, unlike the Madison event at the end of The Long Earth, which was pretty much swept indeed the right by The Long War.

On the bad side... there's a lot going on in this book, and several of the threads don't really tie together at all. The whole business with the Next (which ends up being the climax?) seems to have little to do with the actual Martian voyage of the title. The Next themselves kind of seem like a bridge too far--and not really tried into the central gimmick of the book, the Long worlds. (In fact, it seems like a condensed version of Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" stories crammed in on top of everything else.) Also, I occasionally found myself losing track of who some of the minor characters were, and wondering whether I should remember them from previous books. Some Turtledove-style zinc oxide might actually have been helpful here...

 

[Escape Zeppelin]

I do have a huge problem with the idea of any civilization fed by "combers" mostly because despite the book's repeated statements, the step-wise distance of any one world from Earth is a huge distance. And you still have to travel laterally within the world as well.

Without roads, what's the maximum distance you could forage/hunt for food, say 20 miles? No matter how far you step you can't travel more than 20 miles from your stepping spot and final destination and reliably return with fresh food. Numerous studies indicate that humans need 10 square miles per person to hunt/gather sustainably. That means your radius of 20 miles can feed 12 people sustainably. A town of 1,000 people is going to take 84 step worlds to feed. And as the books have shown us, stepping between worlds often takes a lot of lateral travel to avoid stepping obstacles. Overall, farming is going to be a far less taxing and logistically sustainable operation than "combing".

In addition, with eased population constraints the human population is likely to reach 16 billion by 2100 since history shows frontier families tend toward large famlies. Assuming it doubles again in another century you're looking at 32 billion people. If you limit population to a sustainable million per world to maintain current standards of living you're looking at 32,000 worlds filled within 200 years. By the year 3,000 you're looking at a population somewhere in the multiple trillions. That's 5 million worlds filled with humans. At a certain point the distance step-wise you need to travel to find an empty world is going to be unfeasible.

The book's idea of people abandoning mass farming is dead on arrival.