Best Of Worldbuilding
The best posts from October on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange
This month, again, saw three topic challenges, which were moons (my own suggestion), architecture, and politics.
The moons challenge saw an interesting post along the lines of “just how many sub-orbits can I make before everything breaks?”: Moons of Moons of Moons, by Varrick. It provoked a number of conflicting responses, though the highest voted answer (this one) says you can have 85 nested moons before your moons are just 1 atom small.
In other news, (and while not strictly October), the Worldbuilding site has “graduated”! That essentially means that it’s now recognised as a fully-fledged community on the Stack Exchange network, which should (hopefully) bring in even more traffic and interesting people, questions, and answers. As always, I’d encourage you to come and join us if you haven’t already.
OK, advertisement over and back to the posts: the architecture challenge brought a whole variety of topics in. We had “ How would a city of AI be built?” (hint: think The Matrix), we had questions about how to design zombie apocalypse refuges, and we had someone ask how to levitate a temple, without too much hand-waving.
However, the question I want to highlight for this challenge is “ Architectural encoding of maps”, by Ville Niemi. It’s an interesting premise: how do you encode a map in a cave network such that only the inhabitants will be able to read it? T3 H40 provided an incredibly comprehensive answer that detailed a number of ways you can both encode your maps, and protect your labyrinth (with some handy inspiration from an Indiana Jones movie).
AI seems to be a popular topic, as the topic challenge on politics turned up a question about it. There was also “ What’s the most likely “post democracy” form of political government?”, which proved the most popular question of the challenge. The second question, “ How would government change if everyone died by the age of 25?” by HDE 226868 (one of our writers: HDE 226868), threw everyone a little. Lives are almost quartered in length, vastly reducing the opportunity to gain experience — how does government work now?
There’s one other question to mention in this summary. “How can a pacifist country protect itself?” proved popular across the Stack Exchange network, and stayed on the popular questions list for some time. It’s an interesting question — if you’re not willing to fight, and someone comes along to invade your country, how do you stop them? The obvious answer is politics — but what if that fails? You’ll have to read the answers to the question.
That’s all for this month. Next month: a topic challenge on language, and certainly a whole load more interesting posts.
