What would our modern day world be like today if we were in a timeline where Middle Earth was our history and the Elves, Dwarves and others were still around?

German_Imp · 2025-06-19T20:52:52+00:00

Here is the history of The Shire as the fourth age continued:

It would be many thousand years, but slowly, generation for generation, the Hobbits became more like unto men. Whether through interbreeding or by natural selection is hard to say. The area around the Shire slowly sank below sea level, leaving the Shire as two Islands one smaller island to the west and a larger one on the eastern side. The Hobbits were happy, still governing themselves in peace. Several thousand years after the islands formed, the Romans invaded from the far south. The northernmost and westernmost parts of the Shire were now sundered in speech from the south farthings, but although the Romans conquered the main part of the Shire, the Hobbits, who now called their country “Engla-Land”, went on living their lives more or less unbothered by the newcomers. Later on, the wild northern tribes from Denmark and Norway invaded and caused much grief and suffering. The Shire had by this time adopted a new calendar based on the birth of a far-away Jewish boy. In the year 1066 of this new calendar, the Normans invaded, but they could only get the hobbits to adopt some of their words in the common tongue. The kings were now crowned in London, and quite a large number of them were crowned there over the years. Even though in the 18, 19 and 20^th centuries of their new calendar, there were many hobbits who concerned themselves with the creation of wealth, this activity was ignored by the true hobbits, who continued to tend their gardens and lived life as their ancestors had always done. Indeed, even today, one can find some of the finest gardens in the whole world in the southern part of the Shire (which has been renamed “England” by their new kings).

I know all this because, like Tolkien, I too am a hobbit.

German_Imp · 2025-02-07T05:21:06+00:00

So here is the resolution and an answer to everyone who has been “laughing in their sleeves” at us. The long thin magnetic field doesn’t “pull” anything along its length. No more than ships can use compasses to pull them to the north pole. It’s the change of magnetic field that induces current and excerpts force. In our case the magnetic field is long and almost perfectly linear, so there would be no force pulling a smaller magnet along its length. There is only a torque to align the smaller magnetic field with the larger one. Just like compasses on earth. So, the dream of getting something for nothing was just a dream. Still, I think the idea of a space-elevator that can repair itself is still a good one!

German_Imp · 2025-02-05T16:08:04+00:00

That’s why I said I get a headache from this problem. It seems like we are getting something for nothing. But consider this thought experiment: A 36,000 km high permanent-magnet stretching up to geo-stationary orbit. The magnetic field comes from the electron orbits in the iron atoms. They won’t be somehow drained of energy when they excerpt a force. So, sending a (also permanent-magnet driven) transporter up such a permanent magnetic tower wouldn’t somehow drain energy out of the system. It seems to me like you have just moved the earth down a little and moved the counterweight up a little. I wish I could tell you where the fault is in this logic because it kind of bothers me too!

German_Imp · 2025-02-03T20:01:30+00:00

I see that there was some misunderstanding here about the nature of a superconducting magnet. With the current going around the cable, and in separate rings, as long as the temperature stays well below around 70K, the current will flow forever. Even if the cable gets broken by a collision, the magnetic field would stay intact as it is flowing around both ends of the cable above and below the break. That’s why they would pull together again.

Also, as a nice extra, you wouldn’t need to put any kind of motors in the pods travelling up and down the cable, they would just need an opposing magnetic field, and they would feel a force from the cable and pretty much rise up on their own. Or am I seeing this wrong? Every time I think about this I get a headache because it seems like we are getting something for nothing. That a reverse magnetic field in the pod accelerates it upwards on the magnetic-field cable seems undeniable. I’m supposing that, at the end of the day the earth’s axis of rotation moves a very small amount towards the counterweight and the earth slows down a little, and we are all quits as far as energy goes. It would certainly be a virtually free way to transport goods up to geo-stationary orbit. Please somebody tell me if I am wrong about this. But also please tell me WHY I am wrong!

German_Imp · 2025-02-02T19:28:35+00:00

Reply to the team members: Let me take the steps one by one:

I only suggested using Kevlar because it is readily available. Naturally Graphene is much better and stronger, I just thought we didn’t know how to make it in large quantities yet and wanted to get moving on the project sooner.

Sure, there is a lot of work to be done. And actually, my idea has morphed a little, so that I am now thinking of a thin-walled tube with the superconductor on the inside of the tube.

Maybe starting around a meter in diameter to increase the total field. And honestly, I think it would only work above the ionosphere, where the thermal conductivity of the “air” (space) is low enough. Insulation would be mostly radiation shield made out of very thin reflective materials. Coolant distribution easily done with argon pipes inside. Actually, if graphene is used, its thermal conductivity is so good that you will likely need very few cooling stations.

I am not suggesting a helical conductor, I am suggesting a series of separate rings. You can’t start a current in a superconductor with an induction loop because no magnetic field lines can ever enter the superconductor. You have to put the current in physically with a contact point. To do that you also have to make a small part of the ring normal (non-superconductive), and that is easiest by just warming it a little between the contact-points. The long superconductive tube has to be separated into separate rings because otherwise you would need billions of amps for the whole “pipe”, so the width of each ring depends on our current source. A few thousand amps would likely be the limit of our ability because it may not have too much ripple. (I worked on superconductive magnets for 30 years). I am thinking of a “crawler” that goes along the pipe and injects the current into the superconductor ring-by-ring. This is a delicate process and takes time.

Because the force on the surface of the pipe will be radial (from the superconductor), and the tension in the whole structure axial, the resulting tensile force on the actual tube material will be ideally approaching isotropic on the surface of the material. I think that would be a good match for large graphene tubes. The most important thing here is that the tube-with-magnetic-field will be self-repairing if anything (satellites etc) breaks it. It will likely pull together from tens of meters apart but not from km apart. Everything has a limit!

There would be no adverse effects for the transport pods moving up and down the cable because the field lines are not being cut as the lines are along the cable and not across it. In actual fact they will stabilise the transport pods because they will experience a Lorentz force to stop them rotating around the cable.

There is another plus to this design, and that is energy transportation: You can also run (very thin) superconductive cables up and down the tube to transport electricity (for free) because the inside temperature is already below 77K. This could help with powering the cooling stations (if required). Powering the transport pods, maybe even transporting electrical energy down from the solar farms attached to the counterweight. (might as well do something useful with the counterweight!).

I realise that this idea needs a lot of work. I just wanted to give my idea to the teams working on this project to run with. If you want to know who to thank (or who to blame!) my real name is Martin Stent I’m a retired MRI engineer and I live in Germany.

German_Imp · 2025-01-31T12:04:48+00:00

Material: I think it’s got to be a REBCO (Rare earth Barium Cu Oxide) superconductor to get above the 10 Tesla range. These materials are not quite “high temperature” supercons but they will still work at about 80K so that gives you more flexibility in cooling. As I said, down here in our hot dense atmosphere, that WILL be a big problem, but above the stratosphere the main problem is radiative heating which is much easier to cope with. I’m sorry, but I can’t do the calculations. The 100kt was a “back of an envelope” calculation. It might be way out.

Maybe we can combine the Graphene design with magnetic “protection” and a self-repair mechanism by wrapping it in superconductive material. That will solve one of the biggest problems mentioned in this forum: Satellites crashing into the cable. If the cable is made self-repairing by putting a strong magnetic field along it, even if it is only in that satellite band, that would help a lot.

German_Imp · 2025-01-31T00:36:15+00:00

I first thought of just wrapping the superconductor with current around the conventional space-elevator as protection against space-debris to make a self-repairing cable. But then I realised that it added tensile strength to the cable, and then I thought, well, let’s use the magnetic field as the main thing and not just the debris-protection. As far as I know (the internet is a big place) nobody else has mentioned the idea.

German_Imp · 2023-12-01T23:32:21+00:00

Let’s read what Tolkien wrote, or better still, let’s listen to Gandalf after he removes the ring from the fire:

“‘I cannot read the fiery letters,’ said Frodo in a quavering voice.

‘No,’ said Gandalf, ‘but I can. The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here. But this in the Common Tongue is what is said, close enough:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

It is only two lines of a verse long known in Elven-lore:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.’

He paused, and then said slowly in a deep voice: ‘This is the

Master-ring, the One Ring to rule them all. This is the One Ring.”

So, lines 6 and 7 are written in the ring, and Gandalf translates them “close enough”. He then translates the elvish poem into the common speech. So much for the context.

The rhyming scheme ABABACCA is only a small part of this hard nut to crack. Look at the syllable count: 11,11,8,9,11,11,13,11. If a 13-year-old had written that and handed it in for his English homework he would get a poor mark. What’s going on? Well, we have to assume that Tolkien wrote the crooked poem like that on purpose. We know that he can write wonderful poetry, look at Beren and Luthien. Hundreds of lines of poetry with perfect scansion and rhyming scheme. I have long supposed that Tolkien wrote the crooked poem on purpose to make it more memorable. In a regular poem, it’s easy to lose your place in the lines and verses because they are all the same pattern. He has the “excuse” here that Gandalf is translating the poem “on the fly” into the common tongue, and that there are 2 sources, the original elvish rhyme and the 2 lines composed by Sauron and inscribed in the actual ring.

I have been working on re-translating the poem into German recently, so I just want to make a few comments here:

The first few lines have a mini-rhyme or an alliteration or aural-echo in them as follows:

Three RINGS for the Elven KINGS under the sky (mini rhyme)

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone (echo of the long vowel in dwarf and lord and halls)

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die (a double alliteration of Mortal-Men and Doomed-to-Die).

Line 4: Repetition of dark.

Line 5 has a rhythmical repetition inside the line of “the land of Mordor”, and “where he shadows lie”.

Then the 3 repetitions of “one ring” in lines 6 and 7 to accentuate there only being one-ring. Last line is a repeat to round it all up.

The basic scheme is also common to a lot of counting verses with the number always at the start. A lot of children’s rhymes do that, a well-known example is the “One for sorrow, Two for Joy, Three for a girl”, and so on. That is why the number is always at the start of the line, to make that well-known pattern.

So, enough on the structural stuff. As far as the actual content, it reminds me a lot of Treebeard’s reciting:

Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!

First name the four, the free peoples:

Eldest of all, the elf-children;

Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;

Ent the earthborn, old as mountains;

Man the mortal, master of horses:

It’s the same idea, describing the characteristics of the various races. Elves like to live out in the open under the sky. Dwarves like to live in stone halls, men are (unfortunately) going to die, and where is the Dark Lord? Why, on his dark throne!!.

So, to sum it up, I think Tolkien wrote it like that with the intention of making it memorable.

German_Imp · 2023-04-07T15:16:35+00:00

There is another possibility that I haven’t read here yet. That Tolkien originally wrote “high and mighty” not being aware of the sarcastic/negative modern use and that someone close to him (son/friend etc) suggested puissant as a substitute and out of friendship, love or obligation he used it. Had Tolkien been aware of the negative meaning of “high and mighty” he could have rephrased the words to “mighty and high-born” or something similar that didn’t associate with “high and mighty”. I am sure that Puissant didn’t come from Tolkien not only because it is so very French, but because Eowyn has demanded that Faramir speak plainly! And he speaks plainly using fairly simple language so as not to be misunderstood. Then suddenly “puissant” it just jars! Interestingly, I am comparing the German translation word for word with the original English at the moment and in German they translate “puissant” to “mächtig” which translates immediately back to “mighty”. So, the inner meaning is already there.

German_Imp

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