i want to create a setting in a postapocalypse that revolves around a supernatural winter. like, really, really, really cold with everything being frozen and shit.
theres the basic idea, now its your turn. Any ideas? How did it happen? Why did it happen?
any additional ideas?
also: scientifically speaking, how cold can it possibly be? is there some maximum?
>>44325253
Look up Fimbulwinter for some mythological ideas about a snowpocalypse, OP
>is there a maximum cold?
Yes, it's 0 degrees Kelvin or -273 Celsius. The coldest recorded natural temperatures on Earth are around -90 Celsius. Liquid nitrogen is about -200 Celsius, but you have to artificially create it.
On the other end, there is no maximum temperature, or at least not one we could possibly detect anyways. The Sun's corona is between 1 and 5 million degrees Celsius.
>>44326232
They actually created a gas at negative kelvin a few years ago.
>>44325253
Around -40 degrees and up starts becoming impossible to live for humans.
>>44326294
>>44326232
i'm thinking to make it completely impossible for human to stay outside in this Frostapocalypse, making the rest of humanity either live in special suits or mechs or whatever, i have no specific thoughts yet. i just have a nerdboner for dead frozen cities right now.
>>44326278
Source plz
>>44325253
>how cold can it possibly be? is there some maximum?
Earth's average temperature, if the entire planet was frozen over so as to maximize reflection of absorbed sunlight, would be -40 C. (That's -40 in burger units.)
You can't really make Earth colder than this, unless you also remove all the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. But human habitation is already impossible at -40 average temperature.
>>44326456
>http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-gas-goes-below-absolute-zero-1.12146
>http://www.quantum-munich.de/research/negative-absolute-temperature/
>http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6115/52
>>44325253
Post apocalypse scenarios are about making the world safe for your kind of people by killing off everyone else.
Ask yourself, who are "your kind of people" in an ice apocalypse?
>>44326463
are there reallife suits and technologies in our world that would help to survive these tempratures?
>>44327003
Yes, but since the oceans have frozen over and all surface life is dead, it'd be like colonizing Mars. Much easier and more technically feasible, but it's still dubious as to whether a civilization capable of maintaining and expanding the habitats could arise.
>>44327003
Well, people survive in Antarctica, which averages -49C in the winter, but it's not a "permanent settlement", so to speak. It also costs a lot of resources to maintain, and food and supplies have to be shipped in from warmer climes.
Spacesuits insulate enough; it's just about making them cheap enough for everyone to use in your setting, depending on how often people can make open-air excursions.
>>44325253
If you just want your post-apoc setting to be a winter wonderland, there are othermuch worseways to achieve that.
>>44327133
It's also really dark in Antarctica in the winter.
-40 Earth will still have sunlight, making heated greenhouses viable for food, and since there is likely to be no or virtually no precipitation, solar panels allow for power.
>>44327003
>are there reallife suits and technologies in our world that would help to survive these tempratures?
It gets down to -40 already in places people actually live and build cities and towns in. It's fucking cold, but survivable. The reason it's impossible for human habitation is that agriculture becomes impossible, and the whole world being -40 F means that essentially all life on Earth's surface will die and the oxygen will start to leave the atmosphere.
Give it about 200 hundred years since the world went cold.
That's long enough time for living memory to be gone and for nobody to have met anyone born before the ice.
Why did it happen? Space rock sent up lots of dust into the atmosphere.
There was enough time to build fallout style vaults before it all went to shit.
How technologically brilliant was society before? Hard to say. Certainly the stuff found in the vaults and things aren't the apex of of what could be done if the ruins are anything to go by.
Rumor has it that there was an Ark Ship or even fleets of them cast out into the inky black to seed new worlds. This would make Earth the shit left behind. Is that just a fairy story? are the Star-People coming back one day to save us?
The vaults are connected by tunnels. Or at least some of them are now. They were dug by a 2nd generation of Vault Dwellers who were sick of having to loose toes to the ice every time they wanted to trade. New tunnels are always being dug.
The big project of Hub Vault, that greatish metropolis at the foot of the broken orbital tether, is to dig straight down to where the Earth is still warm.
In many of the vaults, most notably the ones without connecting tunnels, the society has gone a bit tribal.
>>44327601
Super cool! Thanks a lot!
i'd love to have even frozen people standing around like statues from the time before the ice. but thats rather unrealistic i guess.
I can't remember the title or even who wrote it, but there was a guy who lived at one of the poles for a few years and basically realized almost none of the modern tech they had made was properly working in the constant sub-sub zero temperatures.
It'd give you a sense of what sort of stuff would go wrong and what humanity would have to abandon as it tried to survive.
>>44327334
I'm seriously wondering why the Ice-9 in that books didn't just immediately start killing everyone with the humidity in the air.
>>44325253
I'll recommend you read these books from Kim Stanley Robinson:
-Antarctica (1997)
-The Science in the Capital trilogy
Forty Signs of Rain (2004)
Fifty Degrees Below (2005)
Sixty Days and Counting (2007)
This trilogy has been collected and condensed in an omnibus edition released as Green Earth (2015). Is better to read the books, not the omnibus.
Antarctica would help you to understand a lot about living in a frozen world. The author lived in the McMurdo Station at the South Pole for 6 month doing research for his Mars Tirlogy. He ended up writing Antarctica too. The Science in the Capial trilogy shows you a present where climate change is about to pass the "no return" point. You can grab a lot of ideas for your campaign from there. And KSR is a great writer, always a bonus.
>>44327764
>i'd love to have even frozen people standing around like statues from the time before the ice. but thats rather unrealistic i guess.
For that, you'd have to come up with some way to flash-freeze the Earth. That ain't happening.
You could certainly have frozen corpses, captured in their last moments over a few decades as they struggled and failed to keep warm.
>>44327841
Why would it? Only water molecules that touched the Ice-9 would freeze onto it. So the sample would slowly grow as it accumulated humidity, but the entire air wouldn't instantly freeze. It'd be more like ice accumulating on a supercooled object, which also isn't instant.
Note that -40 °C is the planetary average temperature. Earth's average temperature is 15 °C, but I'm sure you can think of places consistently warmer than that. Or consistently colder. It also doesn't account for day/night differences.
Surviving will be difficult. Most seriously, you may have to worry about oxygen - most or all surface life will have been killed and the ocean mostly frozen over, drastically reducing photosynthesis. The decay of all that dead organic matter will be prevented, though, and nothing's likely to catch fire anytime soon, and there's not much left to breathe that oxygen, so it may not run out in the near future. Pity, an anoxic frozen Earth would be a really interesting setting. Actually, I might have to figure out how to make that happen, now I really want to worldbuild it.
Your next problem will be water. Ice is likely to be all around you, (or then again, maybe not) but because everything's frozen over (so no evaporation) and it's too cold for exposed water to exist, you're unlikely to get any rain or snow. The world will be a desert. So you'll either have to spend a lot of energy melting ice, or hope you can tap groundwater. And what are you using for fuel to melt ice?
And then there's food - because nothing's growing outside. Perhaps you saved seeds and are using a heated greenhouse, but remember that it takes quite a bit of space and *water* to feed a person with agriculture.
And then there's staying warm. Where are you getting the power for all of this? Where's that heat coming from? Wood, perhaps, but you'll need a lot of it, and cutting frozen wood isn't easy. Solar panels degrade after a few decades and nobody's making more, almost all remaining coal and oil requires heavy industry to extract and is at high latitudes, hydroelectric plants have frozen up, wind power is shit, and no way in hell do you have a nuclear industry.*
*It'd be nice if you did - decaying isotopes can produce a lot of heat.
how long would a normal human, without any special technical advantages survive under these circumstances?
>>44326643
>Ask yourself, who are "your kind of people" in an ice apocalypse?
Other people who live in northern Minnesota, I guess.
>>44329310
They'd freeze pretty quickly if they didn't have really good clothes or shelter.
>>44325253
>postapocalypse
>supernatural winter
>really, really, really cold with everything being frozen and shit
>>44325253
Check Snowpiercer.
The comic, not the movie.
Or the Ice company. Both are about trains.
>>44327841
Because vonnegut is a hack
>>44329234
>no way in hell do you have a nuclear industry.
Why not?
>>44326232
There actually is a theoretical maximum temperature. You can't get any smaller than planck length, so if a wave's period is 1 planck, it's as hot as can be. A white hole would theoretically be formed if you could get smaller than a planck.
Ever heard of pic related OP?
There is this YA novel about two shapeshifting teenagers who can turn into animals and communicate with them, who end up turning into dragons to defeat these huge crustaceans who generate ice and who have begun traveling south spreading.
They defeat the glacier bugs by burning them with dragon fire.
The boy ended up "dying" but he shapeshifted into a pheonix right before death and is stuck in that form.
>>44333828
If anyone knows the name of the book I'm talking about I'd appreciate it, I've long forgotten it.
>>44326572
Well that's certainly not freaky shit at all.
>>44325253
Stop and do something that isn't postapocalypse.
>>44338210
already did thrice. now its time for something new.
>>44325253
How / Why did it happen?
> An enormous asteroid passes close to Earth and takes it slightly off-orbit. Now Earth is drifting away from the sun.
> A supervolcano erupted and its emanation blocked most of the sun's rays causing temperature at the surface to plummet.
> The planet's spin stopped, very slowly. Now there's a scorching perma-day, a frozen perma-night and a new equatorial area that is heavily guarded by the select few who gets to live there.
Any additional ideas?
> In Dream Pod 9's Heavy Gear series, the planet where the action takes place is a colony that was left to fend for itself as Earth couldn't afford such travel anymore, struck in an ice age. This reshaped humanity, especially Earthdwellers, whose dwindling resources forced to overspecialized. One could imagine survivors on the surface, scavenging what little they can in order to survive, while some extremist elite transcend mankind from the safety of bunkers. Then a crisis forces the well-equipped, genetically-enhanced supersoldiers against battle-hardened, terrain-savvy survivors.
>>44326572
I don't know if my science boner should be aroused or fucking terrified.
