How do I stop people from creating artificial islands using the magic particles that suspend my floating islands?

Question

I have a setting that involves floating islands that coast slowly across a planet. There are multiple tiers separated by cloud layers, however the surface is inaccessible to my floating islanders.

In order to suspend my floating islands I have decided to use a few different magic/handwavium particles. These particles when compressed against each other create a lifting force that pulls objects up. My islands are floated when these particles compress on the planet's surface into a giant crystal-like structure with a very specific internal shape. Pushing the land within a certain radius of said crystal up into the sky.

Based on crystal factors such as crystalline structure, mass, size etc. different islands are floated at different altitudes and coast with different speeds. These altitudes are by and large fixed with allowance for some bobbing up and down. Nothing more than 100 meters at the most.

The inhabitants of my world mine these crystals for airship-like flight. When mined these crystals no longer hold their solid structure, rather they break down into a sludge-like liquid which is placed into a rigid cylindrical container with a few other magic/handwavium particles. When compressed inside said container, the particles excite and effectively lift the container up. Height is controlled by changing how much pressure the pistons inside the container generate.

The end result is essentially a rigid airship, only that it can lift/repel much heavier cargo and cabins off the ground and into the sky. Effectively steampunkesque airship design. If the sludgy liquid is allowed to decay into a gaseous state using another process, the lifting potential is much higher and more efficient. Pistons still control height.

That said, orbital height, or even getting past the highest of islands, is impossible. A solid crystal structure is needed to get very high, something that my people haven't figured out how to recreate, nor will they ever. Refueling also needs to take place as the sludgy liquid or gaseous mix eventually dissipates. Note that solid crystals that islands use to float do NOT have this problem.

The main issue I have, however, is that the people of my world can construct artificial islands using these particles and processes. Something like a floating city or an artificially created floating island would be possible if they arrayed multiple containers. I explicitly want all my people living on naturally floating islands. People flying about on airships or flying carriers are fine. But something like floating Manhattan isn't.

How do I stop people from creating artificial islands using the magic/handwavium particles that suspend my floating islands in the first place?

Notes:

1. The particles only lift things to a certain height; they don't impart lateral direction. Airships need things like propellers or engines to change direction. Islands using crystals coast around the world of their own accord and aren't subjected to this limitation.
2. Refueling needs to occur for such particles. They don't last forever.
3. There is powered flight already, the jet engine has existed for a while. These don't use the above particles. They're normal aircraft by all accounts.
4. The first airships were very steampunk in design. Rigid airship frame with a boat like frame slung underneath it. Thus, any changes to things like atmosphere, winds, etc., must allow humans to still breathe and live.
5. The largest ships are flying aircraft carriers of sorts that can launch fighter jets (think the sizes along the F14 or A5). They are used for expeditionary mining or warfare operations in conjunction with an airship fleet. There are jet cargo aircraft as well.
6. Naturally floating islands will never hit each other.

Edit: The primary end goal in all of this is to stop my floating islanders from expanding past their home island with the physics and technology available to them. Expanding in this sense means living perpetually. Things like airship carriers are not part of the scope in this regard.

Answer 1

Nobody would build on an island that requires refueling

There are people in the real world who are afraid to fly, because they know that airplanes can crash. Even those of us who are willing to spend a few hours on an airplane occasionally would balk at becoming permanent residents on even the most reliable airplane.

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You say:

Refueling also needs to take place as the sludgy liquid or gaseous mix eventually dissipate out. Note that solid crystals that islands use to float do NOT have this problem.

Since your people can't create crystals, but only sludge, that means any artificial floater must be refueled. In other words, every artificial island will eventually crash unless people repeatedly intervene.

No sane person would be willing to spend any significant amount of time on an island that might crash. Nobody will build on it. Nobody will live on it. Nobody will take a job working on it.

Human projects fail all the time. Sometimes our plans just aren't good enough to provide a service that is perfectly uninterrupted. Even when our plans are good enough, we often are not: every human institution is vulnerable to incompetence and corruption.

There's already competition for the limited floating resource. What happens when the combined consumption of all airships plus all artificial islands is greater than what is available?

A lot of people would need to have an absurd amount of faith in people and human economies in order for artificial islands to be viable.

Answer 2

Q: People flying about on airships or flying carriers are fine. But something like floating Manhattan isn't. How do I stop people from creating artificial islands using the magic/handwavium particles that suspend my floating islands in the first place?

A: however the surface is inaccessible to my floating islanders.

You answer in your question. The land they have up in the islands is all the land that they have got. They cannot go down and get more nonfloating land because the surface is inaccessible.

They can carve up the islands they have got. They can stick a few of them together. They can mine ore from a floating island and make an airship, or a building, or belt buckles. But they cannot go down and get a huge new island and float it.

Answer 3

Island Big Boat Small

Your floating island needs a million times more crystal fuel than a large airship to stay afloat. It also needs a billion times more metal and a trillion times more stone and earth to stand on. We do not have that much stuff to spare.

Add to this how -- unlike an airship -- the island needs to be constantly refueled. I propose the airships can sit on the ground all day and not use the fuel. When they land, they open the hatch on the crystal container. The sludge is no longer compressed into the right shape, and it loses its levitation powers. It also stops evaporating.

Answer 4

Winds and currents

Here's a question for you: humanity can make boats. We're pretty good at making boats. We've had thousands of years of practice, and we can make everything from canoes to supercarriers. Massive oil tankers, haulers that can move whole oil wells, all sorts of fun stuff.

So why can't we make an ocean-going city?

We can't do it because of dynamic forces. Waves, water pressure, buoyancy would conspire to make a mockery of our efforts. The forces that can be brought to bear on such a large structure are just too much to handle.

So it is here. If you had a super-gigantic airship, it would be far too large to be rigid, and composed of too many chaotically moving parts to survive.

Answer 5

It's Impractical

There are lots of wild things nowadays people can do, but not a lot things people will do, because of time, money, ect. As an example, a wealthy government could create a city out of gold or chocolate, but there would be no reason to do so or return on investment.

In this case, there will be no incentive for creating an artificial island because it would be extremely expensive; while on a natural island the people could mine and gather resources, rather than losing them. It would be beneficial to have an abundance of islands to this end, but even without this an artificial island made out of gathered resources would just be impractical.

Answer 6

Radiation or toxicity within a certain size range

At size ranges above 100m, the particles start to become dangerous to life.

In one variation on this idea they emit huge amounts of radiation with frequency that changes exponentially (or similar) with the size of the island. It's a sort of resonant cavity. Up to 100m, the emitted radiation is radio frequency, but above 100m you get into microwaves and everyone around gets cooked.

Natural islands are so much bigger they emit safely in the visible light range. There may be continents that are borderline or completely uninhabitable due to UV/xrays/etc.

Therefore, everything between 100 and 3000m is lethal. Collisions between carrier sized airships are always lethal and are a last resort of defeated admirals.

Answer 7

takes too long

The crystals have to grow in place. This takes millennia but imbues the matrix they grow in with powers to hold them together. This is why the crystals break down when mined.

Answer 8

Economics and ergonomics

There is lots of perfectly good land around the world to live on, yet people crowd urban areas. Why? Economics and ergonomics. Access to natural resources, industries, goods and services, jobs and opportunity are all reasons people choose to live on your natural islands rather than on new artificial islands. History plays a role as well: the natural islands have a great head start in terms of economical development, whereas making a new artificial island is expensive and seen as an insane risk, because no one would move to the middle of nowhere. Historically, frontiers were settled due to access to natural resources, but an artificial island doesn't have any of those benefits. Even if housing is very expensive on a natural island, it may still be more economical to build N additional houses on the natural island by towering up rather than build the artificial island + N additional houses.

What about the lifestyle of living on an airship? Perhaps it's harder to sleep at night due to noise from engines or vibrations/rocking or even just routine acceleration. Perhaps people experience something like seasickness. Maybe people perceive it as being less safe. Would you live on an airplane? Probably not. And for many people, they would also prefer not to live on a ship or in a bus/car. Maybe people would feel life on an airship or artificial island would simply be less convenient in many ways. Other possible differences are the atmosphere and ambiance, air quality levels and pollution, presence of greenery and nature. It would take a lot to pull people away from their family/friends on the natural islands to go live on a barren artificial island.

For the vast majority of people, they will not want to pay more for a worse life. There will always be intrepid explorers who are exceptions to the rule, and occupations which must to live on ships, but just like in our world, most people will naturally elect to live as they traditionally have if they can.

Answer 9

It's too expensive.

Simply make these float-crystals very complex to extract. Specifically, I'd suggest something like "crystals instantly decompose into vapor when exposed to atmosphere" or "crystals immediately decompose when exposed to light". Both of these factors would make it superbly difficult to mine, yet allow them to function just fine underground and sealed away where they support the natural floating islands.

For the airships, utilizing these crystals is still possible but they are difficult to acquire. Essentially, all the mining needs to be done in a vacuum, where the miners are sealed in the cave via airlock and need to wear tube-fed respirators while they mine. Then, once they find a crystal, they need to load it in an evacuated airtight container before it can leave the cavern.

This means that small crystals for smaller flying ships are still possible, but building large scale floating islands is functionally impossible because you would need enormous vacuum containers to transport these island-scale crystals and this is simply so impractical compared the the comparative ease of transporting smaller crystals.

Answer 10

your magic particle have the annoying effect to repel each other. But in this case the effect become bigger the closer and the more they are. kind of like magnet but with a reach of several meters and the more particle in a given volume the stronger the effect.

• A scientist studying those Natural Island will found those particle arrange in particular Cristal way in the ground. Way that defy comprehension and no one could recreate it.

• One can make boat putting some of those in container. For larger ship the repel effect start to be feel and the container must be old tight with steel - concrete. No one can even imagine making a flying city.

Answer 11

They might be defeated simply by the logistics of the task, the unavailability of materials, and/or laws the inhabitants have developed against it.

Presumably the floating islands are (mostly?) made out of ordinary rock/sand/soil? If so, then you'd have to deconstruct one in order to make more, since the surface doesn't offer anything. It could presumably destroy livelihoods, require a lot of (floating) earth-moving equipment, and might not really be to anyone's benefit.

If you're after a more pseudo-physics kind of explanation, perhaps the force that keeps them aloft also keeps them intact, like a kind of extra, pseudo-gravity. So, if you created extra islands, they would tend to just run into and coalesce with existing ones. The existing ones don't do that with each other because they're far enough away and, over eons, have entered an equilibrium state. And the airships can of course be controlled.

Answer 12

Increase the Gravity

From what is written in your question, I take it that the island is supported by the thrust of your magic particles, and not by buoyancy of a gas. The pressure generated by the magic particles on these pistons causes these islands to float. Essentially, a zeppelin, without the buoyancy.

There is an easy cheat code, that will prevent people from creating floating islands: Intense Gravity.

Gravity always tends to mess things up. Have too much gravity, and you will struggle to lift things up, rockets become impossible etc.

In your story, natural floating islands will have some sort of unknown mechanism, which would constantly renew the magic particles and thus, be able to remain afloat. However, since the inhabitants do not know this process, and never will, they cannot replicate this process, so they have no choice, but to constantly mine it from sources, to refuel themselves. Here comes the bummer.

The planet is really massive and therefore has a strong gravity. Which means that the fuel gets depleted rather quickly, as the airship has to produce more and more thrust to get itself off the ground.

For airships and flying carriers, this isn't an problem, as they are small enough to not fall back. But when you approach a critical mass, the amount of particles needed is too much to be possibly refueled in a reasonable amount of time, and thus the island falls back. That is the reason why people can float on airships and flying-carriers with the magic particles, but can never, ever get close enough to making real floating islands.

Answer 13

Ecology

This is a twist on the Not Enough Resources answer. In this case, because the inhabitants can't go to the surface to mine crystals, every time they mined one from a floating island it would loose altitude. The result would be an impending ecological disaster, and laws could be passed limiting mining so that islands don't fall. As a result there would never be enough of the particles to float a new island.

Answer 14

They have to be monocrystals....and defective crystals are anti buoyant

It's very hard to make giant monocrystals of anything even in real life.

Natural islands have enormous ancient monocrystals that generate huge amounts of lift.

Down on the planet surface, 99.99% of the crystals that form are non buoyant. They're actually antibuoyant, so much that they sink into the planet where they are heated and compressed. Once in a blue moon, a perfect large or giant monocrystal forms, large enough to rip up the soft earth above it and fly up into the sky.

Smaller crystals can form at the surface without sinking or metamorphasising. They float around at various heights with no dirt on them.

But best of luck making an island because: A) You can't combine two of them. At best, you break your nice boulder sized crystals into less buoyant crystals.

B) If you make a mistake, the crystals become defective and become antibuoyant. Even a few defective antibuoyant nanoparticles are going to prevent any nucleation of good, buoyant crystals. They will seed anti buoyant crystals.

This happens in real life to chemists trying to crystallise things, btw. In horror stories, crystallisation works for years until one day..WHOOPS! Time to move lab.

What's worse, antibuoyant crystals grow really easily.

Answer 15

No dirt

Remember Kevin Costner's Waterworld? In the opening scene, the hero gets mobbed because he has a pile of dirt.

Now, I don't want your story to be like Waterworld in its reception, but maybe we can make lemonade from Mr Costner's lemon.

Buoyant crystals are ten a penny. It's good old dirt that's invaluable. You can't grow trees on crystals, nor wheat. It constantly erodes and falls down to the surface and is only gained when a new natural island is formed.

The amount of dirt you need to prevent a crystal taking off into the frozen stratosphere and freezing or choking everyone increases with the cube of the island radius. Economics forbids it.

Answer 16

It's not mentioned how long it takes for a natural floating island to form or how plentiful they are but since they never collide, it seems likely that they evolved a state of equilibrium over a long period of time equivalent to geologic timescales on Earth.

Cultural and Economic Barriers The inhabitants of each island will have given each island its own name and cultural significance would likely be attached to each one. One thing that might prevent the construction of artificial islands would be chauvinism or snobbery, an unwillingness of the inhabitants to live on something as gauche as an artificial island. Still, considering that analogous projects on Earth managed to find buyers willing to live on man-made, aesthetically questionable coral reefs, we never know what people will go for, and a stronger case is necessary.

The ability to create the first artificial airships would have marked a major milestone in the planetary culture's development, sparking off an era of exploration. And at some point, each floating island will be mapped, its orbital path characterized and relative mineral content classified, etc.

Lack of Raw Materials Building an artificial island would represent a monumental task immense enough to consume the entirety of an island's resources for some time. The natural resources required to build it do not come from the planet's surface, since the inhabitants are isolated from that for reasons that weren't given, but the materials have to come from somewhere. They would have to mine something like planetary satellites or asteroids in the region, or destroy a natural island in order to produce an artificial one. This presents a very real logistic barrier, not to mention economic, to the construction of artificial islands, and it's a convincing one, I think.

Lack of Utility But even assuming they could solve those issues, the OP mentioned that the buoyancy of the natural islands is dependent on a mechanism involving the solidified crystalline structure, which the inhabitants cannot reproduce artificially. In that case, there's really no question about what prevents them from building artificial islands. There simply is no benefit in doing so, and it's likely few people would ever seriously consider the possibility.

Planetary Forces If, while the planet formed, the islands coalesced into their different altitudes and orbital paths from, say, an "accretion sphere" (which would actually be more like a series of concentric "accretion shells"), there may not even be any place to put an artificial island, since the reason there happens to be any space at all in the atmosphere that's not occupied by a natural island is because that space is part of a natural island's orbital path and was cleared out by spectacular collisions early in the planet's formation. Any early attempts to create an artificial island would place it right in the path of a natural island and it would be destroyed by the same processes that created the natural ones.

Biological Processes If the inhabitants went on to develop technology allowing them to steer an immensely massive object out of the way of an oncoming land mass, they would still need to reproduce whatever ecological mechanisms exist to keep the natural islands perpetually inhabitable and able to continually convert metabolic wastes into to agricultural nutrients. Otherwise, life on the artificial island might quickly become intolerable (similar to the spectacular failure of the Biosphere 2 project in 1992, during which eight volunteers locked themselves in a 3-acre hermetically-sealed terrarium in Arizona which cost $150 million to construct. We should be careful, though, to note that the project suffered so much from bad administration, lack of expertise and mismanaged publicity that it probably failed even to falsify the validity of its own underlying concept.)

Answer 17

Lack of Structural Strength.

Islands naturally float because more or less of the particles are dispersed through the rocky substrate that makes up a floating island. That makes the whole rock float, which tends to minimize stresses.

If you instead pull it out and make a lifting cylinder, you have a large rock balanced on a single point. That has a strong tendency to crumble, with catastrophic results for anyone on it.

Of course, you could carefully build a steel platform suspended by lift cylinders with a lot of lifting capacity, and pile dirt on it, but there is no compelling reason to do so. It's about like how we don't make artificial islands by putting sod on aircraft carriers: you totally could, but...why?

Answer 18

I can think of at least 3 ways.

1. They are too much of a target. A ship can always move but anything permanent just invites raiders who can approach from any angle. they can spend months planning waiting for the perfect opportunity because the target will always be there and you can't cover every angle of attack unlike forts on water or land.

2. proximity. You can't put too many of the cylinders too close together or something bad happens, they explode or attract dangerous wildlife, or they just start loosing power. which puts an upper limit on the size of thing you can float with it. That will not stop small outposts (essentially watch towers) but you will not get anything you could call a town. this either puts a limit on the size of ships or lets ships get around it by being light weight.

3. wildlife. the cylinders attract wildlife. Not a big issue for ships that is constantly moving but as soon as something is not moving for too long it starts becoming an issue. Either the wildlife is very dangerous or very destructive. sit still for too long and they start homing in on the spot is huge numbers. use anything from sky sharks to sky barnacles, to giant bees.

Answer 19

The Crystal structure required to maintain an Island is very specific, very large and vibrate at a frequency that maintains their 'pressure' upon the surface air, keeping them floating 'above', like an iceblock in water. they also give off reverberations, maintaining the frequency, and pushing them away from each other.

To Create an Island, the inhabitants would need to understand the exact weight ratio of Crystal to Island size. They'd have to know the frequency for that ammount, get the frequency to be correct so their new island pushes gentle against all other islands and the planet itself. If any of these variables are wrong, the island would not sustain itself.

None of this information is apparent in the crystal at any scale smaller than the smallest existing island. To study it, to break it in any way would possibly result in the very destruction of that 'chunk', and possibly you might have in your world history such an occurance.

The Crystal 'mined' for your existing technology is from pre-existing veins that are identical but in far smaller chunks. They give off the same exact properties, and are far easier to access.

All experiments on the smaller veins, have never resulted in hardening the crystal to the extent of making it a solid for longer than a day, and even when contained in a pressurized containment to maintain its solid state, It still is insufficient quantity to stabilise, harmonize and hold its state for longer than a day (or the desired maximum length for your plot requirements)

The Initial formation of the crystal was aeons ago, when the world was forming, it was a complete sphere, and encompassed the world, metres thick, but it cracked, the islands you have now, rose from the original world, into their approximate places, the chunks that were too small, disintegrated and fell to the earth, creating mountain ranges (and veins of the material for plot hooks)

TL;DR: Only solid crystal is permanent, and its impossible to resolidify, and only singular large natural sized crystal will hold up an island, anything smaller (or groups of smaller) won't work. All sludge forms have a shelf life of a day and takes (plot required time) to recharge. Useful for an airship, useless for permanent floating cities.