Notes
This story came together in a weird way. I knew I wanted to talk about one “form” of energy in every story in this cycle, and the only logical one for this story was “motion energy” or “mechanical energy”. Simply put, the fact that stuff that moves has energy. The simplest form for most people.
But how do you turn that into story? The more I focused on talking about that theme, the less I liked the story. I decided to let it rest for a bit.
When I returned, the idea of “The Alchemist” was born. A character that would have an arc that stretches across (almost) the entire cycle, coming back or being relevant in all sorts of ways later. That’s what eventually kicked off this story.
The idea of “capturing the sun” only came when I wrote the “blurb” for this story—that small summary you see on a book cover or on the tiles of the webste—and improvised that part.
Slowly but surely, my mind puzzled together how to bring back parts of earlier stories, and introduce the Alchemist in a tense way, and talk more about forces and energy. But it was a bumpy road getting there, where I constantly doubted if I shouldn’t do something else entirely. I guess that just shows you how hard writing stories is, because I feel like I regularly start my notes by saying this.
Invention of Tools
This story talks about the invention of “tools”. Most likely, this started with twigs and sticks. Wood was readily available, easy to manipulate, and very early civilizations showed a very deep understanding of how to treat wood. (They used lots of processes, such as sanding and stripping, that we still use today.)
Humans lack the natural tools for self-defense, such as claws. We’re pretty hopeless, actually, in that department. That’s why early humans used our advantage in brain power to manufacture tools. Such as sharp spear-like objects that basically acted like nails or claws.
But a bunch of sharp twigs is obviously hard to preserve. That’s why the earliest evidence of tools comes in the form of stones.
At some point, humans figured out an interesting property of something called “cryptocrystalline” stones (such as flintstone). From most angles, in most cases, it’s very solid rock. Unbreakable. You don’t want to be hit in the head with it.
But if you strike it at just the right place, with some force, it chips in a very predictable way. The stones have a sort of layered structure which you can peel off. (This is what gives all those stone age tools their recognizable and distinct look, if you search for images.)
The result is a very sharp rock. With that, you can modify rocks even more, creating different shapes that eventually led to even more complex tools.
For those first thousands of years, though, people would just hold rocks or sticks directly in their hand. In fact, early humans had similar hands to ours, but with one major difference: their hands were much stronger but less precise, so they could hold a spear or stone in a death grip, but they lacked the finesse to handle sewing needles, for example.
Because tools rely heavily on having precise, agile hands, with opposing thumbs, we have not observed advanced tool usage in other animals. However, other animals do use tools in the broadest sense. Many animals are clever enough to use stones to break stuff. Dolphins understand properties of certain plants well enough to use them as a sort of mask to protect their snout.
Crows have been proven capable of multi-component tools. This means you can give them the individual parts, such as some twigs, and they will rapidly figure out how to combine them to reach an advanced goal. Such as connecting the twigs into a longer one.
(This story also introduces sharpness a bit and gives a hint as to how it works. But I had no time to fully dive into that, so it will probably return in a later story.)
So what makes humans different? What allowed us to shoot from chipping stones to hammers, levers, and eventually machines? Partially luck, with how our hands and body developed. But partially our brains. The ability to look a bit further than most animals …
Intelligence & Adaptability
You might wonder why I chose foxes as the animal here. Sure, they’re quite an old species, so they were around in some shape or form back then. Sure, most people like them and can somewhat “humanize” them. (In fact, there are many drawings and paintings of “fox scientist” online. I bet you won’t find those for “spider scientist”.)
What settled it, though, was when I discovered that foxes are only just behind humans when it comes to range of habitat.
Humans are able to live absolutely everywhere on earth. We spread across the globe, starting from Africa, quite early in our development and were able to live in any climate.
Foxes are the same. You can find them absolutely everywhere, and they’re rarely endangered or in trouble. And this has been the way for millions of years; a time in which the climate changed a lot, so it’s not like foxes were just lucky they could live anywhere in the “current climate of the world”.
As such, to make this possible, a species must be adaptable.
There will never be a “constant climate”. Everything is always changing. If you’re the dominant species, then other animals will try to find new ways to hide from you or defeat you, which forces you to adapt.
Time and time again, we see that species that thrive and survive are adaptable. They are clever enough to know they should always change, and to figure out how to change. Such an animal can live anywhere, survive anything, and we see remarkable similarities here between humans and foxes.
It is my interesting theory, even, that it might be the other way around.
Adaptability leads to intelligence. It is the only path towards it. Assuming you don’t need to change will just kill you when the rest does change. Overcoming changing circumstances is exactly how you learn and grow in knowledge or wisdom.
It’s probably also why foxes are known to be clever and cunning animals. The “sly fox” is a stereotype present in all folklore, all around the world, ever since people started telling stories. This suggests there’s a lot of truth to it.
You will not see a fox building and using a hammer in the wild, of course not. But by simply having the natural mind-set to adapt and be flexible, you can come a very long way, and seem incredibly intelligent.
Why have no other animals developed advanced brains like humans? They might have! It’s quite likely that, randomly, babies are born with much more brainpower than their parents. Which should technically allow them to be more clever and think up better plans about how to survive. Perhaps, right now, a really clever crab is born at the bottom of the ocean.
As this story aims to illustrate, however, brains are expensive. Our human brain requires more energy, all day everyday, than our muscles. Our brain is always thinking and sapping energy, while our muscles only need it for bursts of exercise.
As such, unless you can immediately turn that larger brain into an advantage, you are actually at a disadvantage. You require more food, but have nothing to show for it. Which is why it’s unlikely such a specimen survives, bears children, and passes on those “clever genes”.
Giant Foxes & Glyptodon
As the story states, animals grow larger in cold areas/times. That’s why ice ages produced mammoths.
On top of that, though, large animals usually block the evolution of smaller ones. When the dinosaurs were around, few other species managed to grow very large. There was not enough space or food, they’d just become a bigger target and still not defeat a dinosaur.
When they were removed by the asteroid, though, we see a major resurgence of species. And their general size increases too. That’s when earth entered a time of “Giant Wolves” and “Giant Frogs” and what not.
Over time, as more climate change hit the world (such as ice ages) and more territories changed, most of those larger species went extinct. They could not find enough space and food. They were too large to adapt in time.
This story just mentions a few fun ones. The Glyptodon was a huge armadillo that looks like it’d be an amazing sight if one of them walked past you in the forest. The Megatherium was a huge ground-dwelling sloth that would probably scare you to death. Nowadays, we mostly know much smaller sloths (which are still relatively large) that live in trees.
The major danger during these times, especially for early humans, were catlike creatures. Which are mostly the same ones we know today, but, as expected, a bit larger and even more dangerous.
I don’t know if there were truly Giant Foxes or if they worked like this. But it’s likely.
Most importantly, they are not the same as a fox but just “larger”. These are different species, which would not be able to procreate with a regular fox, for example.
Mechanical Energy & Levers
Two formulas are “demonstrated” in this story. They’ll be covered more times later, shown or used in different ways, but I still wanted to talk about them.
- F = ma => Force is equal to mass times acceleration.
- W = Fd => Energy (“Work”) is equal to force times distance.
This is why levers work. The Conservation of Energy states that, whatever happens, the amount of energy in a (closed) system should stay the same. If you push on a seesaw, you energy should stay the same when it comes to how the seesaw responds.
Now, a regular seesaw is symmetrical: it can move the same distance on both sides. As such, if you push it down 10 centimeters, it will go up 10 centimeters on the other side.
But what if you change that? You move the seesaw so that one side is really short and the other really long. Then pushing one side down 10 centimeters will only move the other side 1 centimeter.
Now let’s go back to our calculations. The distance (d) on one side is 1/10 of the other side.
So how can energy stay the same? If the universe multiplies the force (F) on the other side by 10!
That’s why a lever allows you to “multiply” a small force into a much bigger one. At the cost of having to move a longer distance; and the other side only moving a small distance.
Although, admittedly, the story takes some liberties here. Moving a huge boulder probably needs a longer lever plus more force. But hopefully the idea comes through.
Conservation of Energy is not some annoying limitation we have to work with. It’s what actually allows us to have our modern tools and society, by using smart tools to amplify the meager force of our arms, and machines to convert energy into different things.
I had no time to talk more about force and acceleration in this story. That’s a shame, but I’ll try to handle that in later stories.
All you need to know is that “mechanical energy” or “motion energy” is the most visible and easy to understand type of energy. Because it talkes about how entire objects move. Such as a lever to push away a boulder. Such as a soccer player swinging their leg.
Though the terminology can get a bit confusing.
In common speech, people use “energy” to mean something like a battery charge. You can only swing your leg if you’ve eaten food beforehand, which your body has turned into energy, which you “use” or “deplete” to move. Energy often means electricity, and you deplete it by using it.
But when talking about these formulas, in physics, it’s not that. In fact, maybe confusingly, it’s somewhat the opposite.
Energy is this very abstract concept defined as “the ability to work”. Motion energy is defined as “the ability to move”.
As such, while your leg moves, science says that it “has energy”. If it moves faster, it “has more motion energy”. As you know now, the faster your leg accelerates, or the further you move it, the more energy it has.
As if it’s some magical creature that’s all around us which your leg attracts while moving … maybe something we can call Enyrgia …
As we move through the cycle and you see other types of energy, I hope this concept settles in even more.