The Discussion Board
A section meant for the larger Samsara community, existing for the purpose of tabling matters for discussion and expanding the Samsara canon.
Topic #1: The Age of the Switchboard
How old is the Switchboard? Hard to say.
Take our own universe for example. Estimates put it at 13.7 billion years; a truly mind-bending number already, only becoming more so when appended with âyearsâ. Putting the human lifespan at eighty years means that the entirety of your existence is merely a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of all that ever was. The Earth is slightly less staggeringly old - a mere 4.5 billion years - but that too is multiple times the lifespan of a human being. Life clocks in slightly less than that at 3.7 billion years old, and human life is estimated to have properly arisen at around three hundred thousand years ago. The âmodernâ human civilization is barely ten thousand years old.
Consider my approach angle for this discussion; the age of the Switchboard is ultimately a question of how much time would it take for the systems in place to produce what exists.
Our universe, planet and selves are as old as they are because so many dice, coins and cards had to fall in just the right ways to allow more games of probability to eventually yield desirable results. A single bad throw early in the chain, and the numbers could be doubled or halved. If you consider our universe a fictional bit of worldbuilding, and all of the quirks of natural sciences the product of a genius mind, the age of the universe is simply what is justifiable under the systems that exist. The Switchboard is the same; looking at the nature of the Switchboardâs mechanics, how long would it take for what once was to become what is?
Itâs worth considering that the Switchboard differs from our universe down to the elementary building blocks. The Switchboard doesnât have atoms, and so it is quite difficult to ascertain just how long it would take for certain interactions to yield the results that exist. There are plenty of old science fiction media - for example - that portrayed the 2020s as a period of immense technological advancement, yet here we are in those very years far from anything portrayed in fiction. We continue to push our predictions ever outwards, as we continue to refine our guesstimates on how long it will take to have anything from cybernetic modifications to colonies on other worlds.
How long did the events of The Dawn of the Dancirah span? How long did it take for the First Thinkers to first arise? How long does it take for a star, wellspring or planet to form? How long was the Refrain? Every event in the Switchboard that was the product of relative randomness needs to have an amount of time behind it to make it believable that it occurred in the time that it did.
Itâs worth considering that a lot of the Switchboardâs otherwise punishing probability is subject to an amount of skew towards desirable ends due to the nature of chalk and the influence of the Astrolabe. As such, the final number for the age of the Switchboard may likely be lower than our own. But it is wise to remember that it is all up in the air. You could make the case that the question doesnât even matter; who really is concerned with the void of time that spans the appearance of the Astrolabe and the first thinking weave? Frankly, even I must concede that it isnât particularly relevant to much of what Iâm doing with Samsara beyond adding an amount of gravitas to the cosmos.
But itâs the wrong question to ask. I believe in thoroughness for thoroughnessâ sake, and as such we will devise an answer. One way or another.
Topic #2: The Population of the Stars
The Switchboard will produce narrative conducted on an interstellar scale. This was something I sought to realize from the very beginning when I first concocted the Strider Protocol. Such requires establishing the existence of inhabited star systems, and thus the question of the population of the Switchboard arises.
Our planet is estimated to have eight billion people on it. That means that if we want to take Earth as a unit of measurement, we then can infer the population of the Switchboard by how many âEarthsâ it has. Better put, how many of the Switchboardâs planets are inhabitable? If we assume that the Switchboard is roughly equal to our own universe in size and thus number of habitable planets, we could potentially be looking at fifty sextillion worlds. Even if we say that only 1% of those worlds are as inhabited as Earth, we are still looking at a monstrously large number.
It could really go either way. Hereâs another way of looking at it; how many third kin arose from the Astrolabic Spheres, and how long ago was that? With both numbers, we can approximate how many people exist in the Switchboard currently via deducing how swiftly the Third Kin reproduce. Lancasters multiply swiftly. Fel-Arcad do not. The math only gets muddier with time.
Space science fiction is notorious for having planets with only a single noteworthy settlement on it, and this has drawn a fair bit of critique. I personally have never found an issue with it. If we were moving to colonize Mars tomorrow, weâd land and set up camp in the first region capable of satisfying as many of our short-term and medium-term needs as possible. Satisfying long-term goals is easier with established infrastructure, meaning that even if we do need to set up another colony halfway around the planet, itâll only be after the first is a fully-functional organism. This is something weâd replicate on nearly every planet weâd hypothetically seek to establish a human presence on.
Why this is relevant to mention is that taking the entire Earth as a unit of measurement is absurd, when in reality the most populous planet would have been the Astrolabic Spheres, and all subsequent ones would generally host populations no larger than Earthâs cities. You could more properly think of a planet in the Switchboard as if the entire Earth only had - say - New York on it, and the rest is unexplored territory that simply has too little going for it. This reduces the estimated population of the Switchboard considerably, but still leaves us looking at a very, very large number once multiplied by the number of habitable planets.
It gets worse too. Third Kin are far hardier than humans, meaning that their standard for âhabitableâ is far, far more generous. Biomes of the Dancirah outlines some truly awful places for a vacation, much less permanent residence, but thatâs only from our perspective. Striders could live on Mars with quite literally zero need for advanced life support apparatus, as they can simply breathe in a vacuum and have no actual need for food. This means that fifty sextillion planets is conservative if anything, a truly worrisome prospect.
Important to all this is the question of narrative. If an actor is going to blow up a planet, essential to how we judge this action is the cost of it. If a hundred people are dying, thatâs dreadful, but not much different from the worst, human offenders that exist today. But if its millions or billions, things get far more concerning very fast. Even more important is the fact that some things existing in the Samsara canon only makes sense if there are people - enough people - to put them there. If I propose the existence of orbital shipyards the size of small countries that exist to build, maintain and decommission fleets of starships, I am inadvertently saying that there exists enough manpower to make such a thing possible.
The target is a moving one; very hard to pin down. I look forward to contributions.
Topic #3: The Population of Striders
Third Kin can fundamentally be divided into groups based on presence or lack of the Protocol Powers, these being the Strider and Weave Protocols which allow striding and weaving chalk. It is relevant to then ask how many have these powers - the blessed, as it were - and how many do not - the grounded.
This question is fortunately, a little easier. For one, the answer simply needs to be a percentage that will be applied to the number gotten in Topic #2 to give us our final answers. For another, we can make inferences based on some already established bits of canon. For one, itâs already set in stone that the Lancasters - the largest population of grounded - are also the largest great family by number in the Switchboard. Most of the Switchboard is Lancasters, meaning most of the Switchboard isnât blessed.
The share is pushed down even further when considering the Vahnkin also are majorly those who canât weave chalk or use the Strider Protocol, though some are capable of using the Voidâs equivalent; the depthstride. Additionally, the families that yield the most blessed - the Silâkhan and the Fel-Arcad - are not particularly fond of reproducing, meaning that on average, the blessed donât preemptively replace themselves all that frequently, meaning that the population of the blessed in the Switchboard is almost certainly declining. The divide is pushed ever more in the favor of the grounded.
The narrative significance is much of why this question matters. The divide between the blessed and the grounded is one of individual strength versus collective strength, and this colors much of the higher ideas that will come to define Samsara narrative. A Strider is a fearsome existence on their own, but Striders as a whole are hardly capable of rivalling the power presented by the entirety of non-Striders. There are some exceptions in the form of truly ludicrous phenomena such as ledgerial casts that Striders can pull off, but these require multiple Striders of like-mind to act in massively destructive manners while also not being impeded or prevented from doing so by other elements - including other Striders.
Such is the shape of the dilemma.
Topic #4: The Share of Each Family
And of course, we must consider the share of each great family.
This one is again, rather easy, made so due to the previously established realities relating to each family. The Lancasters are the most numerous of all the great families, while the Silâkhan - due to their being the youngest family and disinclined towards replacing their swiftly diminishing ranks - number the least. The Vahnkin - in universe anyway - are hard to numerically quantify, due to the treacherous nature of the Void. But they are similar to the Lancasters in being believers in the merit of a large population. They and the Fel-Arcad battle for second and third place as though the Fel do not reproduce fairly often, they live the longest of all in the Switchboard, and so many Fel will see the multiple generations of Vahnkin in their lifetime.
This question is answered by percentages, and the relevance of that answer is demographics. With all other extraneous factors removed, what is the breakdown of an average crowd in the Switchboard? When those factors are added, how much do they skew the baseline? How much of a hypothetical characterâs prejudices - for example - are a product of the infrequency of the target of their bias? What does an average squad of the Spyndl Academy look like? How about other academies and groups of interest?
Again, this is open for discussion.