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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

it may indeed be silly, but as far as energy input to the system goes, all you need to do is postulate that one stage can photosynthesise sunlight.

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Yeah, it's been many years, but my impression was that things could be explained as an invasive and engineered all-in-one species that terraforms (arrakiforms?) the environment, partly as a way to eliminate competition.

One phase photosynthesizes, one phase sequesters excess water, and one phase... Stirs the lithosphere and eliminates large animals or trespassers?

In the last Herbert Dune book, Chapterhouse, Arrakis is destroyed to eliminate the source of spice, but at least one worm is transported to another planet to begin to turn that into desert, thus ensuring a continued supply.

there are also many species on the ocean floor that do not get their energy from the sun, but from vents of heat from the earth. maybe they dont photosynthesise, they use heat instead

He says that spice causes psychic activation in humans. That's more than enough woowoo to imply they get their energy from another dimension entirely.

The spice allows creatures to fold spacetime... yet here we are arguing about the finer details of the ecosystem.

The spice that allows a fetus to tap into the consciousness of all its ancestors and communicate with its mother while in the womb.

> The spice allows creatures to fold spacetime...

Doesn't seems so fantastical now, does it?

I dunno, "tapping into consciousness of all its ancestors" could be a metaphor for a form of DNA memory.

Folding spacetime requires incredible amounts of energy. I still think that's the bigger deal.

>Folding spacetime requires incredible amounts of energy

That's unclear. It could easily release incredible amounts of energy, but require very little.

iirc folding spacetime was a separate (and unexplained) piece of magic; what the spice did was to let you navigate a ship through folded space, which unenhanced human perception could not do.

but specifics apart, the main point is just because readers accept hyperspace and extrasensory perception as part of your fictional universe, doesn't mean they will not expect the laws of thermodynamics, or planetary ecology, or other related fields, to also be suspended.

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