If energy is not a constraint, such world would quickly get destroyed. Whatever effect you made, just yell “now, 1000 times more of the same”. If it does not destroy the world immediately, repeat this two or three times.
For example, the world can be easily destroyed by creating a sufficiently high temperature (which will warm up the atmosphere and burn everyone), or sufficient amounts of matter (black-hole amount, gravity-changing amount, or just enough water to create a global tsunami and/or rise ocean levels).
Possible fix—if we assume magic, we might as well have a magical solution, right? -- if the side effects of a spell kill the wizard, time is reverted and the wizard just immediately dies instead. (Question is, how fast and how directly must the wizard be killed; e.g. in case of the global tsunami created on a different continent. Magical answer: 3 days, any cause of death. Among other things, this allows you to reset the timeline by assassinating the wizard after the spell was successfully cast.)
In The Name of the Wind sympathy magic just allows to move energy around. They are talking about units of energy that can be moved around and one emergency source of energy is body temperature with wizard’s chill as a danger. There are implied formula about decrease with distance etc. Thus that world wouldn’t blow up with IT.
The book is not about algorithms/programs though the magic domain of artifactory there could embed something like that.
Wouldn’t the same argumentation lead to conclusion, that world should’ve already end soon after we’ve figured out how to make atomic bomb?
I don’t know how to write a novel with world which survives in equilibrium longer than a week (and this is one reason I’ve asked this question—I’d like to read ideas of others) but I suspect that the same way atomic bomb releases insane amounts of energy, yet we have reasons not to do that repeatedly, mages in would have good reasons to avoid destroying the world. Perhaps there’s not much to gain from doing so, maybe there’s M.A.D., maybe once you are smart enough to do that you are also smart enough not to do that, maybe you have to swear not to do that.
It could also be the case that I am too confident of our nuclear security. What’s currently our best reason not to blow up ourselves? Is it that nuclear energy costs a lot?
If energy is not a constraint, such world would quickly get destroyed. Whatever effect you made, just yell “now, 1000 times more of the same”. If it does not destroy the world immediately, repeat this two or three times.
For example, the world can be easily destroyed by creating a sufficiently high temperature (which will warm up the atmosphere and burn everyone), or sufficient amounts of matter (black-hole amount, gravity-changing amount, or just enough water to create a global tsunami and/or rise ocean levels).
Possible fix—if we assume magic, we might as well have a magical solution, right? -- if the side effects of a spell kill the wizard, time is reverted and the wizard just immediately dies instead. (Question is, how fast and how directly must the wizard be killed; e.g. in case of the global tsunami created on a different continent. Magical answer: 3 days, any cause of death. Among other things, this allows you to reset the timeline by assassinating the wizard after the spell was successfully cast.)
In The Name of the Wind sympathy magic just allows to move energy around. They are talking about units of energy that can be moved around and one emergency source of energy is body temperature with wizard’s chill as a danger. There are implied formula about decrease with distance etc. Thus that world wouldn’t blow up with IT. The book is not about algorithms/programs though the magic domain of artifactory there could embed something like that.
Wouldn’t the same argumentation lead to conclusion, that world should’ve already end soon after we’ve figured out how to make atomic bomb?
I don’t know how to write a novel with world which survives in equilibrium longer than a week (and this is one reason I’ve asked this question—I’d like to read ideas of others) but I suspect that the same way atomic bomb releases insane amounts of energy, yet we have reasons not to do that repeatedly, mages in would have good reasons to avoid destroying the world. Perhaps there’s not much to gain from doing so, maybe there’s M.A.D., maybe once you are smart enough to do that you are also smart enough not to do that, maybe you have to swear not to do that.
It could also be the case that I am too confident of our nuclear security. What’s currently our best reason not to blow up ourselves? Is it that nuclear energy costs a lot?