It’s monstrous, yes, but does anyone here honestly have a better solution, if you accept the premise that Dementors are indestructible?
Were I involved in the decision-making, and assuming the Dementors are not just indestructible but also unimprisonable, unteleportable-to-the-surface-of-Jupiter, and so forth, I’d like to think I would present the following argument: “Right now, we can’t defeat the Dementors, so we do best to negotiate some kind of agreement with them. We ought to continue researching a way to defeat them, and implement it when we find one. If we negotiate an agreement that we find convenient or easy to ignore, our odds of doing those things decrease, so Azkaban is a bad solution. I propose instead that we institute a lottery and feed the selected people to the volcano god—um, I mean, the Dementors. I further propose that we do so publicly, and that the only exception we allow is for people who are actively and effectively working on solving the Dementor problem.”
But I would expect to be voted down.
At which point I would be briefly tempted to “walk away from Omelas,” but wouldn’t follow through on it.
Were I involved in the decision-making, and assuming the Dementors are not just indestructible but also unimprisonable, unteleportable-to-the-surface-of-Jupiter, and so forth
They seem to be un-imprisonable, as far as I see. They can drain magic and decay matter. So that covers.… everything. Eventually, they’d get out of any ward or prison you’d devise for them.
Remember that Harry’s hypothesis of Dementors having no structure but what the wizards involved think of them is untested at best. So they might take revenge if they were suddenly faced with wizards trying to get rid of them.
Even if they do not have any such structure, wizards who started teleporting Dementors to Jupiter would probably think that the Dementors would take revenge on them, and so they would. They’re, after all, capable of breeding and barring Dementor-detecting magic(which I suppose is possible) it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll get all of them.
And yes, it’s a bad solution, unless you think that threatening scientists with killing random people unless they invent a cure for cancer is a good idea.
People already are being “randomly” killed by cancer, and will continue to be until we develop a cure. There’s no threatening left to do.
If I somehow had a choice between N random people dying of cancer every year or N people chosen deliberately by the government dying of cancer every year, and that was the only choice I had (that is, N is fixed), I would choose deliberate choice, with the expectation that we can pick victims who were about to die of other causes anyway and thus minimize the amount of life we destroy. But that reasoning doesn’t apply to a fixed number of people being tortured at any given moment.
If instead of dying of cancer you pick something more analogous, like living with multiple sclerosis, then yes my reasoning is similar: I reluctantly choose randomness over government-selected victims.
As for the logistics of battling Dementors, I’m not sure why that’s relevant: I’ve agreed to assume that there’s no known way to neutralize them, either for the reasons you lay out or for other reasons.
The problem with nuclear waste is that it lasts longer than languages or civilizations. You can’t really depend on systems with active human components to last thousands of years.
Come to think of it, that’s a problem with containing Dementors too. Better to just destroy the lot.
I wonder what would happen if you chucked a Dementor into a black hole.
If technological civilization doesn’t survive long enough to make nuclear waste a laughable problem I don’t really care what happens.
Well, in the long-run, yes. But what happens in the short-run? If there’s a planet-wide disaster that reduces the technology level for a while, it could take a very long time to get back to decent tech levels. In the meantime, the presence of nuclear waste could be quite bad. Indeed, if humans are trying to bootstrap back up to high tech levels by looking at the remains of our civilization, leaving radioactive material around could be very bad.
This line of thinking is similar to one of the major reasons we should not burn fossil-fuels- it isn’t as at all easy for a civilization to bootstrap up to current tech levels without them. We really don’t want to be in a position where a severe civilization crash is not recoverable. And having lots of radioactive material around could easily in a post-apocalyptic scenario be the difference between a return to civilization and extinction.
lots of radioactive material around? enough to pose an existential risk in a return to stone age communities? waste is highly localized. it is coal burning that is dumping radioactive materials into the atmosphere directly.
1) If humans are trying to bootstrap they are going to spend time investigating lots of sites from our society. That’s going to include the ones that had radioactive material. People run into this problem even today when they should know better.
2) While most of the radioactivity today is being released by things like the residual radioactive material in coal, that’s partially due to a lack of catastrophic events. We’re doing a pretty good job keeping most of the severely radioactive material contained for now. But if there were little or no maintenance, it wouldn’t take much (a few earthquakes or fires) to let loose a lot of radioactive material. Look at what happened at Chernobyl and then keep in mind that only a small fraction of the total radioactive material was released and that almost all that material existed prior to the accident itself. There are around 400 nuclear power plants in the world right now. It doesn’t take many of those to have worse than Chernobyl results to make things unpleasant.
That’s a remarkably good point, and I should have thought of it.
On the other hand… bureaucracy can be pretty good at forgetting safety protocols and losing documentation, even over a period of less than ten years. We should definitely at least continue to make a big political point of storing them, so that the storage locations will be documented for the people who care to look it up.
Also, the people who are conscientious enough to bother to keep up the containment would be far fewer, in absolute numbers, in magical England (which needs to store Dementors) than in muggle America (which needs to store nuclear waste), due to the much smaller total population. If that absolute number dips below one, there could be pretty serious trouble.
They seem to be un-imprisonable, as far as I see. They can drain magic and decay matter. So that covers.… everything. Eventually, they’d get out of any ward or prison you’d devise for them.
Can’t you keep them imprisoned in a ring of Patronuses?
Sure, if you’re willing to devote dozens of people to ’round the clock duty, forever. Better hope none of them has an off day wherein they can’t maintain the prerequisite happiness.
Now, if someone created a Charm that would replicate the affects of Patronuses w/o the need to constantly maintain it, or (Deathly Hallows movie pt1 spoiler) Hzoevqtr’f Cngebahf fuvryq was canon, or at least MOR!canon, that might be a different story
Don’t the Aurors in HP:MOR already sit around Azkaban with their Patronuses activated all the time when they’re on-duty?
I had certainly gotten that impression when I was reading it… and I can’t see how they could operate within Azkaban otherwise. As far as I know the Dementor aura is area-of-effect, it affects unshielded Aurors as readily as anyone else.
Admittedly, perhaps switching Azkaban from Dementors-as-employees to Dementors-as-prisoners would require more Aurors… it depends, I guess, on the number of Patronuses (Patroni?) required to maintain a sphere around them. Which in turn depends, I guess, on how many Dementors there are, and how compressible they are. (Or how well they overlap, I guess.)
That said, repairing their cell walls faster than they can destroy those walls might be more cost-effective.
There’s a huge difference between a couple of Aurors maintaining a couple of Patronuses (I thought it was Patroni too, but the wiki refers to them as Patronuses) to protect themselves from the fringe effect of the Dementors and trying to hold back over a hundred Dementors actively trying to leave. This is particularly true when you take into account that not only would this effort have to maintained, but Dementors can fly, meaning they’d just float right over the wall of Patronic energy (isn’t coinage fun?).
Maintaining a sphere...I don’t recall, could Patronuses of terrestrial animals fly? If they couldn’t, that would make it even harder to maintain a sphere, since the upper hemisphere would only be maintainable by those with aerial or aquatic Patronuses, given the assumption that water-animal Patronuses would “swim” through the air.
It’s notable that while one Patronus could have theoretically shielded all three card-players, all three aurors had theirs out, implying that they were all needed to combat the proximity to so many Dementors. Additionally, more Dementors means more of their effect seeping through the Patronuses, which sucks away your happiness, which weakens your Patronuses, which means more of their effect...etc. Heck, when the two remaining Dragon Poker-playing Aurors had both of their Patronuses up, all it took was one Dementor coming close to them to break through enough of their Patronic energy to give them instant headaches. Think of how many it would take to stop dozens of them all trying to wear you down.
Sticking them in their own cells and patrolling to make sure they haven’t worn away too much, shifting them to other cells and repairing the cells when they do...that could be possible, especially if magical repairs don’t break down faster around Dementors. It also might be worth it to see if you could Transfigure them into something else, in the hopes that though they’d still be unkillable, they hopefully wouldn’t project the decaying effect when turned into, say, a rock.
Were I involved in the decision-making, and assuming the Dementors are not just indestructible but also unimprisonable, unteleportable-to-the-surface-of-Jupiter, and so forth, I’d like to think I would present the following argument: “Right now, we can’t defeat the Dementors, so we do best to negotiate some kind of agreement with them. We ought to continue researching a way to defeat them, and implement it when we find one. If we negotiate an agreement that we find convenient or easy to ignore, our odds of doing those things decrease, so Azkaban is a bad solution. I propose instead that we institute a lottery and feed the selected people to the volcano god—um, I mean, the Dementors. I further propose that we do so publicly, and that the only exception we allow is for people who are actively and effectively working on solving the Dementor problem.”
But I would expect to be voted down.
At which point I would be briefly tempted to “walk away from Omelas,” but wouldn’t follow through on it.
They seem to be un-imprisonable, as far as I see. They can drain magic and decay matter. So that covers.… everything. Eventually, they’d get out of any ward or prison you’d devise for them.
Remember that Harry’s hypothesis of Dementors having no structure but what the wizards involved think of them is untested at best. So they might take revenge if they were suddenly faced with wizards trying to get rid of them.
Even if they do not have any such structure, wizards who started teleporting Dementors to Jupiter would probably think that the Dementors would take revenge on them, and so they would. They’re, after all, capable of breeding and barring Dementor-detecting magic(which I suppose is possible) it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll get all of them.
And yes, it’s a bad solution, unless you think that threatening scientists with killing random people unless they invent a cure for cancer is a good idea.
People already are being “randomly” killed by cancer, and will continue to be until we develop a cure. There’s no threatening left to do.
If I somehow had a choice between N random people dying of cancer every year or N people chosen deliberately by the government dying of cancer every year, and that was the only choice I had (that is, N is fixed), I would choose deliberate choice, with the expectation that we can pick victims who were about to die of other causes anyway and thus minimize the amount of life we destroy. But that reasoning doesn’t apply to a fixed number of people being tortured at any given moment.
If instead of dying of cancer you pick something more analogous, like living with multiple sclerosis, then yes my reasoning is similar: I reluctantly choose randomness over government-selected victims.
As for the logistics of battling Dementors, I’m not sure why that’s relevant: I’ve agreed to assume that there’s no known way to neutralize them, either for the reasons you lay out or for other reasons.
You are thinking only of passive static defense, which is an incorrect model that will predict much weaker ability than actual.
it’s the same shoddy reasoning we see applied to nuclear waste.
”but the current containment will only last 1000 years!”
okay, reseal it every thousand.
The problem with nuclear waste is that it lasts longer than languages or civilizations. You can’t really depend on systems with active human components to last thousands of years.
Come to think of it, that’s a problem with containing Dementors too. Better to just destroy the lot.
I wonder what would happen if you chucked a Dementor into a black hole.
The black hole would probably survive.
If technological civilization doesn’t survive long enough to make nuclear waste a laughable problem I don’t really care what happens.
Well, in the long-run, yes. But what happens in the short-run? If there’s a planet-wide disaster that reduces the technology level for a while, it could take a very long time to get back to decent tech levels. In the meantime, the presence of nuclear waste could be quite bad. Indeed, if humans are trying to bootstrap back up to high tech levels by looking at the remains of our civilization, leaving radioactive material around could be very bad.
This line of thinking is similar to one of the major reasons we should not burn fossil-fuels- it isn’t as at all easy for a civilization to bootstrap up to current tech levels without them. We really don’t want to be in a position where a severe civilization crash is not recoverable. And having lots of radioactive material around could easily in a post-apocalyptic scenario be the difference between a return to civilization and extinction.
lots of radioactive material around? enough to pose an existential risk in a return to stone age communities? waste is highly localized. it is coal burning that is dumping radioactive materials into the atmosphere directly.
1) If humans are trying to bootstrap they are going to spend time investigating lots of sites from our society. That’s going to include the ones that had radioactive material. People run into this problem even today when they should know better.
2) While most of the radioactivity today is being released by things like the residual radioactive material in coal, that’s partially due to a lack of catastrophic events. We’re doing a pretty good job keeping most of the severely radioactive material contained for now. But if there were little or no maintenance, it wouldn’t take much (a few earthquakes or fires) to let loose a lot of radioactive material. Look at what happened at Chernobyl and then keep in mind that only a small fraction of the total radioactive material was released and that almost all that material existed prior to the accident itself. There are around 400 nuclear power plants in the world right now. It doesn’t take many of those to have worse than Chernobyl results to make things unpleasant.
I think we’d have to get down to brass tacks and look at real projections because I still seriously doubt it could be an existential threat.
That’s a remarkably good point, and I should have thought of it.
On the other hand… bureaucracy can be pretty good at forgetting safety protocols and losing documentation, even over a period of less than ten years. We should definitely at least continue to make a big political point of storing them, so that the storage locations will be documented for the people who care to look it up.
Also, the people who are conscientious enough to bother to keep up the containment would be far fewer, in absolute numbers, in magical England (which needs to store Dementors) than in muggle America (which needs to store nuclear waste), due to the much smaller total population. If that absolute number dips below one, there could be pretty serious trouble.
Can’t you keep them imprisoned in a ring of Patronuses?
Sure, if you’re willing to devote dozens of people to ’round the clock duty, forever. Better hope none of them has an off day wherein they can’t maintain the prerequisite happiness.
Now, if someone created a Charm that would replicate the affects of Patronuses w/o the need to constantly maintain it, or (Deathly Hallows movie pt1 spoiler) Hzoevqtr’f Cngebahf fuvryq was canon, or at least MOR!canon, that might be a different story
Don’t the Aurors in HP:MOR already sit around Azkaban with their Patronuses activated all the time when they’re on-duty?
I had certainly gotten that impression when I was reading it… and I can’t see how they could operate within Azkaban otherwise. As far as I know the Dementor aura is area-of-effect, it affects unshielded Aurors as readily as anyone else.
Admittedly, perhaps switching Azkaban from Dementors-as-employees to Dementors-as-prisoners would require more Aurors… it depends, I guess, on the number of Patronuses (Patroni?) required to maintain a sphere around them. Which in turn depends, I guess, on how many Dementors there are, and how compressible they are. (Or how well they overlap, I guess.)
That said, repairing their cell walls faster than they can destroy those walls might be more cost-effective.
That is the correct Latin plural, although not used by Rowling.
There’s a huge difference between a couple of Aurors maintaining a couple of Patronuses (I thought it was Patroni too, but the wiki refers to them as Patronuses) to protect themselves from the fringe effect of the Dementors and trying to hold back over a hundred Dementors actively trying to leave. This is particularly true when you take into account that not only would this effort have to maintained, but Dementors can fly, meaning they’d just float right over the wall of Patronic energy (isn’t coinage fun?).
Maintaining a sphere...I don’t recall, could Patronuses of terrestrial animals fly? If they couldn’t, that would make it even harder to maintain a sphere, since the upper hemisphere would only be maintainable by those with aerial or aquatic Patronuses, given the assumption that water-animal Patronuses would “swim” through the air.
It’s notable that while one Patronus could have theoretically shielded all three card-players, all three aurors had theirs out, implying that they were all needed to combat the proximity to so many Dementors. Additionally, more Dementors means more of their effect seeping through the Patronuses, which sucks away your happiness, which weakens your Patronuses, which means more of their effect...etc. Heck, when the two remaining Dragon Poker-playing Aurors had both of their Patronuses up, all it took was one Dementor coming close to them to break through enough of their Patronic energy to give them instant headaches. Think of how many it would take to stop dozens of them all trying to wear you down.
Sticking them in their own cells and patrolling to make sure they haven’t worn away too much, shifting them to other cells and repairing the cells when they do...that could be possible, especially if magical repairs don’t break down faster around Dementors. It also might be worth it to see if you could Transfigure them into something else, in the hopes that though they’d still be unkillable, they hopefully wouldn’t project the decaying effect when turned into, say, a rock.