When did Holtzmann live?


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Davaro
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When did Holtzmann live?

Post by Davaro »

Besides the Dune Encylopedia and the 'Abominations' is there any reference on when Holtzmann was alive? Pre-BJ or during the Jihad?

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Re: When did Holtzmann live?

Post by Freakzilla »

Davaro wrote:Besides the Dune Encylopedia and the 'Abominations' is there any reference on when Holtzmann was alive? Pre-BJ or during the Jihad?

Thank you?
He's barely mentioned at all in FH's books and I don't think they say when he lived.
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Post by SandChigger »

Ditto; FH didn't say.

In my opinion, the Legends treatment of him can be viewed as yet another example of Pinky and The Brine tearing down a character created by FH...even one as little fleshed out as Holtzmann.

Only the use of "design" in one quote by FH implies that Holtzmann was actually more than a theorist and had any hand in the application of his theories in actual inventions. It's not clear whether he invented just the Holtzmann generator, or was also involved in the invention of th engines. It seems a fairly common occurrence for someone else (engineers) to apply the ideas of theorists. (In that at least, P&B got something right. Making Holtzmann a burnt-out hasbeen is what I object to.)

I prefer to think that Holtzmann lived sometime between 3500 to 3000 B.G.; that he or someone else discovered the space-folding application of his theories and that the new form of travel gradually reunited a scattered group of human colonies. People being people, there was eventually conflict and agression and "wars of reunification" leading to the creation of an empire and finally to that of the Landsraad about 2,000 years before the Jihad.

Unless you put the discovery of spacefolding well BEFORE the Jihad, you have to admit some form of FTL propulsion/travel. And that seems diametrically opposed to why I think FH introduced space-folding in the first place.

(Sorry...kinda rambled, didn't I? :oops: )
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Post by Omphalos »

You base that on when you think spacefolding engines would have gone in to effect to populate all the planets of hte Imperium?
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Post by Dune Nerd »

Holtzman is only important because his theories allowed Norma to become the ultimate goddess....

Oh wait....yea that sounds shitty to me too
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Post by SandChigger »

Yeah, it wasn't enough that she becomes the FIRST NAVIGATOR and DESIGNED THE SHIPS and later becomes A GODDESS, they also had to make her responsible for most of Holtzmann's more important discoveries and inventions. Why?!? :roll:
Omphalos wrote:You base that on when you think spacefolding engines would have gone in to effect to populate all the planets of hte Imperium?
You being me? ;)

Yep. Remember, you only have to get up to around 13,000 planets by the time of the Jihad.

13,333 and a third planets, to be more exact, by sometime around 1 A.G (or whenever the CET riots occurred...definitely after the Jihad):
Historians estimate the riots took eighty million lives. That works out to about six thousand for each world then in the Landsraad League. Considering the unrest of the time, this may not be an excessive estimate, although any pretense to real accuracy in the figure must be just that—pretense. Communication between worlds was at one of its lowest ebbs.
This doesn't include a probable fringe of sparsely populated planets not yet admitted or included in the Landsraad for various reasons.

Even with the Guild more or less completely in control of exploration and new colonization after its advent, the Imperium presumably grows to something like a million worlds in 10,000 years. The availability of FTL before the Guild for any significant period, even though much slower than space-folding, would surely have resulted in a much larger number of occupied systems by the time of the Jihad/CET, no?

I think the age of the Landsraad is also significant. As Freak recently noted in another thread, the Landsraad probably originated more or less as a means of opposing and limiting the power of an emperor or small controlling group. It would take time for such power structures to develop. If FTL had been available for longer, I would think the Landsraad would be older as well.

There's also the compact nature of the Old Empire: all the "major player" planets are fairly close together. To me that implies a long period of settlement using (initially) very slow transportation. Around the time of the advent of space-folding, there could have been as few as several thousand systems settled. The eventual increase in freedom of mobility this permitted, along with displacements accompanying what I'm calling the "reunification wars", could have led to a mini-Scattering. Along with more stable growth and expansion after the creation of the Landsraad, getting up to 13,000 some planets probably isn't too far fetched. (I'm planning on crunching some numbers in a simulation using actual star data to see how feasible this is.)
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Post by Omphalos »

For a guess, that makes great sense to me.
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Post by SandChigger »

Well, whatever FH didn't fill in himself, we may as well regard as labelled with an invitation:

Use your own imagination! :)


I'm not saying this is anything like what he had in mind. But I don't think it directly contradicts anything in the published books and it kinda works. FWIW, take it as you will. ;)
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Re: When did Holtzmann live?

Post by georgiedenbro »

(sorry for wall of text to follow, but a lot of data is needed for this)
Dune: Appendix II wrote:Mankind's movement through deep space placed a unique stamp on religion
during the one hundred and ten centuries that preceded the Butlerian Jihad. To
begin with, early space travel, although widespread, was largely unregulated,
slow, and uncertain, and, before the Guild monopoly, was accomplished by a
hodgepodge of methods. The first space experiences, poorly communicated and
subject to extreme distortion, were a wild inducement to mystical speculation.
This seems to indicate that "early" space travel was slow, and here "space travel" in this context means "deep space travel." NASA has implicitly defined "deep space" as anything beyond the distance of early Moon missions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Merriam-Webseter.com defines deep space as: "space well outside the earth's atmosphere and especially that part lying beyond the earth-moon system."

However, the Appendix goes on to say:
Dune: Appendix II wrote:During this period, it was said that Genesis was reinterpreted, permitting
God to say:
"Increase and multiply, and fill the universe, and subdue it, and rule over
all manner of strange beasts and living creatures in the infinite airs, on the
infinite earths and beneath them."
This implies that this period was influenced by the discovery of extra-terrestrial flora and fauna. We might be safe in assuming that the discovery of life other than on Earth might be what would cause a large religious shift to occur, resulting in this rewriting of a passage from the Bible. In this sense, I think we might be safe assuming that Frank meant "deep space" to mean extra-solar travel. Especially so, since I doubt anyone was colonizing planets in our solar system other than Mars or Venus, which don't have life on them as far as we know. Some of Jupiter's moons might, but I doubt they'd ever be colonized.

Assuming this is the case, and that there is no FTL available, we must assume that all modes of travel before space-folding could be defined as "slow", meaning at sub-light speeds. And since only "slow" travel occurred during "early space travel" we might also surmise that this wouldn't have lasted all the way until 3,000 BG. If 8,000 out of 11,000 years of B.G. (before Guild) history consisted of pre-spacefolding tech then I don't think that 8/11th of history could be categorized as "early space travel." Let's be fair and say that "early" can't really mean more than, say, half of the time period given, which would mean that space-folding would have been invented in some form by 5,500 BG and would allow for travel faster than "slow."

The following quote refers to the period during the CET commission, which took place between 108 BG and 101 BG (7 year period after BJ):
Dune: Appendix II wrote:The major dams against anarchy in these times were the embryo Guild, the
Bene Gesserit and the Landsraad, which continued its 2,000-year record of
meeting in spite of the severest obstacles.
The fact seems to be that the Landsraad was conceived at around 2,000 BG. I doubt it could have existed before space folding since if its purpose was to maintain lines of communication and stability this would require the ability to actually meet to discuss current issues. Without folding space these meetings couldn't occur, and so we assume there was no Landsraad before space folding. And yet this doesn't imply that space folding couldn't have existed before the Landsraad. We have every reason to assume that there existed a possibly long period of total chaos after space folding was devised, including both rampant expansion and colonization, as well as constant wars between systems and of warships jumping all over the place conquering territory and using atomics against planetary populations. The advent of the Landsraad, the Guild, and the Great Convention would have brought this period of chaos to an end, but there's no telling how long this period would have lasted before it could finally be brought to a close by joint agreements from the major large and small colonies. I think that 2,000-3,000 years of this doesn't seem far-fetched at all, and it could have even been more. To SandChigger's suggestion that space folding had to be recent compared to the advent of the Landsraad, due to there only being ~13,000 colonies by 0 B.G., I would suggest that starting a colony is very hard and that blowing up a colony is very easy, and that atomics and war could have easily checked the rate of successful expansion. Finding out where expansion was taking place could have been done using various methods including torture, spies, or even checking out random nearby systems one by one; it wouldn't take much time to do this and to catalogue it all using computers. Automated scout ships could even have been sent out purely for the purpose of jumping from system to system for centuries to find out which systems had colonies on them, and how large they were.

I also believe it might be fair to surmise that Holtzmann, himself, did devise or participate in the creation of all "Holtzman tech" due to this:
CH:D wrote:Not even Guild Navigators professed knowledge of how they guided foldspace
ships. Ixian scientists made machines to duplicate Navigator abilities but
still could not define what they did.
"Holzmann's formulae can be trusted."
No one claimed to understand Holzmann. They merely used his formulae because
they worked. It was the "ether" of space travel. You folded space. One
instant you were here and the next instant you were countless parsecs distant.
Someone "out there" has found another way to use Holzmann's theories! It was a
full Mentat Projection. He knew its accuracy from the new questions it
produced.
The fact that no one understood the equations would tend to mean that no one could do more with them than had been done previously. Engineers couldn't have done things with equations they didn't understand, as engineering procedures can only be derivative of a comprehension of the mechanics of how the equations work. It's one thing to work off an equation that is understood but unproven (like Fermat's last theorem), but I don't know that engineers could do anything with equations they don't even understand. Since "another way to use Holtmann's theories" here seems to be a revelation to Duncan, we can also assume that there hasn't been any progress in this area for a long time; if there had been, it would presumably mean that someone had, in fact, understood his theories. I believe that Holtzmann created certain technologies, died, and then that was it for 20,000 years or however long until M&D came along.

My guess would be that Holtzmann lived sometime between 8,000 BG and 5,500 BG. This allows for ~3,000 years of sub-light expansion to nearby star systems (but not much farther due to extreme travel times elsewhere), and then Holtzmann, and then a few thousand years of pandemonium until the Landsraad is formed in ~2,000 BG. I base a lot of this on the quote from Appendix II saying that only "early" deep space travel was slow.
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