It’s cool to know that all the worlds in the Dune future are still in our stellar neighborhood. So when they brag about traveling vast distances, it’s really not that far on a galactic scale. It also gives perspective on what a big deal the Great Scattering was.
It's been a while since I've read the books but, yeah, I had always wondered about the scale and scope of the Paul to Leto years and how those changes effected humanity. Sounds like a video like that would take hours and not 20 minutes to discuss!
Canonically a Heighliner is basically engines and docking clamps. If you ever read the novel Permanence by Karl Schroeder you'll get an idea of space travel in dune, with the heighliners taking long circituous routes and depositing ships carrying goods and people, or picking them up. Thats also a reason why in the 2021 adaptation they make mention of the cost for the imperial entourage, which would be staggeringly expensive to all but the most wealthy houses, Emperor notwithstanding. Also I don't know if they'll explain it in part 2, but the Harkonnen assault on arrakis was so mind bogglingly expensive it took them from one of the wealthiest houses to one of the poorest in the span of 1 trip.
They do mention it in Part One. There's only the scene where Vladimir tells Rabban to sell their spice reserves (slowly, so as not to lower the price too much) and "squeeze" Arrakis for all its worth since the hiring and transportation of the Sardaukar and Harkonnen troops was so expensive. In part two they don't mention this cost at all.
There was also the detail that stockpiling spice reserves was outlawed by CHOAM (I think), and Leto has spies successfully sabotage some of the Harkonnen reserves. At any rate, the Harkonnen and Sardaukar transport cost was exorbitant (alongside likely extra fees from the Guild, so long as they get their spice).
We get fairly clear idea of how much the guild charges for large-scale military deployments across interstellar space. At one, the 'Baron' I think, mentions that House Harkonens operations on Arrakis will cost 80 years of spice profits. This fact alone reveals much about the Dune Universe. Namely, outside the emperor, the ability to project significant military force at scale and distance, is cost-prohibitive in almost every case. This also explains, why most 'warfare' between houses, when it comes to that, is carried out by either single operatives, assassins', or small groups of select personnel, who often engage in INdirect warfare, usually against individuals. So most, 'conflict' is really between specific people or small(ish) groups, and not against large targets like planets and solar systems (though such things do happen from time to time), these are quite rare. The Harkonens can only land forces on Dune, because the planet itself, has only one official imperial city, outside the fremen settlements. If Dune were a 'regular' planet, it is doubtful the Harkonen could raise enough forces to fight a 'conventional' style war as we think of it, on another planet. All of this, is by design, and is not an accident. The ptb in Dune, did not want unrestricted wide open warfare across the stars to be possible, IE star trek, or star wars style.
@@champisthebunny6003 Excellent points, it also makes the subsequent shifts in power dynamics all the more dramatic as the Atreides Empire is free to consolidate with no fear of reprisal.
@@champisthebunny6003excellent points. What I would like to add is that money is just part 1 of the problem to wage war. You got to convince the guild that starting a war is something they should support. It is not in this movie, but The Guild feared/foresaw/predicted a future where house Atreides would impact the spice flow -which fun fact. Is exactly what Paul and Leto II did in wake of the assault on the Atreides. Anyhow, point being. Say you can pay them enough, then still they have to support the aims of your war to allow military assets on their transports.
I love how small the Dune Imperium is compared to other sci-fi empires, makes it feel that much more real. It's not a galaxy spanning empire, it doesn't even breach the Gould Belt. It's a small blip on a galactic map.
The Houses Major and Minor cover many more stars than the just the ones close to Arrakis. That they can all get the Emperor's call, send a ship, and arrive at the same time as the Emperor ( book ) suggests that messages are somehow faster than ships, or entirely un-interceptable.
And that's just the Known Universe (as House Corrino names their territory) in Paul's times, don't wanna make spoilers about the following books, but later under Leto II's rule it gets way much bigger. And after that... By Shai Hullud's mercy, y'all betta read da whole saga!!!!!
@@jave2274 yup, in fact, through the Duniverse it's said that some navigators come and go on exploration missions searching for new territories, that's the official version: they're looking for a new undiscovered source of melange. And yes, the navigators need to know the Known Universe star maps in order to set the departure coordinates and the arrival coordinates, and use their limited prescience to add stars and planets' orbits into the calculations
@@stevetheduck1425 the thing about Imperial messages is that there's a special Imperial department of Mail Agents, people who didn't fulfill mentat training, that carry out those messages, sometimes as documents, sometimes like just memorized messages, and they use special Guild ships that don't make other planet stops, but go right through the destination and back without picking or leaving smaller ships or cargo
As I understand it 'folding Space' in Dune relies on the Holtzman Engines to move the actual spacecraft inside an area of 'space' that is not part of the Universe involving Electromagnetism. the background space, if you like. this area is currently posited as why distant stars can move faster than light relative to us. If you sue this 'space' you can move much faster than light. the DANGER is that you an your ship will hit something at that speed and just die/vanish/be destroyed. The spice allows the Navigators to see into the future enough that they can see the danger long before it arrives and plot a course that thus avoids all dangers in the journey. It is all in the books. Hope this helps. By the way, we are currently investigating the ways this might be achieved in the present day! Great video, by the way. 👍
_"this area is currently posited as why distant stars can move faster than light relative to us"_ That is not at all what modern physics says. Redshift happens because space is stretching. But this stretching isn't "our space" stretching in another, external type of space. It's not quite like a rubber band stretching in a room which itself stays unchanged - a common analogy that ultimately fails to get the nature of whats happening across. The stretching of our spacetime is a change to its metric, something for which there is sadly no good analogy for. If you must have a visual mental picture (rather than relying on the horror that is differential geometry) then you can image space being spontaneously created constantly everywhere, but very slowly, so you need to look over huge distances to things a long time ago for the amount of space that's been created to be important. There's no need to hypothesise another kind of meta space, and I've never come across any physics textbook or paper that posits such a thing. There's no "other space" that our space is stretching or moving through any more than there's a "before" the Big Bang. Talking about either of these things is to fundamentally misunderstand what space and time are in general relativity. Which is a common mistake, unsurprisingly, because the idea of GR that space and time are things which change rather than merely the stage on which things happen is so different from our intuition (and any science learnt in school). Of course, it's scifi, so feel free to make anything up you want. But please don't take your cues about real physics from fiction.
@@QuantumHistorianI agree with you both, but that just because it’s scale. You are more semantically correct. But a perceived “other space” might be more perceptually correct for us when experiencing such a thing. Semantics. Thanks for sharing.
@@TheIgnoramus I think it's more than semantics. Conceptualising something weird as something familiar might make you think you understand it, but in this case it provides a totally false understanding.
The electromagnetic universe hypothesis hasn’t taken hold in academia because of a lack of evidence, but it is very popular amongst RUclips-trained, new-age physicists. For it to work, one would have to completely throw out Einstein’s theory of relativity, all modern cosmology and then replace it with a new mathematical sound bases that would make its founder(s) MORE famous than Einstein!! But instead of doing that, all that is offered are conspiracy theories, charlatans such Deepak and JZ Knight, mysticism and/or transcendalism, and other nonsense that can not be tested and only seem to exist in one’s mind. So a person can posit electromagneticism and a fictional Holtzman drive all they want, but I cringe anytime someone brings it up because it simply is not a scientific theory. Great for science fiction to skirt the physics of interstellar travel….
The folding through the ship itself TOTALLY breaks canon, but is an amazing touch in terms of artistic licence and adaptation. Even in the books they usually side step anytime spent in travel between worlds because it's boring. But it is implied that travel between worlds takes time. When Paul and Leto talk about leaving for Arrakis in the first few chapters of the book Paul says he'd like to get a look at one of the navigators and Leto cautions him to do nothing that would risk their use of the guild and that he wouldn't even have a chance to get off their ship by saying something to effect of "There could be a Harkonnen ship right beside us in the Guild's hold and we'd never know it or do anything about it" which implies you are along for the ride and the directness of the route varies based on how much you're willing to pay for an express route or milk run ticket. Leto also forces the Guild ship to remain in orbit longer then was scheduled by withholding part of their cargo as a way to gain face over the smugglers and spite the Guild by making them late for a delivery on their next stop. I was always curious though if Guild travel was hours, days, weeks, etc long between places like Arrakis and the other worlds because if you take into account at the end of Dune Paul is around 18 or 19 years old and by the start of Dune Messiah Paul is now around 31 or 33 years old and has already put down most of the rebellion with the most violent and war heavy days of the Jihad seeming to be years behind them. This would likely mean either the wars on each planet where long (which is likely) or that he spent the better part of 13 years traveling the empire to snatch and grab and move on (which could also be possible but less likely)
I always interpreted it as space folding is fast itself, but that doesn't mean the travel itself is fast. You have to pack your stuff, leave the gravity well, probably travel to a Lagrange point or something to meet the highliner, dock the highliner, wait for the other to dock, maybe the Guild runs security checks etc etc. Just like travelling via plane. The plane journed might take only 1-2-3 hours but you need to pack, take a cab to the airport, go through security, board, take your seat, then the plane waits in line to take off. I like this because space travel is hard and isn't trivial. It's also mentioned in the books that travelling is EXPENSIVE. The transportation of 50 Harkonnen divsions almost bankrupted the Baron and he was almost as rich as the Emperor. It made him indebted for 50 years. Only the wealthiest houses can afford space travel. It explains why the Imperium is feudal and isolated.
The way I took it was as a concession to the unfortunate fact that the average viewer is, in fact, an idiot and must have some indication that a vast gulf is being spanned. As far as winking goes, it does seem the best way to communicate this visually, and like everything else in the film is done masterfully. Honestly, I missed it the first two times I watched. I assumed it went down as it did in the books. My brain was already exploding from all the tiny little details from the book that were shown and left for the viewer to figure out by themselves; I was in a forgiving mood. IMO Herbert was wise to treat travel mainly as a chance to exposit in the least cheesy way possible. He didn't dwell on the mundane, but when forced to address it he used it well. I can honestly say that I never once pondered Paul impatiently pacing in flight worrying about missing his own jihad. To each his own. I probably will now. Thanks for that.
@@amarissimus29 Oh Herbert has totally dabbled in cheesy space travel mechanics lol Read his series called The Ship alternate title for the Series is The God Problem. Most of the story is based around space travel and space time perspectives, and insane genetic manipulation. Like would make Emperor Leto wince kind of genetic manipulations
@@Mickekzonit almost bankrupted the Baron simply because the rate to transport the military were far more expensive than civilian ones. It was by design since the Guild desires for a peaceful empire instead of warring feudal nobles who have an axe to grind with one another. Hence why the era before the ascencion of Paul as emperor was called the "Guild Peace". Leto II made sure to take notes from that and enacted his own "Leto's Peace" for 3,500 years.
I interpret the visual of space folding through the ship as just a visual effect stemming from some weird physics of FTL travel. The ship is not there, it is already gone, but you can still see the shadow of the ship on orbit before it disappears and the "reflection" of the original departure point through the ship to its back near its engines. You can see it, because the ship itself is faster than light and the light just didn't get the memo that it is already gone. It will disappear in time and you cannot communicate through it and cannot just enter the other star system through it, you either pass the "photon screen" and come out of the other side if the ship has a hole on the other side, or, I like this better, you smash your ship into the engine compartment of the heighliner because that is why the "forgotten" photons are there, it is actually just a one-sided tube and the weird physical effects the engine produces creates the "reflection" of the other system.
The way I think about is, "folding space" is more like tunnelling through space. For example, when the Atreides moved from Caladan to Arrakis, the Guild sent a Heighliner to Caladan to pick them up. - So now the Heighliner is in only one place - Caladan. - They pack up, strap in and the Heighliner "departs" from Caladan. - It's not instantaneous and the travel takes time while the Guild Navigators "fold" space around them and find a route to Arrakis - essentially tunneling through space faster than light from one point to the next. - Once the folding of space is done, the heighliner appears out of folded space into real space outside of Arrakis - much like a burrower emerging from a tunnel. It could explain why you can see the origin point on the other side of the Heighliner in Villeneuve's movie - The Heighliner basically establishes a tunnel through spacetime. But I don't think the travel would be instantaneous since you would need to be on the heighliner as it burrowed through spacetime. You can just see the origin point but you would not be able to go back unless the Heighliner folds space the other way too. I like this idea because poetically, it makes the Heighliners work essentially like Sand Worms, burrowing through the sands of Spacetime.
@@Alpha_GameDev-wq5cc If you can see something, that doesn't necessarily mean that something can see you. e.g. if an object was to travel faster than light, the photons emmited from it would lag behind creating a "contrail". Only if you were to intersect that contrail, would you be able to see the object in the past. For the object moving above the speed of light, only photons directly in its path would be visible. So an interstellar traveler coming directly at you would see you long before you see him and you would only catch him from behind, while he was already moving and looking away from you.
@@VulpeculaJoy and? I never said anything about the order of events. You decided to disagree with me and then provided an explanation for a completely different concept. If there’s a path for light in a direction, unless there’s a speed barrier to tunnel through… then YOU CAN ALSO TRAVEL THROUGH. Even that is just that… a speed barrier.
From a pedantic standpoint, the 2021 take on the heighliner seems to take inspiration from how theoretic wormholes "fold" space by literally bending the dimensions of spacetime making a path from A to B significantly shorter.
_"Man may not be replaced"_ at 6:26 is a strange way of spelling the much more commonly repeated maxim _"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"_ of the Orange Catholic Bible.
'Man may not be replaced' was the core concept of the Butlerian Jihad in its time (stated in the books), the later OC Bible maxim was created after the jihad, although ends up being the more common associated phrase.
Who controls the past now controls the future. Who controls the present now controls the past. Who controls the past now controls the future. Who controls the present now?
Folding Space: Literally that. If Space and Time are the same thing, visualize space as a giant piece of paper that you can fold to create a shorter path. Paul's abilities, and that of the navigators, is to see through time and know where the folds are safe to use.
Interstellar rather than Intragalactic. Even the Culture in Ian M Bank's stories on covers a small part of a galaxy. The allies and agreements with other powers make the space the Culture knows of about a ten-thousandth of the galaxy. The size of even one galaxy contains billions of stars.
It really captures the sheer size of the galaxy, and beyond that the size of the universe. I personally love that despite all of mankind's advancements, mankind is still microscopic compared to just one galaxy. Microscopic enough that despite their vast empire they are taken down by the literal worms of one planet. In that way you could see Dune as a love letter to nature, and a nod to its extreme power and majesty which I think was part of what inspired Frank to write the stories to begin with. He was an environmentalist.
@@1lukeycharmz sandworms were introduced to arrakis. As for by whom or when the history is lost but it happened well before the butlerian jihad. They’re not native to arrakis. The spice was an unintentional byproduct produced by the worms exclusively in arrakis due to the special soil maybe
Another outstanding video -- and timely, too! 😉 You've touched on a lot of my favorite book series, and added some fun context by showing distances and location. Looking forward to what you tackle next. As far as FTL travel in the Dune series, I think its description morphed as Herbert wrote more novels. But using one of the later books, it's definitely not instantaneous. There are some travel scenes where Bene Gesserit strategy meetings are held while en route to other planets. Individual ships are docked within the Heighliner, which then travels FTL, and offloads the ships at its destination. Seems like that's how the Atreides entourage traveled to Arrakis, too. But Herbert usually focused more on the characters than the technology, leaving readers to theorize on specifics...
19:30 - my head canon for FTL travel in the 2021 film: 1) a heighliner ship arrives at the starting point of your journey; 2) the guild navigator starts folding spacetime using the heighliner; 3) your tiny ship now can start entering the fold in spacetime; 4) the guild navigator finishes folding; 5) heighliner arrives at the destination through the fold but the fold is kind of "inside of it"; 6) the guild navigator starts to unfold the spacetime; 7) your ship can start exiting the fold in spacetime.
Tio is indeed Spanish for uncle and if Tio Holtzman is of Asian descent he is not necessarily Chinese since Tio (or Tiyo) is also a Filipino word for uncle (because the Philippines is a Spanish colony in the 1500s-1800s so Tio Holtzman may be of Filipino descent.
Well, tio is huncle in Portuguese too, and Ferdinand Magellan (Fernando de Magalhães) was the first Westerner to set foot in the Philippines; he died there. There's that.
@@factorgsi Magellan wasnt the first European to set foot in the Philippines. We dont know who was the first, because he wasnt travelling alone. It might have been Elcano, the first one to actually circumnavigate the world. Let's not take merit out from it's crew.
iIrc during the journey on an intergalactic highliner. The passengers were prohibited to leave their ships because at times enemies were transported within the very same highliner, meaning that they did spent some time inside the highliner
This elegant work this channel exhibits is with one word - amazing. I have fallen in love with this video about Dune, so informative, so creative and so much lore gathered in one place, just one-of-a-kind experience.
Regarding the pronunciation of Richese, I vaguely remember in Lynch's Dune from 1984, the scene where the Guild Navigator had an audience with the Emperor it pronounced it as "Ree-chess".
thank you so much for this, I knew that arrakis is in the canopus system but I didn't know about all the other stuff, I love it when a sci-fi setting actually takes place in "our" universe and is not just completely made up (tho that can be fun too)
I think that you have greatly misunderstood the heighliners as they appear in Dune 2021. I don't think they just appear or create a portal - we just see them while they are in orbit, not while they are moving. The tube shape might help with the bending of space, but I think the shuttles and ships that we see coming down from the heighliners are literally docked inside of that massive tube ship somewhere. But the heighliner itself is traveling the massive gulfs between the stars, just like Frank Herbert wrote in the original novels.
What then is the point of showing us a different region of space within the so-called tube of the heighliner if not to indicate that the ship literally has generated and sustained a wormhole within it, one from which we can observe the Bene Gesserit ship emerge before landing on Caladan? It's an interesting question!
Though they don't specify in Dune 2021, I think it is strongly implied that the "stargate ship" suddenly appear, seeing how they were not even alerted that an invasion was under way till the last second. This is just speculation on my part however. But like you said, otherwise it would make the spacing guild unnecessary. Awesome video. I like your work.
It's been a very long time since I've read the first book, but I vaguely recall that Arrakis doesn't have much in the way of planetary defenses. Very few satellites, controlled by the space guild and perhaps either by interference of the emperor, the choam company, the guild, the great houses or whoever, is kept "in the dark" this way. Maybe there was quite a bit of collusion between the interested parties for this, but I'm not sure, I only read the first two books and it was a long time ago.
I liked that it was a visual language way of showing that it'd bridged the gulf of space, but didn't explain if it actually worked differently. I had two interpretations on this: either it is making a wormhole (heh) between two locations, but it itself can also jump around, OR, my own head canon: it still works the way it is described in canon, and what you're seeing is sort of an optical illusion, where the Holtzman effect somehow causes an afterimage of its previous location to remain within the physical boundaries of the heighliner. But, because you're able to see through the ship, say you went towards the center instead of out one end, the image would then shift and be behind you once you passed the midpoint, and perhaps show what its previous location looked like from the opposite end of the ship. If the Holtzman effect plays with how particles repel but the folded space it passes through doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum the same way it does unfolded... Maybe it does something funky to light particles. I mean, both superfluidic helium and black holes exhibit the holographic effect when modeled in a supercomputer, so who knows what such an effect might have on light waves/particles.
May I suggest doing a video like this for BattleTech/MechWarrior? Sure the official maps are all 2D, but any real stars used would inherently have a 3D aspect to add to them. The hard part is that BattleTech maps tend to lable stars with the names of the inhabited planet that orbits it, rather than the name of the star...
@@OverviewEffekt fair enough, while I could always recommend Tex Talks BattleTech or Sven van der Plank as two fantastic lore channels to see if it hooks you or not, the volume of research/work that would likely need to be done to try and make an actually spherical map of the Inner Sphere and Periphery is not something anyone less than a hard-core fan should put themselves through.
I’m so glad people are making videos based on the Dune Encyclopedia over the extended universe. It’s just so much better and fits the themes and ideas of the original novels so much better.
These videos are amazing! They provide the true sense and distances of space while also showcasing simplicity! These videos have also really helped out in my worldbuilding projects. These videos are once again amazing, keep it up! :)
i personally take the space folding as quite literally. the ship folding space so that rather than traveling the long distance they essentially make their current location and the location they want to go to touch. the reason you then need either computers or prescient navigators is so your ship doesn't explode from manifesting inside of an asteroid, or gets caught in a star or the deepest blackness of space.
This was really great. I knew the distances between each system would be far but I didn't think it was quite on this scale, and when you throw in all the unknown systems from expansion that occurred during the Scattering and anytime a house went Renegade that's a crazy reach into the Galaxy Frank Herbert gave us
(5:48) As far as I can tell Richese is pronounced [rɪkʰeːsɛ] (a trilled r, an aspirated k (as in ‘character’), and a sharp s (as in ‘sink’)). But Frank Herbert may have made up his own pronunciation. Loved the video! I will definitely watch it a few more times before Part 2 comes out in the hope of remembering at least some of it^^ The switch to a dark background is definitely a big improvement! The map looks amazing, and you can really see the stars shine now. Looking forward to what comes next!
@@RonCecchetti I based it on how it would be pronounced in Latin since most stars (and planets) have names in either Latin or Arabic. But as I said, Herbert might have made up his own pronunciation. Besides, it seems reasonable that the pronunciation would have changed throughout the millennia
I always thought it was pronounced [ʁi.ʃɛs] like 'richesse' , French for 'wealth', also it derives from old french 'richese' and it would be fitting with the planet being a wealthy tech world.
The movie heighliner scene makes sense if it is running based on the Alcubierre Drive based on an actual solution of Einstein's field equations. You basically fold space by contracting space in front and expanding it behind, allowing for FTL travel.
I mentioned this in a thread: I liked that it was a visual language way of showing that the heighliner bridged the gulf of space, but didn't explain if it actually worked any differently. I did have two interpretations on this: either it is indeed just making a wormhole (heh) between two locations, but it itself can also jump around, OR, my own head canon: it still works the way it is described in canon, and what you're seeing is sort of an optical illusion, where the Holtzman effect somehow causes an afterimage of its previous location to remain within the physical boundaries of the heighliner. But, because you're able to see through the ship, say you went towards the center instead of out one end, the image would then shift and be behind you once you passed the midpoint, and perhaps show what its previous location looked like from the opposite end of the ship. If the Holtzman effect plays with how particles repel but the folded space it passes through also doesn't interact with electromagnetism the same way it does unfolded... Maybe it does something funky to the electromagnetic spectrum of light. I mean, both superfluidic helium and black holes exhibit the holographic effect when modeled in a supercomputer, so who knows what such an effect might have on light waves/particles, and what it would actually look like to us.
I just wanted to say that I loved the 3D map you used in your video. Nicely done! 👏 My quibble is when you said that the Butlerian Jihad was a war against AI. That’s not quite correct. Here’s what Frank Herbert said in Dune: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” It was a war between humans that resulted in the end of thinking machines.
Extrapolation from the Dune novels by Frank Herbert reveals that foldspace travel is not the foldspace travel we know from modern theory, it is essentially just an instantaneous form of warp travel, a warp bubble is formed around the Heighliner and the fabric of space time is moved around the vessel at near instantaneous speeds. This makes sense as the concept of modern foldspace travel did not exist when the books were originally written, the most popular theory around was the Alcubierre Theory in which time and space is bent to allow a ship to move without moving. The other part that adds credence to this is the need for Navigators, also known as Steersmen, to plot a course, such plotting of courses would not be necessary for instantaneous foldspace travel, it'd be a very simple mathematical equation which many people can learn quite easily, navigators need to see all obstacles in their path, suns, moons, comets and the rest to safely plot a course to the destination, in the early days of the Guild travel via foldspace was still an uncertain and dangerous way to travel, it took a long time to train enough Navigators to build their monopoly on space travel, until that time mathematical solving systems were used to navigate (not computers or thinking machines, just simple arithmetic devices). The 2024 movie actually has the least accurate depiction of Foldspace travel as ships docked in a heighliner, they didn't just fly in one side and out the other.
"There was no AI used in the making of this video." Respect, subbed. Also, Bela Tegeuse sounds suspiciously similar to the star "Betelgeuse." I wonder if Frank originally intended it to be Betelgeuse but the pronunciation had become corrupted over 20,000 years.
I would argue that it's not that the known dune universe it small, but that all the big players were from areas pre-space folding, so naturally their homeworlds would all be in the neighbourhood.
The heighliners are giant ships inside which other ships are docked for the journey. In order to avoid needing to describe it, Herbert made it a core part of the story that one is not allowed to move, or even see, outside their ship during embarkation, transit and while disembarking. So, you get on your ship and park it in space, then a Guild representative comes aboard and checks everything. Once that's done, they move your ship into the heighliner and you sit there until they take it out at your destination. The books even mention how enemy ships headed to the same warzone could be right next to each other.
I like the idea of a Highliner appearing simultaneously in two locations and a shared "space" appearing in its core during it transition from one system to the next. The Highliner then disapears from the origin system and is only in the destination, it then begins a transition to its next stop, like a space train.
@5:09 that eve online character portrait popping up for harkonnen ....was that the mitanni ? either way, loved it. Brings back some nastalgia, to hell with goon swarm lol.
Lately I've come to the conclusion that FTL travel in Dune works like this: You have the FTL engine (the Holtzman Engine) that folds space (wormhole, actual FTL movement, IDK), but that folding is not very accurate., so you get the 1 in 10 ships lost while travelling. Enter the Guild Navigators, who thanks to their specialized training in "pure mathematics" (as stated by Gaius Helen Mohiam at the beginning of the first book) and their mental enhancement with spice are capable of performing the *very* complicated calculations (without A.I. assistance) required for an accurate space folding, in essence "seeing the future" thru astrodinamycal mathematics, like an overclocked NASA supercomputer.
Your conclusion is the same as everyone else...but it's the actual specific details on how it works (which you are missing) that people are wondering about. In the book it makes it sound like it takes days or weeks to travel, but the movie shows it more like crossing a bridge or portal which wouldn't take long. In case you missed it, you can see a planet not in the same system as Caladan through the highliner when the imperial ship passes the camera.
Hard to say which presentation of is the best. I did not read the books but I think the idea of folding space in dune can't be separated from the concept of wormholes anymore as it has been explained with folding a paper so often... If it's more travel then teleport it may has been shown best in star wars
No AI used in the making of this video! Thanks for not giving in to lazy AI, and for the disclaimer so we can enjoy the real art and work that went into this.
You made two mistakes. (1st.) I can't remember the book, I think it's 'The Battle of Corrin' that the Fermen (Free Men) ended up on Arakis by accident as a group of them stole a ship and did a blind jump and ended up crashing on Arakis. (2nd) As of the first novel Earth no longer exists as it was destroyed by nuclear bombardment right before 'The Butlerian Jihad'.
I read Dune when it first came out. I thought it was pretty clear how Heighliners worked. The Holzman engines achieved a kind of unimagineably fast speed - in a way that was never exactly explained - but only a Navigator could safely steer one because of the prescient 'sight' they acquired. I don't remember there being any suggestions that the Navigator personally folded space. The film versions made different interpretations but I imagine it would really be about as unexciting as watching an oil tanker appear on the horizon then slow to a stop near a harbour.
18:45 I think it could work like some sort of 4D Möbius strip-- Something that to outside 3D viewers like us might seem like a donut/hole shaped on either end, but really stretches into a different time with folding space inside itself allows for instantaneous travel through the stars.
Am gonna go watch Dune pt 2 again today or tomorrow maybe First few times watching part 1 I missed that amazing shot thru the Heighliner, where you see the other planet thru it. I think those ships are my favourite thing of the lore so far. Also fantastic video mate. Gives me more context to go watch it again in cinema. First watch was also an incredible experience
Merging canon from the books with the movie visuals, I imagine the Heighliners are like a hollow needle. They can tunel through space itself. Ships can dock into them. When they or rather, the navigators, fold space, they sort of pierce the folded space-time like a needle, and ships inside can move out of them into the destination. During that process a one-way "hole" exists that the Heighliner keeps open, acting as a gate that is temporarily there, allowing light to pass through.
9:19 "We've only just begun to detect exoplanets around stars in the past few years". We've been detecting exoplanets for over 30 years now. From Wikipedia: "The first confirmation of the detection occurred in 1992. A different planet, first detected in 1988, was confirmed in 2003. As of 1 March 2024, there are 5,640 confirmed exoplanets in 4,155 planetary systems, with 895 systems having more than one planet."
I like what you say and how you show it. For me, from reading the first couple books a few times (as a kid).. Playing Dune 2 back in the early 90s, listening to Frank Herbert interviews during the later 60s then of course watching the last couple Dune movies.. I am impressed
As far as the heighligners traveling and their shape, iirc (from over 10 years ago lol) they were basically shaped like big toilet paper tubes to maximize their cargo volume, and the engine that created the holtzman effect was able to extend the area it could transport to whatever fit inside the ship. Whether it was from individual ships' systems or the heighligners themselves, there was no mention of feeling acceleration that I can remember. There was just a phase into the fold-space, the path(s) the navigator took, and a phase back into real space. If I had to guess I would say it would most likely be changing of the frequency of the space the holtzman engine could affect and somehow equalizing it with the destination so that they essentially became the same space and the ship "slid" from one space to the next. Actually, that would be similar to why a shield and a laser would create an atomic detonation, in only one of them, as each are generated from the same effect and only one wins the coin flip for staying coherent in space, now that I think about it.
I thought the Heighliners traveled through hyperspace. To travel without moving means the ship doesn't move in the everyday 4D universe. Rather, it does something in another level of reality that changes its coordinates here. The net effect is teleportation: the ship ceases to exist at one location and begins existing in another at the same instant. The difficulty arises from hyperspace not being completely empty of danger.
I think in Dune Part One and Two, Guild Highliners kind of duplicate themselves at the destination system to form two ends of a wormhole. This is why the job of a Guild Navigator is so hard. They have to literally project their minds across dozens of light years of space and focus on a very tiny location within the destination system, and a very specific velocity vector at that location, so that when the wormhole end appears it's in a circular orbit around the destination planet rather than plummeting towards it, or a billion kilometers away from it.
Could be the portal option, but then even when you go through the portal, whatever ship you're on needs a navigator to safely even go through the portal (like stargate except instead of you just automatically going through the wormhole sequence that plays in the movie version of stargate you have to find your way and not hit stars on your journey)
I think it’s possible to look at the Dune 2021 heighliners and have them not break canon. If we assume the ship is essentially present in two places in space then it still fits the idea of folding space around the ship. Furthermore, it’s worth noting we don’t actually know if it’s instantaneous travel. The image we see through the ship doesn’t necessarily mean it’s still physically present on the other side. It is also possible the journey within the ship takes a while from the perspective of those inside it.
Somewhere in this adaptation, Denis "must" give us his srtistic interpretation of the Guild Navigators.😮 But now that I consider it, the concept of FTL was such an integral element of commerce that it is a bit of a curve when the guild/navs & CHOAM didn't immediately capitulate to Paul's ascendancy as Emperor. Moreover, the concept of prescience is treated more like "Bad Dream Syndrome", than the uber-conscious Paul would have post "Water of Life" -part of which he shared with the guild/navs, though Paul's was obviously more expansive. Great original concept vid regarding the star mapping. I have watched a lot of vids on Dune on YT and this is truly terrific work by you 🎙, (NOT AI!!) 😜. This is what makes YT my fave entertainment platform because of creative, original & thought provoking content creators like yourself! 🎬 And @ 67, I am an Intrawebby OG !😎🤣 Really great job!! 💯👍🏾👍🏾
I fell like the Highliners allow you to see light from the other side because it is difficult for matter to traverse it but there are so many photons that the chances of them making it through are so high allowing you to see the other side. It prolly also helps that light is a wave and a particle. And it takes a lot of calculations to let the mass amount of a ship go through.
Folding space was described in "Event Horizon." That is, the ship 'folds' space like a piece of paper. The origin point and destination point essentially merge for a moment, the ship transfers from Point A to Point B, then the space 'unfolds'. The ship didn't "move" in the traditional sense but it now orbits Point B. The 'folding process' takes tremendous energy and extremely difficult and complicated mathematical calculations. This complexity, absent computers, is how the Guild continues to exist.
Dune is a merge of science fiction with high fantasy elements like knights, wizards, and dragons (the sandworms). Some authors have tried merging these two genres before but Dune is one of the successful, and most spectacular ones.
It’s cool to know that all the worlds in the Dune future are still in our stellar neighborhood. So when they brag about traveling vast distances, it’s really not that far on a galactic scale. It also gives perspective on what a big deal the Great Scattering was.
It's been a while since I've read the books but, yeah, I had always wondered about the scale and scope of the Paul to Leto years and how those changes effected humanity. Sounds like a video like that would take hours and not 20 minutes to discuss!
Agreed
Canonically a Heighliner is basically engines and docking clamps. If you ever read the novel Permanence by Karl Schroeder you'll get an idea of space travel in dune, with the heighliners taking long circituous routes and depositing ships carrying goods and people, or picking them up.
Thats also a reason why in the 2021 adaptation they make mention of the cost for the imperial entourage, which would be staggeringly expensive to all but the most wealthy houses, Emperor notwithstanding. Also I don't know if they'll explain it in part 2, but the Harkonnen assault on arrakis was so mind bogglingly expensive it took them from one of the wealthiest houses to one of the poorest in the span of 1 trip.
They do mention it in Part One. There's only the scene where Vladimir tells Rabban to sell their spice reserves (slowly, so as not to lower the price too much) and "squeeze" Arrakis for all its worth since the hiring and transportation of the Sardaukar and Harkonnen troops was so expensive. In part two they don't mention this cost at all.
There was also the detail that stockpiling spice reserves was outlawed by CHOAM (I think), and Leto has spies successfully sabotage some of the Harkonnen reserves. At any rate, the Harkonnen and Sardaukar transport cost was exorbitant (alongside likely extra fees from the Guild, so long as they get their spice).
We get fairly clear idea of how much the guild charges for large-scale military deployments across interstellar space. At one, the 'Baron' I think, mentions that House Harkonens operations on Arrakis will cost 80 years of spice profits. This fact alone reveals much about the Dune Universe. Namely, outside the emperor, the ability to project significant military force at scale and distance, is cost-prohibitive in almost every case. This also explains, why most 'warfare' between houses, when it comes to that, is carried out by either single operatives, assassins', or small groups of select personnel, who often engage in INdirect warfare, usually against individuals. So most, 'conflict' is really between specific people or small(ish) groups, and not against large targets like planets and solar systems (though such things do happen from time to time), these are quite rare.
The Harkonens can only land forces on Dune, because the planet itself, has only one official imperial city, outside the fremen settlements. If Dune were a 'regular' planet, it is doubtful the Harkonen could raise enough forces to fight a 'conventional' style war as we think of it, on another planet. All of this, is by design, and is not an accident. The ptb in Dune, did not want unrestricted wide open warfare across the stars to be possible, IE star trek, or star wars style.
@@champisthebunny6003 Excellent points, it also makes the subsequent shifts in power dynamics all the more dramatic as the Atreides Empire is free to consolidate with no fear of reprisal.
@@champisthebunny6003excellent points. What I would like to add is that money is just part 1 of the problem to wage war. You got to convince the guild that starting a war is something they should support. It is not in this movie, but The Guild feared/foresaw/predicted a future where house Atreides would impact the spice flow -which fun fact. Is exactly what Paul and Leto II did in wake of the assault on the Atreides. Anyhow, point being. Say you can pay them enough, then still they have to support the aims of your war to allow military assets on their transports.
_"There was no AI used in the making of this video"_ sounds like someone's afraid that the Butlerian Jihad police was going to come after them
He must not fear...fear is the mind killer the little death that brings total obliteration. Until Ominus arrives
You got the joke!
TOE: cant pronounce "dystopia"
also TOE: "hey i think ill do a 20 minute vid on mythical places with awkward names"
Lmfao yes I laughed hard at this😂
Butlerian police. No Butlerian diet no Butlerian powers!
I love how small the Dune Imperium is compared to other sci-fi empires, makes it feel that much more real. It's not a galaxy spanning empire, it doesn't even breach the Gould Belt. It's a small blip on a galactic map.
The Houses Major and Minor cover many more stars than the just the ones close to Arrakis.
That they can all get the Emperor's call, send a ship, and arrive at the same time as the Emperor ( book ) suggests that messages are somehow faster than ships, or entirely un-interceptable.
And that's just the Known Universe (as House Corrino names their territory) in Paul's times, don't wanna make spoilers about the following books, but later under Leto II's rule it gets way much bigger. And after that... By Shai Hullud's mercy, y'all betta read da whole saga!!!!!
May i ask why (in lore) that is? Isnt space travel instand in dune? Must the galaxy first be mapped bevor the guild can reach it?
@@jave2274 yup, in fact, through the Duniverse it's said that some navigators come and go on exploration missions searching for new territories, that's the official version: they're looking for a new undiscovered source of melange. And yes, the navigators need to know the Known Universe star maps in order to set the departure coordinates and the arrival coordinates, and use their limited prescience to add stars and planets' orbits into the calculations
@@stevetheduck1425 the thing about Imperial messages is that there's a special Imperial department of Mail Agents, people who didn't fulfill mentat training, that carry out those messages, sometimes as documents, sometimes like just memorized messages, and they use special Guild ships that don't make other planet stops, but go right through the destination and back without picking or leaving smaller ships or cargo
As I understand it 'folding Space' in Dune relies on the Holtzman Engines to move the actual spacecraft inside an area of 'space' that is not part of the Universe involving Electromagnetism. the background space, if you like. this area is currently posited as why distant stars can move faster than light relative to us. If you sue this 'space' you can move much faster than light. the DANGER is that you an your ship will hit something at that speed and just die/vanish/be destroyed. The spice allows the Navigators to see into the future enough that they can see the danger long before it arrives and plot a course that thus avoids all dangers in the journey. It is all in the books. Hope this helps. By the way, we are currently investigating the ways this might be achieved in the present day! Great video, by the way. 👍
_"this area is currently posited as why distant stars can move faster than light relative to us"_
That is not at all what modern physics says. Redshift happens because space is stretching. But this stretching isn't "our space" stretching in another, external type of space. It's not quite like a rubber band stretching in a room which itself stays unchanged - a common analogy that ultimately fails to get the nature of whats happening across. The stretching of our spacetime is a change to its metric, something for which there is sadly no good analogy for. If you must have a visual mental picture (rather than relying on the horror that is differential geometry) then you can image space being spontaneously created constantly everywhere, but very slowly, so you need to look over huge distances to things a long time ago for the amount of space that's been created to be important. There's no need to hypothesise another kind of meta space, and I've never come across any physics textbook or paper that posits such a thing. There's no "other space" that our space is stretching or moving through any more than there's a "before" the Big Bang.
Talking about either of these things is to fundamentally misunderstand what space and time are in general relativity. Which is a common mistake, unsurprisingly, because the idea of GR that space and time are things which change rather than merely the stage on which things happen is so different from our intuition (and any science learnt in school). Of course, it's scifi, so feel free to make anything up you want. But please don't take your cues about real physics from fiction.
@@QuantumHistorianI agree with you both, but that just because it’s scale. You are more semantically correct. But a perceived “other space” might be more perceptually correct for us when experiencing such a thing. Semantics. Thanks for sharing.
@@TheIgnoramus I think it's more than semantics. Conceptualising something weird as something familiar might make you think you understand it, but in this case it provides a totally false understanding.
🤓
The electromagnetic universe hypothesis hasn’t taken hold in academia because of a lack of evidence, but it is very popular amongst RUclips-trained, new-age physicists. For it to work, one would have to completely throw out Einstein’s theory of relativity, all modern cosmology and then replace it with a new mathematical sound bases that would make its founder(s) MORE famous than Einstein!! But instead of doing that, all that is offered are conspiracy theories, charlatans such Deepak and JZ Knight, mysticism and/or transcendalism, and other nonsense that can not be tested and only seem to exist in one’s mind.
So a person can posit electromagneticism and a fictional Holtzman drive all they want, but I cringe anytime someone brings it up because it simply is not a scientific theory. Great for science fiction to skirt the physics of interstellar travel….
Haha, nice touch: "There was no AI used in the making of this video"
Hes doing weird flex but okay bro 😂😂
No thinking machines were involved in accordance with Bulterian Law.
No thinking machines were involved in accordance with Bulterian Law.
@@aonozan it's not a flex. AI is illegal in Dune Lore because of historical events where AI subjugated humanity for thousands of years.
@@handlesshouldntdefaulttonames ahh okay
The folding through the ship itself TOTALLY breaks canon, but is an amazing touch in terms of artistic licence and adaptation. Even in the books they usually side step anytime spent in travel between worlds because it's boring. But it is implied that travel between worlds takes time. When Paul and Leto talk about leaving for Arrakis in the first few chapters of the book Paul says he'd like to get a look at one of the navigators and Leto cautions him to do nothing that would risk their use of the guild and that he wouldn't even have a chance to get off their ship by saying something to effect of "There could be a Harkonnen ship right beside us in the Guild's hold and we'd never know it or do anything about it" which implies you are along for the ride and the directness of the route varies based on how much you're willing to pay for an express route or milk run ticket. Leto also forces the Guild ship to remain in orbit longer then was scheduled by withholding part of their cargo as a way to gain face over the smugglers and spite the Guild by making them late for a delivery on their next stop.
I was always curious though if Guild travel was hours, days, weeks, etc long between places like Arrakis and the other worlds because if you take into account at the end of Dune Paul is around 18 or 19 years old and by the start of Dune Messiah Paul is now around 31 or 33 years old and has already put down most of the rebellion with the most violent and war heavy days of the Jihad seeming to be years behind them. This would likely mean either the wars on each planet where long (which is likely) or that he spent the better part of 13 years traveling the empire to snatch and grab and move on (which could also be possible but less likely)
I always interpreted it as space folding is fast itself, but that doesn't mean the travel itself is fast. You have to pack your stuff, leave the gravity well, probably travel to a Lagrange point or something to meet the highliner, dock the highliner, wait for the other to dock, maybe the Guild runs security checks etc etc. Just like travelling via plane. The plane journed might take only 1-2-3 hours but you need to pack, take a cab to the airport, go through security, board, take your seat, then the plane waits in line to take off.
I like this because space travel is hard and isn't trivial. It's also mentioned in the books that travelling is EXPENSIVE. The transportation of 50 Harkonnen divsions almost bankrupted the Baron and he was almost as rich as the Emperor. It made him indebted for 50 years. Only the wealthiest houses can afford space travel. It explains why the Imperium is feudal and isolated.
The way I took it was as a concession to the unfortunate fact that the average viewer is, in fact, an idiot and must have some indication that a vast gulf is being spanned. As far as winking goes, it does seem the best way to communicate this visually, and like everything else in the film is done masterfully. Honestly, I missed it the first two times I watched. I assumed it went down as it did in the books. My brain was already exploding from all the tiny little details from the book that were shown and left for the viewer to figure out by themselves; I was in a forgiving mood. IMO Herbert was wise to treat travel mainly as a chance to exposit in the least cheesy way possible. He didn't dwell on the mundane, but when forced to address it he used it well. I can honestly say that I never once pondered Paul impatiently pacing in flight worrying about missing his own jihad. To each his own. I probably will now. Thanks for that.
@@amarissimus29 Oh Herbert has totally dabbled in cheesy space travel mechanics lol
Read his series called The Ship alternate title for the Series is The God Problem. Most of the story is based around space travel and space time perspectives, and insane genetic manipulation. Like would make Emperor Leto wince kind of genetic manipulations
@@Mickekzonit almost bankrupted the Baron simply because the rate to transport the military were far more expensive than civilian ones.
It was by design since the Guild desires for a peaceful empire instead of warring feudal nobles who have an axe to grind with one another.
Hence why the era before the ascencion of Paul as emperor was called the "Guild Peace".
Leto II made sure to take notes from that and enacted his own "Leto's Peace" for 3,500 years.
I interpret the visual of space folding through the ship as just a visual effect stemming from some weird physics of FTL travel. The ship is not there, it is already gone, but you can still see the shadow of the ship on orbit before it disappears and the "reflection" of the original departure point through the ship to its back near its engines. You can see it, because the ship itself is faster than light and the light just didn't get the memo that it is already gone. It will disappear in time and you cannot communicate through it and cannot just enter the other star system through it, you either pass the "photon screen" and come out of the other side if the ship has a hole on the other side, or, I like this better, you smash your ship into the engine compartment of the heighliner because that is why the "forgotten" photons are there, it is actually just a one-sided tube and the weird physical effects the engine produces creates the "reflection" of the other system.
2:12 Mass Effect "uncharted worlds" background music, how satisfying😌. Ah now I feel very nostalgic!
I have to imagine Aralakh (the Krogan home system) was named in an allusion to Arrakis.
Yes as a fan of both franchises it was so satisfying.
It took me right back lol. wat a great game that was
also: "Alright. Probing Uranus" xD
The way I think about is, "folding space" is more like tunnelling through space.
For example, when the Atreides moved from Caladan to Arrakis, the Guild sent a Heighliner to Caladan to pick them up.
- So now the Heighliner is in only one place - Caladan.
- They pack up, strap in and the Heighliner "departs" from Caladan.
- It's not instantaneous and the travel takes time while the Guild Navigators "fold" space around them and find a route to Arrakis - essentially tunneling through space faster than light from one point to the next.
- Once the folding of space is done, the heighliner appears out of folded space into real space outside of Arrakis - much like a burrower emerging from a tunnel.
It could explain why you can see the origin point on the other side of the Heighliner in Villeneuve's movie - The Heighliner basically establishes a tunnel through spacetime. But I don't think the travel would be instantaneous since you would need to be on the heighliner as it burrowed through spacetime. You can just see the origin point but you would not be able to go back unless the Heighliner folds space the other way too.
I like this idea because poetically, it makes the Heighliners work essentially like Sand Worms, burrowing through the sands of Spacetime.
Yes
Yes
And Yes.100% agree.
Yes! Like a wormhole, self made, self collapsed or Space woukd be clogged with worm holes,
If you can see it, aka light can travel through… then you can also travel through
@@Alpha_GameDev-wq5cc If you can see something, that doesn't necessarily mean that something can see you. e.g. if an object was to travel faster than light, the photons emmited from it would lag behind creating a "contrail". Only if you were to intersect that contrail, would you be able to see the object in the past. For the object moving above the speed of light, only photons directly in its path would be visible. So an interstellar traveler coming directly at you would see you long before you see him and you would only catch him from behind, while he was already moving and looking away from you.
@@VulpeculaJoy and? I never said anything about the order of events. You decided to disagree with me and then provided an explanation for a completely different concept.
If there’s a path for light in a direction, unless there’s a speed barrier to tunnel through… then YOU CAN ALSO TRAVEL THROUGH. Even that is just that… a speed barrier.
From a pedantic standpoint, the 2021 take on the heighliner seems to take inspiration from how theoretic wormholes "fold" space by literally bending the dimensions of spacetime making a path from A to B significantly shorter.
absolutely loved that you used the mass effect galaxy map music.
I started reading again because of your video "The Real Stars and Scale of Sci-fi", A Fire Upon the Deep is an amazing book.
It’s so good. I haven’t read the sequel yet.
_"Man may not be replaced"_ at 6:26 is a strange way of spelling the much more commonly repeated maxim _"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"_ of the Orange Catholic Bible.
'Man may not be replaced' was the core concept of the Butlerian Jihad in its time (stated in the books), the later OC Bible maxim was created after the jihad, although ends up being the more common associated phrase.
Who controls the past now controls the future.
Who controls the present now controls the past.
Who controls the past now controls the future.
Who controls the present now?
@@ehdan3038Oh the wise sphinx of the YT comments, my answer to this riddle is Dr Who
@@plSzq1 NoOo THE ANSWER IS... MAN!
not strange at all, it is the original declaration of Butler. Maybe you, a person from the 10,191 AG might mistake it so.
Folding Space: Literally that. If Space and Time are the same thing, visualize space as a giant piece of paper that you can fold to create a shorter path.
Paul's abilities, and that of the navigators, is to see through time and know where the folds are safe to use.
That Mass Effect galaxy map tune brings up such pleasant memories for me. I love that universe as well.
Haha, I love the Mass Effect map music. Excellent choice.
Wow only 500 out of the milky way's ~150,000 lightyears. I didnt realize the Known Universe in Dune was so small
Interstellar rather than Intragalactic.
Even the Culture in Ian M Bank's stories on covers a small part of a galaxy.
The allies and agreements with other powers make the space the Culture knows of about a ten-thousandth of the galaxy.
The size of even one galaxy contains billions of stars.
That’s why there are no aliens in Dune.
It really captures the sheer size of the galaxy, and beyond that the size of the universe. I personally love that despite all of mankind's advancements, mankind is still microscopic compared to just one galaxy. Microscopic enough that despite their vast empire they are taken down by the literal worms of one planet. In that way you could see Dune as a love letter to nature, and a nod to its extreme power and majesty which I think was part of what inspired Frank to write the stories to begin with. He was an environmentalist.
@@InnerFire6213 I mean, there is the big ass worm... hiding under... the dunes.
@@1lukeycharmz sandworms were introduced to arrakis. As for by whom or when the history is lost but it happened well before the butlerian jihad. They’re not native to arrakis. The spice was an unintentional byproduct produced by the worms exclusively in arrakis due to the special soil maybe
Another outstanding video -- and timely, too! 😉 You've touched on a lot of my favorite book series, and added some fun context by showing distances and location. Looking forward to what you tackle next.
As far as FTL travel in the Dune series, I think its description morphed as Herbert wrote more novels. But using one of the later books, it's definitely not instantaneous. There are some travel scenes where Bene Gesserit strategy meetings are held while en route to other planets. Individual ships are docked within the Heighliner, which then travels FTL, and offloads the ships at its destination. Seems like that's how the Atreides entourage traveled to Arrakis, too. But Herbert usually focused more on the characters than the technology, leaving readers to theorize on specifics...
19:30 - my head canon for FTL travel in the 2021 film: 1) a heighliner ship arrives at the starting point of your journey; 2) the guild navigator starts folding spacetime using the heighliner; 3) your tiny ship now can start entering the fold in spacetime; 4) the guild navigator finishes folding; 5) heighliner arrives at the destination through the fold but the fold is kind of "inside of it"; 6) the guild navigator starts to unfold the spacetime; 7) your ship can start exiting the fold in spacetime.
Tio is indeed Spanish for uncle and if Tio Holtzman is of Asian descent he is not necessarily Chinese since Tio (or Tiyo) is also a Filipino word for uncle (because the Philippines is a Spanish colony in the 1500s-1800s so Tio Holtzman may be of Filipino descent.
Wouldn't that be "tito"? Because I hear that more often than "tio".
Well, tio is huncle in Portuguese too, and Ferdinand Magellan (Fernando de Magalhães) was the first Westerner to set foot in the Philippines; he died there. There's that.
Also in South America we had a lot of inmigration from Japan and China.
@@factorgsi Magellan wasnt the first European to set foot in the Philippines. We dont know who was the first, because he wasnt travelling alone. It might have been Elcano, the first one to actually circumnavigate the world. Let's not take merit out from it's crew.
Interesting since his surname is German with a spanish name... yet he looks and is culturally chinese? hehe
iIrc during the journey on an intergalactic highliner. The passengers were prohibited to leave their ships because at times enemies were transported within the very same highliner, meaning that they did spent some time inside the highliner
This elegant work this channel exhibits is with one word - amazing. I have fallen in love with this video about Dune, so informative, so creative and so much lore gathered in one place, just one-of-a-kind experience.
So glad your channel found me!! Awesome content.
I dig the 3d/4d map/grid mapping locations of the star systems in the description!🎉❤
Regarding the pronunciation of Richese, I vaguely remember in Lynch's Dune from 1984, the scene where the Guild Navigator had an audience with the Emperor it pronounced it as "Ree-chess".
Came here to say that! Yeah I'd say he pronounces it like "ri-CHESS" (like a portmanteau of rich and chess) or "re-CHESS"
@@endoplasmicreticulum8357 the Richese factory
The Mass Effect ambient music was a nice touch. Still gives me nostalgic feeling
Now this is the lore I want! Do the UNSC control space from Halo next!
thank you so much for this, I knew that arrakis is in the canopus system but I didn't know about all the other stuff, I love it when a sci-fi setting actually takes place in "our" universe and is not just completely made up (tho that can be fun too)
I think that you have greatly misunderstood the heighliners as they appear in Dune 2021. I don't think they just appear or create a portal - we just see them while they are in orbit, not while they are moving. The tube shape might help with the bending of space, but I think the shuttles and ships that we see coming down from the heighliners are literally docked inside of that massive tube ship somewhere. But the heighliner itself is traveling the massive gulfs between the stars, just like Frank Herbert wrote in the original novels.
What then is the point of showing us a different region of space within the so-called tube of the heighliner if not to indicate that the ship literally has generated and sustained a wormhole within it, one from which we can observe the Bene Gesserit ship emerge before landing on Caladan? It's an interesting question!
I love you man, finally show me perspective
Though they don't specify in Dune 2021, I think it is strongly implied that the "stargate ship" suddenly appear, seeing how they were not even alerted that an invasion was under way till the last second. This is just speculation on my part however. But like you said, otherwise it would make the spacing guild unnecessary. Awesome video. I like your work.
It's been a very long time since I've read the first book, but I vaguely recall that Arrakis doesn't have much in the way of planetary defenses. Very few satellites, controlled by the space guild and perhaps either by interference of the emperor, the choam company, the guild, the great houses or whoever, is kept "in the dark" this way. Maybe there was quite a bit of collusion between the interested parties for this, but I'm not sure, I only read the first two books and it was a long time ago.
I liked that it was a visual language way of showing that it'd bridged the gulf of space, but didn't explain if it actually worked differently. I had two interpretations on this: either it is making a wormhole (heh) between two locations, but it itself can also jump around, OR, my own head canon: it still works the way it is described in canon, and what you're seeing is sort of an optical illusion, where the Holtzman effect somehow causes an afterimage of its previous location to remain within the physical boundaries of the heighliner. But, because you're able to see through the ship, say you went towards the center instead of out one end, the image would then shift and be behind you once you passed the midpoint, and perhaps show what its previous location looked like from the opposite end of the ship. If the Holtzman effect plays with how particles repel but the folded space it passes through doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum the same way it does unfolded... Maybe it does something funky to light particles. I mean, both superfluidic helium and black holes exhibit the holographic effect when modeled in a supercomputer, so who knows what such an effect might have on light waves/particles.
@@gcolombelli 15:52 The Fremen had to keep bribing the Space Guild to not use satellites to observe the deep desert, or let anyone else observe it.
love the Mass Effect theme in the background. perfect for this.
Wow what an excellent, In depth and creative video on the dune story, great efforts and beautifully made, thnx mate
May I suggest doing a video like this for BattleTech/MechWarrior?
Sure the official maps are all 2D, but any real stars used would inherently have a 3D aspect to add to them.
The hard part is that BattleTech maps tend to lable stars with the names of the inhabited planet that orbits it, rather than the name of the star...
I’ll consider it but I don’t personally know the canon. I kind of have to have some personal connection to the canon to make a good video.
There’s so many people into it I may have to give the people what they want!
@@OverviewEffekt fair enough, while I could always recommend Tex Talks BattleTech or Sven van der Plank as two fantastic lore channels to see if it hooks you or not, the volume of research/work that would likely need to be done to try and make an actually spherical map of the Inner Sphere and Periphery is not something anyone less than a hard-core fan should put themselves through.
I’m so glad people are making videos based on the Dune Encyclopedia over the extended universe. It’s just so much better and fits the themes and ideas of the original novels so much better.
Amazing production overall, thank you so much for making this video. Please make more astronomy dune content!
The disclaimer that AI was not used in the making of this film is really funny given the lore of Dune. I'm certain that was intentional
These videos are amazing! They provide the true sense and distances of space while also showcasing simplicity! These videos have also really helped out in my worldbuilding projects.
These videos are once again amazing, keep it up! :)
What is the flag on your pfp?
You make good use of Mass Effects unquestionably most memorable tune - Heleus, New Worlds or ME1s Uncharted Worlds. Proud of you ^-^
When the Mass effect music started playing, i had actual shivers... I really like the nerdy jokes in this video.
Can't have a star map without it
Knew I recognized something ❤
i personally take the space folding as quite literally. the ship folding space so that rather than traveling the long distance they essentially make their current location and the location they want to go to touch.
the reason you then need either computers or prescient navigators is so your ship doesn't explode from manifesting inside of an asteroid, or gets caught in a star or the deepest blackness of space.
This was really great. I knew the distances between each system would be far but I didn't think it was quite on this scale, and when you throw in all the unknown systems from expansion that occurred during the Scattering and anytime a house went Renegade that's a crazy reach into the Galaxy Frank Herbert gave us
Such great content, good humor and I’m loving your channel. I can’t wait to see what you release in the future.
This video is so good can’t believe the algo is letting her down! Thanks for prompting us to come watch.
(5:48) As far as I can tell Richese is pronounced [rɪkʰeːsɛ] (a trilled r, an aspirated k (as in ‘character’), and a sharp s (as in ‘sink’)). But Frank Herbert may have made up his own pronunciation.
Loved the video! I will definitely watch it a few more times before Part 2 comes out in the hope of remembering at least some of it^^
The switch to a dark background is definitely a big improvement! The map looks amazing, and you can really see the stars shine now.
Looking forward to what comes next!
I don't know IPA but I've listened to the audiobooks and the narrator says "rich-ay-zee"
@@RonCecchetti I based it on how it would be pronounced in Latin since most stars (and planets) have names in either Latin or Arabic.
But as I said, Herbert might have made up his own pronunciation. Besides, it seems reasonable that the pronunciation would have changed throughout the millennia
@@huehnerfrikassee good observation
I always thought it was pronounced [ʁi.ʃɛs] like 'richesse' , French for 'wealth', also it derives from old french 'richese' and it would be fitting with the planet being a wealthy tech world.
The movie heighliner scene makes sense if it is running based on the Alcubierre Drive based on an actual solution of Einstein's field equations. You basically fold space by contracting space in front and expanding it behind, allowing for FTL travel.
I mentioned this in a thread: I liked that it was a visual language way of showing that the heighliner bridged the gulf of space, but didn't explain if it actually worked any differently. I did have two interpretations on this: either it is indeed just making a wormhole (heh) between two locations, but it itself can also jump around, OR, my own head canon: it still works the way it is described in canon, and what you're seeing is sort of an optical illusion, where the Holtzman effect somehow causes an afterimage of its previous location to remain within the physical boundaries of the heighliner. But, because you're able to see through the ship, say you went towards the center instead of out one end, the image would then shift and be behind you once you passed the midpoint, and perhaps show what its previous location looked like from the opposite end of the ship. If the Holtzman effect plays with how particles repel but the folded space it passes through also doesn't interact with electromagnetism the same way it does unfolded... Maybe it does something funky to the electromagnetic spectrum of light. I mean, both superfluidic helium and black holes exhibit the holographic effect when modeled in a supercomputer, so who knows what such an effect might have on light waves/particles, and what it would actually look like to us.
I just wanted to say that I loved the 3D map you used in your video. Nicely done! 👏 My quibble is when you said that the Butlerian Jihad was a war against AI. That’s not quite correct. Here’s what Frank Herbert said in Dune:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
It was a war between humans that resulted in the end of thinking machines.
Love the 5th Element clip 👌.
Great video
I wish there was real stars and hard scifi in that movie its my top 1 or 2 films.
I would love to see this done for Warhammer 40k im not sure how many systems have real counterparts but ir would be cool
Extrapolation from the Dune novels by Frank Herbert reveals that foldspace travel is not the foldspace travel we know from modern theory, it is essentially just an instantaneous form of warp travel, a warp bubble is formed around the Heighliner and the fabric of space time is moved around the vessel at near instantaneous speeds. This makes sense as the concept of modern foldspace travel did not exist when the books were originally written, the most popular theory around was the Alcubierre Theory in which time and space is bent to allow a ship to move without moving. The other part that adds credence to this is the need for Navigators, also known as Steersmen, to plot a course, such plotting of courses would not be necessary for instantaneous foldspace travel, it'd be a very simple mathematical equation which many people can learn quite easily, navigators need to see all obstacles in their path, suns, moons, comets and the rest to safely plot a course to the destination, in the early days of the Guild travel via foldspace was still an uncertain and dangerous way to travel, it took a long time to train enough Navigators to build their monopoly on space travel, until that time mathematical solving systems were used to navigate (not computers or thinking machines, just simple arithmetic devices). The 2024 movie actually has the least accurate depiction of Foldspace travel as ships docked in a heighliner, they didn't just fly in one side and out the other.
"There was no AI used in the making of this video."
Respect, subbed. Also, Bela Tegeuse sounds suspiciously similar to the star "Betelgeuse." I wonder if Frank originally intended it to be Betelgeuse but the pronunciation had become corrupted over 20,000 years.
8:20 Maybe he is a Filipino, Spanish and Asian at the same time 😂. Tiyo also mean "uncle" in the Philippines.
And german bc Holtzman
Portuguese arrived first in the Philippines, and tio is huncle in portuguese too.
@@factorgsi Magellan is Portuguese but it's still a Spanish Expedition and the crew are mostly Spanish
"There was no AI in the making of this video" = Yup- that's worth a subscription! Thanks for a great video.
Love the mass effect music playing in the background!
I would argue that it's not that the known dune universe it small, but that all the big players were from areas pre-space folding, so naturally their homeworlds would all be in the neighbourhood.
Honestly huge respect for the effort it must have took to research, 3D model and edit this video :)
Really incredible video. Great work!
Absolutely epic. The research, explanation, and visuals are top-notch. I am subscribing!
I’m loving the mass effect music in the background
The heighliners are giant ships inside which other ships are docked for the journey. In order to avoid needing to describe it, Herbert made it a core part of the story that one is not allowed to move, or even see, outside their ship during embarkation, transit and while disembarking. So, you get on your ship and park it in space, then a Guild representative comes aboard and checks everything. Once that's done, they move your ship into the heighliner and you sit there until they take it out at your destination. The books even mention how enemy ships headed to the same warzone could be right next to each other.
I'm reading the book right now so this was nice to see. Thanks.
I like the idea of a Highliner appearing simultaneously in two locations and a shared "space" appearing in its core during it transition from one system to the next. The Highliner then disapears from the origin system and is only in the destination, it then begins a transition to its next stop, like a space train.
what a lovely video, no ai used, mass effect music , plent of lore and science
This is the video I was looking for. I got many answers I was looking for. Thanks man. Well explained.
You need more subscribers, you deserve more, thank you for making these types of videos
veery interesting and educative video. Thank you! 😃
@5:09 that eve online character portrait popping up for harkonnen ....was that the mitanni ? either way, loved it. Brings back some nastalgia, to hell with goon swarm lol.
Glad im not the only one that noticed lmfao, that had me laughing so hard.
Lately I've come to the conclusion that FTL travel in Dune works like this:
You have the FTL engine (the Holtzman Engine) that folds space (wormhole, actual FTL movement, IDK), but that folding is not very accurate., so you get the 1 in 10 ships lost while travelling. Enter the Guild Navigators, who thanks to their specialized training in "pure mathematics" (as stated by Gaius Helen Mohiam at the beginning of the first book) and their mental enhancement with spice are capable of performing the *very* complicated calculations (without A.I. assistance) required for an accurate space folding, in essence "seeing the future" thru astrodinamycal mathematics, like an overclocked NASA supercomputer.
Your conclusion is the same as everyone else...but it's the actual specific details on how it works (which you are missing) that people are wondering about. In the book it makes it sound like it takes days or weeks to travel, but the movie shows it more like crossing a bridge or portal which wouldn't take long. In case you missed it, you can see a planet not in the same system as Caladan through the highliner when the imperial ship passes the camera.
Nicely done. This is heavy information and easter eggs drilled down into pure nerd nectar.
Damn never expected a new video now. I'm happy
Very informative. I am loving the 3D star maps. Could you tell us a little bit about how those are made, i.e. software, etc.
Perfect music for space maps. Also a great game!
Thank you for this video.
I’m very impressed so far with the world building of Dune.
Reminds me somewhat of middle earth. It’s impressive
My favorite bit of lore from the Dune Encyclopedia is that Earth, aka Terra, is recognized as a "natural park" by the imperium.
Hard to say which presentation of is the best. I did not read the books but I think the idea of folding space in dune can't be separated from the concept of wormholes anymore as it has been explained with folding a paper so often... If it's more travel then teleport it may has been shown best in star wars
I thought Star Trek lore was complicated. With only 200-300 years from now but Dune Lore with 18-20k years from now is something different
No AI used in the making of this video! Thanks for not giving in to lazy AI, and for the disclaimer so we can enjoy the real art and work that went into this.
You made two mistakes. (1st.) I can't remember the book, I think it's 'The Battle of Corrin' that the Fermen (Free Men) ended up on Arakis by accident as a group of them stole a ship and did a blind jump and ended up crashing on Arakis. (2nd) As of the first novel Earth no longer exists as it was destroyed by nuclear bombardment right before 'The Butlerian Jihad'.
Earth was physically obliterated or just rendered uninhabitable?
@@vegasboy5931 I think it was physically destroyed but I could be wrong.
I always thought that "folding space" in Dune was something similar to what we see in Battlestar Galactica series or Foundation
I read Dune when it first came out. I thought it was pretty clear how Heighliners worked. The Holzman engines achieved a kind of unimagineably fast speed - in a way that was never exactly explained - but only a Navigator could safely steer one because of the prescient 'sight' they acquired. I don't remember there being any suggestions that the Navigator personally folded space. The film versions made different interpretations but I imagine it would really be about as unexciting as watching an oil tanker appear on the horizon then slow to a stop near a harbour.
18:45 I think it could work like some sort of 4D Möbius strip-- Something that to outside 3D viewers like us might seem like a donut/hole shaped on either end, but really stretches into a different time with folding space inside itself allows for instantaneous travel through the stars.
Love the mass effect galaxy map music.
Fantastic job with the visuals
Am gonna go watch Dune pt 2 again today or tomorrow maybe
First few times watching part 1 I missed that amazing shot thru the Heighliner, where you see the other planet thru it.
I think those ships are my favourite thing of the lore so far.
Also fantastic video mate. Gives me more context to go watch it again in cinema. First watch was also an incredible experience
Merging canon from the books with the movie visuals, I imagine the Heighliners are like a hollow needle. They can tunel through space itself. Ships can dock into them. When they or rather, the navigators, fold space, they sort of pierce the folded space-time like a needle, and ships inside can move out of them into the destination. During that process a one-way "hole" exists that the Heighliner keeps open, acting as a gate that is temporarily there, allowing light to pass through.
9:19 "We've only just begun to detect exoplanets around stars in the past few years". We've been detecting exoplanets for over 30 years now. From Wikipedia: "The first confirmation of the detection occurred in 1992. A different planet, first detected in 1988, was confirmed in 2003. As of 1 March 2024, there are 5,640 confirmed exoplanets in 4,155 planetary systems, with 895 systems having more than one planet."
Well done. Also, scrolling through the planets reminds me of doing the same thing playing Mass Effect 2 back in the day
I like what you say and how you show it. For me, from reading the first couple books a few times (as a kid).. Playing Dune 2 back in the early 90s, listening to Frank Herbert interviews during the later 60s then of course watching the last couple Dune movies.. I am impressed
As far as the heighligners traveling and their shape, iirc (from over 10 years ago lol) they were basically shaped like big toilet paper tubes to maximize their cargo volume, and the engine that created the holtzman effect was able to extend the area it could transport to whatever fit inside the ship.
Whether it was from individual ships' systems or the heighligners themselves, there was no mention of feeling acceleration that I can remember. There was just a phase into the fold-space, the path(s) the navigator took, and a phase back into real space.
If I had to guess I would say it would most likely be changing of the frequency of the space the holtzman engine could affect and somehow equalizing it with the destination so that they essentially became the same space and the ship "slid" from one space to the next. Actually, that would be similar to why a shield and a laser would create an atomic detonation, in only one of them, as each are generated from the same effect and only one wins the coin flip for staying coherent in space, now that I think about it.
I thought the Heighliners traveled through hyperspace. To travel without moving means the ship doesn't move in the everyday 4D universe. Rather, it does something in another level of reality that changes its coordinates here. The net effect is teleportation: the ship ceases to exist at one location and begins existing in another at the same instant. The difficulty arises from hyperspace not being completely empty of danger.
I think in Dune Part One and Two, Guild Highliners kind of duplicate themselves at the destination system to form two ends of a wormhole. This is why the job of a Guild Navigator is so hard. They have to literally project their minds across dozens of light years of space and focus on a very tiny location within the destination system, and a very specific velocity vector at that location, so that when the wormhole end appears it's in a circular orbit around the destination planet rather than plummeting towards it, or a billion kilometers away from it.
Although many stars of Pisces belong to Waiping (外屏 outer fence), Gamma Piscium was listed as Pili 2 (霹雳 thunderbolt 2) in Ancient China.
Could be the portal option, but then even when you go through the portal, whatever ship you're on needs a navigator to safely even go through the portal (like stargate except instead of you just automatically going through the wormhole sequence that plays in the movie version of stargate you have to find your way and not hit stars on your journey)
I think it’s possible to look at the Dune 2021 heighliners and have them not break canon. If we assume the ship is essentially present in two places in space then it still fits the idea of folding space around the ship. Furthermore, it’s worth noting we don’t actually know if it’s instantaneous travel. The image we see through the ship doesn’t necessarily mean it’s still physically present on the other side. It is also possible the journey within the ship takes a while from the perspective of those inside it.
Man, this is the true super nerd analysis of the dune universe, excellent work
Somewhere in this adaptation, Denis "must" give us his srtistic interpretation of the Guild Navigators.😮 But now that I consider it, the concept of FTL was such an integral element of commerce that it is a bit of a curve when the guild/navs & CHOAM didn't immediately capitulate to Paul's ascendancy as Emperor. Moreover, the concept of prescience is treated more like "Bad Dream Syndrome", than the uber-conscious Paul would have post "Water of Life" -part of which he shared with the guild/navs, though Paul's was obviously more expansive. Great original concept vid regarding the star mapping. I have watched a lot of vids on Dune on YT and this is truly terrific work by you 🎙, (NOT AI!!) 😜. This is what makes YT my fave entertainment platform because of creative, original & thought provoking content creators like yourself! 🎬 And @ 67, I am an Intrawebby OG !😎🤣 Really great job!! 💯👍🏾👍🏾
I like your use of the Mass Effect music 😊
I fell like the Highliners allow you to see light from the other side because it is difficult for matter to traverse it but there are so many photons that the chances of them making it through are so high allowing you to see the other side. It prolly also helps that light is a wave and a particle. And it takes a lot of calculations to let the mass amount of a ship go through.
Folding space was described in "Event Horizon." That is, the ship 'folds' space like a piece of paper. The origin point and destination point essentially merge for a moment, the ship transfers from Point A to Point B, then the space 'unfolds'. The ship didn't "move" in the traditional sense but it now orbits Point B. The 'folding process' takes tremendous energy and extremely difficult and complicated mathematical calculations. This complexity, absent computers, is how the Guild continues to exist.
Dune is a merge of science fiction with high fantasy elements like knights, wizards, and dragons (the sandworms). Some authors have tried merging these two genres before but Dune is one of the successful, and most spectacular ones.
It's true, it's really hard. I once put beer on my cornflakes. It wasn't the delicious breakfast treat I'd imagined.