Tukukkk

In my current fictional fantasy-ish endeavor, I have a world with a great war. This war is vast and encompasses all of the known land. Due to magical means, soldiers for the war are 'summoned' from other worlds and times, thus negating the drain on population which would otherwise occur due to the war. However, there are difficulties:

These soldiers do not return to their worlds or times, but remain in my fantasy world, using up its valuable resources with everyone else. To make matters worse, through magical means there are no permanent casualties of war (Think WoW-style resurrections). The per capita consumption of resources will outweigh the per capita natural production of resources by the world. (Aka, too many people, not enough food.)

I can't have this happen. I need a world with infinite resources, or at least a world where the resources are replenished faster than they can be used up. Is such a world possible? If so, how? Details are below:

• Technology level is that of Ancient Rome. Battles are fought with swords, shield, arrows, and the like. Farming and other resource harvesting also have this technology level.


• 'Resources' refer mainly to food, both grown and animal. However, lumber for housing and metal for warfare should also be considered.


• 'Infinite' resources simply means that the rate at which the resources are supplied per capita outpaces the rate at which they are used per capita. If a man requires X amount of grain in one year, X amount of grain needs to have been regrown and ready for consumption by the next year.


• Magic should not be considered.


• That being said, due to magic, only people can be 'summoned'. Resources cannot.

Working along the assumption that everyone has sufficient resources (not starving, but not necessarily getting in three square meals a day either), is it possible for a world to have infinite resources, and if so, how?

There are a couple ways you could handwave this away.

The most obvious is the simple "Magic". How does food production keep up? Druids. How do we keep making swords? Transfiguration. Whenever you are met with some kind of deficiency get a corresponding magic form. This makes pretty much every resource entirely magic produced.

Another good magic one is to say they come from the same place as the soldiers. When fresh soldiers are summoned so is food iron and whatever else you need. With this kind of setting you can make a theme around the perpetual consumption of more and more worlds to fuel this forever war.

One that is a bit less magical would be constant asteroid strikes delivering fresh war materials. Either naturally for whatever reason or summoned. You would still need to explain food production with "its magic" but this could be fresh building materials and metals.

Finally you could use the worlds metaphysics to explain it. Your world simply creates and eats land in a treadmill like way. Let's say your world is a circular disk where the outer edge is a "creation line where new land pushes in towards the middle. The center is a "destruction line" where a black hole like structure eats everything.

You have created a horrible problem. There does not exist a way within known physics to make an infinite amount of something from a finite amount of it. Unless your people are smart enough to limit their summoning to fit within resources (hint hint hint), they can always summon more mouths to feed than there are food.

100% of resources (meaning "things you and I might possibly consider to be resources") have energy to them. Conservation of energy along will ruin this plot.

But all is not lost. Consider that you haven't answered the question I'd ask immediately: what happens if these newly summoned warriors don't consume food?

What if, after your WoW style resurrection, we simply push them all into a pit, where they aren't given food or water or resources of any kind? Eventually the pit might fill up, which would be a problem, but it'd be a start.

The real problem is resurrection. When life itself has limited value due to the implicit guarantees of resurrection, pretty much everything else shifts around to fit. The summoning isn't actually the problem. It could even be a solution: summoning people and stripping them of their resources may be a valid solution, but if they resurrect as a new mouth to feed, there's still a problem.

Myself, if I were a warring leader in your world, I would invest tremendous resources into understanding the specifics of this ressurection mechanism. You mention that they can only die of natural deaths... let's explore what "natural death" actually means. Really really means. Like if you say "a heart attack is a natural death," I'm going to start with a snake venom which coagulates your blood, and see if you ressurect.

The leader who understands this mechanism will have a virtually boundless advantage over all other leaders who don't. Anyone worthy of leading a great war should be trying to game your system almost instantly... probably even before the war starts. Assume that every leader in your war is your enemy, and by that I mean you as a worldbuilder. Assume they are actively trying to exploit every tiny little crack in your world, because that's exactly what leaders of warring nations do.

We exploited a corner case in the stability of an atomic nucleus to end WWII. That exploit has caused considerable consternation since then.

As others mentioned, it's scientifically impossible to generate "infinite resources" for your "infinite troops". However, perhaps some world "quirks" could help alleviate said resources running out.

Space-time cracks: Your fantasy world has been summoning people from other worlds and times. This has caused the entire world's space-time to be unstable (Or could be the very reason why you can summon people in the world in the first place. These cracks appear randomly anywhere in the world, either spewing out random resources, or destroying whatever it contacts with.

"Broken evolution": With the ongoing war spanning for eons(?), creatures have evolved to rapidly reproduce and grow at astonishing rates. Even with limited resources, it can grow to an adult within days, ready to reproduce even more. This in turn, makes it very easy for an unlimited number of people to be fed.

White Hole: Theorized to be true, but never seen, it's basically an opposite of a black hole, spewing out matter and information. This is a similar concept of @Evelyn's Disk world, but instead the White hole would be the center of the planet.

As the war goes on, ravaging all lands, mining out resources underground extensively, the crust of the planet has been depleted already. However, the white hole in the center keeps spewing out more resources that can be dugged up years and years ahead. Though this questions physics as the planet will undoubtedly keep on growing and growing and everyone would probably die from the ever-increasing gravity or something..

/This war is vast and encompasses all of the known land./

Your world is vaster, and almost all of it remains unknown.

When they are done fighting, persons so inclined (I hope they bring in male and female soldiers in equal proportion) go out to settle new lands. Yours is a hospitable world with pleasant weather, grassy fields, ample rainfall, and few dangerous creatures. The world is very big, and people are small. Like minded pioneers go out together into the wilds and find a place with running water and good sites for fields. They settle. They grow crops, raise animals, make things, have weddings, make babies, hold funerals and do all the things people do when no-one is making them fight.

This is how it worked in our world for a long, long time. For all intents and purposes, up until about 200 years ago the resources of the Earth were infinite.

Your world is a simulation. Just that world in particular though. It could exist as a planet sized super computer, an old arcade in the future, or even within the dreams of an android. The why of it poses a rather interesting question.

To access infinite resources, you merely need an infinite world! As @Willk mentioned, that was the practical situation for a decent chunk of our own history, before the world was fully mapped. But in your world, it won't just be temporarily effectively infinite, but really, truly infinite.

First, suppose that the world is an infinite flat plane. You'll have to figure out how, e.g., the sun works in such a radically different cosmology, but hey, magic (and there are plenty of existing questions & answers on related topics). If you run out of grain here, where the war is going on, you just have to travel into the as-yet-unexplored regions beyond your borders to find an unending supply of more fields.

Of course, that doesn't completely solve your problem. If you have to travel prohibitively far to get those infinite resources, the fact that infinite resources exist is academic. For practical purposes, you only have the finite resources within your finite sphere of influence, and your ability to bring in new resources is limited by a border length for your civilization that grows more slowly than the people-holding area.

In order to solve the geometry problem, we'll simply change your world's geometry. It's not an infinite Euclidean plane--it's a hyperbolic plane, which can fit a lot more area within the same small travel radius than a spherical planet or even a Euclidean plane can! Just pick your curvature parameter so that things remain normal-enough looking on whatever scale you need. If, e.g., you merely need things to be close-to-Euclidean within the scale of a single city at a time, you could still easily fit a whole Earth's worth of area into a radius of only a few hundred miles. Now, your border still grows more slowly that your area in such a scenario, if you expand everywhere equally... but would you expand everywhere equally? Probably not--in such a world, people are likely to occupy a network of individually-close-to-Euclidean communities, with huge unexplored expanses sitting in between population centers that are nevertheless still a mere day's walk or less in shortest-path distance from each other, leaving plenty of space to be explored for additional resource extraction well within the nominal extreme radius of your civilization.