Spicy thoughts

[gfish]

I've been thinking about Dune technology recently. Why didn't they just make Spice Harvesters that didn't involve rhythmic vibrations? Obviously industrial processes will always create vibrations, but do they have to be rhythmic? Stochastic Mechanical Engineering could be a major field of study at Arrakeen University.

Comments

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

What about biological systems? If you had critters that ate spice, and then other critters that ate those, and concentrated the spice. Repeat as necessary, you could eventually end up with critters that pooped processed spice, kinda like civets.

Maybe the first level spice finders are plants, so not to arouse the worm's attention, and then the second-level processors are like hummingbirds, that don't alight on the sand. Then the third level critters eat the eggs and young of the birds, which only do that stuff on rock, by which time you're safe.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

This is, in fact, what you have on Arrakis — the only problem is, there's one more thing after that in the food chain, and it's kinda big...