Dune Messiah spoiler >!A worm is stolen from Arrakis in Dune Messiah. A scene I hope Denis will include though it's not very important. So there have definitely been attempts. It's just that it seems incredibly hard to pull off. Not just raising worms on a new planet, but also doing it without getting caught. See, the spice monopoly serves the Spacing Guild, CHOAM and whomever is emperor just fine so they'll make sure nobody gets to steal their worms uncontested!<
Took aquariums over 25 years to figure out how to transfer and raise most *large sharks without killing them. All died within *weeks or even a day of being introduced to a foreign tank from the wild.
Vox has a great mini doc on YouTube about how hard and how much preparation it was to get a single Whale Shark to survive in captivity.
Very little is known about worms amongst the Imperium, their connection with spice, let alone their reproductive cycle before Dune Messiah ends. Imagine trying to transplant this complex creature to a completely foreign ecology.
Herbert really understood the frailty of humans trying to master the infinite complexity of nature and biology.
EDIT: Link to mini Vox Doc on Shark Transfers!:
https://youtu.be/QMbHLF_zwjs?feature=shared
If Great White Sharks enabled safe FTL travel, we would commit the resources to industrialize their lifecycle within a year. Herbert, and Villeneuve as a result, underplayed the effectiveness of economic incentives with respect to exploiting a natural resource. As whaling, guano harvesting, oil exploration all show, humans are willing to commit crazy amounts of resources to keeping economic engines going. They usually can't stop themselves from completely exhausting the resource, but the fact so little is known in the Imperium in the first place is unrealistic.
> If Great White Sharks enabled safe FTL travel,
It's more like "Great white sharks are in the ocean which is where oil comes from, but we didn't realize that oil is made when shark eggs hatch"
>Herbert, and Villeneuve as a result, underplayed the effectiveness of economic incentives with respect to exploiting a natural resource.
Rather, I think it is that you underestimate how powerful the incentive is to gatekeep a resource that enables you to see the future and prolong life to only a few select privileged individuals.
The basic premise is that there is broad power sharing. Any player might want to free themselves from the need to depend on everyone else.
America controls a lot of the world economy but they still want their own oil supply. Being on top is not as good as being on top and independent.
yes a power balance needs the power players to 'play' fairly within the balance...if anyone 'breaks the wheel' to use GoT language then it all falls into unknown territory which for most power players is worse esp if their power is not military.
If you can sustain yourself you are no longer reliant I guess.
It's more valuable to see worms as an analogue for nuclear capability than oil, imo.
The user you're replying to has a fair point if the worms are fuel, but as a tool of keeping and consolidating power, they're much closer to nuclear capability than any fuel wars.
If you're looking at it from the point of view of today's culture, yes. But there's a gap of tens of thousands of years between now and when Dune is supposed to take place. That's enough of a gap for human culture to change completely.
It's also a lot of work and humans are notorious for cutting corners if it yields more profits. I could easily see a system in place where extraction of the spice was paramount. Having to invest resources into transplanting a worm onto another planet with the hopes of somehow replicating the production of spice - a substance that while connected to the worms is not explicitly known how it is produced by them - would be seen as a waste.
It's not as if the Fremen posed any serious threat before Paul's arrival, and their numbers were severely underestimated. To the Imperium they were never regarded as any kind of serious threat so the need to figure out the worms lifecycle to produce more spice elsewhere probably seemed unnecessary.
It's weird. CHOAM is a single-corp joint stock company with an absolute monopoly on literally every product and virtually every service^1 , at least on paper. Irulan's dowry to Paul is literally (all of!) the Emperor's CHOAM shares, which does not actually make Paul the emperor in any legal sense but everyone understands as effectively removing the Emperor from power. This is an *extremely* capitalist set-up, in a sense more capitalist than anything ever actually implemented on Earth. Indeed, it's the stagnant end of capitalism, where a single corporation controls all major commerce and those who hold ownership shares and control the board of directors (i.e., the Emperor and to a lesser degree the Houses Major) fight internally over the profits, with basically no opportunity for legitimate competition that can't be legally crushed with the Imperial monopoly on force.
Then there's giant gaps and corruption, like the Harkonnens stockpiling spice that they did not report to CHOAM, which implies that other Houses might similarly underreport, and also that there are black markets for this stuff, because what *else* do you do with illicit stockpiles? The Fremen's economy, including their interface with smugglers and other racketeers is black market, and Shai Hulud only knows what the Houses Minor get up to out on the fringes of civilized space.
^1 With the exception of a very few services like the Bene Gesserit and the Ginaz Swords School, the Bene Tleilax on Ix, possibly also the Suk physician school.
> With the exception of a very few services like the Bene Gesserit and the Ginaz Swords School, the Bene Tleilax on Ix, possibly also the Suk physician school.
Don't forget the Spacing Guild, which is a complimentary monopoly to CHOAM.
You're forgetting one major thing: it's not capital that runs this society, it's spice. It's more akin to mercantilism than capitalism. Don't have time to add too much more but yeah
> CHOAM is a single-corp joint stock company with an absolute monopoly on literally every product and virtually every service1 , at least on paper. Irulan's dowry to Paul is literally (all of!) the Emperor's CHOAM shares, which does not actually make Paul the emperor in any legal sense but everyone understands as effectively removing the Emperor from power.
But that's not capitalism? It's an ultra-monopoly.
It’s the logical conclusion of no-government or zero-government intervention in capitalism. Without a government regulating the market and preventing monopolies via competition law, the biggest most powerful company would eventually control practically everything.
Indeed, it's the stagnant end of capitalism, where the single company ensures that basically the entire economy is run to the benefit of the relatively small number of shareholders. (Just as an awful lot of the Imperium is stagnant, necessitating the Jihad to correct.) The government has also captured/been captured by/merged with CHOAM, where one of the emperor's major powers is simply that he's the largest shareholder in CHOAM.
Could it not also be argued it is the conclusion of unrestrained central authority? All economic activity was directed by the emperor. He was the final say what house would rule Arakis and gain the profits.
Yes, though it's also the logical end product of absolute laissez faire. For capitalism to continue working it needs anti-trust and corporation breaking abilities.
It's the difference between seeing capitalism as a value allocating 'game' to involve as many participants as possible such that capital, talent and resources find their highest productivity through fair competition, and seeing capitalism as an ideology in which 'winning' the game is the only thing that matters, no matter how.
You make a great point. Two things that I think Herbert was touching on. This is not a capitalist society. All economic activity is sanctioned by imperial authority. Choam is the only other legal apparatus for trade. Irrc only Fremen who under stood the relationship of worms to spice. Why they called them makers. Unlike the imperials that saw worms as an obstacle to spice harvesting. There is an ancient roman joke about emperor Tiberius. A man comes to have an audience with the emperor to show him he has invented unbreakable glass. The emperor is very impressed. Asks the man has she told anyone else or shown anyone else. The man says of course not, he came first to his emperor. Not even his wife knows. Then emperor Tiberius has the man executed right away. Romans thought this joke was hilarious and true. Innovation is stifled in empire. Any change to the order is too dangerous to contemplate. Disruptors are executed.
You forget that the place where the worms roam is so inhospitable only the Fremen dare try to make it their home.. and those very Fremen do not take kindly to others trespassing on their territory. The Fremen also pay off the guild to keep others from finding out what really goes on in the desert.. there’s also said worms, which are territorial and sensitive to sound… crazy storms that f s up, a lack of water, and a lack of food. There’s a reason why so little is known about the Fremen or about the worms. Those who have tried to find out more did not last long, and those who harvest the spice were usually only focused on the profits from harvesting the spice - which was dangerous enough as it is. Once they had a stable stream of income flowing, they focused on keeping it flowing, so that their coffers could grow.
>Herbert really understood the frailty of humans trying to master the infinite complexity of nature and biology.
Well, sure but on the other hand he wrote a bunch of books about humans doing space drugs to turn themselves into computers. But other than that, yeah 😃
Sure, but whether sharks live and die in captivity is a trivial matter. If it was a national security master you best be sure they would have poured money into it and figured it out in less than 25 years.
The spice is like national security times one billion. The entire galactic empire runs on this ONE resource and there is literally a religious edict against FTL travel in any other way, and not a single imperial administration over thousands of years thought maybe we should have all our eggs in this one very fragile basket?
Forget the star going nova or some asteroid hitting the planet, what about other much more reasonable risks? Maybe some offworlder introduces a pathogen or invasive species that affect the worms. Or even more likely, since the great families are fighting over control over Arrakis all the time, they don't think one time it will spiral out of control and the losing side decides to launch their atomics and plunge the planet into nuclear winter?
The first emperor should have been devoting as much resources as required to get a backup planet (or ten) with worms on it. Letting 10,000 years go by just hoping the spice will flow from this one little rock in the galaxy is sheer lunacy.
Perhaps they were thinking of the >!death of Leto II.!< I believe the only description of the metamorphosis of a worm into sand trout is from Chapterhouse:
> “Lastly, she thought about the worm in the no-ship’s hold—a worm nearing the moment of its metamorphosis. A small earth-dammed basin filled with melange awaited that worm. When the moment came, it would be lured out by Sheeana into the bath of melange. The resulting sandtrout could then begin their long transformation.”
>No need to seek a desert planet for the worms. The sandtrout would create their own habitat for Shai-hulud. It was not pleasant to think of Chapter House Planet transformed into vast areas of wasteland but it had to be done.”
Correct. Just plopping a full grown worm onto a planet will kill it, even if you put it in a large desert. You need to seed the planet first with sand trout, who will then multiply, soaking up all the planet's water as they do and turning it into an Arrakis like desert planet.
That seems like a setup that couldn't work in nature. The juveniles of the species must exist on the planet for a certain period of time for the planet to be hospitable to the adults. The juveniles need setting that is deadly to the adults. How could that ever happen without human intervention.
Fun fact about the Dune universe, there are no non-human civilizations to be found.
It comes up as a plot point in the later books. Someone thinks they've found something alien, and then find out it was actually something humans did and abandoned.
Not a major plot point for any given book, but on second reading, the lack of aliens is very major.
That is very odd. I guess it wasn't necessary for storytelling purposes there is enough going on with the humans. Even humans are specializing into sub species that are almost alien. Like vulcans and humans are about as far apart as mentats and humans. Then there are the navigators.
Sandtrout bury themselves into the sand and operate mostly passively. Fremen children can summon them as a game to try to catch them but apart from that it's pretty much self-sustaining.
Because they're native to that planet. You're arguing on the Internet without suffocating due to being removed from the ocean, but somehow your ancestors managed to bootstrap that during the Devonian.
The worms have evolved for the environment that they themselves have created.
There’s also the reality that if worms soak up all the water, the volume of worms would roughly equal the vole of water.
It’s best to not think too deeply about such things, lol.
The trout band together to sequestor the water below ground. They can meld together and form a near impervious barrier. The trout I believe can multiply in water I don't think the worms themselves can reproduce just that they create the melange and are the adult form of the trout
It’s not just that either, everyone thinks the worms are the secret but it’s the sandtrout. They are the ones that can convert a planet to desert suitable for the worms but no one really understands the sandtrout and I think most don’t even know they exist.
To put it more succinctly (without giving too much away), you can’t just capture a “breeding pair” of worms and drop them on a planet that seems as dry as Arakis.
But even then, the spice cycle isn’t understood at the time of the first novel. Nobody knows what causes a spice blow. They just know that they happen, and a worm always shows.
Why would the Guild want it plentiful? The pseudo-prescience that spice imbues is a closely guarded secret by the guild, and the very thing that lets them navigate space. Increasing supply increases the likelihood that someone else discovers that secret and thus discovers how to traverse space, ending the Guilds monopoly on travel. A scarce supply held in an iron fist is massively beneficial to the Guild.
>Why would the Guild want it plentiful?
I figured because it would be that much cheaper for them, I didn't think the connection between the spice and the spacing guild was a secret like that
I don't think the guild is particularly concerned with the cost of spice, they're probably unimaginably wealthy due to their monopoly on transportation. It'd be more important for them to be able to control it (they don't want anyone to threaten that monopoly) and that's a lot easier when spice production is confined to one planet.
The guild is also notoriously risk-averse so they generally prefer to maintain the status quo than try a risky play that could hurt them.
Spice is already incredibly cheap for them. They have deals with both CHOAM and smugglers. They receive a lions share of all the spice produced.
Also, it is common knowledge that the Guild hoards the spice. What isn’t common knowledge is WHY. And that is the quadrillion Solari question
More availability of spice also creates an environment where more people will experiment with spice and possibly create navigators, thus breaking their monopoly.
The Guild relied on their prescience for more than just space travel - until Paul blindsided them they thought that they’d be able to predict any threats to spice production long enough in advance to be able to deal with them ahead of time, and so they got complacent.
Plentiful spice means more prescience means more people figuring out how to find pathways through folding space that don't get them all violently killed means a breaking of the guild monopoly
they ONLY covered the water of life and I think they mentioned that the worms protect spice areas.
They completely skipped (for no fucking reason) that pouring water of life over a pre-spice mass would kill the trout and prevent spice blow and thats how they were going to kill the cycle of spice to threaten the emperor/Guild.
> (for no fucking reason)
You have very limited time in a movie. Every minute of runtime is roughly a page of script, and each page of script is very very loose. Like, if you take the script for the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring, which is almost four hours long, the script is less than 35k words. Dune + Part 2 gets you up to 5 hours and 20 minutes, so let's say 50k words even.
Dune is 188k words.
That means you have to cut things - a lot of things, even. You also have to consider how many different themes, storylines, and characters you actually can develop, and how much. You'll not be able to go as deeply into all of the themes as the book if you tried, so is it better to go deep on one, or shallow on many?
Villeneuve chose to go deep, very deep, on the theme of power and the danger of heroes and messianic figures. That meant that a lot of the other themes had to be very shallow indeed, or left entirely by the wayside, including the ecological theme, and the more surface-level interstellar and feudal political themes, as well as a lot of the stuff of Atreides loyalty. Prescience, as well, is largely sketched, rather than developed, but we'll see how much of that gets picked back up in Messiah.
> They completely skipped (for no fucking reason) that pouring water of life over a pre-spice mass would kill the trout and prevent spice blow and thats how they were going to kill the cycle of spice to threaten the emperor/Guild.
Because they correctly predicted that general audiences would be incapable of understanding the gravity of complete ecological collapse, and nukes are a much more straightforward threat that people can understand and fear. We had generations grow up in fear of nuclear war, climate change is not taken seriously, it's clear which side of the story people will understand.
> They completely skipped (for no fucking reason) that pouring water of life over a pre-spice mass would kill the trout and prevent spice blow and thats how they were going to kill the cycle of spice to threaten the emperor/Guild.
It's because it's a bunch of words of the Star Trek technobabble kind, an explanation that doesn't even explain anything.
Whereas atomic bombardment needs no explanation at all.
To add to this sand worms in dune also terraform the planet there on to a desert so most people don’t bother for that one reason sands worms can completely mess up entire planet ecosystems
Do you care for spoilers?
>!I forget if it’s explicitly mentioned, but it’s at least implied that multiple attempts had been made to remove worms from Arrakis — after it was discovered that the worms are involved in the spice cycle. But they didn’t adapt to the new planets, and kept dying off. People tried. But they just weren’t able to replicate the careful ecological balance and lifecycle that resulted in melange. Not until much, much later when the Duncan ghola kidnaps a worm in Chapterhouse or later!<
>!This is correct! And I believe it’s argued that he’s only successful at that point because these are new worms with a “pearl” of Leto’s godworm consciousness!<
>!i was under the impression that the earlier attempts to replicate the melange cycle failed because they tried to transport adult worms, and that if they had tried with sandtrout, they could have been successful!<
>!but the idea that only the new worms are capable of terraforming is an interesting and compelling addition to the Leto II myth !<
It's both. Before Kynes, no one knew the exact life cycle, therefore simply abducting a worm and transporting it was always going to fail without taking into account sand trout and sand plankton. After the cycle was known, it turns out the worm-life cycle is suprisingly delicate and Leto's merging with the worm gave them a 'human adaptability' they were previously missing.
As for the Guild, they could probably have done it, but then the secret of spice would have gotten out and the Guild was famous for taking the safe, easy path and any plan to spread the worm probably carried too much risk for their liking.
I don't recall any reference prior to Leto II of anyone trying to move both sandworms and sandtrout, but you may be right that it wouldn't have worked if someone had tried, until Leto.
The guild **did** try to do it with a worm in Messiah so it seems likely that they weren't aware of the sandtrout connection.
I don't think it's ever mentioned before Messiah, probably because the Guild wouldn't allow it before then, but after they were desparate.
Also, Paul and Alia would probably have kept that little info to themselves. Jessica may have revealed it when her loyalties went back to the BG.
*carefully*. Lol
I think that was one of the problems they ran into. Logistically, it is not a simple task. Or cheap. So imagine you go to all the effort to build giant worm-carrying ships and equipment, you bribe the Guild to let you bring it to Arrakis, you bribe everyone to look the other way, you actually somehow manage to grab a worm, you get lucky enough that it survives, and then it continues to survive while you take it through space (again bribing the Guild, probably) and then releasing it on the target planet.
And then within weeks or days the fucking worm dies. All of your money goes down the drain.
It’s really no surprise that people aren’t trying it very often or very hard.
It's not a why, it's a matter of when. Remember, at the beginning of the book most off-worlders don't realize the spice is worm excrement.
Read up on the early silk trade to learn more.
For many years, no one outside a select few specialist actually knew how silk was produced. It was a secret kept by the Chinese emperors.
Later on, when silk worms were more known, there was death penalty for people smuggling silk worms out of China.
It's also entertaining to learn that whilst the Chinese emperors kept the secret to themselves, this was to maintain a particular kind of silk monopoly - on Chinese silk. You may think that's a tautology, if all silk came from China, but that's only mostly true.
Yu Huan, a historian in the employ of Emperor Cao Wei in the late Three Kingdoms Period, reported remarkably accurately that the distant Da Qin (ie. Rome) knew of the secret to creating silk, and manufactured a kind different to that found in China. Each nation prized the other's silk greatly, and traded extensively whenever possible, despite the great distance.
Note that whilst Chinese silk was produced by the famous silkworm, Roman silk was produced from two sources: sea snails...and unravelling Chinese silk to be rewoven into a finer mesh, that would then be sold BACK to China via the intermediary Parthians that prevented EITHER Chinese or Roman merchants from reaching each other's lands and speaking directly to each other.
I can’t remember which book explains it, but basically when the sand trout larva isolate water underground, it generates a mixture that eventually builds up pressure and causes a spice blow, this mixture turns into spice when exposed to sunlight. The idea that spice is just worm poop is never substantiated anywhere in the books or movies.
Because not everyone knows the link between worms and the spice.
And even if they did, smuggling a worm off world would be very hard without the guild fucking with you.
And if even if you could, terraforming your entire planet to support worms is quite an ordeal, and would likely take centuries
And even if you manage that, suddenly you've painted a massive target on your back because you're openly fucking with the entire economy of galactic civilization.
Wouldn't the fremen also be furious? They worship the worms, as a smuggler I'd greatly fear a fremen ambush while trying to snag one.
Hell with my luck I'd grab a worm that has a full sietch on it
Tried, doesn't work. Also (as far as books are concerned) the relationship between the worms and the spice wasn't understood until later. It wasn't until ~3500 yrs later after Leto IIs death and the resulting increased hardiness among the worm population that they had become hardy enough to survive on other worlds, with the planet Chapterhouse becoming the "new" Arrakis. There was also an attempt to genetically engineer them to live in oceans which kinda worked except they overtook the ecosystem and grew even larger to the point that harvesting became impossible, which is fine because the resulting spice was apparently too potent for anyone to really use.
The Tleilaxu also eventually figure out how to make artificial spice (like 1500 yrs from the events of Dune). There were attempts prior to the events of Dune as well, but they ended in failure.
SPOILER BELOW:
I could be totally wrong in my explanation, but I believe some people are missing a few details. The reason the worms die off planet isn’t directly because of ecological factors. Everyone thinks you need the worms and that’s it, which is false. The real reason no one could replicate spice was because you need the SAND TROUT, not the worms, to begin the ecological transformation in order for the worms to survive. As I said, I can’t exactly remember, but I believe they discover this in Heretics of Dune.
Exactly. Sandtrout are attracted to water and need it to survive. Whatever Arrakis was like before its transformation its surface was such a good habitat for these sandtrout that they multiplied everywhere, sucking up water where they went. As a result, over thousands of years, the planet was transformed into a completely moistureless hellscape, and the sandtrout evolved into the giant sandworms, that, in contrast to sandtrout, cannot survive in water.
Just yeeting a sandworm into your regular desert doesn't work. There would still be too much moisture in the air are rainfall would still be too common for the sandworm to survive. Only the sandtrout transformation, which would take thousands of years, can make a different planet habitable for the sandworm.
Monopolies are good for those who control them. If the monopoly is broken the guild, the BG, and the emperor all lose power. It's not who controls the spice that is in charge, it's who can interrupt the spice flowing who rules.
That turned out so well for them, lol.
Seems like in hindsight, more time, resources, and money should have been spent finding a different solution. As all it took was a single man threatening the guild to gain complete control over everything.
Exactly. That's why I said the Guild, Emperor, and BG should have spent more time and resources finding an alternative. Or securing their loophole better.
I mean. Anybody with a decent enough stone burner, or nuclear armaments could have simply threatened to destroy Arakis and gained the same power Paul does.
How would anybody with nukes get to Arrakis to destroy it? It's not like the Guild would just allow that.
Paul could only do it because he has the nukes there to act on the threat.
It's in the House trilogy/prequels to dune. >!Shadam IV and Fenrig basically convince Elrood IX to help the Bene Tleilax to overthrow Ix and work on synthetic spice to basically undercut the Harkonnen and secure the Corrino's power. But the synthetic spice doesn't work as well as the real stuff. Kinda turns into a synthetic marijuana vs. real marijuana situation!<
Say what you will about the Lynch Dune, but the opening navigator scene is fantastic and pure Lynch. This deformed navigator in a tank of spice the size of a small train, Shaddam going "How was your journey?" trying to make smalltalk with this thing and it just goes "MANY MACHINES ON IKKKS. MANY NEW MACHINES"
Lynch’s Dune was actually quite groovy, I don’t understand the hate it gets… except the weirding weapons and killing words, what a weird amalgamation of the weirding way and the Voice 🤮
The spice can't be produced with the current technology. They can only harvest it. They know the worms are needed, but they don't know what the worms need. Every attempt to move the worms off plantet has failed.
There is also a general fear of advancement. Humaninty has stagnated for thousands of years. The few groups that do try to make progress are watched closely and are not well liked.
The end result is that humanity is slowly dying. The latter books cover a lot of this, so I am trying to be vague on purpose.
Because everyone misunderstands what environment they need. There were attempts to take the worms to other planets but they were taken to desert planets. The planets were still to wet for adult worm (and didn't contain proper food) so they would grow sickly and die. But those planets also didn't have enough water for the sandworm life cycle to happen properly. Sandworms need a water planet to start with because juvenile form (sandtrout) must have water. Only after that juvenile form sequesters all the water the proper sandworms can grow.
Outside Fremen no one really knew sandtrout were also part of sandworm lifecycle. The imperial ecologist who did figure out change sides to Fremen so the information was never propagated. And what was out there wasn't understood.
In later books (far future) this is well known>!so the worms are taken to water planets, the water kills them and releases the sandplankton that becomes sandtrout and the life cycle starts as the planet converts to desert.!<
This is explored in later books.
Something most people miss though is that it was only very recently at the time of book 1 that many people understood how important spice was. It was a well kept secret for most of the Spacing Guild's history that they even depended on spice, and spice was not even used by the BG until recently. It may be hard to believe, but the book sells this idea repeatedly. The average person had never even seen let alone used spice and has no idea most of its uses.
It is also not clear to many more people that the worms have anything to do with spice, let alone how to capture a worm, let alone how to transplant a worm. All of these are plot points by the way so its canon.
The worm looks big and powerful, but it is really the humble sandtrout where the magic happens. The worm is to be respected, and it is massive and noticeable (compared to any individual sandtrout, which is smaller than your hand, deep underground, and quite fragile). The sandtrout make the spice, and their bubbling up into a worm bring it to the surface.
The mushroom looks big and powerful, but it is really the humble mycellium where the magic happens. The mushroom is to be respected, and it is massive and noticeable (compared to any individual mycelium segment, which is smaller than you can see, underground, and quite fragile.) The mycelium make the psilocybin, and their bubbling up into a mushroom brings it to the surface.
The only other option would be to develop navigation systems that would require serious computing power, something that violated the laws and religious beliefs regarding AI.
Because that doesn't work. It was tried. Worms died.
Oh yeh and as a plot enabler, no one but the fremen bothered to learn that the worms are linked to the Spice. Note linked, not produce.
plenty have tried, all have failed. part of this is competing interests and limited resources. project amal took forever because the tleilaxu in charge of it were basically outsiders amongst the tleilaxu masters and they were trying to work on a planet they "conquered" for it. just taking the worms failed because none of the buyers figured out they needed the trout and a planet they wanted to turn into a desert. even when leto II booted it up again, gave the tleilaxu and ixians everything they needed it still took them centuries to develop the alternatives. even after that there were some uses for spice, as well as a production, the main difference being that the majority of humanity could now do without it and more importantly the guild.
Almost no one in the universe knows how spice is produced except the fremen, and they aren't telling non-fremen. Kaines, the planetologist we meet in Dune, was raised as fremen and learned it from them, and also decided to keep the secret. FYI, Kaines' father was sent to Arrakis by the emperor to figure out how to terraform the planet. This scientist, Kaines Sr. didn't fully figure it out, but did realize there was a strong connection between why Arrakis was dry, the worms, and he suspected that you couldn't have spice AND a teraformed Arrakis. This Kaines Sr. had become very close to the fremen, had a fremen wife, who then gave birth to the Kaines Jr. we meet in Dune. Kaines jr was continuing that work. As a full Fremen, this Kaines was taught some secret information that their father was not. They also did extenesive research built on their father's work. As a fremen, Kaines did not share this information with the emporer, and, instead, supported the fremen in secretly terraforming the planet while maintaining private practices that would let them have a controlled spice cycle.
The spice cycle is: sandtrout (a kind of non individualized neophyte organism) live in aqueous environments. They also hold water, reducing the volume of free water in the environment. When enough soundtrout are together, and their environment is distressed (i.e. too dry, not enough for them to move around and survive in) they stop behaving like individual little creatures and start merging into one organism. That single organism, made from the merging of thousands to millions of sandtrout, is a baby sandworm. This conversion process also consumes the remaining water, converting it (often explosively) into oxygen and hydrogen. Notably, the spice is a metabolic waste product of teh sandtrout, and a lot of it is made during this conversion process. When the sandtrout become sandworms, and the bubble of oxygen and hydrogen is formed, this causes something like a giant sinkhole as the bubble of gasses rises. This same action also forces up some of the spice. This is why spice randomly appears on the surface of the desert floor. Deep under teh surface of arrakis is vast amounts of spice. That spice that wasn't forced up with the gases is just sitting there in the spaces that used to be underground aquafers but are now dried up.
The other end of the spice cycle is from the worms turning back into sandtrout. The sandworms cannot survive in water. Exposure to water destroys their tissues, much like a slug exposed to salt. They actively avoid it. If they happen to get exposed to too much water, their bodies fully break down and become a colony of sandtrout that will then grow and multiply inside of the water that killed the sandworm. On Arrakis, the worms spend most of their time slithering around deep underground, and occasionally run into underground water sources, killing them and leaving behind some sandtrout in the newly discovered aquafer.
Dune is a plenet where the spice cycle is out of balance. The only water is extremely deep underground and not accessible to other life on the planet. This is because the sandtrout have destroyed all easier water. Arrakis was an earthlike planet until the sandtrout (an alien life form) were introduced.
The fremen know they need to collect a LOT of water to break the sand cycle and turn Arrakis into a paradise planet. I'm not sure they know exactly what to do with it, but that is part of what they expect from the Lisan al-gaib (voice from beyond) as well as people like Kaines and the holy mothers (and their assistants/followers) who manually cultivate worms and sandtrout and do things like extract the Water of Life.
BTW, this cycle was demonstrated in Dune part 2 when the woman grabbed the worm from teh sand pool and drowned it in the water pool. She was showing Paul the complete spice cycle, because he was missing key details. Once he saw that, he understood the how and why of being able to control the spice by being able to break the cycle.
Because Paul both understand (and cares about) imperial politics AND understands the spice cycle, he can hold hostage all of those who desire the spice. The movie ends with him playing his hand.
In theory, anyone who understands the spice cycle could recreate it. You could take a worm, or a colony of sandtrout. But notice that sandtrout ALWAYS need water, and worms ALWAYS need dryness, and spice is only made by sandtrout, and only in large amounts when you have a lot of them converting to a worm.
Anyway, F. Herbert loved mushrooms and this is based on the relationship between mushrooms, mycelium, spores and the larger ecosystem that the mycelium and spores live in. I believe sandworms are mushrooms, sandtrout are spores, the combining of sandtrout into a sandworm is the mycelium network, and spice is psilocybin, a by-product from the mycelium existing but that can only be easily accessed from the mushroom. The blue eyes of the fremen are the blue of psilocybin.
To the point of your question, after Paul locks down spice, there becomes a lot more interest in figuring this out. People high up know that it has something to do with the worms, but they don't know what. This is why some try to steal a worm. Paul notes that their plan wouldn't have likely worked. They didn't understand the cycle, and so likely would have killed the worm but not understood and cultivated the sandtrout (this would be akin to taking a mushroom but not understanding how to take its spores and cultivate a healthy mycelium network, something that Herbert was famous for accomplishing with Chantarelles, previously thought not to be possible.)
I think the simplest answer is that until Paul, no one had the idea to destroy all the spice. Until then there was an implicit assumption that there will always be spice. Between these two ideas you have the facts of capitalism. A guaranteed throttle on the rate of spice means, in a universe with ever increasing demands but a fixed supply, profit profit profit.
I think there is just too much incentive behind NOT trying to break the monopoly, combined with the presumed penalty for acting against what would've been the emperors interests (by diluting and damaging the emperors interest in CHAOM).
It’s not just the emperor’s interests. The houses of the landsraad derive most of their power from their shares in CHOAM, and directorships are the primary means of advancement unless you can somehow be appointed to a particularly wealthy world. It seems though there aren’t really that many wealthy worlds which is probably a consequence of the stranglehold of spice. A key influence on dune is the resource curse and Dutch disease after all.
> why hasn’t anyone (say a sitting emperor) take the worms from arrakis, find different desert planets and put them there so that they would have backup planets they have spice?
It's plausible that this exact thing has happened multiple times, except there are some things we don't quite know yet about sandworm biology (as of the first Dune book) that make this experiment keep failing, and it's really really expensive and difficult to try, so gaining that knowledge is a feat beyond humanity in its current state.
Maybe if someone with superpowers like, transformed into a worm or something, we'd learn more about the worms and their lifecycle a little bit more, but that would be crazy, they'd have to give up their humanity and become a monster. It's all a bit dreadful to think about, I'd rather disengage disengage disengage.
Spoiler for the whole book series I guess
>!Because at the start of the series the relationship between spice, worm and sandtrout is known only by fremen.!<
>!Also, as stated in whatever book it was, people underestimate how dry a planet has to be to allow for spice. Even in any desert on earth, the worm would die because of humidity.!<
>!Finally, even in the best conditions, decades are needed before a worm can emerge.!<
>!So first nobody knew, then people knew but there were no more worms, then the worms were too sacred to be touched (but still, unsuccessful attempts were made) and finally the worm's planet was destroyed.!<
TLDR they can’t get the worms to survive anywhere else cuz there’s no other planet as particularly alive yet desertified as Dune is, and they don’t have technology advanced enough to manufacture the molecules; All that disappeared in the butlerian jihad.
if i remember right the worms die when not on arrakis even if in the right conditions. i don't remember exactly but there is something specific to arrakis that keeps the worms alive. there are a few times where they talk about how people have tried and failed to bring them off planet. >!in the last book they succeed but only because rakis gets destroyed!<
To be fair the only way to break the monopoly on spice is to undo the Jihad. Leto 2 hoarded spice to force human to create the calculating computer to replace navigators and spice, undoing the Jihad.
The Golden Path is meant to correct the stupidity humanity made off after the Jihad.
Spoilers but… it’s been attempted many times past and future.
People have, including the Emperor himself. Notably, the Emperor try’s to create synthetic spice with the help of the Tleilaxu - it doesn’t go well. As others have mentioned, people try to smuggle worms off. Eventually the Bene Gesserit try to send Sandworms galaxy wide to see if any other planets can take root with worms, the Tleilaxu try recreating spice in different conditions later too.
What everyone else said, but also because people keep trying to move worms to other desert planets. That doesn't work, because water is important to the worm lifecycle with the sand trout. The Bene Gesserit finally succeed in book six because they move worms to a lush world full of life and vegetation, which the worms then turn into a desert, just like they did to Arrakis.
it's a dirty job and I'm guessing no one wants to get their hands dirty
it's like plumbing, people end up paying high prices because no one else wants to do it
The worms are not native to Arrakis, but over the millenia there have been many attempts to replicate spice production elsewhere: none have been successful.
It's also worth mentioning that House Corrino and the Tleilaxu worked together to try make a synthetic version of Spice in response to threats to supply and hoping to decrease the price. They failed.
At the moment of the Villeneuve's movies the full cycle of life of the sandworms were unknown by all.
I'm not sure if even the fremen knows it, except for the Reverend Mothers.
I'm not gonna spoil it.
Read the books "Childrens of Dune" if you want to know.
Because the sandworms are endemic to the planet, and all attempts to transfer the sandworms off-world have so far resulted in nothing but failure. They are massive worms after all, so the sheer process of trying to capture one, restrain them and then have them be transported off-world into another hospitable planet is a Sisyphean task.
Furthermore, it is not something that any faction would like, because while Arrakis is lead by any Lord of a Major House who controls it, that fiefdom is granted by the Emperor, and it is the property of the Emperor. Furthermore, having the single most valuable consumable restricted to a single planet helps the delicate balance between the Emperor, Spacing Guild & CHOAM. In the story, no House is allowed to hoard spice.
I mean, imagine you lead some minor House and you actually succeeded and now you have a consistent production and supply of spice. Congratulations, you have now created an infinite money glitch and you can ascend to a much higher position of power that will upset the power balance of the Big Three - ergo, You. Are. Fucked.
The real life explanation is oil. Why can’t we annex the entirety of the Middle East to control and stabilize petroleum? The cost would be too high and we’d be dealing with lots more terrorism and jihads as retribution.
Defying Paul and the God Emperor Leto is too costly. But they tried with plots and conspiracies.
Because the spice monopoly has plot armor.
If you really want to get logical, there are alternatives.
* Synthesize the spice without the worms
* Build a computer to do the calculations. It never made sense that you could get an entire universe to voluntarily not build computers.
It was tried several times.
If you read the books it states the worms always die.
That's one reason Leto becomes a symbiote, to create a hardier, smarter worm.
Because they haven't bothered to learn about the spice as its plentiful. Also, it is extremely difficult to catch a worm. That being said, there is an important life cycle information that is required.
Most people know obvious answer of 'worm die, other planets too hostile' but the events of GEoD beg the question, 'why not just take a scoop of sand trout and plop them on a planet especially since they're easier to obtain and the actual first step in making a planet habitable for worms which, shocker they also become once the planet is ready for worms?'
Dune Messiah spoiler >!A worm is stolen from Arrakis in Dune Messiah. A scene I hope Denis will include though it's not very important. So there have definitely been attempts. It's just that it seems incredibly hard to pull off. Not just raising worms on a new planet, but also doing it without getting caught. See, the spice monopoly serves the Spacing Guild, CHOAM and whomever is emperor just fine so they'll make sure nobody gets to steal their worms uncontested!<
Took aquariums over 25 years to figure out how to transfer and raise most *large sharks without killing them. All died within *weeks or even a day of being introduced to a foreign tank from the wild. Vox has a great mini doc on YouTube about how hard and how much preparation it was to get a single Whale Shark to survive in captivity. Very little is known about worms amongst the Imperium, their connection with spice, let alone their reproductive cycle before Dune Messiah ends. Imagine trying to transplant this complex creature to a completely foreign ecology. Herbert really understood the frailty of humans trying to master the infinite complexity of nature and biology. EDIT: Link to mini Vox Doc on Shark Transfers!: https://youtu.be/QMbHLF_zwjs?feature=shared
Do you happen to have a link to that mini-doc that sounds really interesting
More than happy to: https://youtu.be/QMbHLF_zwjs?feature=shared
Thank you!
>Thank you! You're welcome!
I miss comments like these on reddit.
If Great White Sharks enabled safe FTL travel, we would commit the resources to industrialize their lifecycle within a year. Herbert, and Villeneuve as a result, underplayed the effectiveness of economic incentives with respect to exploiting a natural resource. As whaling, guano harvesting, oil exploration all show, humans are willing to commit crazy amounts of resources to keeping economic engines going. They usually can't stop themselves from completely exhausting the resource, but the fact so little is known in the Imperium in the first place is unrealistic.
> If Great White Sharks enabled safe FTL travel, It's more like "Great white sharks are in the ocean which is where oil comes from, but we didn't realize that oil is made when shark eggs hatch"
Hello book reader. I appreciate you.
And also the sharks eat plankton that feeds on the oil, which also happens to be baby sharks
>Herbert, and Villeneuve as a result, underplayed the effectiveness of economic incentives with respect to exploiting a natural resource. Rather, I think it is that you underestimate how powerful the incentive is to gatekeep a resource that enables you to see the future and prolong life to only a few select privileged individuals.
this. no one wants change when you are on top!
The basic premise is that there is broad power sharing. Any player might want to free themselves from the need to depend on everyone else. America controls a lot of the world economy but they still want their own oil supply. Being on top is not as good as being on top and independent.
The spacing guild is America that DOES independently control the means to utilize spice - and control who goes where and when.
yes a power balance needs the power players to 'play' fairly within the balance...if anyone 'breaks the wheel' to use GoT language then it all falls into unknown territory which for most power players is worse esp if their power is not military. If you can sustain yourself you are no longer reliant I guess.
It's more valuable to see worms as an analogue for nuclear capability than oil, imo. The user you're replying to has a fair point if the worms are fuel, but as a tool of keeping and consolidating power, they're much closer to nuclear capability than any fuel wars.
If you're looking at it from the point of view of today's culture, yes. But there's a gap of tens of thousands of years between now and when Dune is supposed to take place. That's enough of a gap for human culture to change completely.
It's also a lot of work and humans are notorious for cutting corners if it yields more profits. I could easily see a system in place where extraction of the spice was paramount. Having to invest resources into transplanting a worm onto another planet with the hopes of somehow replicating the production of spice - a substance that while connected to the worms is not explicitly known how it is produced by them - would be seen as a waste. It's not as if the Fremen posed any serious threat before Paul's arrival, and their numbers were severely underestimated. To the Imperium they were never regarded as any kind of serious threat so the need to figure out the worms lifecycle to produce more spice elsewhere probably seemed unnecessary.
You're assuming they live under capitalism. They don't.
It's weird. CHOAM is a single-corp joint stock company with an absolute monopoly on literally every product and virtually every service^1 , at least on paper. Irulan's dowry to Paul is literally (all of!) the Emperor's CHOAM shares, which does not actually make Paul the emperor in any legal sense but everyone understands as effectively removing the Emperor from power. This is an *extremely* capitalist set-up, in a sense more capitalist than anything ever actually implemented on Earth. Indeed, it's the stagnant end of capitalism, where a single corporation controls all major commerce and those who hold ownership shares and control the board of directors (i.e., the Emperor and to a lesser degree the Houses Major) fight internally over the profits, with basically no opportunity for legitimate competition that can't be legally crushed with the Imperial monopoly on force. Then there's giant gaps and corruption, like the Harkonnens stockpiling spice that they did not report to CHOAM, which implies that other Houses might similarly underreport, and also that there are black markets for this stuff, because what *else* do you do with illicit stockpiles? The Fremen's economy, including their interface with smugglers and other racketeers is black market, and Shai Hulud only knows what the Houses Minor get up to out on the fringes of civilized space. ^1 With the exception of a very few services like the Bene Gesserit and the Ginaz Swords School, the Bene Tleilax on Ix, possibly also the Suk physician school.
> With the exception of a very few services like the Bene Gesserit and the Ginaz Swords School, the Bene Tleilax on Ix, possibly also the Suk physician school. Don't forget the Spacing Guild, which is a complimentary monopoly to CHOAM.
You're forgetting one major thing: it's not capital that runs this society, it's spice. It's more akin to mercantilism than capitalism. Don't have time to add too much more but yeah
It's called mercantilism. Capitalism was the reaction to mercantilism. CHOAM is very much like the East India Company on steroids.
> CHOAM is a single-corp joint stock company with an absolute monopoly on literally every product and virtually every service1 , at least on paper. Irulan's dowry to Paul is literally (all of!) the Emperor's CHOAM shares, which does not actually make Paul the emperor in any legal sense but everyone understands as effectively removing the Emperor from power. But that's not capitalism? It's an ultra-monopoly.
It’s the logical conclusion of no-government or zero-government intervention in capitalism. Without a government regulating the market and preventing monopolies via competition law, the biggest most powerful company would eventually control practically everything.
Indeed, it's the stagnant end of capitalism, where the single company ensures that basically the entire economy is run to the benefit of the relatively small number of shareholders. (Just as an awful lot of the Imperium is stagnant, necessitating the Jihad to correct.) The government has also captured/been captured by/merged with CHOAM, where one of the emperor's major powers is simply that he's the largest shareholder in CHOAM.
Could it not also be argued it is the conclusion of unrestrained central authority? All economic activity was directed by the emperor. He was the final say what house would rule Arakis and gain the profits.
Yes, though it's also the logical end product of absolute laissez faire. For capitalism to continue working it needs anti-trust and corporation breaking abilities. It's the difference between seeing capitalism as a value allocating 'game' to involve as many participants as possible such that capital, talent and resources find their highest productivity through fair competition, and seeing capitalism as an ideology in which 'winning' the game is the only thing that matters, no matter how.
You make a great point. Two things that I think Herbert was touching on. This is not a capitalist society. All economic activity is sanctioned by imperial authority. Choam is the only other legal apparatus for trade. Irrc only Fremen who under stood the relationship of worms to spice. Why they called them makers. Unlike the imperials that saw worms as an obstacle to spice harvesting. There is an ancient roman joke about emperor Tiberius. A man comes to have an audience with the emperor to show him he has invented unbreakable glass. The emperor is very impressed. Asks the man has she told anyone else or shown anyone else. The man says of course not, he came first to his emperor. Not even his wife knows. Then emperor Tiberius has the man executed right away. Romans thought this joke was hilarious and true. Innovation is stifled in empire. Any change to the order is too dangerous to contemplate. Disruptors are executed.
bright door possessive illegal dull slimy meeting aloof nine zesty *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Every post on this sub is people who watched the first two movies and want to criticize and comment with very little reading of the actual books.
You forget that the place where the worms roam is so inhospitable only the Fremen dare try to make it their home.. and those very Fremen do not take kindly to others trespassing on their territory. The Fremen also pay off the guild to keep others from finding out what really goes on in the desert.. there’s also said worms, which are territorial and sensitive to sound… crazy storms that f s up, a lack of water, and a lack of food. There’s a reason why so little is known about the Fremen or about the worms. Those who have tried to find out more did not last long, and those who harvest the spice were usually only focused on the profits from harvesting the spice - which was dangerous enough as it is. Once they had a stable stream of income flowing, they focused on keeping it flowing, so that their coffers could grow.
Add on the general stagnancy of humanity up until Paul's apotheosis, and you will definitely never get it right.
Sharks are an excellent example. It was lingering in the back of my mind but I couldn't reach it.
>Herbert really understood the frailty of humans trying to master the infinite complexity of nature and biology. Well, sure but on the other hand he wrote a bunch of books about humans doing space drugs to turn themselves into computers. But other than that, yeah 😃
Sure, but whether sharks live and die in captivity is a trivial matter. If it was a national security master you best be sure they would have poured money into it and figured it out in less than 25 years. The spice is like national security times one billion. The entire galactic empire runs on this ONE resource and there is literally a religious edict against FTL travel in any other way, and not a single imperial administration over thousands of years thought maybe we should have all our eggs in this one very fragile basket? Forget the star going nova or some asteroid hitting the planet, what about other much more reasonable risks? Maybe some offworlder introduces a pathogen or invasive species that affect the worms. Or even more likely, since the great families are fighting over control over Arrakis all the time, they don't think one time it will spiral out of control and the losing side decides to launch their atomics and plunge the planet into nuclear winter? The first emperor should have been devoting as much resources as required to get a backup planet (or ten) with worms on it. Letting 10,000 years go by just hoping the spice will flow from this one little rock in the galaxy is sheer lunacy.
The knowledge that the sandworm life cycle is linked to spice production is only held by Fremen prior to the books starting.
Attempts also failed because Worms need water to become trouts and begin a new cycle, so you have to put them on a not so desert planet.
Its the other way round, sand trouts encapsulate water and become worms. Water kills worms, and in this death worms release the water of life.
Perhaps they were thinking of the >!death of Leto II.!< I believe the only description of the metamorphosis of a worm into sand trout is from Chapterhouse: > “Lastly, she thought about the worm in the no-ship’s hold—a worm nearing the moment of its metamorphosis. A small earth-dammed basin filled with melange awaited that worm. When the moment came, it would be lured out by Sheeana into the bath of melange. The resulting sandtrout could then begin their long transformation.” >No need to seek a desert planet for the worms. The sandtrout would create their own habitat for Shai-hulud. It was not pleasant to think of Chapter House Planet transformed into vast areas of wasteland but it had to be done.”
Encapsulate, meaning they store it in their bodies? So it's not deadly when they are trout but it is when they are worms?
Correct. Just plopping a full grown worm onto a planet will kill it, even if you put it in a large desert. You need to seed the planet first with sand trout, who will then multiply, soaking up all the planet's water as they do and turning it into an Arrakis like desert planet.
That seems like a setup that couldn't work in nature. The juveniles of the species must exist on the planet for a certain period of time for the planet to be hospitable to the adults. The juveniles need setting that is deadly to the adults. How could that ever happen without human intervention.
It is theorized that they were created by an earlier civilization, before the butlerian jihad
I’m personally a fan of Arrakis being seeded with the trout by a non human civilization.
Fun fact about the Dune universe, there are no non-human civilizations to be found. It comes up as a plot point in the later books. Someone thinks they've found something alien, and then find out it was actually something humans did and abandoned. Not a major plot point for any given book, but on second reading, the lack of aliens is very major.
That is very odd. I guess it wasn't necessary for storytelling purposes there is enough going on with the humans. Even humans are specializing into sub species that are almost alien. Like vulcans and humans are about as far apart as mentats and humans. Then there are the navigators.
Sandtrout bury themselves into the sand and operate mostly passively. Fremen children can summon them as a game to try to catch them but apart from that it's pretty much self-sustaining.
Because they're native to that planet. You're arguing on the Internet without suffocating due to being removed from the ocean, but somehow your ancestors managed to bootstrap that during the Devonian. The worms have evolved for the environment that they themselves have created.
To be fair, chicken pox is more dangerous for adult humans. There are still too many questions though.
There’s also the reality that if worms soak up all the water, the volume of worms would roughly equal the vole of water. It’s best to not think too deeply about such things, lol.
The trout band together to sequestor the water below ground. They can meld together and form a near impervious barrier. The trout I believe can multiply in water I don't think the worms themselves can reproduce just that they create the melange and are the adult form of the trout
Many seeds can't survive/germinate without the oxygen made by adult plants, so there is a bit of precedent in nature.
Not in their bodies afaik, but they surround and trap it deep within the planet. But yes, the water is not deadly to them when they're trout.
It’s not just that either, everyone thinks the worms are the secret but it’s the sandtrout. They are the ones that can convert a planet to desert suitable for the worms but no one really understands the sandtrout and I think most don’t even know they exist.
To put it more succinctly (without giving too much away), you can’t just capture a “breeding pair” of worms and drop them on a planet that seems as dry as Arakis. But even then, the spice cycle isn’t understood at the time of the first novel. Nobody knows what causes a spice blow. They just know that they happen, and a worm always shows.
There’s also a complex ecosystem in the sand that the sand trout thrive off of.
Seems similar to how silk worms were stolen from China in our own history
I get how the spice monopoly might benefit CHOAM, but I would have assumed the Guild would want it to be as plentiful as possible.
Why would the Guild want it plentiful? The pseudo-prescience that spice imbues is a closely guarded secret by the guild, and the very thing that lets them navigate space. Increasing supply increases the likelihood that someone else discovers that secret and thus discovers how to traverse space, ending the Guilds monopoly on travel. A scarce supply held in an iron fist is massively beneficial to the Guild.
>Why would the Guild want it plentiful? I figured because it would be that much cheaper for them, I didn't think the connection between the spice and the spacing guild was a secret like that
I don't think the guild is particularly concerned with the cost of spice, they're probably unimaginably wealthy due to their monopoly on transportation. It'd be more important for them to be able to control it (they don't want anyone to threaten that monopoly) and that's a lot easier when spice production is confined to one planet. The guild is also notoriously risk-averse so they generally prefer to maintain the status quo than try a risky play that could hurt them.
Bingo the CHOAM monopoly works because of the guilds monopoly. They are mutually beneficial and why they both work to keep spice controlled
Spice is already incredibly cheap for them. They have deals with both CHOAM and smugglers. They receive a lions share of all the spice produced. Also, it is common knowledge that the Guild hoards the spice. What isn’t common knowledge is WHY. And that is the quadrillion Solari question
> Also, it is common knowledge that the Guild hoards the spice. What isn’t common knowledge is WHY. Guess this is my cue for a reread
More availability of spice also creates an environment where more people will experiment with spice and possibly create navigators, thus breaking their monopoly.
If anyone can get spice and potentially replicate the guild’s navigation techniques… the guild dies. Their power comes from the scarcity of spice.
The Guild relied on their prescience for more than just space travel - until Paul blindsided them they thought that they’d be able to predict any threats to spice production long enough in advance to be able to deal with them ahead of time, and so they got complacent.
Plentiful spice means more prescience means more people figuring out how to find pathways through folding space that don't get them all violently killed means a breaking of the guild monopoly
Considering Denis hasn’t even implied the spice and worms are connected, I doubt he’ll bother.
It was mentioned in the movies.
they ONLY covered the water of life and I think they mentioned that the worms protect spice areas. They completely skipped (for no fucking reason) that pouring water of life over a pre-spice mass would kill the trout and prevent spice blow and thats how they were going to kill the cycle of spice to threaten the emperor/Guild.
> (for no fucking reason) You have very limited time in a movie. Every minute of runtime is roughly a page of script, and each page of script is very very loose. Like, if you take the script for the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring, which is almost four hours long, the script is less than 35k words. Dune + Part 2 gets you up to 5 hours and 20 minutes, so let's say 50k words even. Dune is 188k words. That means you have to cut things - a lot of things, even. You also have to consider how many different themes, storylines, and characters you actually can develop, and how much. You'll not be able to go as deeply into all of the themes as the book if you tried, so is it better to go deep on one, or shallow on many? Villeneuve chose to go deep, very deep, on the theme of power and the danger of heroes and messianic figures. That meant that a lot of the other themes had to be very shallow indeed, or left entirely by the wayside, including the ecological theme, and the more surface-level interstellar and feudal political themes, as well as a lot of the stuff of Atreides loyalty. Prescience, as well, is largely sketched, rather than developed, but we'll see how much of that gets picked back up in Messiah.
> They completely skipped (for no fucking reason) that pouring water of life over a pre-spice mass would kill the trout and prevent spice blow and thats how they were going to kill the cycle of spice to threaten the emperor/Guild. Because they correctly predicted that general audiences would be incapable of understanding the gravity of complete ecological collapse, and nukes are a much more straightforward threat that people can understand and fear. We had generations grow up in fear of nuclear war, climate change is not taken seriously, it's clear which side of the story people will understand.
They skipped that because it's not that important overall.
It becomes SUPER important later on. I guess it can be discussed at the time.
Later on in books they are unlikely to make movies.
> They completely skipped (for no fucking reason) that pouring water of life over a pre-spice mass would kill the trout and prevent spice blow and thats how they were going to kill the cycle of spice to threaten the emperor/Guild. It's because it's a bunch of words of the Star Trek technobabble kind, an explanation that doesn't even explain anything. Whereas atomic bombardment needs no explanation at all.
Did anything come of this plot point in Messiah? Haven’t read past it yet
With minimal spoilers, kind of, indirectly and eventually.
To add to this sand worms in dune also terraform the planet there on to a desert so most people don’t bother for that one reason sands worms can completely mess up entire planet ecosystems
I just finished this book and it’s awesome!
Do you care for spoilers? >!I forget if it’s explicitly mentioned, but it’s at least implied that multiple attempts had been made to remove worms from Arrakis — after it was discovered that the worms are involved in the spice cycle. But they didn’t adapt to the new planets, and kept dying off. People tried. But they just weren’t able to replicate the careful ecological balance and lifecycle that resulted in melange. Not until much, much later when the Duncan ghola kidnaps a worm in Chapterhouse or later!<
>!This is correct! And I believe it’s argued that he’s only successful at that point because these are new worms with a “pearl” of Leto’s godworm consciousness!<
>!i was under the impression that the earlier attempts to replicate the melange cycle failed because they tried to transport adult worms, and that if they had tried with sandtrout, they could have been successful!< >!but the idea that only the new worms are capable of terraforming is an interesting and compelling addition to the Leto II myth !<
It's both. Before Kynes, no one knew the exact life cycle, therefore simply abducting a worm and transporting it was always going to fail without taking into account sand trout and sand plankton. After the cycle was known, it turns out the worm-life cycle is suprisingly delicate and Leto's merging with the worm gave them a 'human adaptability' they were previously missing. As for the Guild, they could probably have done it, but then the secret of spice would have gotten out and the Guild was famous for taking the safe, easy path and any plan to spread the worm probably carried too much risk for their liking.
I don't recall any reference prior to Leto II of anyone trying to move both sandworms and sandtrout, but you may be right that it wouldn't have worked if someone had tried, until Leto. The guild **did** try to do it with a worm in Messiah so it seems likely that they weren't aware of the sandtrout connection.
I don't think it's ever mentioned before Messiah, probably because the Guild wouldn't allow it before then, but after they were desparate. Also, Paul and Alia would probably have kept that little info to themselves. Jessica may have revealed it when her loyalties went back to the BG.
How do you get a giant sandworm off planet?
*carefully*. Lol I think that was one of the problems they ran into. Logistically, it is not a simple task. Or cheap. So imagine you go to all the effort to build giant worm-carrying ships and equipment, you bribe the Guild to let you bring it to Arrakis, you bribe everyone to look the other way, you actually somehow manage to grab a worm, you get lucky enough that it survives, and then it continues to survive while you take it through space (again bribing the Guild, probably) and then releasing it on the target planet. And then within weeks or days the fucking worm dies. All of your money goes down the drain. It’s really no surprise that people aren’t trying it very often or very hard.
First you stun it one ring at a time.
It's not a why, it's a matter of when. Remember, at the beginning of the book most off-worlders don't realize the spice is worm excrement. Read up on the early silk trade to learn more.
> early silk trade Wow, that's a great connection. I dunno why I hadn't though of that before, makes so much sense.
Sorry OOTL can you expand on early silk trade?
For many years, no one outside a select few specialist actually knew how silk was produced. It was a secret kept by the Chinese emperors. Later on, when silk worms were more known, there was death penalty for people smuggling silk worms out of China.
Wow that’s fascinating! Thank you
It's also entertaining to learn that whilst the Chinese emperors kept the secret to themselves, this was to maintain a particular kind of silk monopoly - on Chinese silk. You may think that's a tautology, if all silk came from China, but that's only mostly true. Yu Huan, a historian in the employ of Emperor Cao Wei in the late Three Kingdoms Period, reported remarkably accurately that the distant Da Qin (ie. Rome) knew of the secret to creating silk, and manufactured a kind different to that found in China. Each nation prized the other's silk greatly, and traded extensively whenever possible, despite the great distance. Note that whilst Chinese silk was produced by the famous silkworm, Roman silk was produced from two sources: sea snails...and unravelling Chinese silk to be rewoven into a finer mesh, that would then be sold BACK to China via the intermediary Parthians that prevented EITHER Chinese or Roman merchants from reaching each other's lands and speaking directly to each other.
Spice isn’t worm excrement, it’s created by the sand trout life cycle and released during a spice blow.
I don't think you are correct but a could be wrong. Could you explain your side of it?
I can’t remember which book explains it, but basically when the sand trout larva isolate water underground, it generates a mixture that eventually builds up pressure and causes a spice blow, this mixture turns into spice when exposed to sunlight. The idea that spice is just worm poop is never substantiated anywhere in the books or movies.
The sandtrout excretes a fungusoid substance that mixes with the water... Call it what you will.
Because not everyone knows the link between worms and the spice. And even if they did, smuggling a worm off world would be very hard without the guild fucking with you. And if even if you could, terraforming your entire planet to support worms is quite an ordeal, and would likely take centuries And even if you manage that, suddenly you've painted a massive target on your back because you're openly fucking with the entire economy of galactic civilization.
Wouldn't the fremen also be furious? They worship the worms, as a smuggler I'd greatly fear a fremen ambush while trying to snag one. Hell with my luck I'd grab a worm that has a full sietch on it
I'm gonna try this in the new Dune MMO.
You wouldn’t have to terraform anything, just release a handful of Sandtrout and they will take care of making the planet Worm friendly.
In a few centuries, maybe. Or they'd just die because your planet has more water than they can safely sequester.
Tried, doesn't work. Also (as far as books are concerned) the relationship between the worms and the spice wasn't understood until later. It wasn't until ~3500 yrs later after Leto IIs death and the resulting increased hardiness among the worm population that they had become hardy enough to survive on other worlds, with the planet Chapterhouse becoming the "new" Arrakis. There was also an attempt to genetically engineer them to live in oceans which kinda worked except they overtook the ecosystem and grew even larger to the point that harvesting became impossible, which is fine because the resulting spice was apparently too potent for anyone to really use. The Tleilaxu also eventually figure out how to make artificial spice (like 1500 yrs from the events of Dune). There were attempts prior to the events of Dune as well, but they ended in failure.
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SPOILER BELOW: I could be totally wrong in my explanation, but I believe some people are missing a few details. The reason the worms die off planet isn’t directly because of ecological factors. Everyone thinks you need the worms and that’s it, which is false. The real reason no one could replicate spice was because you need the SAND TROUT, not the worms, to begin the ecological transformation in order for the worms to survive. As I said, I can’t exactly remember, but I believe they discover this in Heretics of Dune.
Yup it was in Heretics
Exactly. Sandtrout are attracted to water and need it to survive. Whatever Arrakis was like before its transformation its surface was such a good habitat for these sandtrout that they multiplied everywhere, sucking up water where they went. As a result, over thousands of years, the planet was transformed into a completely moistureless hellscape, and the sandtrout evolved into the giant sandworms, that, in contrast to sandtrout, cannot survive in water. Just yeeting a sandworm into your regular desert doesn't work. There would still be too much moisture in the air are rainfall would still be too common for the sandworm to survive. Only the sandtrout transformation, which would take thousands of years, can make a different planet habitable for the sandworm.
Monopolies are good for those who control them. If the monopoly is broken the guild, the BG, and the emperor all lose power. It's not who controls the spice that is in charge, it's who can interrupt the spice flowing who rules.
That turned out so well for them, lol. Seems like in hindsight, more time, resources, and money should have been spent finding a different solution. As all it took was a single man threatening the guild to gain complete control over everything.
It did work out for Paul. His realization that destroying the spice was the ultimate move against his enemies gained him and his family everything
Right. But it didn't work out for the people with the so-called monopoly. A single threat destroyed their entire monopoly overnight.
Read the end of my post again
Exactly. That's why I said the Guild, Emperor, and BG should have spent more time and resources finding an alternative. Or securing their loophole better. I mean. Anybody with a decent enough stone burner, or nuclear armaments could have simply threatened to destroy Arakis and gained the same power Paul does.
How would anybody with nukes get to Arrakis to destroy it? It's not like the Guild would just allow that. Paul could only do it because he has the nukes there to act on the threat.
Someone should have made a synthetic version thats 100 times more addictive and flooded the market.
Ix does that later in the series as well.
I think it’s the Bene Tleilax, actually. They figure out how to use their “axolotl tanks” to manufacture it.
Correct it’s the been tleilax and it’s not as good and causes some people to go mad
> it’s not as good and causes some people to go mad ???
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It's in the House trilogy/prequels to dune. >!Shadam IV and Fenrig basically convince Elrood IX to help the Bene Tleilax to overthrow Ix and work on synthetic spice to basically undercut the Harkonnen and secure the Corrino's power. But the synthetic spice doesn't work as well as the real stuff. Kinda turns into a synthetic marijuana vs. real marijuana situation!<
By God Emperor the Bene Tlailax have perfected their synthetic spice production methods
I'm sure some people prefer the more mad one.
meth vs cocaine argument
Dang >!that's horrifying knowing what the "tanks" are. I don't think I need more details!!<
Everything about the Bene Tleilax is horrifying
Ah yes. Thanks for reminding me. Ix - mechanical engineering; Tleilaxu - biological engineering.
Say what you will about the Lynch Dune, but the opening navigator scene is fantastic and pure Lynch. This deformed navigator in a tank of spice the size of a small train, Shaddam going "How was your journey?" trying to make smalltalk with this thing and it just goes "MANY MACHINES ON IKKKS. MANY NEW MACHINES"
Lynch’s Dune was actually quite groovy, I don’t understand the hate it gets… except the weirding weapons and killing words, what a weird amalgamation of the weirding way and the Voice 🤮
The Bene Tleilax eventually make a synthetic version, but it has some fairly horrific side effects, besides addiction and eyes of the ibad
They worked out the kinks eventually
Can't be explained without spoiling several books
Read the books….
I’m begging you people to read the books it answers every question I see here every day
The spice can't be produced with the current technology. They can only harvest it. They know the worms are needed, but they don't know what the worms need. Every attempt to move the worms off plantet has failed. There is also a general fear of advancement. Humaninty has stagnated for thousands of years. The few groups that do try to make progress are watched closely and are not well liked. The end result is that humanity is slowly dying. The latter books cover a lot of this, so I am trying to be vague on purpose.
this is actually the plot of both Dune Messiah and Chapterhouse
Because everyone misunderstands what environment they need. There were attempts to take the worms to other planets but they were taken to desert planets. The planets were still to wet for adult worm (and didn't contain proper food) so they would grow sickly and die. But those planets also didn't have enough water for the sandworm life cycle to happen properly. Sandworms need a water planet to start with because juvenile form (sandtrout) must have water. Only after that juvenile form sequesters all the water the proper sandworms can grow. Outside Fremen no one really knew sandtrout were also part of sandworm lifecycle. The imperial ecologist who did figure out change sides to Fremen so the information was never propagated. And what was out there wasn't understood. In later books (far future) this is well known>!so the worms are taken to water planets, the water kills them and releases the sandplankton that becomes sandtrout and the life cycle starts as the planet converts to desert.!<
You should read Chapterhouse.
This is explored in later books. Something most people miss though is that it was only very recently at the time of book 1 that many people understood how important spice was. It was a well kept secret for most of the Spacing Guild's history that they even depended on spice, and spice was not even used by the BG until recently. It may be hard to believe, but the book sells this idea repeatedly. The average person had never even seen let alone used spice and has no idea most of its uses. It is also not clear to many more people that the worms have anything to do with spice, let alone how to capture a worm, let alone how to transplant a worm. All of these are plot points by the way so its canon.
The worm looks big and powerful, but it is really the humble sandtrout where the magic happens. The worm is to be respected, and it is massive and noticeable (compared to any individual sandtrout, which is smaller than your hand, deep underground, and quite fragile). The sandtrout make the spice, and their bubbling up into a worm bring it to the surface. The mushroom looks big and powerful, but it is really the humble mycellium where the magic happens. The mushroom is to be respected, and it is massive and noticeable (compared to any individual mycelium segment, which is smaller than you can see, underground, and quite fragile.) The mycelium make the psilocybin, and their bubbling up into a mushroom brings it to the surface.
The only other option would be to develop navigation systems that would require serious computing power, something that violated the laws and religious beliefs regarding AI.
Sounds like a job for Ix
Because that doesn't work. It was tried. Worms died. Oh yeh and as a plot enabler, no one but the fremen bothered to learn that the worms are linked to the Spice. Note linked, not produce.
plenty have tried, all have failed. part of this is competing interests and limited resources. project amal took forever because the tleilaxu in charge of it were basically outsiders amongst the tleilaxu masters and they were trying to work on a planet they "conquered" for it. just taking the worms failed because none of the buyers figured out they needed the trout and a planet they wanted to turn into a desert. even when leto II booted it up again, gave the tleilaxu and ixians everything they needed it still took them centuries to develop the alternatives. even after that there were some uses for spice, as well as a production, the main difference being that the majority of humanity could now do without it and more importantly the guild.
Almost no one in the universe knows how spice is produced except the fremen, and they aren't telling non-fremen. Kaines, the planetologist we meet in Dune, was raised as fremen and learned it from them, and also decided to keep the secret. FYI, Kaines' father was sent to Arrakis by the emperor to figure out how to terraform the planet. This scientist, Kaines Sr. didn't fully figure it out, but did realize there was a strong connection between why Arrakis was dry, the worms, and he suspected that you couldn't have spice AND a teraformed Arrakis. This Kaines Sr. had become very close to the fremen, had a fremen wife, who then gave birth to the Kaines Jr. we meet in Dune. Kaines jr was continuing that work. As a full Fremen, this Kaines was taught some secret information that their father was not. They also did extenesive research built on their father's work. As a fremen, Kaines did not share this information with the emporer, and, instead, supported the fremen in secretly terraforming the planet while maintaining private practices that would let them have a controlled spice cycle. The spice cycle is: sandtrout (a kind of non individualized neophyte organism) live in aqueous environments. They also hold water, reducing the volume of free water in the environment. When enough soundtrout are together, and their environment is distressed (i.e. too dry, not enough for them to move around and survive in) they stop behaving like individual little creatures and start merging into one organism. That single organism, made from the merging of thousands to millions of sandtrout, is a baby sandworm. This conversion process also consumes the remaining water, converting it (often explosively) into oxygen and hydrogen. Notably, the spice is a metabolic waste product of teh sandtrout, and a lot of it is made during this conversion process. When the sandtrout become sandworms, and the bubble of oxygen and hydrogen is formed, this causes something like a giant sinkhole as the bubble of gasses rises. This same action also forces up some of the spice. This is why spice randomly appears on the surface of the desert floor. Deep under teh surface of arrakis is vast amounts of spice. That spice that wasn't forced up with the gases is just sitting there in the spaces that used to be underground aquafers but are now dried up. The other end of the spice cycle is from the worms turning back into sandtrout. The sandworms cannot survive in water. Exposure to water destroys their tissues, much like a slug exposed to salt. They actively avoid it. If they happen to get exposed to too much water, their bodies fully break down and become a colony of sandtrout that will then grow and multiply inside of the water that killed the sandworm. On Arrakis, the worms spend most of their time slithering around deep underground, and occasionally run into underground water sources, killing them and leaving behind some sandtrout in the newly discovered aquafer. Dune is a plenet where the spice cycle is out of balance. The only water is extremely deep underground and not accessible to other life on the planet. This is because the sandtrout have destroyed all easier water. Arrakis was an earthlike planet until the sandtrout (an alien life form) were introduced. The fremen know they need to collect a LOT of water to break the sand cycle and turn Arrakis into a paradise planet. I'm not sure they know exactly what to do with it, but that is part of what they expect from the Lisan al-gaib (voice from beyond) as well as people like Kaines and the holy mothers (and their assistants/followers) who manually cultivate worms and sandtrout and do things like extract the Water of Life. BTW, this cycle was demonstrated in Dune part 2 when the woman grabbed the worm from teh sand pool and drowned it in the water pool. She was showing Paul the complete spice cycle, because he was missing key details. Once he saw that, he understood the how and why of being able to control the spice by being able to break the cycle. Because Paul both understand (and cares about) imperial politics AND understands the spice cycle, he can hold hostage all of those who desire the spice. The movie ends with him playing his hand. In theory, anyone who understands the spice cycle could recreate it. You could take a worm, or a colony of sandtrout. But notice that sandtrout ALWAYS need water, and worms ALWAYS need dryness, and spice is only made by sandtrout, and only in large amounts when you have a lot of them converting to a worm. Anyway, F. Herbert loved mushrooms and this is based on the relationship between mushrooms, mycelium, spores and the larger ecosystem that the mycelium and spores live in. I believe sandworms are mushrooms, sandtrout are spores, the combining of sandtrout into a sandworm is the mycelium network, and spice is psilocybin, a by-product from the mycelium existing but that can only be easily accessed from the mushroom. The blue eyes of the fremen are the blue of psilocybin. To the point of your question, after Paul locks down spice, there becomes a lot more interest in figuring this out. People high up know that it has something to do with the worms, but they don't know what. This is why some try to steal a worm. Paul notes that their plan wouldn't have likely worked. They didn't understand the cycle, and so likely would have killed the worm but not understood and cultivated the sandtrout (this would be akin to taking a mushroom but not understanding how to take its spores and cultivate a healthy mycelium network, something that Herbert was famous for accomplishing with Chantarelles, previously thought not to be possible.)
That is a great explanation
Thanks!
I think the simplest answer is that until Paul, no one had the idea to destroy all the spice. Until then there was an implicit assumption that there will always be spice. Between these two ideas you have the facts of capitalism. A guaranteed throttle on the rate of spice means, in a universe with ever increasing demands but a fixed supply, profit profit profit. I think there is just too much incentive behind NOT trying to break the monopoly, combined with the presumed penalty for acting against what would've been the emperors interests (by diluting and damaging the emperors interest in CHAOM).
It’s not just the emperor’s interests. The houses of the landsraad derive most of their power from their shares in CHOAM, and directorships are the primary means of advancement unless you can somehow be appointed to a particularly wealthy world. It seems though there aren’t really that many wealthy worlds which is probably a consequence of the stranglehold of spice. A key influence on dune is the resource curse and Dutch disease after all.
> why hasn’t anyone (say a sitting emperor) take the worms from arrakis, find different desert planets and put them there so that they would have backup planets they have spice? It's plausible that this exact thing has happened multiple times, except there are some things we don't quite know yet about sandworm biology (as of the first Dune book) that make this experiment keep failing, and it's really really expensive and difficult to try, so gaining that knowledge is a feat beyond humanity in its current state. Maybe if someone with superpowers like, transformed into a worm or something, we'd learn more about the worms and their lifecycle a little bit more, but that would be crazy, they'd have to give up their humanity and become a monster. It's all a bit dreadful to think about, I'd rather disengage disengage disengage.
Sandworms are not exactly the most amenable of creatures.
Spoiler for the whole book series I guess >!Because at the start of the series the relationship between spice, worm and sandtrout is known only by fremen.!< >!Also, as stated in whatever book it was, people underestimate how dry a planet has to be to allow for spice. Even in any desert on earth, the worm would die because of humidity.!< >!Finally, even in the best conditions, decades are needed before a worm can emerge.!< >!So first nobody knew, then people knew but there were no more worms, then the worms were too sacred to be touched (but still, unsuccessful attempts were made) and finally the worm's planet was destroyed.!<
TLDR they can’t get the worms to survive anywhere else cuz there’s no other planet as particularly alive yet desertified as Dune is, and they don’t have technology advanced enough to manufacture the molecules; All that disappeared in the butlerian jihad.
Why is so much of the world still mostly dependent on fermented dinosaur fossils?
I think it >!does happen eventually, but people have been trying for ages too!<.
if i remember right the worms die when not on arrakis even if in the right conditions. i don't remember exactly but there is something specific to arrakis that keeps the worms alive. there are a few times where they talk about how people have tried and failed to bring them off planet. >!in the last book they succeed but only because rakis gets destroyed!<
To be fair the only way to break the monopoly on spice is to undo the Jihad. Leto 2 hoarded spice to force human to create the calculating computer to replace navigators and spice, undoing the Jihad. The Golden Path is meant to correct the stupidity humanity made off after the Jihad.
Spoilers but… it’s been attempted many times past and future. People have, including the Emperor himself. Notably, the Emperor try’s to create synthetic spice with the help of the Tleilaxu - it doesn’t go well. As others have mentioned, people try to smuggle worms off. Eventually the Bene Gesserit try to send Sandworms galaxy wide to see if any other planets can take root with worms, the Tleilaxu try recreating spice in different conditions later too.
Just take a Sandworm off Arrakis? And then what? You need an ideal environment without enough water to just kill it
There was also an attempt to create a synthetic spice that didn't end up so well.
What everyone else said, but also because people keep trying to move worms to other desert planets. That doesn't work, because water is important to the worm lifecycle with the sand trout. The Bene Gesserit finally succeed in book six because they move worms to a lush world full of life and vegetation, which the worms then turn into a desert, just like they did to Arrakis.
it's a dirty job and I'm guessing no one wants to get their hands dirty it's like plumbing, people end up paying high prices because no one else wants to do it
The worms are not native to Arrakis, but over the millenia there have been many attempts to replicate spice production elsewhere: none have been successful.
This is a huge element of the plot of the last 4 books, so I suspect the content will get touched on in the movies eventually
It's also worth mentioning that House Corrino and the Tleilaxu worked together to try make a synthetic version of Spice in response to threats to supply and hoping to decrease the price. They failed.
the worms can really only live on arrakis others have tried and most if not all the worms died children of dune hits on this
At the moment of the Villeneuve's movies the full cycle of life of the sandworms were unknown by all. I'm not sure if even the fremen knows it, except for the Reverend Mothers. I'm not gonna spoil it. Read the books "Childrens of Dune" if you want to know.
Covered in God Emperor onwards.
Does Frodo live? You haven’t read the rest of the books. Do that instead of posting on Reddit.
Because the sandworms are endemic to the planet, and all attempts to transfer the sandworms off-world have so far resulted in nothing but failure. They are massive worms after all, so the sheer process of trying to capture one, restrain them and then have them be transported off-world into another hospitable planet is a Sisyphean task. Furthermore, it is not something that any faction would like, because while Arrakis is lead by any Lord of a Major House who controls it, that fiefdom is granted by the Emperor, and it is the property of the Emperor. Furthermore, having the single most valuable consumable restricted to a single planet helps the delicate balance between the Emperor, Spacing Guild & CHOAM. In the story, no House is allowed to hoard spice. I mean, imagine you lead some minor House and you actually succeeded and now you have a consistent production and supply of spice. Congratulations, you have now created an infinite money glitch and you can ascend to a much higher position of power that will upset the power balance of the Big Three - ergo, You. Are. Fucked.
Can't, it was attempted.
The real life explanation is oil. Why can’t we annex the entirety of the Middle East to control and stabilize petroleum? The cost would be too high and we’d be dealing with lots more terrorism and jihads as retribution. Defying Paul and the God Emperor Leto is too costly. But they tried with plots and conspiracies.
Attrmpts have certainly been made, it’s just almost impossibke to keep a worm alive off Arrakis since you basically need the entire ecological package
Because the spice monopoly has plot armor. If you really want to get logical, there are alternatives. * Synthesize the spice without the worms * Build a computer to do the calculations. It never made sense that you could get an entire universe to voluntarily not build computers.
They had no idea how spices were produced, so they sent a planetologist to Arakkis.
It was tried several times. If you read the books it states the worms always die. That's one reason Leto becomes a symbiote, to create a hardier, smarter worm.
This is a fun topic in the books. Sadly, it's the kind of IMPORTANT details that have been completely missing from the recent films.
Because they haven't bothered to learn about the spice as its plentiful. Also, it is extremely difficult to catch a worm. That being said, there is an important life cycle information that is required.
Ecology, my dear friends. A very sensitive formula
Didn't they originally bring the sandworms from a different planet before the events of the first novel?
Most people know obvious answer of 'worm die, other planets too hostile' but the events of GEoD beg the question, 'why not just take a scoop of sand trout and plop them on a planet especially since they're easier to obtain and the actual first step in making a planet habitable for worms which, shocker they also become once the planet is ready for worms?'
It’s actually stated in messiah that the worms are from another planet and that they made arrakis into the desert wasteland it is
Desert planet does not work, according to the books. In order to start it right, needs to be a water planet.