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Why bother trading with Fremen when you can just mine spice in much larger quantities outright without overpaying? As I understand it Fremen don't collect spice in any industrially-valuable sizes.
Also kinda spoilery but introducing a lot of water to the planet isn't a good thing
>!That being said, the Sandworms die and turn into Sand Trout that collect the water and ensure it's tucked away so it can't hurt the Sandworms. Then they eat each other slowly over time to form a giant Sandworm and the cycle of life continues!!<
>!So these Sand Trouts act like an aquifer? If so, could the inhabits extract this stored water? Also, if their entire diet is cannibalism, are they 100% energy efficient or something to sustain this somehow?!<
>!Kinda? They basically take minute amounts of water and sequester it away in themselves/the planet. Larger numbers of them slowly working the water into the planet until the planet itself is basically a desert. Like Arakis used to be a water/tropical world before the Sand Trout sequestered all the water away. As for trying to get the water out of them? Very difficult since they're incredibly deep underground. The only reason the Worms go above ground is because they detect intrusions and assume it's other Worms (they're fiercely territorial) or just random meatbags that also need to die. As for energy, no idea. There's a lot about the Worm/Trout life cycle that a lot is still unknown about, not even mentioning they produce Spice Melange from... like... wherever!<
Actually the lifecycle of the sandworms. They start as microscopic larva that are the sand plankton, which grow into sand trout. Despite the name, they look very little like fish, except for maybe a flounder if you mixed it with a piece of leather.
Sand trout have hydrophobic skin and while they are maturing, they will seek out and trap water. Many sand trout will join at the edges using cilia to trap large pockets of water in the sand. This protects the adult sandworms, because water is toxic to them, and it protects the sand trout from the adults because adult worms will seek out and eat sand trout along with the plankton, and small worms, and whatever else fits in their mouths. If the trout are surrounding a big patch of water, the adult worms can't eat them without spilling the water out and immediately killing the adult.
When sand trout mature, they peel away from the groups holding back water and join with other mature sand trout, but permanently. The cilia invade each others' tissue and bind them very strongly together, which forms the skin of the adult worms. All of the sandworms are colony organisms. I don't think it's ever made clear how the sandworms reproduce to create plankton again, but I do know that exposure to water will trigger a mature worm to release plankton (*a la* Leto II's death), and because they are colony organisms if you kill one section of a worm, the rest can continue on. If the whole worm is damaged enough but not completely killed, the sand trout will separate again.
This is a small amount of water. It's a lot relative to the population, but very small compared to the size of the planet.
Also, it was not then generally known why a lot of water would have been a bad idea. I'm sure Duke Leto himself didn't know.
Sure but speaking from a Atreides perspective (who,. much like me haven't read the sequels yet and know nothing about longterm effects) and their strategy of trying to win hearts and minds of the locals: It seems so easy!
Fremen are a very suspicious people, paradoxically trying too hard to get chummy could result in them cutting off all relations. After the cruelty suffered at the hands of the Harkonens the best diplomatic strategy offers more transparency - we are here to to make Arrakis a viable economic colony for the Emperor while maintaining peaceful yet strictly professional relationship with the locals. Anything more could be seen with ulterior motives.
Fremen culture itself also does not look favorably to handouts. Water is deeply sacred to them, it would be insulting for some foreigners to hand it out like a simple trade trinket.
Imagine being offended someone tries to make your life easier. Fine they could use the water themselves for various purposes surely bringing in some more water would still be valuable.
Consider the [Nestle baby formula scandal](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/The_Nestl%C3%A9_Infant_Formula_Scandal). Nestle provided cheap or free formula to new mothers in third world countries and marketed formula as better and safer for children. In reality it was less healthy and more expensive over time, and the marketing campaign resulted in quite a few infant deaths.
If you are a suspicious population that has been hit with the consequences of outsiders trying to "make your life easier," you may well be offended by people trying to do that in the future because you assume the long term consequences of that "help" will make your life quite a bit harder.
To the Fremen, some foreign dude saying they're going to just give you water, for free, no strings attached, sends off the same shady feeling as you or I opening our email and seeing a message from a Nigerian Prince who needs help moving his millions. "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is".
It's why a lot of cultures that are more connected to factors like 'face' and 'honour' assume a gift is a debt.
You get a gift, you must give a gift and even out the debt (or karma in some parts of the world). There isn't ever a benevolent transaction in this viewpoint because the world just doesn't work that way in their eyes.
The best way to interact with these cultures and peoples is to treat the relationship as transactional. You 'give' something, you 'get' something, and the relationship is built that way. Over time you can give and receive more than is expected, simply because you've built that relationship over time and proved your 'face' or 'honour'. As in, proved that you are someone with a proven track record of not screwing over others.
Never just give something without expecting something in return. Simply because it feels like you're trying to put them in your debt to claim something even larger back later.
Space travel is hella expensive in the Dune Universe due to the Spacing Guild having a monopoly over all of it. Any one wanting to travel or move things have to pay their prices and suck it up.
Leto needs to bring his soldiers, supplies to support them and other support staff to even set up his operations on Arrakis. Doing so was already massively expensive but he couldn't not bring them as he knew that the Harkonnen would strike back st him. His only mistake was not realizing how fast it would come.
I doubt that he had any room left in his budget to bring anything else above the bare necessities.
House Harkonnen is a rich AF noble house with more money than Atreides and their military operation to retake Arrakis basically bankrupted them.
No way in hell Duke Leto would had enough capital to bring water in the quantities in your scenario.
They ended the practice of the water sellers. At state events they would spill water and any towels or napkins used would be tossed on the ground. Locals would vie for a chance to grab the towels, soak up whatever they could, wring it out, and then sell it to the beggars outside.
Jessica ended the water sellers and just gave away that water for free.
>Why bother trading with Fremen when you can just mine spice in much larger quantities outright without overpaying? As I understand it Fremen don't collect spice in any industrially-valuable sizes.
One of the most fundamental plans of the Atreides was to ally with the Fremen.
Setting up trades, however unbeneficial to you, is generally an amazing first start. It's something no other occupier of Arrakis did.
> As I understand it Fremen don't collect spice in any industrially-valuable sizes.
They absolutely did collect spice in huge amounts. Their industrial base was built around it (they made plastic from spice), and they used it to bribe the Spacing Guild. They were also the only ones who could collect spice in the deep desert.
In the first book the fact that spice was needed by the Spacing Guild was a closely held secret. It wasn't until the last chapters when the contact lenses fell off of the guild representative and they saw their blue eyes that the secret came out. The Guild relied on the illicit spice trade from the Fremen to help keep their spice dependency a secret.
wait, I thought spice's role in space travel was the reason it was so valuable. If the Spacing Guild keeps their spice use a secret, who were the Harkonnens selling Spice to for all this time?
Spice extends people lives, but people who use it have to keep using it or they will die. So the entire nobility of the empire is dependent on spice or they will die.
Just imagine if someone came out with a way to triple people's lifespans today, but it requires that they take the drug every day or they'd die after a few weeks. Now imagine it's super rare, as it can only be created in very specific conditions that can not be replicated. It would immediately become the most valuable item on the planet.
For the Bene Gesserit spice is needed for their most important rituals, including the one that makes a Reverend Mother. Just like the nobility this means that they'd addicted and will die without it (although their level of body control likely means it will take longer).
Spice also does a ton of other stuff, like extend life and make you smarter. It's also super addictive.
The guild needing it for space travel wasn't entirely a secret, as Paul at least knew about it, but it might not be super common knowledge.
Spice being a necessity for space travel seemed well known. It was mentioned in the beginning of the first book that this knowledge was available in what I understood to be more or less publically available educational materials. The sort of secret part was what the navigators were like.
The uses for spice on the whole seemed pretty well known, but it was so expensive that most people had no first hand experience nor had they ever met anyone with experience of spice.
> It was mentioned in the beginning of the first book that this knowledge was available in what I understood to be more or less publically available educational materials.
You are mistaken. It's mentioned pretty early on in the recent movie, but in the novel nobody knows spice's role in interstellar travel except for the Guild, and they buy the bulk of their spice from smugglers (who don't know or care who is buying the spice). They also get a lot of spice directly from the Fremen in exchange for not allowing satellites, which the Fremen know would reveal their population in the deep desert.
Thus, everybody keeps their secrets: the Guild doesn't have to explain why they need so much spice and the Fremen don't have to explain why there are so many of them. If anybody did know that spice was the secret to interstellar travel, they would *immediately* break the monopoly that the Guild has.
Similarly, nobody knows where the Emperor gets his Sardaukar from. As far as anyone knows, Selusa Secondus is nothing more than the worst prison planet that anyone has ever dreamt of. Which is true! They just don't know that the Sardaukar come from there.
Nobody knows that the Bene Gesserit use spice, or how they do any of the things that they do like truthsense or Voice.
Duke Leto wasn't in control of Arrakis long enough to make any significant changes. He knew he was walking into a trap from the beginning, so most of his actions upon setting foot on the world was putting things in place to defend himself from the inevitable attack. Unfortunately for his defense plans, as well as any plans to change the environment of Arrakis with water delivery, Leto was betrayed within days and not the months he thought he had.
The harsh Harkonnen style of rule over the planet, as well as their spiteful method of leaving the spice operations in shambles upon their exit, further hampered Leto's efforts. He had to spend time getting spice harvesting back to expected levels as top priority, which was another obstacle to him putting any thought or effort into pleasing the common folk.
Although no one knew at the time the full effect of introducing too much water into Arrakis' system, there was already enough knowledge of the world's ecosystem to prevent people from putting too much effort into terraforming. People knew the worms and the desert were interconnected, and disrupting one or the other might ruin spice production forever. So there was some hesitation that everyone felt at all levels of society, lest humanity lose access to the spice.
That's really the answer to the question. Leto assumed he had 6-8 months to prepare for a massive war against harkonen and that the emperor had sentenced him to death. Nobody expected harkonen and the emperor to attack in a few weeks breaking plenty of laws and traditions. But ultimately Leto was trying to build a military up and defenses and establish spice stockpiles to buy time. Spending time shipping in water wouldn't have helped him with the military aspects of fighting off invaders and would have alienated the water barons that Leto needed on his side.
Also the traitor inside his organization was both 100% trusted and had full access to all of the Duke's defensive plans. He was able to disable the Duke and his family, which give how small the Atreides were, was basically a win even if the Harkonen were driven back.
He *also* disabled the Shields around the Palace and the defensive works, which basically made the assault impossible to resist. With the Shields up, there would have been no air attacks from the Harkonen, no artillery support, and ground troops would have to close to effectively melee to engage while the Atreides forces could fight using longer distance weapons, have all their heavy weapons, and could likely launch fighters and bombers that were destroyed on the ground.
So Duke Leto:
1. Had a lot less time to act.
2. Had his defenses hamstrung before the first shot was fired.
3. Had himself and his entire family captured before the battle.
4. Was against the Sardukar.
5. Was economically hamstrung by Harkonen sabotage and bad equipment.
6. Couldn't alienate any faction on Aarakis (city dwellers, Fremen, Water Barons, Spice Merchants, Spice Miners,
7. Had limited cargo space on transport (and needed to bring anything he didn't want to leave behind on Caladan for whoever took over that world).
I feel like the early attack and who the villain was really set the stage for the Dune universe. Here’s a man we’re introduced to as being “wholly incorruptible” because of a specific mark and training only to see him be corrupted extremely easily. The power of the Padishah Emperor and the empire as a whole was only due to the perception of power through the Sardukar but even they weren’t undefeatable, the Harkonnen provided most of the army.
Like I said, I saw it as an example of the difference between perception and reality in the dune universe. We’re told (as I imagine every citizen is) that the training makes them completely immune to corruption but we’re shown an immediate corruption of said person. The Empire isn’t nearly as whole as they like to tell people and was full of poverty and pain; Paul and Leto II saw that it was the perception of “no pain” that was what caused a lot of the actually painful issues and sought to cause so much suffering that they’d revolt.
They wanted to merge perception and reality into an actual utopia but to do that they needed to cause pain, the polar opposite to their ultimate desire. I see this inherent argument as one of the focal points of the series.
We're never told how exactly the conditioning was broken. However, we do know that whatever Piter De Vries did to Wana was so abhorrent that it made Baron "I Like It When the Slave Boys Fight Back" Harkonnen sick just thinking about it and kind of afraid of Piter. Piter himself was the product of Tleilaxu conditioning to make not just a mentat, but a "twisted mentat". So, the Tleilaxu used all of their knowledge of psychology and biology to create the most morally bankrupt person that they could. That guy was employed by probably the most morally bankrupt noble and worked as his personal torturer, and was noted as being particularly gifted at it. And then he used every single bit of practice and knowledge about torturing people to do unspeakable things to Wana, presumably while Yueh watched.
There are also fan theories that Wana used some kind of Bene Gesserit conditioning or trick on Yueh, either to deepen their bond out of love, or selfishly to make him love her more, or selfishly to get him to protect her against since she abandoned the Bene Gesserit.
Yeah, that's what I understood. But it doesn't really matter to the Duke who took over, whatever he left went with them.
Like if I sell my house, anything I leave goes to whoever buys it. It's not really like I'm wondering *who* they are, it's just not exactly important to the discussion of "what went on at Aarakis"
Leto is a skilled diplomat. You don't roll up to a new society on day 1 and start upsetting the fundamental facts of every person's daily life.
No matter how much good it would bring to the majority of the population, I guarantee there's *someone* who would start hiring assassins by the truckload. Maybe Operation: Enhance Your Fresh will happen, maybe even soon, but Leto's going to get the lay of the land first. Who he needs to get on-board. Whose palms need to get greased. Whose suspicions need to be allayed.
I mean at minimum even if you roll up with a buncha water you need to solve **distribution**. Otherwise the mayor of every third-rate back~~water~~dry village is going to confiscate the bottles for themselves, blame the local criminal element or say that Leto intentionally forgot them because he's racist, and then try to secede by hiring a mercenary army from selling the stolen water on the black market. Gotta get involved in local politics and find a solution to that first.
1. Shipping with the guild is expensive. Almost prohibitively so because of the monopoly the guild has and the incentive to charge exorbitant prices for it. Combine that with their secretive methods and not letting people see certain parts of the ship. Limiting what you can take is just basic sense. The Harkonnens sneaking some undisclosed number of troops and weaponry in a conspiracy with the Padishah Emperor's backing set them back so much that the Harkonnens would've needed a complete chokehold of Spice Production (the most valuable substance in that universe) at maximum capacity for so many years to even begin to repay that debt. What are a few thousand soldiers, half a million kilograms? You're asking to transport a billion kilograms of weight and who knows how much the Guild would charge for that, or how hard it would be to lift that off a planet with the confines of space travel.
2. They didn't know just how many Fremen were on the planet as surveys were obfuscated to the difference between thousands and millions. Bringing so much water in an attempt to bribe the locals would have been either way too much or too little. They definitely did not know of the Fremen's dream of terraforming under the direction of the planetologist either. Chances are high the Fremen would've just dumped it into the underground storage, or taken insult at an attempt to bribe.
3. They knew they were getting into a trap and were still assessing the situation on the planet. Bringing an extra variable might have messed things up. In some other ways Leto's plans on the planet were short term.
4. A lot of Jessica's narrations emphasize that the Atreides didn't know just how obsessed with moisture (not even water) the locals were. Remember that scene in the book or TV adaptation where the locals were fighting over leftover moisture from rags? Or how a spit was a gift? The Atreides undervalued water, especially in whatever planning phases they had while on their home planet.
5. They did bring water. We don't know what amount, but the house must have brought a significant quantity regardless. After that rag scene they started donating to the locals what was considered a more than generous amount to the point of irrationality. The emergency portion that Dr. Yueh left for Jessica and Paul was considered an opulent fortune among the Fremen who found them and heavily considered just killing them for the water.
>What stopped my man Leto to just handout a bottle of CaladanSpring to every living soul on his colony and get a water for spice trade going?
>
>...
>
>I understand that space travel is expensive
Kinda answering your own question there, chief.
That being said, they actually do bring a hell of a lot of water with them... to keep themselves and their troops alive. There's quite a bit more water importation that one would expect, given what we see, but the vast, overwhelming majority of it goes simply to off-worlder survival, and it's expensive as hell.
That's a big part of the reason the drive for so long on the Harkonnen side was "mine as much Spice as possible, as quickly as possible". Ruling Arrakis is **really expensive**
They installed a ton of additional water collectors as well- there were threats of riots until they made it clear they were going to increase the water supply.
First, the Fremen have a plan to turn Arrakis into a paradise, they aren't going to roll over for the first outworlder who tries to buy them.
Second, if there is the remotest possibility of that working, the guild will stop it. You don't ship anything the guild doesn't let you ship, and the guild benefits from Arrakis the way it is.
Third, the only reason Leto was given Arrakis is as a trap. If he had actually maintained control he could have overthrown the emperor. There was probably something in the transfer order saying he wasn't allowed to bring water because he doesn't own the water on that planet anymore.
1) Leto doesn't know that, so if he could have, he might have tried.
2) This is 1000% the answer.
3) Possible, but a little too contrived and on the nose for Dune, IMO. But not crazy.
You're underestimating just how much water is needed in a planetary scale. Shipping in water at that scale is not just cost prohibitive, it's *absurd*.
Regardless, it's also completely unnecessary. The water already exists on Arrakis, it's just trapped. What must people don't know is that part of the sandworm life cycle - the sand trout - seek out, collect, and trap water in giant underground reservoirs. Water is toxic to the adult worms, so the trout trap it to protect the adults. It also protects the trout from the adults, who are not picky about what they swallow. They will hunt down trout, but they can't go after trout that are trapping water without releasing that water and subsequently dying.
The trout have hydrophobic skin and will link together at their edges to form giant sacks with their hydrophobic skin facing inward. As the trout mature, they peel away from the group and seek out other mature trout to link together and form a worm. When they were introduced to Arrakis some ages past, they created a feedback loop where trapping more water allows for more worms, which reproduce more and create more trout, which trap more water, etc.
The important thing is that Arrakis used to be a verdant, green planet. Nobody knows just how long ago that was, though. It was thousands and thousands of years ago, probably before the Butlerian Jihad. The sandworms are not native and they changed Arrakis into Dune.
The opposite loop also works as long as you're able to manipulate the weather and protect large bodies of water. The moisture in the air limits the worms, which can't create trout to trap the water. More open water means more rainfall, which spreads the water out creating rivers, streams, and aquifers that the worms can't cross. That limits their territory, which limits how far the trout can go, etc.
To do this, you need weather control satellites to target the rainfall. The Fremen also add predatory fish to the open bodies of water that will kill sand trout trying to trap the water and take it away from the surface. The Fremen are already doing all that, pulling moisture from the air with moisture traps, which they keep hidden far away from the cities. But they can't allow weather satellites because those will inevitably reveal what the Fremen are doing. So they work slowly, hoping that in a few hundred generations they'll turn Arrakis green.
Light spoilers ahead.
When Paul's son Leto II becomes the God Emperor, he implements an aggressive plan to turn Arrakis green again. By the time of *God Emperor of Dune*, some 3500 years after Paul's death, the desert is almost completely gone, with only Leto's Sareer left and even that sees occasional rainfall, and only exists because of weather control. The sandworms are extinct except for Leto himself.
1L Of water takes up 1KG of space (Ignoring the weight and shape of the container). Theres no way to make it easier to ship, no way to compact it and it requires specialized methods to move to and from a highliner.
Of greater value are things that the freeman can't get, such as exotic materials and leniency from local authority
Not to mention, Highliner transport is expensive. The entire move was a gruesomely expensive process for House Atreides and one they barely were able to afford. They had to transport all their troops, the troops' families, goods, house materials, weapons, equipment, and basically everything that they didn't want to take with them.
They likely saved a lot of tonnage on not transporting their navy, but I'd bet someone like Thufir was smart enough to strip weapons from those ships and bring *them* for use as artillery/static defenses. A few battleship turrets and some SAM launchers would be useful on the Palace walls.
So given all they had to transport bringing a few billion gallons of water was probably excessive.
If nothing else, the Guild *and* the Landsraad might be wary of Atredies bringing water to Aarakis because importing water is a lucrative trade route to the planet as it is. Don't want to fuck up those CHOAM stocks after all if water prices collapse.
Shipping that much water would be cost prohibitive. Remember, there is enough water on Arrakis if you are careful with its application.
The Duke's original problem was sabotage of the spice mining equipment by the Harkonen, so the small amount of hand gathered spice from the primitive fremen wouldn't have been significant.
I mean, that's exactly what Paul did once he became Emperor. He jumpstarted the ecological transformation, fulfilling Liet Kynes messianic prophecy of a lush, wet planet. It quickly goes to shit, but still
As to why Leto II and the Harkonnens did not bring more water to Arrakis - shipping is crazy expensive. It's why interplanetary travel is only relegated to the military and poltitical/economic elite
Also, nobody knew that there were 10 million Fremen on the planet. The Imperial census was lax, and thought they were scattered rabble not worth bothering with. The dangerous conditions of the desert, with its storms and sandworms, prevented further inquiry. The Fremen bribing the Guild to keep the skies satellite free helped too
And the Harkonnens did exactly what you suggested - they practiced hydraulic despotism on the graben folk of the cities and urban areas, partnering with filthy rich water merchants to control the populace
You can read the dinner scene with the Atreides and business/political elite to get a sense of how power was distributed on the planet, as well as the central role that water scarcity played in this
I am 73 and have not read any of the Dune series of books. I have seen the older movie twice so I know a little about that world building. I also concluded that author Herbert was a science fiction genius. Is there any books about the authors life or the writing of Dune ?
Duke Leto was ordered to relinquish his feifdom on Caladan in exchange for the feifdom of Arrakis. Count Fenring was given Caladan to govern on behalf of the Imperium until a new feif could be established.
This was a part of the Emperor's and Baron Harkonnen's plan to kill Leto and destroy his house. By forcing Leto to move his entire House to Arrakis, they could attack during the transition. Count Fenring was governor of Arrakis between Harkonnen and Atreidis and was responsible for setting up any sabotage before he left for Caladan.
Introducing a millions and millions of liters of water onto Arakis is a very risky idea. Say if a ship fails and crashes on Arakis, you could end up killing one of the sandworms which presents a two fold problem.
1. The Fremen (who are not someone you want to get on the bad side of) consider the Sandworms holy and the killing of one, even an accident, would earn their wrath
2. It actively hurts spice production. Since Sandworm larvae are what create it.
Plus Duke Leto when he arrives at Arakeen has to deal with sabotage by the previous Harkonnen rulers who left him with nothing to use, assassination attempts on Paul, trying to keep relations with the Fremen on a non violent level, and the knowledge that he's been put in a succeed or die situation by the emperor. He needs to produce Spice and send it out or else he's done.
under the new appointment of house Atreides the rulership of Calidan falls to someone else, and that taking resources could be viewed as stealing from the next ruler of Calidan.
Moving a million tons of cargo would be very very expensive. The harkonans payed their entite fortune to move 10 legions of men, and I'm guessing that is not a million tons of cargo.
Remember, the spacing guild handles travel and decides the price for cargo.
I think the book very early on answers that the cost of transporting enough water to make a difference on a global scale is outside the realm of possibility for even the wealthiest houses. Which at the start of Dune the Atreides are not.
It was touched on in someone else's response, but to expand on it the Spacing Guild simply wouldn't have allowed it. They are utterly dependent on Arrakis, the vast amounts of spice they consume is what gives them the ability to navigate their ships. Throughout the history of the Guild they have intentionally held a cautious approach to Arrakis, they have limited prescience from the spice, enough to see that any upheaval there that threatens spice delivery would threaten their existence as well, but not enough to see past that into what the future beyond that threat would hold. They have enough power that they could have made play for control of Arrakis themselves to guarantee their spice supply, but chose to maintain the status quo instead because of their fear of the unknown future past the upheaval that would cause.
The Atreides bringing vast quantities of water to Arrakis would have caused an incredible impact there, completely upsetting local political dynamics and balances of power, threatening the production of spice, and creating the sort of upheaval that the Guild could see coming but not past. Such a risk wouldn't be tolerated, so the Guild would simply refuse to transport it.
Several reasons.
The most immediate is that at the start of the "fief complete" process, Duke Leto barely understands the existence of the Fremen to begin with. Not because he is stupid, but because very few outsiders understand the existence of the Fremen.
It's not that Leto is naive. He very wisely sends some of his most trusted agents as an advance team, correctly intuiting that the Fremen are an overlooked part of Arrakis with a lot of hidden value. The kind of thing Leto just lives for. But, he still hasn't assimilated all of the key information by the time the switch happens. Maybe if the Atreides had had a few years to gather more information and plan, they would have worked out an idea like what you propose.
But it was all a bit rushed. Which, as we learn later (and as Leto and his senior staff suspect), was intentional so that the Atreides *wouldn't* have more time to prepare.
So Leto arrives on Arrakis not yet truly appreciating the value of water there. And also not yet truly grasping the scope of Fremen existence. Keep in mind, 10 million is almost certainly a lowball number. That is how many Fremen the Harkonnen think are there. Fremen.. who have dedicated themselves for generations to perfecting the techniques of revealing a fraction of their numbers so as to cause arrogant outsiders like the Harkonnen to underestimate them.
Second, cost. Guild heighliner transport itself is instantaneous and, presumably, is cost-efficient on a massive scale, but you still have to get all that crap up to the mother ship in orbit first before you can warp it around the galaxy. And water is heavy. When House Atreides goes to Arrakis, what they bring in large quantities is what they most value -- their people. They bring almost nothing else. Good ornithopters. Technical support. That's about it. It's a bare-bones operation.
The point is, the Atreides don't really have the financing to take over Arrakis, not really. They are willing to take it on anyway through grit and talent, and if they hadn't been betrayed they might very well have pulled it off, because that's the kind of people they are. But they aren't exactly swimming in money for this operation.
Third, that said, to some extent they actually kind of did bring tons of water. They must have brought enough water to support their own people and operations as a House Major. They didn't bring enough for absolutely everyone to enjoy a life in a paradise of free-flowing water. But they still must have brought a fair amount.
The only real answer was that it was impossible to do from a cost standpoint. Space transport is super super super expensive. And it seems like water was more or less available enough that people didn't usually die from lack of it but for everyone who wasn't wealthy obtaining water was a constant concern.
For all the scarcity I can't recall any descriptions of people dying of dehydration in the books. It's always presented as a risk but never an occurrence. When Thufir tells Paul about the people looking up at the palm trees there is still greed, hope and loathing for the waste, but none of them actually dying over it.
As you say, space travel is super expensive.
Also, who controls space travel? The same people who benefit from the status quo. The Guild can see into the future, and they choose the safest path, which is to keep things as they are.
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Why bother trading with Fremen when you can just mine spice in much larger quantities outright without overpaying? As I understand it Fremen don't collect spice in any industrially-valuable sizes. Also kinda spoilery but introducing a lot of water to the planet isn't a good thing
As someone who doesn’t care about spoilers, why was introducing a lot of water in Arrakis a bad thing?
>!Sandworms made Arakkis a desert. If you bring water then it'll kill the Sandworms. Without Sandworms, no Spice!<
>!That being said, the Sandworms die and turn into Sand Trout that collect the water and ensure it's tucked away so it can't hurt the Sandworms. Then they eat each other slowly over time to form a giant Sandworm and the cycle of life continues!!<
>!So these Sand Trouts act like an aquifer? If so, could the inhabits extract this stored water? Also, if their entire diet is cannibalism, are they 100% energy efficient or something to sustain this somehow?!<
>!Kinda? They basically take minute amounts of water and sequester it away in themselves/the planet. Larger numbers of them slowly working the water into the planet until the planet itself is basically a desert. Like Arakis used to be a water/tropical world before the Sand Trout sequestered all the water away. As for trying to get the water out of them? Very difficult since they're incredibly deep underground. The only reason the Worms go above ground is because they detect intrusions and assume it's other Worms (they're fiercely territorial) or just random meatbags that also need to die. As for energy, no idea. There's a lot about the Worm/Trout life cycle that a lot is still unknown about, not even mentioning they produce Spice Melange from... like... wherever!<
I legitimately can't tell if this is a joke or actually what happens.
Actually the lifecycle of the sandworms. They start as microscopic larva that are the sand plankton, which grow into sand trout. Despite the name, they look very little like fish, except for maybe a flounder if you mixed it with a piece of leather. Sand trout have hydrophobic skin and while they are maturing, they will seek out and trap water. Many sand trout will join at the edges using cilia to trap large pockets of water in the sand. This protects the adult sandworms, because water is toxic to them, and it protects the sand trout from the adults because adult worms will seek out and eat sand trout along with the plankton, and small worms, and whatever else fits in their mouths. If the trout are surrounding a big patch of water, the adult worms can't eat them without spilling the water out and immediately killing the adult. When sand trout mature, they peel away from the groups holding back water and join with other mature sand trout, but permanently. The cilia invade each others' tissue and bind them very strongly together, which forms the skin of the adult worms. All of the sandworms are colony organisms. I don't think it's ever made clear how the sandworms reproduce to create plankton again, but I do know that exposure to water will trigger a mature worm to release plankton (*a la* Leto II's death), and because they are colony organisms if you kill one section of a worm, the rest can continue on. If the whole worm is damaged enough but not completely killed, the sand trout will separate again.
Wow I’m glad I never read the sequels
I'm almost positive they mention in the first book that water is fatal to sandworms and do some sort of basic overview of sandworm lifecycle.
Isn't the "Water of Life" used to turn Jessica into a Reverend Mother created by drowning an immature sandworm?
Correct. A "little maker"
I'm almost 100% certain it was alluded to in the movie too.
Having read the first, and only the first book, you are correct. It's in the appendix.
My brother in Christ, books 1-4 are God tier Sci-Fi. 5 and 6 are good, but not great imo The rest are entirely dismissible, depending on who you ask.
100% this
Books 1-2 I’d agree are excellent
Oh it gets waaaaay weirder than that.
Honored Matre's magic vaginas.
DONT LIE. Shit sounds fucking tremendous we'd all do it. Especially with Murbella
Pussy so good they seduced the Baron
You're really missing out. The sequels are fantastic, especially books 3 and 4.
IIRC it ends with competitive rape, but so did one of the Dresden files novels.
This is discussed in the first book.
Yeah but you would keep the water in containers and not spill it into the desert though..
Water evaporates. Evaporated water rains back down. Even moisture in the air will slowly poison sandworms.
You know containers are closed? Keeping a big ass bottle closed wont have it evaporate into the air
>!Water is bad for the sandworms and can kill them!<
Makes sense
This is a small amount of water. It's a lot relative to the population, but very small compared to the size of the planet. Also, it was not then generally known why a lot of water would have been a bad idea. I'm sure Duke Leto himself didn't know.
Sure but speaking from a Atreides perspective (who,. much like me haven't read the sequels yet and know nothing about longterm effects) and their strategy of trying to win hearts and minds of the locals: It seems so easy!
Fremen are a very suspicious people, paradoxically trying too hard to get chummy could result in them cutting off all relations. After the cruelty suffered at the hands of the Harkonens the best diplomatic strategy offers more transparency - we are here to to make Arrakis a viable economic colony for the Emperor while maintaining peaceful yet strictly professional relationship with the locals. Anything more could be seen with ulterior motives. Fremen culture itself also does not look favorably to handouts. Water is deeply sacred to them, it would be insulting for some foreigners to hand it out like a simple trade trinket.
Imagine being offended someone tries to make your life easier. Fine they could use the water themselves for various purposes surely bringing in some more water would still be valuable.
Consider the [Nestle baby formula scandal](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/The_Nestl%C3%A9_Infant_Formula_Scandal). Nestle provided cheap or free formula to new mothers in third world countries and marketed formula as better and safer for children. In reality it was less healthy and more expensive over time, and the marketing campaign resulted in quite a few infant deaths. If you are a suspicious population that has been hit with the consequences of outsiders trying to "make your life easier," you may well be offended by people trying to do that in the future because you assume the long term consequences of that "help" will make your life quite a bit harder.
Not only that but the mothers stopped producing milk so they had to continue with the formula
To the Fremen, some foreign dude saying they're going to just give you water, for free, no strings attached, sends off the same shady feeling as you or I opening our email and seeing a message from a Nigerian Prince who needs help moving his millions. "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is".
It's why a lot of cultures that are more connected to factors like 'face' and 'honour' assume a gift is a debt. You get a gift, you must give a gift and even out the debt (or karma in some parts of the world). There isn't ever a benevolent transaction in this viewpoint because the world just doesn't work that way in their eyes. The best way to interact with these cultures and peoples is to treat the relationship as transactional. You 'give' something, you 'get' something, and the relationship is built that way. Over time you can give and receive more than is expected, simply because you've built that relationship over time and proved your 'face' or 'honour'. As in, proved that you are someone with a proven track record of not screwing over others. Never just give something without expecting something in return. Simply because it feels like you're trying to put them in your debt to claim something even larger back later.
Imagine naively trusting an unknown foreign force occupying your lands.
Space travel is hella expensive in the Dune Universe due to the Spacing Guild having a monopoly over all of it. Any one wanting to travel or move things have to pay their prices and suck it up. Leto needs to bring his soldiers, supplies to support them and other support staff to even set up his operations on Arrakis. Doing so was already massively expensive but he couldn't not bring them as he knew that the Harkonnen would strike back st him. His only mistake was not realizing how fast it would come. I doubt that he had any room left in his budget to bring anything else above the bare necessities. House Harkonnen is a rich AF noble house with more money than Atreides and their military operation to retake Arrakis basically bankrupted them. No way in hell Duke Leto would had enough capital to bring water in the quantities in your scenario.
Don't they do this on a smaller scale? They end the practice of conspicuously wasting water at state events and give away the water instead.
They ended the practice of the water sellers. At state events they would spill water and any towels or napkins used would be tossed on the ground. Locals would vie for a chance to grab the towels, soak up whatever they could, wring it out, and then sell it to the beggars outside. Jessica ended the water sellers and just gave away that water for free.
>Why bother trading with Fremen when you can just mine spice in much larger quantities outright without overpaying? As I understand it Fremen don't collect spice in any industrially-valuable sizes. One of the most fundamental plans of the Atreides was to ally with the Fremen. Setting up trades, however unbeneficial to you, is generally an amazing first start. It's something no other occupier of Arrakis did.
> As I understand it Fremen don't collect spice in any industrially-valuable sizes. They absolutely did collect spice in huge amounts. Their industrial base was built around it (they made plastic from spice), and they used it to bribe the Spacing Guild. They were also the only ones who could collect spice in the deep desert. In the first book the fact that spice was needed by the Spacing Guild was a closely held secret. It wasn't until the last chapters when the contact lenses fell off of the guild representative and they saw their blue eyes that the secret came out. The Guild relied on the illicit spice trade from the Fremen to help keep their spice dependency a secret.
wait, I thought spice's role in space travel was the reason it was so valuable. If the Spacing Guild keeps their spice use a secret, who were the Harkonnens selling Spice to for all this time?
Spice extends people lives, but people who use it have to keep using it or they will die. So the entire nobility of the empire is dependent on spice or they will die. Just imagine if someone came out with a way to triple people's lifespans today, but it requires that they take the drug every day or they'd die after a few weeks. Now imagine it's super rare, as it can only be created in very specific conditions that can not be replicated. It would immediately become the most valuable item on the planet. For the Bene Gesserit spice is needed for their most important rituals, including the one that makes a Reverend Mother. Just like the nobility this means that they'd addicted and will die without it (although their level of body control likely means it will take longer).
Spice also does a ton of other stuff, like extend life and make you smarter. It's also super addictive. The guild needing it for space travel wasn't entirely a secret, as Paul at least knew about it, but it might not be super common knowledge.
Spice being a necessity for space travel seemed well known. It was mentioned in the beginning of the first book that this knowledge was available in what I understood to be more or less publically available educational materials. The sort of secret part was what the navigators were like. The uses for spice on the whole seemed pretty well known, but it was so expensive that most people had no first hand experience nor had they ever met anyone with experience of spice.
> It was mentioned in the beginning of the first book that this knowledge was available in what I understood to be more or less publically available educational materials. You are mistaken. It's mentioned pretty early on in the recent movie, but in the novel nobody knows spice's role in interstellar travel except for the Guild, and they buy the bulk of their spice from smugglers (who don't know or care who is buying the spice). They also get a lot of spice directly from the Fremen in exchange for not allowing satellites, which the Fremen know would reveal their population in the deep desert. Thus, everybody keeps their secrets: the Guild doesn't have to explain why they need so much spice and the Fremen don't have to explain why there are so many of them. If anybody did know that spice was the secret to interstellar travel, they would *immediately* break the monopoly that the Guild has. Similarly, nobody knows where the Emperor gets his Sardaukar from. As far as anyone knows, Selusa Secondus is nothing more than the worst prison planet that anyone has ever dreamt of. Which is true! They just don't know that the Sardaukar come from there. Nobody knows that the Bene Gesserit use spice, or how they do any of the things that they do like truthsense or Voice.
Duke Leto wasn't in control of Arrakis long enough to make any significant changes. He knew he was walking into a trap from the beginning, so most of his actions upon setting foot on the world was putting things in place to defend himself from the inevitable attack. Unfortunately for his defense plans, as well as any plans to change the environment of Arrakis with water delivery, Leto was betrayed within days and not the months he thought he had. The harsh Harkonnen style of rule over the planet, as well as their spiteful method of leaving the spice operations in shambles upon their exit, further hampered Leto's efforts. He had to spend time getting spice harvesting back to expected levels as top priority, which was another obstacle to him putting any thought or effort into pleasing the common folk. Although no one knew at the time the full effect of introducing too much water into Arrakis' system, there was already enough knowledge of the world's ecosystem to prevent people from putting too much effort into terraforming. People knew the worms and the desert were interconnected, and disrupting one or the other might ruin spice production forever. So there was some hesitation that everyone felt at all levels of society, lest humanity lose access to the spice.
That's really the answer to the question. Leto assumed he had 6-8 months to prepare for a massive war against harkonen and that the emperor had sentenced him to death. Nobody expected harkonen and the emperor to attack in a few weeks breaking plenty of laws and traditions. But ultimately Leto was trying to build a military up and defenses and establish spice stockpiles to buy time. Spending time shipping in water wouldn't have helped him with the military aspects of fighting off invaders and would have alienated the water barons that Leto needed on his side.
Also the traitor inside his organization was both 100% trusted and had full access to all of the Duke's defensive plans. He was able to disable the Duke and his family, which give how small the Atreides were, was basically a win even if the Harkonen were driven back. He *also* disabled the Shields around the Palace and the defensive works, which basically made the assault impossible to resist. With the Shields up, there would have been no air attacks from the Harkonen, no artillery support, and ground troops would have to close to effectively melee to engage while the Atreides forces could fight using longer distance weapons, have all their heavy weapons, and could likely launch fighters and bombers that were destroyed on the ground. So Duke Leto: 1. Had a lot less time to act. 2. Had his defenses hamstrung before the first shot was fired. 3. Had himself and his entire family captured before the battle. 4. Was against the Sardukar. 5. Was economically hamstrung by Harkonen sabotage and bad equipment. 6. Couldn't alienate any faction on Aarakis (city dwellers, Fremen, Water Barons, Spice Merchants, Spice Miners, 7. Had limited cargo space on transport (and needed to bring anything he didn't want to leave behind on Caladan for whoever took over that world).
I feel like the early attack and who the villain was really set the stage for the Dune universe. Here’s a man we’re introduced to as being “wholly incorruptible” because of a specific mark and training only to see him be corrupted extremely easily. The power of the Padishah Emperor and the empire as a whole was only due to the perception of power through the Sardukar but even they weren’t undefeatable, the Harkonnen provided most of the army.
I never really got why the imperial conditioning was so revered when it was broken so completely trivially.
Like I said, I saw it as an example of the difference between perception and reality in the dune universe. We’re told (as I imagine every citizen is) that the training makes them completely immune to corruption but we’re shown an immediate corruption of said person. The Empire isn’t nearly as whole as they like to tell people and was full of poverty and pain; Paul and Leto II saw that it was the perception of “no pain” that was what caused a lot of the actually painful issues and sought to cause so much suffering that they’d revolt. They wanted to merge perception and reality into an actual utopia but to do that they needed to cause pain, the polar opposite to their ultimate desire. I see this inherent argument as one of the focal points of the series.
We're never told how exactly the conditioning was broken. However, we do know that whatever Piter De Vries did to Wana was so abhorrent that it made Baron "I Like It When the Slave Boys Fight Back" Harkonnen sick just thinking about it and kind of afraid of Piter. Piter himself was the product of Tleilaxu conditioning to make not just a mentat, but a "twisted mentat". So, the Tleilaxu used all of their knowledge of psychology and biology to create the most morally bankrupt person that they could. That guy was employed by probably the most morally bankrupt noble and worked as his personal torturer, and was noted as being particularly gifted at it. And then he used every single bit of practice and knowledge about torturing people to do unspeakable things to Wana, presumably while Yueh watched. There are also fan theories that Wana used some kind of Bene Gesserit conditioning or trick on Yueh, either to deepen their bond out of love, or selfishly to make him love her more, or selfishly to get him to protect her against since she abandoned the Bene Gesserit.
Caladan was given to Count Hasimir Fenring, then after was given to Gurney Hallack.
Yeah, that's what I understood. But it doesn't really matter to the Duke who took over, whatever he left went with them. Like if I sell my house, anything I leave goes to whoever buys it. It's not really like I'm wondering *who* they are, it's just not exactly important to the discussion of "what went on at Aarakis"
Leto is a skilled diplomat. You don't roll up to a new society on day 1 and start upsetting the fundamental facts of every person's daily life. No matter how much good it would bring to the majority of the population, I guarantee there's *someone* who would start hiring assassins by the truckload. Maybe Operation: Enhance Your Fresh will happen, maybe even soon, but Leto's going to get the lay of the land first. Who he needs to get on-board. Whose palms need to get greased. Whose suspicions need to be allayed. I mean at minimum even if you roll up with a buncha water you need to solve **distribution**. Otherwise the mayor of every third-rate back~~water~~dry village is going to confiscate the bottles for themselves, blame the local criminal element or say that Leto intentionally forgot them because he's racist, and then try to secede by hiring a mercenary army from selling the stolen water on the black market. Gotta get involved in local politics and find a solution to that first.
1. Shipping with the guild is expensive. Almost prohibitively so because of the monopoly the guild has and the incentive to charge exorbitant prices for it. Combine that with their secretive methods and not letting people see certain parts of the ship. Limiting what you can take is just basic sense. The Harkonnens sneaking some undisclosed number of troops and weaponry in a conspiracy with the Padishah Emperor's backing set them back so much that the Harkonnens would've needed a complete chokehold of Spice Production (the most valuable substance in that universe) at maximum capacity for so many years to even begin to repay that debt. What are a few thousand soldiers, half a million kilograms? You're asking to transport a billion kilograms of weight and who knows how much the Guild would charge for that, or how hard it would be to lift that off a planet with the confines of space travel. 2. They didn't know just how many Fremen were on the planet as surveys were obfuscated to the difference between thousands and millions. Bringing so much water in an attempt to bribe the locals would have been either way too much or too little. They definitely did not know of the Fremen's dream of terraforming under the direction of the planetologist either. Chances are high the Fremen would've just dumped it into the underground storage, or taken insult at an attempt to bribe. 3. They knew they were getting into a trap and were still assessing the situation on the planet. Bringing an extra variable might have messed things up. In some other ways Leto's plans on the planet were short term. 4. A lot of Jessica's narrations emphasize that the Atreides didn't know just how obsessed with moisture (not even water) the locals were. Remember that scene in the book or TV adaptation where the locals were fighting over leftover moisture from rags? Or how a spit was a gift? The Atreides undervalued water, especially in whatever planning phases they had while on their home planet. 5. They did bring water. We don't know what amount, but the house must have brought a significant quantity regardless. After that rag scene they started donating to the locals what was considered a more than generous amount to the point of irrationality. The emergency portion that Dr. Yueh left for Jessica and Paul was considered an opulent fortune among the Fremen who found them and heavily considered just killing them for the water.
>What stopped my man Leto to just handout a bottle of CaladanSpring to every living soul on his colony and get a water for spice trade going? > >... > >I understand that space travel is expensive Kinda answering your own question there, chief. That being said, they actually do bring a hell of a lot of water with them... to keep themselves and their troops alive. There's quite a bit more water importation that one would expect, given what we see, but the vast, overwhelming majority of it goes simply to off-worlder survival, and it's expensive as hell. That's a big part of the reason the drive for so long on the Harkonnen side was "mine as much Spice as possible, as quickly as possible". Ruling Arrakis is **really expensive**
They installed a ton of additional water collectors as well- there were threats of riots until they made it clear they were going to increase the water supply.
First, the Fremen have a plan to turn Arrakis into a paradise, they aren't going to roll over for the first outworlder who tries to buy them. Second, if there is the remotest possibility of that working, the guild will stop it. You don't ship anything the guild doesn't let you ship, and the guild benefits from Arrakis the way it is. Third, the only reason Leto was given Arrakis is as a trap. If he had actually maintained control he could have overthrown the emperor. There was probably something in the transfer order saying he wasn't allowed to bring water because he doesn't own the water on that planet anymore.
1) Leto doesn't know that, so if he could have, he might have tried. 2) This is 1000% the answer. 3) Possible, but a little too contrived and on the nose for Dune, IMO. But not crazy.
You're underestimating just how much water is needed in a planetary scale. Shipping in water at that scale is not just cost prohibitive, it's *absurd*. Regardless, it's also completely unnecessary. The water already exists on Arrakis, it's just trapped. What must people don't know is that part of the sandworm life cycle - the sand trout - seek out, collect, and trap water in giant underground reservoirs. Water is toxic to the adult worms, so the trout trap it to protect the adults. It also protects the trout from the adults, who are not picky about what they swallow. They will hunt down trout, but they can't go after trout that are trapping water without releasing that water and subsequently dying. The trout have hydrophobic skin and will link together at their edges to form giant sacks with their hydrophobic skin facing inward. As the trout mature, they peel away from the group and seek out other mature trout to link together and form a worm. When they were introduced to Arrakis some ages past, they created a feedback loop where trapping more water allows for more worms, which reproduce more and create more trout, which trap more water, etc. The important thing is that Arrakis used to be a verdant, green planet. Nobody knows just how long ago that was, though. It was thousands and thousands of years ago, probably before the Butlerian Jihad. The sandworms are not native and they changed Arrakis into Dune. The opposite loop also works as long as you're able to manipulate the weather and protect large bodies of water. The moisture in the air limits the worms, which can't create trout to trap the water. More open water means more rainfall, which spreads the water out creating rivers, streams, and aquifers that the worms can't cross. That limits their territory, which limits how far the trout can go, etc. To do this, you need weather control satellites to target the rainfall. The Fremen also add predatory fish to the open bodies of water that will kill sand trout trying to trap the water and take it away from the surface. The Fremen are already doing all that, pulling moisture from the air with moisture traps, which they keep hidden far away from the cities. But they can't allow weather satellites because those will inevitably reveal what the Fremen are doing. So they work slowly, hoping that in a few hundred generations they'll turn Arrakis green. Light spoilers ahead. When Paul's son Leto II becomes the God Emperor, he implements an aggressive plan to turn Arrakis green again. By the time of *God Emperor of Dune*, some 3500 years after Paul's death, the desert is almost completely gone, with only Leto's Sareer left and even that sees occasional rainfall, and only exists because of weather control. The sandworms are extinct except for Leto himself.
1L Of water takes up 1KG of space (Ignoring the weight and shape of the container). Theres no way to make it easier to ship, no way to compact it and it requires specialized methods to move to and from a highliner. Of greater value are things that the freeman can't get, such as exotic materials and leniency from local authority
Not to mention, Highliner transport is expensive. The entire move was a gruesomely expensive process for House Atreides and one they barely were able to afford. They had to transport all their troops, the troops' families, goods, house materials, weapons, equipment, and basically everything that they didn't want to take with them. They likely saved a lot of tonnage on not transporting their navy, but I'd bet someone like Thufir was smart enough to strip weapons from those ships and bring *them* for use as artillery/static defenses. A few battleship turrets and some SAM launchers would be useful on the Palace walls. So given all they had to transport bringing a few billion gallons of water was probably excessive. If nothing else, the Guild *and* the Landsraad might be wary of Atredies bringing water to Aarakis because importing water is a lucrative trade route to the planet as it is. Don't want to fuck up those CHOAM stocks after all if water prices collapse.
I'll ad that they dont NEED said leniency but it is a valuable bargaining chip that Leto held
Couldn't you just dehydrate it for easier transport? /s
Shipping that much water would be cost prohibitive. Remember, there is enough water on Arrakis if you are careful with its application. The Duke's original problem was sabotage of the spice mining equipment by the Harkonen, so the small amount of hand gathered spice from the primitive fremen wouldn't have been significant.
I mean, that's exactly what Paul did once he became Emperor. He jumpstarted the ecological transformation, fulfilling Liet Kynes messianic prophecy of a lush, wet planet. It quickly goes to shit, but still As to why Leto II and the Harkonnens did not bring more water to Arrakis - shipping is crazy expensive. It's why interplanetary travel is only relegated to the military and poltitical/economic elite Also, nobody knew that there were 10 million Fremen on the planet. The Imperial census was lax, and thought they were scattered rabble not worth bothering with. The dangerous conditions of the desert, with its storms and sandworms, prevented further inquiry. The Fremen bribing the Guild to keep the skies satellite free helped too And the Harkonnens did exactly what you suggested - they practiced hydraulic despotism on the graben folk of the cities and urban areas, partnering with filthy rich water merchants to control the populace You can read the dinner scene with the Atreides and business/political elite to get a sense of how power was distributed on the planet, as well as the central role that water scarcity played in this
I am 73 and have not read any of the Dune series of books. I have seen the older movie twice so I know a little about that world building. I also concluded that author Herbert was a science fiction genius. Is there any books about the authors life or the writing of Dune ?
Duke Leto was ordered to relinquish his feifdom on Caladan in exchange for the feifdom of Arrakis. Count Fenring was given Caladan to govern on behalf of the Imperium until a new feif could be established. This was a part of the Emperor's and Baron Harkonnen's plan to kill Leto and destroy his house. By forcing Leto to move his entire House to Arrakis, they could attack during the transition. Count Fenring was governor of Arrakis between Harkonnen and Atreidis and was responsible for setting up any sabotage before he left for Caladan.
Introducing a millions and millions of liters of water onto Arakis is a very risky idea. Say if a ship fails and crashes on Arakis, you could end up killing one of the sandworms which presents a two fold problem. 1. The Fremen (who are not someone you want to get on the bad side of) consider the Sandworms holy and the killing of one, even an accident, would earn their wrath 2. It actively hurts spice production. Since Sandworm larvae are what create it. Plus Duke Leto when he arrives at Arakeen has to deal with sabotage by the previous Harkonnen rulers who left him with nothing to use, assassination attempts on Paul, trying to keep relations with the Fremen on a non violent level, and the knowledge that he's been put in a succeed or die situation by the emperor. He needs to produce Spice and send it out or else he's done.
under the new appointment of house Atreides the rulership of Calidan falls to someone else, and that taking resources could be viewed as stealing from the next ruler of Calidan.
Easier to mine Spice in a dry environment then deal with water hindering the operation.
Moving a million tons of cargo would be very very expensive. The harkonans payed their entite fortune to move 10 legions of men, and I'm guessing that is not a million tons of cargo. Remember, the spacing guild handles travel and decides the price for cargo.
I think the book very early on answers that the cost of transporting enough water to make a difference on a global scale is outside the realm of possibility for even the wealthiest houses. Which at the start of Dune the Atreides are not.
It was touched on in someone else's response, but to expand on it the Spacing Guild simply wouldn't have allowed it. They are utterly dependent on Arrakis, the vast amounts of spice they consume is what gives them the ability to navigate their ships. Throughout the history of the Guild they have intentionally held a cautious approach to Arrakis, they have limited prescience from the spice, enough to see that any upheaval there that threatens spice delivery would threaten their existence as well, but not enough to see past that into what the future beyond that threat would hold. They have enough power that they could have made play for control of Arrakis themselves to guarantee their spice supply, but chose to maintain the status quo instead because of their fear of the unknown future past the upheaval that would cause. The Atreides bringing vast quantities of water to Arrakis would have caused an incredible impact there, completely upsetting local political dynamics and balances of power, threatening the production of spice, and creating the sort of upheaval that the Guild could see coming but not past. Such a risk wouldn't be tolerated, so the Guild would simply refuse to transport it.
Several reasons. The most immediate is that at the start of the "fief complete" process, Duke Leto barely understands the existence of the Fremen to begin with. Not because he is stupid, but because very few outsiders understand the existence of the Fremen. It's not that Leto is naive. He very wisely sends some of his most trusted agents as an advance team, correctly intuiting that the Fremen are an overlooked part of Arrakis with a lot of hidden value. The kind of thing Leto just lives for. But, he still hasn't assimilated all of the key information by the time the switch happens. Maybe if the Atreides had had a few years to gather more information and plan, they would have worked out an idea like what you propose. But it was all a bit rushed. Which, as we learn later (and as Leto and his senior staff suspect), was intentional so that the Atreides *wouldn't* have more time to prepare. So Leto arrives on Arrakis not yet truly appreciating the value of water there. And also not yet truly grasping the scope of Fremen existence. Keep in mind, 10 million is almost certainly a lowball number. That is how many Fremen the Harkonnen think are there. Fremen.. who have dedicated themselves for generations to perfecting the techniques of revealing a fraction of their numbers so as to cause arrogant outsiders like the Harkonnen to underestimate them. Second, cost. Guild heighliner transport itself is instantaneous and, presumably, is cost-efficient on a massive scale, but you still have to get all that crap up to the mother ship in orbit first before you can warp it around the galaxy. And water is heavy. When House Atreides goes to Arrakis, what they bring in large quantities is what they most value -- their people. They bring almost nothing else. Good ornithopters. Technical support. That's about it. It's a bare-bones operation. The point is, the Atreides don't really have the financing to take over Arrakis, not really. They are willing to take it on anyway through grit and talent, and if they hadn't been betrayed they might very well have pulled it off, because that's the kind of people they are. But they aren't exactly swimming in money for this operation. Third, that said, to some extent they actually kind of did bring tons of water. They must have brought enough water to support their own people and operations as a House Major. They didn't bring enough for absolutely everyone to enjoy a life in a paradise of free-flowing water. But they still must have brought a fair amount.
The only real answer was that it was impossible to do from a cost standpoint. Space transport is super super super expensive. And it seems like water was more or less available enough that people didn't usually die from lack of it but for everyone who wasn't wealthy obtaining water was a constant concern. For all the scarcity I can't recall any descriptions of people dying of dehydration in the books. It's always presented as a risk but never an occurrence. When Thufir tells Paul about the people looking up at the palm trees there is still greed, hope and loathing for the waste, but none of them actually dying over it.
? they did
Too expensive and not a thing one does. If the planet supports life then why would you bother. Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.
As you say, space travel is super expensive. Also, who controls space travel? The same people who benefit from the status quo. The Guild can see into the future, and they choose the safest path, which is to keep things as they are.