Navigators see far enough into the future to know which future has them arrive safely at their destination. Then, they simply use the "seen" course. The helm can then engage the drive.
I thought it was they were able to Calculate all the variables.. like a computer.. and map out all moving objects and create a Wormhole across the universe... folding space is just an easy way of saying travel from point A to B in a anytime you want.. time is like a book, each page a mico nano second.. opened up its as fkat as the Galaxy..
@@artmosley3337 : They don't calculate. Mentats do. Navigators look into the future, and follow the future actions that have them arrive safely at their destination. The crew engages the fold drive, but the route they take is given by people who play a game of synchronicity, and butterfly-effect themselves to the target. Those are the Navigators.
@@argonwheatbelly637 They do not butterfly effect themselves to the target and they do not use the future to navigate. They manipulate space so that it folds, effectively creating a wormhole type of course. If all they did was find the safest route then they are no better than a computer, and the safest route may take a millennium to get there.
@@chrisledbetter9278 : The Holzman drive is what allows FTL travel. The navigators navigate. The see a future where the ship isn't destroyed by the path it takes. They guide others to take actions according to that chosen future.
@@argonwheatbelly637 - so you're saying the Navigators are basically Star Wars Navicomputers. So if computers hadn't been banned, the the Holdman drive + computers = safe FTL travel. The video makes it more like they're making space fold and moving the ship, instantly to the destination. But of course the video/movies aren't to book, etc. All of it is of course just scifi magic.
Yeah, except for the part which mutates you into something inhuman and you can no longer partake in the joys and comforts of life and also will never have sex or regular partnerships again. You basically just become a freak that's treated like a most precious asset, isolated in holding tanks and only released when your special ability is needed.
@@axelhopfinger533 You've left the physical concerns and have stepped into the metaphysical and hearing the pulse of the universe. Worth it IMHO. The Spacing Guild is so wealthy it spares no expense on it's Navigators and has an entire support network they spend lavishly on.
I did not read original Dune in English, I read it in Bulgarian. Is strange, but there was nothing about "folding space". It was explained that Holtzmann engine *move* the heighliner with speed faster than the speed of light. The job of navigator is to choose path that avoid hazards such asteroids, planet or stars along the way. The navigator chooses the path, because he sees the future and he can choose the "right" path. Once I watched 1985's movie, I was "introduced" to "folding space" thing.
It's The Holtzman effect that allows folding space through a Holtzman drive. The navigators choose the path whilst in folded space. The Holtzman effect is also used for other machines such as the The Holtzman shield which warriors use in battle and suspensors like the one that Baron Harkonen uses to float around. Herbert never went into too much detail about the science behind The Holtzman effect. It was expanded on a little in the books written by his son.
Yar, the FTL capabilities of the Spacing Guild were basically a proprietary technology, and given the Spacing Guild were a secretive bunch and not particularly vulnerable to infiltration by the Bene Geserit, no one really knows anymore how to replicate it. As the story is never told from their perspective, you never learn about how FTL in dune really works; only that the Navigators replace the roles of navigation computers in plotting these FTL movements ever since the Butlerian Jihad.
@@justinsherman9350 No the Houses know how to build FTL engines but without the Navigators it's really dangerous to use. Plus the Spacing guild would rally everyone against anyone dumb enough to build their own. Without the spice the whole imperial economy collapses
@@Aeolusdallas I'm not so certain. Building ftl capable ships without navigation equipment would be pointless, and the navigation equipment necessary is forbidden and largely forgotten, except perhaps by the Ixians. Presumably the Spacing Guild didn't spring up overnight after the Butlerian Jihad; it would have taken them a long time, copious spice consumption, likely several generations of selective breeding to become Navigators and develop the technology with which they interact, and how would the houses have access to that? Supposition aside, no one but the spacing guild has access to FTL until post Leto-II.
@@dihydrogenmonoxide7600 actually according to notes by the author it mimicked the Byzantine Empire mainly. Paul’s sister was based loosely on Empress Theodora.
Spice stands for "life". the desert stands for "underworld", land of the dead, unbelievers Kwisatz Haderach stands for "beast of the bottomles pit". kabbalistic Kefitzat Haderech Bene Gesserit stands for "sons/builders of the path" - hebrew 'ben' - son, stone, builder(breeder) Leto stands for "the stone" - the stone the builders rejected became the head stone Paul stands for "the little one" - the stone Jessica stands for "Jezebel" - the witch, worshiper of Baal, the wife of the king of Israel Shai Hulud is the serpent of eternity, who.. makes.. life... serpens mercurialis of the alkimists Ghola stands for golem - ex. Lord of the Rings golum, Jungle Book mowgli, an animated monster Alia stands for "the exalted" - hebrew 'aliyah, eliahu, el yawun, allah. Diana twin of Apollo born of Leto Caladan stands for "garden of eden" - hebrew 'gan eden' - whence the stone is thrown into underworld and so on.
@@jameretief8327 actually Frank Herbert was an environmentalist and wanted to use the spice as an allegory for the west’s foreign policy as it pertains to the acquisition of foreign oil.
I agree. I actually like it better than the new version. Yes the new version has better effects, but I thought it was a case of the emperors new clothes. Way too much hype.
@@keithpetersen4920 ... Yes & let's not forget that these past 3 greenlit Dune adaptation versions, 1984, 2000 & 2021, will not be the only film versions. This includes the rumor of Villeneuve's Dune Messiah for our recent times, if the plan for it continues. As long as the film, television, & internet industries are alive in some way & form, there will be countless more Dune 1 remakes from now, maybe even going as far as 10 thousand years into the real future, which would nearly align with its fictional timeline. I would at least currently assume another 5 more remakes, each one at around every 20-40 years or so. Or unless the world finally gets sick of it at some point & stops making reboots of this story, long after our great great great grand children are old or gone. This of course assumes nothing else goes bad, like an asteroid annihilation or we are overthrown by our own AI & was too late to make our own Butlerian Jihad, heh.
Read the books. The navigators don't fold the space, the Holtzmann engines folded the space. Think of it as moving from room to room in your house without taking a step while the house moves around you. You would still need to avoid walls, floors and ceilings as you go. That's what the navigators are for. The Holtzmann effect, the same one that produces shields for subspace ships and personal battle shields, is used to bend space-time so that two portions of space can be in the same place at the same time, letting the ship be in both of those places simultaneously for that moment. One more thing... the first Navigator was a woman, Norma Cenva. She created the Spacing Guild. (Battle of Corrin, 2004)
the Navigators are linked to the Holtzmann drive and function as a supercomputer that calculates probability by using prescience. By controlling the drive they control the fold. the third-stage Navigator is what drives the ship, essentially.
Maybe its just me, but I never thought of "folding space" as meaning the navigator teleports the vessel from one spot to another. My take was that they already have something like a light or warp drive, but they aren't allowed to build machines that would be able to calculate a course that would avoid hazards like asteroids of black holes. But the navigators have a degree of clairvoyance that allows them to do so in place of a machine, so they literally do navigate the ship through space. But that's my take.
+Daniel Ryan I agree with you. The Guildsmen are purely navigators, they are not generating propulsion. In Dune, while Paul and his mother are fugitives and have yet to find refuge with the Fremen, he briefly considers the alternative of joining the Guild: "But the idea of living out his life in the mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures that guided hurtling spaceships appalled him. It was a way, though." The Guild shares with Paul prescience, not some sort of telekinetic ability.
+marysueeasteregg Glad we agree. Its a weird distinction to make, but my take was always that Paul, and let Leto, aren't telepathic-they can't read people's thoughts or levitate objects or any of that nonsense. Its more like a sort of clairvoyance-they can predict all possible outcomes at any given time, and that lets them anticipate what others are going to do. But they can still be incorrect and taken by surprise-which happens several times.
+Daniel Ryan The Guild Navigator in Frank Herbert's Dune could control the Holtzman Effect, which was the ability to "fold space", and that makes it so they do not need to traverse the distance between two points in space, but instead teleport instantaneously.
Navigators don’t fold space themselves, they decide how/where the space is folded using their super-prescience to detect if their ship will collide with anything. Navigators are used to not run into stuff
Hokibukisa Cool, I get it. But do you gotta turn into the Blob for the privilege. I mean you still gotta use a machine in the year 10,000 something as well. Sheesh!
@@stevelopez372 AI is religiously banned across the galaxy. Super computers have been replaced by these things, who are basically humans so jacked up on spice they've been deformed. Like a space-magic version of a crackhead, but with the brain of a supercomputer.
@@rockstargamer97 yep the butlerian jihad which occured thousands of years before the books of dune was when humans rise against the robots they created as robots and computers the humans created started to think for humans to the extent some humans began thinking like computers , and subsequent enslavement of many people , which started this massive civil war . Humans eventually won after a billion dead and so banned all computer technology
I wonder if the Navigator "George" as a child imagined one day when he's all grown up he'd be a mutated lonely thing living in a gold fish bowl. "Charlie what would you like to be when you grow up" " A doctor mammy". "George. Hold my beer"..
I didn't know until recently that the Guild Navigators look the way they do because they ingest way too much melange. They were humanoid to start with, but the more spice they ingest, the more mutated they become. The fact that they can navigate safe passage in space is just fascinating to me.
It strikes me that in the original Dune, the Navigator closes with the line “and I was never here”. It’s the same line which James Earl Jones uses as the Director of CIA in The Hunt for Red October.
I prefer the Lynch version, where a genuinely weird, vaguely human looking space entity vomits pure energy at the computer, the universe throws its hands in the air, yells 'f**k it!' and the Heighliner appears above Arrakis. This looks like rejected B-Roll from Babylon 5.
Lynch obviously put a lot of care into crafting that scene with the Guild Navigator and its entourage, it was in some ways the highlight of the movie. Still nightmare fuel after all these years, and true to Herbert's original description.
As far as I know, Herbert didn't clarify how the navigators help to drive spaceships. The warp engine or similar technology must have complex computer devices which were prohibited after the Butlerian jihad. Spice doesn't cause teleportation or make hole in the space/time continuum, it just gives prophetic abilities for navigators. So, the physical mechanism of voyages between stars in Herbert's Dune University remains unclear.
In the book The navigators do not fold space they just look ahead to make sure the path is clear so the highliner does not hit anything when they go faster than light
Despite the mini-series being notorious for its many FX fails, this scene, to their credit, was well done. It is still possible to see the senior navigators were once human, even with all the spice inducted mutations. There is a distinct amphibian feel to his physiology and a mix of (vaguely) humanoid features that works well here. While I like the heigh-liner design in the 1985 movie, I much prefer the mini-series plotting the actual space fold jump here to the confusing jump sequence and tad-pole navigators of the Lynch movie.
Frank Herbert had a thing for writing about drugs. One of his lesser known novels had a kind of a drug-substance theme. I can’t remember the name of it.
I like this version of Navigators the best. Folding space is basically just teleportation. Consumption of the Spice Melange helps a person to access more than ten percent of their brain allowing for the awakening of the abilities that Navigators use. I understand this is all fictional but I do believe the science behind the Dune series of books is sound.
Wrong. The Navigators do NOT fold space: the Holtzman engines do. Safely navigating this process can be done in two ways, either by massive amount sof computation which is impossible without computers, which are outlawed, or by the Navigators who use prescient powers to "see" the safe path. That's why they need melange, which unlock prescience in some humans, depending on the dose and their physiology (as well as increasing lifespan and vitality). The Navigators have use extremely high doses of the spice for so long they have mutated from it. Also the 10% thing is a myth. We would not have brains where 90% of it went unused. That goes against the principles of evolution. We do in fact use ALL of our brain. Anything else would be a waste of energy - the human brain takes up an enormous amount of the body's resources - and would be evolved away as redundant. If the 10% thing was true evolution would long ago have discarded the unused 90% and we'd have brains just as good, but one tenth the size.
I don't think it's teleportation - it's just folding space ahead in an extreme way so that the spot you starteed from and the spot you want to go to very close to each other, perhaps even in the same place at once. And what's behind you is INCREDIBLY far away - perhaps somewhat in the way that Alcubierre describes a warp drive. To "fold" essentially is just another expression for to "warp", i.e. to "distort the shape of". What Alcubierre describes sounds very much like "folding".
I like the original 3rd stage guild navigator that looked like a giant " fleshy grasshopper" go into the spice chamber, then fold space- to travel without moving. This rendition showed the ship enter a wormhole. It moved into it which took away from the definition...
If you'd like a good read, try the original book "Beastmaster" by Andre Norton. The TV series kept the central idea of a man linked to animals but NOTHING else.
A lot of people don't understand what folding space is, when you fold space, the space moves, you don't. Therefore there is no chance that you can collide with anything. And you can only fold space where there are no collidable objects in it, because the objects inside the space has their own effects to space. So you can only fold "empty space", then space compresses and contracts, ultimately making you end up in different location, but you haven't moved at all. For example, you can create a path towards a planet and beyond, but you can only fold space until the planet, as the planet has it's own gravitational effect on the space, you can only fold space until the planet. The ship will end up somewhere close to the planet. With better folding skills, the ship can end up closer to the planet, but it's exponentionally harder to do, because of the gravitational effects are also exponentionally increasing. Long story short, space travel by folding space ie warp drive whatever, is in fact, very safe. You are only exposed to the elements and other collidable objects, when either warped space fails or ends. And yes, if an object crosses your path while in warped space, warped space prematurally fails and you will end up in the vicinity of the target object, a little far away, but as completely with initial speed and acceleration, which will be hugely inadequate for a collision. Space physics people! Look it up in my year 2163 class section B.
I was under the impression that the Methodist didn't file space but simply were precient and could find the one time when they wouldn't hit anything at light speed.
For those wondering yes the Navigator doesn't actually fold space they use prescience to find the best path to travel, the Holzman's engines do the folding "this is changed later on as navigators are no longer needed and in the prequels/continuation by Brian Herbert"
One of the main reasons a remake would be welcome (impossible politically, but I'd love to see it) would be to see the technical magnificence of the effects used on films like 'Gravity' and 'Interstellar' used to dramatize unthinkable sequences like this one.I mean, you're never going to accurately depict a wormhole, or an event horizon, or even a light year but some of the new techniques are pretty mind-blowing.
Chazbot From what little I saw of Gravity, Interstellar and the Martian was that if you removed the sci-fi bells and whistles, you'd find some solid human dramas.
You probably know about The Expanse already, far more "grounded" space travel (they don't even have FTL, everything is in the Solar System, much of it the inner planets) but still interesting. Earth is rich (in air, water and farmland; the things that really matter!) but stagnant, Mars is go-getting and advanced but relies on imports, and the Asteroid belt / Jovian moons work for all and feed all, and aren't happy about it. Oh and there's vomiting zombies turning people into monsters.
NO! The Holtzman effect engines fold space....the navigators only NAVIGATE the highliners safely via using prescience / seeing possible future paths with the least amount of risk/ danger. Using a holtzman effect engine without a navigator leads to every 1 in 10 trips ending up lost or destroyed
@MachtNixPasstSo they can see into the future seeing all possible outcomes and steer the vessel to safety. The Bene Geserit can see back through genetic memory (family trees. Consider for a moment that you are really an ancient life form of mother to mother to mother) Pual can do that as well as seeing forward into possible futures and into people’s minds and futures
Yes ...travel Without movement...the origin and the destination are drawn Together...merged...and in so doing the speed of light and its so called limitations......are circumvented without violating any such laws...it is a folding of the fabric of space...a bringing of the destination to you...there is no travelling involved....this makes "warp drive" technology such as seen on star trek ,primitive ,antiquated by comparison... a closer example to this would be the :jump tech: demonstrated by the most recent series of battlestar galactica..their FTL is instantaeneous from point a to point b
Why wasn't this in the recent movie. I loved the emporer's summoners and guild members in spice orb helmets obviously pumping the stuff. But the most we got was the gargantuan tube where ships flew through and immediately ended up on the other side of the universe like *THAT* no psychedelic manipulation of space and time.
It wasn't in the book either. Villeneuve went for a more faithful route. While this and Lynch's were mostly the director's headcanons on how it worked. Also it seemed like space is folded inside the heighliners instead in the recent version.
Guild Navigators did not fold space. The Holzman engines on the highliners did that. What navigators did was to use their spice prescience to navigate a safe path through folded space to ensure that the highliner didn’t go through a Star or other debris and arrive safely at their destination.
You 4got the most important part of the space guild navigators, they are basically living computers that can forsee the future, they have telepathic capabilities and are clairvoyant, computer machines cannot even come close to their mathematic prowess but the guild have to use tremendous amounts of spice that makes them mutate into something else without the spice they die also the guild is the most powerful order in the universe, they even control the emperor behind the shadows.
At least until Paul Atreides came along. The Navigator's prescient abilities saw the Kwisatz Haderach and the danger he posed to their monopoly which is how they convinced the Emperor Padisha to do something he didn't really want to. (As Irulan pointed out in 'Dune' the Emperor wished Leto Atreides had been his son.)
It would be nice to see the new movie being more true to the book and have the guild navigator just plot the course through seeing into the future so they know which route is the successful one. None of this folding of space which was invented by the Lynch movie. Paul's power of seeing the future came from the spice as well so it would all tie together quite neatly. Did we see him fold space in the movie? No, because spice is not about folding space, it's about precognition. What exactly is wrong with this plot element?!
i was just about to complain about that. this miniseries was real close to the book in general though. i don't remember any actual description of the navigators' physical appearance either, not in the first book anyway (never read the rest), just speculation from the characters that they might not look human any more. there was that one space guild character who came into a scene holding a hand over one eye; i think it was revealed he was doing that because he'd lost the the little cosmetic eye cover on that eye, so that you could see that his eyes were solid blue. pretty sure he wasn't an actual navigator though. been a while since i read that book.
@@richard_d_bird The books state there are stages and that they are mutant humans. That and the they have Melange Blue eyes is all we get in the first book.
They didnt fold space, they navigated to the other side so they did appear inside a planet. the Holtzman Effect actually folded space, Norma Cenva was the first Navigator who learnt prescience using melange.
hdckdsadd they use the spice to predict where the ship will go. while the Holtzmann drive is what folds space the Navigators made adjustments based on what the 3rd stage Navigator sees
As I remember from the first book, navigators use spice to predict what obstacles the ship will encounter so they can avoid them. I don't remember any drive or the concept of folding of space&time. can anybody point the page where this is explained?
To think that the purity of man could be so grotesquely deformed in such a manner! This mutant filth must be purged in the name of he who is enthroned on Terra and the Imperium of man!
In the book, Frank Herbert makes it very clear that is is the Einstein - Holtzman engines that fold space, the navigator, who is prescient, simply sees all futures and guides the ship on a successful course....
With galaxies, stars, planets, moons, etc all having their own orbits. The navigator determines the correct space for the ship to "move" to. So that they dont end up inside or too close to a star. They dont determine the route. They dont change direction. They arrive instantly so they get places faster than light can but they dont actually move so they dont move faster than light. Dune 2020 makes the most sense with this. It creates a noneuclidean space. So you enter the ship in one point and exit in a completely different part of the universe.
Lynch made up the travel without moving. In the books it's a hyperspace drive and the navigators use spice to navigate because they don't have computers
I beg to differ.....................Holtzman driveThe effect is used in this case to fold space at the quantum level, allowing the Spacing Guild's heighliner ships to instantaneously travel far distances across space without actually moving at all. However, the chaotic and seemingly non-deterministic quantum nature of "foldspace" requires at least limited prescience on the part of the human navigator.
The greatest Sci-Fi/Fantasy expert I knew told me 5 years ago the whole Dune series was basically Space Wizards, not Sci-Fi, and the whole Butlerian Jihad thing was a bad joke because so much of the tech would have used some form of computer inside- but they didn't call them computers, just "guidance units" or whatever, to keep the plebs from rioting.
Although I don't like very much the narrative way in the books, all in Dune is amazing. And I really like the movie and the mini series designs, equally, knowing that the mini series maybe is more accurate to the books, except for the age of Paul.
I kind of wish 2021 went off book and did an interpretation of the space and guild guy and the transport. They did it in the next book so nothing wrong with bringing forward a couple of characters right.
The miniseries navigators are actually closer to the book’s descriptions than Lynch’s interpretation. Herbert doesn’t go into extensive detail, but they look more like fishy humans that still have use of their arms than seals made out of scrotal skin with vaginas for mouths
Don’t worry mini-series, in 7 months Dennis is gonna the make the scene you and David Lynch wanted to make so beautiful so much but were restrained by budget issues, and even in spite of those issues, this scene is not half bad❤️
HC they arr heavily mutated by the spice melange, even in the books. Similarly the Bene Gesserit have odd looking heads and gait because of their breeding programme. The Baron Harkonnen has pustules and corpulence all over himself. it is not a pretty universe
I've come to find that Dune book touters are some of the most pretentious in all of sci-fi fandom. Every comment section is filled with novels they write to prove how much they know about the series. Its funny.
VersusARCH so true, but funny/odd, hardly funny/amusing. Folding space is still not very likely as a physical means of travel, though. Sometimes SF is just fiction, minus the Science.
i enjoyed this series -especially when i learned i need to tone the colour down and look past some of the costume choices= but wle aced and written and was very glad to see that the women played a much bigger role than was seen in the Lynch version (which i also like) . kinda hoping the Villeneuve version will also give some lengthier trippy time to the whole space folding Guild Navigator stuff. for me the less exciting moments are actually the battles...maybe cos we see them so often in so many other things.