Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
Anyways my idea for a new conworld is for a Neptune sized gas giant. With a twist though. The setting for life on this planet will take place on top of the metallic hydrogen layer. Where the atmosphere above is soupy and thousands of degrees. Calling for life to be truly alien. The only thing I will divulge about the life in this post is that they will have a hydrogen based lung system. And metallic hydrogen bone structure. (I don't know how far fetched this is.) None of the animals will have eyes one thing I have thought up would be a crest on top of the skull used to discern direction through wind currents. Please tell me what you think. I like feedback. And will post more of my idea after hearing feedback. Thank you.
Eh, I think you're right :facepalm: Okay, revision. I will be now using an ice giant class giant planet using the supposed icy mantle as the setting. Thank you for the feedback.
I hate to break this to you, but the "icy" mantle of ice giants is actually hot. like, 2000°K-5000°K. There aren't any elements I'm aware of (useful for forming organic compounds, at any rate) whose bonds won't break down at those temperatures (and we're not even taking pressures into consideration).
Thanks 2+3, I actually have read that particular book, and I just love the idea.
To Drydic Guy, I understand that these conditions aren't suitable for any life that we're aware of. I only say 'icey' mantle because it's compressed into ice. And even though it is thousands of degrees and crazy pressure at that depth, that's basically what I'm going for. Nothing to do with terrain biology I'm going for something "truly alien" as I said in the first post. I want something that would never be seen on earth. Something that could call the lower levels of an ice giant its home. With all the adaptations needed to do so. Such as lungs special for breathing the local gases and a body of a different type of biology actually suited for the heat and pressure. So when it's a form of life that can't survive there as we know it, we can only speculate as to the life that could evolve there. Don't get me wrong guys I'm loving the feedback, keep it coming. It's just that I'm going on the phrase that "life always finds a way"
Hey if you want that to be your gimmick (nearly every conworld has one, nothing despicative intended with the word), go ahead. I'm just saying I can't see any element being usable to form the basis for life at those temperatures; it's not about adaptions, it's about chemical bonds being unable to form. 2000°K-5000°K is ~3400°F to 8400°F, btw.
Perhaps I could avoid the bonds forming in unimaginable temperatures and say that thebeggining of life started high in the atmosphere and did not evolve the ability to fly but instead began to gain extreme heat tolerance as a way to survive in the ice giant's lower atmosphere.
I don't think so... at high enough temperatures, chemistry just stops working, kind of like physics stops working at black holes or economics stop working when you only have one guy. non-chemical life <for example, life that emerges as a result of increasingly complex structures in neutron stars or plasma> has been posited and is, at the very least, concievable... but I'm not sure its what you're seeking.
Torque wrote:I don't think so... at high enough temperatures, chemistry just stops working [...]
Yes. And at high enough pressures, chemistry also stops working because the electron shells are just crushed into a quasi-metallic state of matter. Deep in a gas giant, you have both immense temperatures and immense pressures, so no chemistry, just a dense mass of atomic nuclei and electrons.
Few things are less likely than life deep in a gas giant.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
Thanks guys, and Torque, I'm just seeking to construct an idea of what kind of life could evolve in a place like this. Life that take the shape of life as we know it. Including arms and legs a head lungs... etc. Just not with the same biological makeup. Help would be appreciated about theories about what biological organisms can be made of at this temperature. I am trying to base this loosely around science but not strictly... I am sorry if the questions I ask seem dumb to many of you. It's just that I'm 16, and I just decided one day that I would try to combine two of my favorite things: ice giants and animals. With the fun of creating a creature that looks truly alien and not just mix matched parts of animals that I like. I was hoping when I chose an ice giant that since there isn't as much atmospheric pressure and heat at these depths compared to a gas giant that life would be a bit more plausible in an ice giant.
Last edited by Csodaszarvas on Thu Aug 22, 2013 9:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
The point here is that a creature with a physical form--no matter what they're made of--simply could not exist at those temperatures and pressures. You could hypothetically take the approach Timothy Zahn did in Manta's Gift: flying creatures in the upper atmosphere. I think there's a planet in Mass Effect that has plankton-like creatures in the upper atmosphere. Those might be things to look into.
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”
An idea I came up with is that this Neptune sized giant forms in a system with a larger star than our own so the star sucks up more of its protoplanetary disk to ignite so there is less for the planets to form with. On top of that, there are multiple larger giant planets orbiting in close proximity to my conworld. The larger giants sucked up more of the gases than it was able to while it gained more solids and ices. Making it a new class of ice giant. Still around the size of Neptune all together but with a much larger core and a much thinner atmosphere. Though still much thicker than Earth's. I realize this means much more gravity but that's okay. So, what do you guys think? I know its not really an ice giant or an ice giant anymore. More of it's own type now. This is way more plausible for life right?
Dude you don't really need your lifeforms so deep inside the planet <nor can you unless you don't care about elementary laws of physics>. any planet that isn't rocky is gonna have many concentric layers of material: like, on neptune, you have an upper layer of fucking cold gas. then another layer of just cold gas. then some more gas that's not cold and not so pressury, and then even more sodding air that's lie an ocean. and only the you start getting into the depths where nothing is possible. Just stay in the middle.
Sagan imagined life on a gas giant as far back as whenever he was filming cosmos. And any ice giant surely will have an intermediate layer were water is liquid <well, i dunno if surely, but i would expect so> so you can put your fishies and little anemonae there ! trying to put life deep within any planet is like asking 'hey guise, why did life not evolve deep beneath the crust of earth' ?
<answer is: because there's lava there. and lava hurts. a lot>
Csodaszarvas wrote:An idea I came up with is that this Neptune sized giant forms in a system with a larger star than our own so the star sucks up more of its protoplanetary disk to ignite so there is less for the planets to form with. On top of that, there are multiple larger giant planets orbiting in close proximity to my conworld. The larger giants sucked up more of the gases than it was able to while it gained more solids and ices. Making it a new class of ice giant. Still around the size of Neptune all together but with a much larger core and a much thinner atmosphere. Though still much thicker than Earth's. I realize this means much more gravity but that's okay. So, what do you guys think? I know its not really an ice giant or an ice giant anymore. More of it's own type now. This is way more plausible for life right?
What you described is a super-earth. Plausible for life, certainly, but not related to ice giants.
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”
Yeah Zaarin, that's basically what I'm going for now but I also want it to have a relatively thick atmosphere that gives it the size and appearance of an ice giant. It's more of a hybrid at this point as its atmosphere is thick enough to behave like a giant planet's with crazy windstorms tearing across the cloudtops to be seen from space and the like. I guess you could think of Venus, but much larger with a much thicker atmosphere but far enough out in the system the the temperatures don't climb so high in the day. Let's say the rocky core is 17,000 miles in diameter and the cloud layer it 13,000. Though please do correct me if you feel the atmosphere is far to thick. I'm thinking of around a 70 year orbit for the planet. So yeah, my planets kind of a hybrid. Kind of like a super earth and kind of like a gas giant. And Torque, I never really wanted sea animals, as stupid as thus may sound to you guys I wanted terrestrial animals on a planet with an extremely thick atmosphere and that is what I am doing with my new hybrid planet.
I believe that would be a gas dwarf, and that would still be way too thick. In Saturn's case the atmosphere is only gas or gas-like for the upper 1000km or so, same for Jupiter, while it is thicker for Uranus and Neptune, it still only remains a gas for the upper 5000km at most. Any lower and you'd end up with weird floating sea life stuff, assuming life could even form at all.
Around 300km into Uranus's atmosphere, (as in 300km below the point at which the atmospheric pressure is the same as sea level on Earth) the pressure is about 100 times sea level on Earth and the temperature is slightly warmer than Earth, if your planet had a surface there it would be similar to Venus's surface but with tolerable temperatures. Go any deeper and it would get too hot, and Uranus is already way far away from the sun. (Most of this heat comes from the formation of the planet, I believe, not directly from the sun.) Neptune is actually warmer than Uranus deeper down, and emits 2.6 times as much heat than it receives from the sun (Uranus only emits 1.1 times as much heat as it receives from the sun.)
Also, assuming the star to be similar to the sun, your planet would be around the orbit of Uranus and would receive similar heating.
Zain pazitovcor, sio? Sio, tovcor.
You can't read that, right? Yes, it says that.
Shinali Sishi wrote:"Have I spoken unclearly? I meant electric catfish not electric onions."
Csodaszarvas wrote:Yeah Zaarin, that's basically what I'm going for now but I also want it to have a relatively thick atmosphere that gives it the size and appearance of an ice giant. It's more of a hybrid at this point as its atmosphere is thick enough to behave like a giant planet's with crazy windstorms tearing across the cloudtops to be seen from space and the like. I guess you could think of Venus, but much larger with a much thicker atmosphere but far enough out in the system the the temperatures don't climb so high in the day. Let's say the rocky core is 17,000 miles in diameter and the cloud layer it 13,000. Though please do correct me if you feel the atmosphere is far to thick. I'm thinking of around a 70 year orbit for the planet. So yeah, my planets kind of a hybrid. Kind of like a super earth and kind of like a gas giant. And Torque, I never really wanted sea animals, as stupid as thus may sound to you guys I wanted terrestrial animals on a planet with an extremely thick atmosphere and that is what I am doing with my new hybrid planet.
I really hate being a voice of doom about this...
Venus isn't a hellscape because of its proximity to the sun. It's a hellscape because the atmosphere had too much CO2 at a crucial point in its history, which made the planet what it is today via the largest-known greenhouse effect occurrence ever.
Zaarin wrote:The point here is that a creature with a physical form--no matter what they're made of--simply could not exist at those temperatures and pressures.
I'm sorry, but that's absurdly wrong. No creature with a similar form remotely like ours could exist in those conditions. But as substance exists in that state, physical forms are possible. They would merely be based on radically different principles than our familiar, low-temperature-and-pressure chemistry.
Life exists in lots of conditions instantly fatal to"familiar life"; exothermic organisms are actually thought to be closer to the original forms of life on Earth. We're actually highly cold-adapted. If life can exist in boiling, pressurized saline mud, why can't it exist in a sea of metallic hydrogen?
Zaarin wrote:The point here is that a creature with a physical form--no matter what they're made of--simply could not exist at those temperatures and pressures.
I'm sorry, but that's absurdly wrong. No creature with a similar form remotely like ours could exist in those conditions. But as substance exists in that state, physical forms are possible. They would merely be based on radically different principles than our familiar, low-temperature-and-pressure chemistry.
Life exists in lots of conditions instantly fatal to"familiar life"; exothermic organisms are actually thought to be closer to the original forms of life on Earth. We're actually highly cold-adapted. If life can exist in boiling, pressurized saline mud, why can't it exist in a sea of metallic hydrogen?
Because Carbon-based molecules break down at those temperatures and pressures (which are several times greater than those in saline mud around volcanic vents). If you have an alternative element that chains could be based on under those conditions, I'll listen; I couldn't find one when I looked around (admittedly I didn't look over every element in the table.) The problem isn't elements not existing there, that is beyond question, but whether they can maintain complex chemical structures, which is very much in question.
Drydic Guy wrote:Because Carbon-based molecules break down at those temperatures and pressures (which are several times greater than those in saline mud around volcanic vents).
Drydic Guy wrote:Because Carbon-based molecules break down at those temperatures and pressures (which are several times greater than those in saline mud around volcanic vents).
Who said anything about carbon-based life?
Way to ignore the rest of my post, where I said "I have been able to find no other element whose chemical compounds can survive the temperatures and pressures present at the depths in question". I said Carbon-based because all life we know of is based on it, sure there are theories that life could be based on other elements, but such life hasn't been found, and the usual go-to element for that, Silicon, is even less able to survive those conditions in compounded form than Carbon.
Look, if you've got an element in mind, by all means, let's hear it. I'd be glad to find out there is one that could work there. I'm skeptical there is, though.
Drydic Guy wrote:Way to ignore the rest of my post, where I said "I have been able to find no other element whose chemical compounds can survive the temperatures and pressures present at the depths in question".
That's because they form different kinds of compounds. Which is what the entire 'metallic hydrogen' thing is all about. Hydrogen isn't a metal in any set of conditions we're used to, but we think it may be one in (for example) the Jovian core. We don't know enough about how matter acts under that much pressure to have any ideas about what sorts of stability might exist, or how they might exploit it.
I said Carbon-based because all life we know of is based on it, sure there are theories that life could be based on other elements, but such life hasn't been found, and the usual go-to element for that, Silicon, is even less able to survive those conditions in compounded form than Carbon.
So? Sandworms are poisoned by water - it doesn't render them any less appropriate as science fictional speculation, even though all life we know of absolutely requires water. It would be insane to say "your fictional world has no water on it, so there's no way it could have any kind of life".
