New Gas giant conworld

[Torco]

You don't need to be silicon or unobtanium based to die from being exposed to water: if you evolved in low enough moisture environments, but still having *some* water, it may well be the case that water harms its skin, or too much water at one time harms its skin or entrails: like, if I were to drink 6 or 10 liters of water in one sitting, it'd harm me! and I'm the product of an philogenetic line that's mostly been always in or near water... sooo yeah.

[Hallow XIII]

\

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".

There is an extreme difference between these two scenarios. Think about it.

[Drydic]

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.

Stop it. Metallic Hydrogen isn't even a metal under those conditions; the distinction between solid, liquid and gas does not exist there. This is the problem. And we do know more than enough about how matter acts under those conditions to know what will happen. I also ask you to tell me exactly what 'different kinds of compounds' they form.

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".

No, not all life we know of requires water. But all life, even theoretical forms of life, require a basic, pervasive element to be used as a building block for amino acids and cellular structures.

[patiku]

Let us also bear in mind that sandworms do not exist in a hard SF universe, whereas you appear to be interested in scientific plausibility.

[Melend]

You don't need to be silicon or unobtanium based to die from being exposed to water: if you evolved in low enough moisture environments, but still having *some* water, it may well be the case that water harms its skin, or too much water at one time harms its skin or entrails: like, if I were to drink 6 or 10 liters of water in one sitting, it'd harm me! and I'm the product of an philogenetic line that's mostly been always in or near water... sooo yeah.

True enough, but sandworms' biochemistry is incompatible with water, the same way yours is incompatible with ammonia, or a cyanide salt.

Admittedly, there are some indications that they were designed, as their larval form is capable of sequestering virtually all of a world's water so that the adult form can manifest - not something you'd expect to spontaneously evolve. There's no reason they can't appear in a hard SF world, as long as no one expects detailed analyses of their biochemistry, which isn't something that anyone is capable of speculating about in detail.

I've read hard SF which dealt with lifeforms living in the hearts of suns and the grossly non-Euclidean space around black holes. The core of a Jovian world is safe and tame in comparison.

[patiku]

Now you're just being deliberately obtuse.

[Drydic]

You don't need to be silicon or unobtanium based to die from being exposed to water: if you evolved in low enough moisture environments, but still having *some* water, it may well be the case that water harms its skin, or too much water at one time harms its skin or entrails: like, if I were to drink 6 or 10 liters of water in one sitting, it'd harm me! and I'm the product of an philogenetic line that's mostly been always in or near water... sooo yeah.

True enough, but sandworms' biochemistry is incompatible with water, the same way yours is incompatible with ammonia, or a cyanide salt.

Admittedly, there are some indications that they were designed, as their larval form is capable of sequestering virtually all of a world's water so that the adult form can manifest - not something you'd expect to spontaneously evolve. There's no reason they can't appear in a hard SF world, as long as no one expects detailed analyses of their biochemistry, which isn't something that anyone is capable of speculating about in detail.

I've read hard SF which dealt with lifeforms living in the hearts of suns and the grossly non-Euclidean space around black holes. The core of a Jovian world is safe and tame in comparison.

You don't know, or are deliberately acting as if you don't know, what hard SF is. Therefore I assume you are deliberately not answering any objections raised to you. Good day sir.

[Torco]

Strictly speaking, scifi that features extensive technical details about orbitals and engineering and coefficients and other technical terms is often considered 'hard', even though its not extremely realistic. So the works mentioned by Melend *could* exist. I don't think that if I were to be exposed to them I'd consider them hard, though, that is, I think while they *could* exist a book that is both hard scifi and also about life in the hearts of suns, I'm dubious

Your universe, Melend, is probably not intended for scientific plausibility but on the lack of scientific implausibility, if this makes any sense. I mean that it doesn't want to be something science suggests might be, but rather something science can't look at and say "that's just impossible". This is, of course,a specific kind of plausibility, but not the one we generally think about around here.

That being said, I seem to remember some story, maybe by Asimov, featured dudes living in jupiter, which were weird and aggro and evil. An interesting question, however, is what are these inner jovian lifeforms. Like, we're bags of aminoacids and have this nice hidrocarbon oxydizing metabolism, but before that we're things of chemistry, our nature is that of molecules exchanging atoms and in so doing becoming other molecules. No such thing is possible at the heart of jovians, so... what are your dudes?

[Drydic]

I have no problem with suspensio ad absurdum settings. I quite like a number of them, in fact. What I have a problem with is suspensio ad absurdum settings which are claimed to be realistic and possible without any evidence or even reasons beyond 'it just uses something else!' given.

[Torco]

i take it suspensio ad absurdum is saying 'well, this is different, but its not forbidden so don't worry' ?
And yeah, "this is something else" is a terrible explanation, which is why I asked him if he had a better one.

[Drydic]

i take it suspensio ad absurdum is saying 'well, this is different, but its not forbidden so don't worry' ?
And yeah, "this is something else" is a terrible explanation, which is why I asked him if he had a better one.

Suspension of disbelief.

[Torco]

suspension to absurd ? weird.
Anyway, that... Looks like I was wrong and this is something else was as interesting as it got.
Oh well, better to commit the sin of innocence than of being prejudiced, my father used to say.

he doesn't anymore, perhaps he's been wrong on the side of innocence enough times? oh well

[Melend]

No, not all life we know of requires water. But all life, even theoretical forms of life, require a basic, pervasive element to be used as a building block for amino acids and cellular structures.

Theoretically, life does not require amino acids. Nor does it require cells.

I think we're done here.

[Melend]

One last note from me:

Greg Egan has written a SF novel founded on a simple change: he went to the equations describing some fundamental physics and reversed a single sign. The world that follows from this change, in which his story is set, has 'plants' radiating light into the dark sky in order to decrease their entropy. Oh, and the speed of light in vacuum isn't a constant.

Is this hard SF, or not?

(He's the guy who wrote a book in which the first extraterrestrial intelligence was found living 'inside' a natural alien computer composed entirely of carbohydrate molecules, in a virtual space which could be simplified for human comprehension by modeling it in only seventeen dimensions. He's known for writing some of the hardest SF in existence.)

[Drydic]

No, not all life we know of requires water. But all life, even theoretical forms of life, require a basic, pervasive element to be used as a building block for amino acids and cellular structures.

Theoretically, life does not require amino acids. Nor does it require cells.

I think we're done here.

[citation needed]


Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Note that I am not saying you cannot be right; I'm giving you a chance to back your claim up.

[Torco]

He won't, he's just interested in establishing that weird things could be. Yes, Melend, weird things could be. That's boring and uninteresting: *how* could there be is the interesting thing.

[Melend]

Quite right, Torque. But before we can work out how an organism that lives at the center core of a Jovian world can live, we need to (hypothetically) accept that it does. Putting Earth-standard life within Jupiter is ridiculous. We'd need to imagine a type of life that could exist in those conditions - and we understand neither the conditions nor the nature of matter well enough to make even an intelligent guess about what sorts of interactions are possible.

Ironically, we know far more about the conditions on Pluto and the similar plutonian objects. One proposal for life on such worlds involved helium-3 'blood' - a bizarre substance whose properties at very low temperatures would be unbelievable if they hadn't been so thoroughly verified by scientific inquiry.

[Torco]

Well sure we understand what happens on pluto better than than whatever happens at the core of Jupiter... we're like, what, 400 degrees hotter than pluto ? plus, vacuum is pretty transparent. Hell, we don't even know very well what happens at the core of the earth! why? cause its dark and surrounded by opaque stuff <namely, the earth>. Now, since as you put it we understand neither the conditions nor the nature of matter well enough to make even an intelligent guess about what sorts of interactions are possible, then it follows that no intelligent guess can be made by us about what sort of kinds of life are possible under those conditions or even if any sorts of life are possible or not. That being said, its useful to remember that, well, those educated guesses are completely required for hard scifi, your jovians are not a reversal of a sign, so to speak, but rather, a pretty big what if the rest of the equation is just a+l^2-log(x-1/(sqrt(e+3pi))): hell, i'd argue educated guesses required for scifi at all: if you have no reality-based educated guess about what *might* happen under certain conditions you've got fantasy, like starwars, the epic of gilgamesh or the book of genesis. Not that there's anything wrong at all with fantasy, I happen to like it. Trying to write scifi of any hardness about life deep within jupiter is pretty possible, but you need to *express* what your rest of the equation is, what your counterfactual proposition is, like: "imagine jovian life based not on chemistry, but on configurations of different isotopes of hidrogen deep within the metallic layers" or stuff like plasma structures like these http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 150630.htm
or, I dunno, *something*.