Life on a gas giant, the conworld

[Torco]

@Torco: I love this idea you're working with, do not get me wrong, I just don't see it being possible without unobtanium or magic.

what idea: the superconducting thing, or the more general carbon-based life on a gas giant thing?

I understand, but the question is twofold:
one, why would something evolve into the form of coral ? and two, why would such structures grow into a relevant size? winds and the like would likely break them up, which would end up being good for them.
Plus, air tends to have little calcium: my own continent rays, the only landmass-like-thingie in the planet, operates on a similar principle, though: bubbles of hydrogen bound by tissue, and bam they float.

hydrogen, then, ill try to remember

[Sortsdam]

If this has already been mentioned here, forgive me. I saw a program on Discovery a few years back (don't remember the name) about hypothetical plant-like organisms in Jupiter's gaseous atmosphere. Basically, the plant was like a balloon, with a long "stem" hanging down. During daytime, the sun would heat up the gas inside the plant's bulbous balloon, causing it to rise in the atmosphere to absorb sunlight for photosynthesis. In the night, the lack of sun would cause the gas in the plant to cool down and the plant would fall into the lower nutrient-rich atmospheres. Here, the plant's long stem would feed on nutrients and the like, nourishing it for another day. It's really cool, it's pretty much like a floating tree.

[Lithray]

Buoyancy is the word I meant I just couldn't remember it. The reason I would want lower pressure is to lower density. People already know that a vacuum chamber would have more lift more than a hydrogen filled balloon (after a certain point.) I thought that high pressure would make this more viable.

[Drydic]

Why would it slow down, and why would it find balance? The gravitational force that pulled it in in the first place hasn't stopped or anything.

Wind resistance + buoyancy.

The rest of your post is...rather confusingly written. Why would denser air allow rockballs OR pumiceballs to maintain themselves, rather than wearing them down even faster?

Buoyancy. And where did you come up with maintaining themselves, there'd still be erosion, just it would be a bit different on a floating rock pile than it would on Earth (and mainly caused by the rocks banging into eachother)... Certain currents just might bring a bunch of the stuff to one spot.

I "came up with" maintaining themselves because he doesn't want these rockballs disintegrating, thus they have to maintain their size in order to be useful.

And the analogy isn't erosion on Earth, it's meteors & comets blowing through Earth's atmosphere and being friction-burned into near-nothingness in the process. These rockballs aren't just going to float gently into the gas giant after they're formed, they're going to fall in at some exponentially-increasing speed, because of gravity. You seem to be talking about once they're established floating in the atmosphere, whereas I'm talking about how they'd start floating there in the first place. This is why I suggested magic or unobtanium for whatever the rockballs/islands/what-have-you are made of.


@Torco: the islands/rockballs/what-have-you are what I meant.

[Torco]

oh, that's certainly not my idea! and I'm not implementing it for amphitrite, either

[Drydic]

oh, that's certainly not my idea! and I'm not implementing it for amphitrite, either

Yeah, I got a tiny bit muddled on that point in the post where I said 'zomg good idea'.

[Avis Noctis]

I want to see more of this! It was really interesting while it was going.

[cromulant]

I want to see more of this! It was really interesting while it was going.

OP has undoubtedly moved on, else the thread wouldn't be four years dead. Necroing it was a dick move.

[Torco]

XD man, for one's sole post to be the necroing of a four year old conworld. I'm kinda flattered

I've been thinking about doing some more amphitrite, but the same reason the conworld idea is attractive is the reason why it's kind of hard to develop: it's entirely unprecedented, so there's almost no assumptions one can import from terrestrial planets.

[Avis Noctis]

Well I understand. Maybe if you have more ideas, you'll have an excuse to post them

[WeepingElf]

XD man, for one's sole post to be the necroing of a four year old conworld. I'm kinda flattered

I've been thinking about doing some more amphitrite, but the same reason the conworld idea is attractive is the reason why it's kind of hard to develop: it's entirely unprecedented, so there's almost no assumptions one can import from terrestrial planets.

Not only that: it is pretty certain that a planet of this type does not exist anywhere in our universe - because gas giants are always a lot of hydrogen and little else, so you won't ever get an oxygen-rich atmosphere with any process short of alchemy, if there is life in a gas giant at all.

[Torco]

Why not? carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, these are relatively common things in our universe, about gas giants we mostly know what's on the outside of them, and besides uranus and neptunes are pretty rich in methane and ammonia and water and all kinds of fun stuff. Take a neptune and put it closer to the sun, where the solar winds are blowing the hydrogen not bound in heavier molecules, as well as a lot of the helium. Sure it would be mostly hydrogen and helium, or at least have quite a bit of it, but there's a decent amount of oxygen and carbon and nitrogen and whatnot on such planets as neptune. comets are also pretty rich in not-hydrogen. I don't think such a planet is impossible at all.

[WeepingElf]

I can't say your scenario was possible, but would that world still be a gas giant? I'd rather guess that the outcome would be an ocean planet, with a very deep ocean and a thick atmosphere.

But it is your conworld, and you may do what you want in it.

[Torco]

You're not wrong, I head they call neptune and uranus "ice giants", reserving gas giants for jupiter and saturn. so I suppose "water giant" is as good a term as any.

[WeepingElf]

I have heard that some people think there could be life in the vast "oceans" of Uranus and Neptune, but those "water oceans" aren't really water as we know it, just a super-hot super-pressurized supercritical fluid consisting mostly of hydrogen and oxygen in a roughly 2:1 molar ratio in which organic molecules would decay faster than in a flask of boiling concentrated sulfuric acid. But a Neptune-like planet in the habitable zone may have more life-friendly conditions in its outer reaches.

[gach]

If there'd be even simple life in the the deeper high pressure layers of a gas giant, it would have to be quite exotic to our standards. The physical conditions and chemistry down there aren't terribly suitable for the development of the carbon based life we are familiar with.

You also need to remember that even though the heavier molecular gasses (water, methane, ammonia) may play an important role in the dynamics of the atmospheres of gas giants, they are still minor components in the full atmospheric composition. Gas giants form since they get heavy enough to accrete large amounts of gas from the protoplanetary disk and stop it from evaporating away. The accretion works the same for all gasses so the elemental composition in the atmospheres of these planets should reflect the composition of the protostellar nebula, and by extension the central star. Hence, what you get are atmospheres mostly consisting of hydrogen and helium with a few percent of heavier elements capable of forming more complex molecular gasses. The outer ice giants Uranus and Neptune are no different in this regard, see for example Lunine (1993, from p. 222).

Anyway, this is just physics, which might not be terribly relevant for a conworld.

[Zju]

XD man, for one's sole post to be the necroing of a four year old conworld. I'm kinda flattered

I've been thinking about doing some more amphitrite, but the same reason the conworld idea is attractive is the reason why it's kind of hard to develop: it's entirely unprecedented, so there's almost no assumptions one can import from terrestrial planets.

Do you have your project posted in the SE forum? You could get a fair amount of critique and advices there.

[Salmoneus]

If there'd be even simple life in the the deeper high pressure layers of a gas giant, it would have to be quite exotic to our standards. The physical conditions and chemistry down there aren't terribly suitable for the development of the carbon based life we are familiar with.

You also need to remember that even though the heavier molecular gasses (water, methane, ammonia) may play an important role in the dynamics of the atmospheres of gas giants, they are still minor components in the full atmospheric composition. Gas giants form since they get heavy enough to accrete large amounts of gas from the protoplanetary disk and stop it from evaporating away. The accretion works the same for all gasses so the elemental composition in the atmospheres of these planets should reflect the composition of the protostellar nebula, and by extension the central star. Hence, what you get are atmospheres mostly consisting of hydrogen and helium with a few percent of heavier elements capable of forming more complex molecular gasses. The outer ice giants Uranus and Neptune are no different in this regard, see for example Lunine (1993, from p. 222).

Anyway, this is just physics, which might not be terribly relevant for a conworld.

Apparently, it's possible but unlikely that there could be liquid oceans on Neptune, and the probability will rise to 40% when the planet has cooled down more. See Wiktoricz and Ingersoll's "Liquid Oceans in Ice Giants". The problem is, Neptune's already extremely cold, so making it even colder might pose its own hazards to life....

The other possibility might be clouds. Neptune and Uranus are both thought to have water clouds, which I guess could be an environment that could sustain life. They're only slightly below earth pressure, too. But again: freezing cold.

Unfortunately, you can't just warm things up by moving them closer to the sun. Because when you warm them up, all these calculations about clouds and liquids and pressures and whatnot will change...

[gach]

I'm not a planetary scientist, but I find it hard to think of a process that would bring massive amounts of water to a gas giant without also accreting the overwhelmingly more common hydrogen and helium. There are icy clouds (including water) on all of our gas planets but these are only clouds floating in an atmosphere of roughly the solar composition. Then again, there's talk of ocean planets with rocky cores, so maybe closer to the star the radiation pressure might in certain conditions lead to some differential effect for enriching heavier elements on the atmospheres of gas giant as well.

The deep cold far from the star is certainly a big problem, if you decide to have a planet there. Even very exotic life would have to be very slow at those temperatures.