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Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?


Ragitsu

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

How far can technology mitigate this problem?

 

How big is your ocean? You're talking about a terraforming-scale project. And of course, all the research I have done regarding terraforming suggests that the most efficient way to terraform a planetary body is to... seed it with life. :)

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

Unlikely. You'd end up with all sorts of nasty chemical combinations leached out of the surrounding stones and then never re-sequestered in animal and plant remains. My guess is that it would stink and be highly toxic.

Well, if you take an iceball planet (something like a supersized Europa) and have it migrate inwards (or possibly undergo a merger with a rockball further in), you'll wind up with a planetary ocean some hundred miles deep, with most minerals locked down below a layer of some high pressure/high temperature allotrope of ice, and stellar UV breaking down water should cause a gradual loss of hydrogen into space and a gradual buildup of oxygen. You won't have any land, and you might well wind up with some really nasty permanent storms, since there's no land masses to break up hurricanes, but you might be able to manage a breathable atmosphere and a pleasant enough ocean. You probably also won't have any life; while there's water, most of the other necessary minerals are locked down below the ice.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

Well' date=' if you take an iceball planet (something like a supersized Europa) and have it migrate inwards (or possibly undergo a merger with a rockball further in), you'll wind up with a planetary ocean some hundred miles deep, with most minerals locked down below a layer of some high pressure/high temperature allotrope of ice, and stellar UV breaking down water should cause a gradual loss of hydrogen into space and a gradual buildup of oxygen. You won't have any [i']land[/i], and you might well wind up with some really nasty permanent storms, since there's no land masses to break up hurricanes, but you might be able to manage a breathable atmosphere and a pleasant enough ocean. You probably also won't have any life; while there's water, most of the other necessary minerals are locked down below the ice.

 

A couple of the Star Trek: Titan books dealt with Water Planets, and the issue about Water Planets with no Land what so ever. Fairly good reads....

 

~Rex...says there is god game stuff to swipe in some of the Star Trek novels....

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

Single Climate could lead into very long Climates. Or at least a Climate long enough in one Phase that entire Civilizations could rise and fall without ever seeing the rest of the seasons. Kind of like the Helliconia books by Brian Aldiss.

 

~Rex

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

another options, of course, could be Nightworlds. Rogue planets warmed only be residual geothermal heat, or dark matter decay in the core. Climate would be mostly stable, although colder away from the geologically active zones. A thick atmosphere would be a must though.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

How about the Locked Planet. One side Always Night the Other Always Day. Of course there is always the Well World option as well where you have 1560 Individual and artificially maintained Environments + 3 (Poles and Equators).....

 

~Rex

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  • 2 weeks later...

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

I will say this, if trade was ever disrupted in the Star Wars universe, Coruscant would descend into utter chaos in very rapid fashion. Any numbers I throw out would be completely arbitrary and made up, but assuming they had three days surplus for the entire planet, on day four there is going to be trouble.

 

As to the general question, if your game is not depending rigidly on science to prop it up, go ahead with single climate/purpose worlds. Plenty of Pulp SciFi has used that tradition.

 

You know what? There was a BATTLE over Coruscant that i'm sure made cargo ship travel impossible. I bet more people died of starvation that day, than blaster fire / missiles.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

You know what? There was a BATTLE over Coruscant that i'm sure made cargo ship travel impossible. I bet more people died of starvation that day' date=' than blaster fire / missiles.[/quote']

 

I'd be more worried by the wreckage of million-ton warships raining down from the sky, all over your planet-wide city.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

I'd be more worried by the wreckage of million-ton warships raining down from the sky' date=' all over your planet-wide city.[/quote']

 

Wasn't the fight entirely above the planet's atmosphere? Also, it certainly didn't look like any fighting was done in a gravity well.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

Well, we know one ship-chunk got into atmosphere, and from there down to the surface in a semi-controlled fashion.

 

Given all the ships blowing up and ordnance being thrown around, I am guessing a few other ship pieces would have made the trip as well - though probably more destructively.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

Wasn't the fight entirely above the planet's atmosphere? Also' date=' it certainly didn't look like any fighting was done [i']in[/i] a gravity well.

 

Everywhere is everywhere's gravity well. Those ships had an acceleration due to gravity towards the centre of the planet. The magic science takes care of that as long as it works. When it stops working, they start falling towards the planet. Not terribly relevant if they're a light year away, unless you want to be Ernst Mach; but very quickly leading to very large craters if they're only twenty kilometers up or so, as they looked to be.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

Everywhere is everywhere's gravity well. Those ships had an acceleration due to gravity towards the centre of the planet. The magic science takes care of that as long as it works. When it stops working' date=' they start falling towards the planet. Not terribly relevant if they're a light year away, unless you want to be Ernst Mach; but very quickly leading to very large craters if they're only twenty kilometers up or so, as they looked to be.

 

Actually, I did mention "that day". Perhaps eventually some ships would reach the planet, but we didn't see any besides the Invisible Hand going down. And, we didn't see any interplanetary/interstellar cargo travel continue on during the battle, either...

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

W-e-l-l' date=' it probably wouldn't. Not that we see many gratuitous cargo haulage scenes at other times either.[/quote']

 

Hence, some Ithorians, Humans, Bothans, etc dying because they couldn't get their Big Star Macs :(.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

That is to say' date=' a world with nothing but rain forests, nothing but beaches, etc.[/quote']

 

I would think that extreme worlds would be possible (ie all/Mostly Deserts, All Ice, All water) beyond that any world that has significant land mass, high enough mountains, Water etc will have different climates. It may be that most of the landmass is in the equatorial regions and that would be mostly tropical in climate (ie during the ages of Dinosaurs, most of the world is thought to be tropical with shallow warm seas. Even there they had polar ice caps (Small) and high mountains that were cold.

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

Actually' date=' I did mention "that day". Perhaps eventually some ships would reach the planet, but we didn't see any besides the [i']Invisible Hand[/i] going down. And, we didn't see any interplanetary/interstellar cargo travel continue on during the battle, either...

 

Earthlings have difficulty with scale. Space is really really, really big. That giant space battle we saw was was threatening maybe 0.01% of Coruscant's gravity well. Whole fleets of freighters could have been offloading, and we would never have seen them on film .... just like we don't see them on film any other time. :)

 

It's still a silly planet, of course, but the space battle makes it no more or no less silly.

 

cheers, Mark

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Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

 

I would think that extreme worlds would be possible (ie all/Mostly Deserts' date=' All Ice, All water) beyond that any world that has significant land mass, high enough mountains, Water etc will have different climates. It may be that most of the landmass is in the equatorial regions and that would be mostly tropical in climate (ie during the ages of Dinosaurs, most of the world is thought to be tropical with shallow warm seas. Even there they had polar ice caps (Small) and high mountains that were cold.[/quote']

 

Actually, I don't know any paleoecologists who think that earth's climate was mostly tropical during the "ages of the dinosaurs". There were long periods with much higher warmth (and much higher seas) than today, but even during the cretaceous (which is about as warm as it got) you still had seasonal snowfall in northern and southern latitudes (thought to be common during the Berassian epoch), and glaciers (ie: permanent snowpack) at higher altitudes. Common winter snowfalls doesn't sound very tropical to me!

 

In truth, I can't think of any way you can have a one-climate planet without the sort of extremes you mentioned: all-ice, all-desert, all-scorching-bare-rock, etc.

 

cheers, Mark

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