Did you just make this up? I can see it being said in a number of contexts…
It came out of my brain fresh for this thread.
But I’ve been listening to Heinlein audio books for the past few weeks.
Seems like the OQ has two different answers- microorganisms, or pick a planet that has mineable ores as your colony site.
Subject header has a strong and attractive ring to it. It made me first think of this:
Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
…
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
…
It also occurred to me it’s a good name for a guy.
I post this after two/three days of debating whether to open the thread based on its header…
Five minutes on wikipedia leads me to believe that while most iron ores come from the Great Oxygenation Event, other ores exist which are not. So, assuming the world is similar to pre-GOE Earth, there should be some iron ores around, just fewer.
Which is really boring from a world-building point of view, so I say go with bioengineered iron-concentrating micro-organisms.
What if the original settlers foresaw this problem, and used their interstellar spacecraft to steer an iron-rich asteroid into the planet before starting the colony? Of course the asteroid would have disinterested upon impact, but it should have left a lot of metal scattered around on the planet surface.
Why not add algae to speed up the oxygenation process?
Anyway, there’ll be plenty of iron and other metals in the landmasses.
Plant Leaucaena glauca trees in the tropical belt. They can be harvested in three years to power thermal plants and, to a less extent, make steel. You say “no iron ore” refers only to banded iron ore which is a product of oxidation and sedimentation. You can have other sources of magnetite and hematite.
Cyanobacteria is another name for blue-green algae. The other kind of algae (green) would probably not thrive in a low oxygen environment. But eventually it will be introduced. The main goal of the colony is to recreate Earth’s biosphere as best as can be done. That’s going to take a long time, though.
Wouldn’t survive. Plants need oxygen too. Yes, they produce oxygen, but only during daylight hours. They consume it all the time. And a wind during the night would blow the oxygen away. Result: dead plant.
OK, there will be plants introduced to this planet. Food crops will be grown in greenhouses, as will some kind of oil producing plant to have a stock for plastics. After the colony is established, they will start a pilot project for a natural area. This will be under either some kind of large tent-like structure or a geodesic dome and cover a few acres.
So I’m not the only one who fantasizes about developing a planet surface beginning from just bare rock, water and CO2-N2. I wonder why people like thinking about this?
Can’t help with the chemistry, but the energy question doesn’t seem to have been explored much.
Between whatever magic it is that enables FTL travel and an entire planet’s worth of potential energy sources (especially geothermal as md2000 said, but also maybe wave, nuclear, solar*), certainly you have plentiful spare energy, right? Then you could at least get oxygen from the oceans (if they’re water oceans) through electrolysis. And the energy, however you get it, is heat for extraction and smelting. And you can get carbon from the CO2 atmosphere.
These projects will be extravagantly inefficient, but if you have the tech, access to an entire planet’s worth of free resources, and maybe a fleet of robots, it should be doable to some degree, right? A tiny colony’s industrial production wouldn’t be able to match Earth’s, but neither should its consumption – how much metal could it possibly need? Unless they crash-landed on the planet, it’s bizarre that they would be sent to an ore-poor planet and be expected to rapidly industrialize to a large scale.
*Also, could photovoltaic or solar thermal panels perhaps be more efficient on this planet? Between unspecified future tech, a different star, an ozone-less atmosphere, differences in atmospheric UV penetration, and potential changes in evaporative cooling/wind velocity from the absence of forests and water vapor in the air, maybe there’s enough there to make something up about really cheap solar energy?
Now back to the metal question, what if the colony were simply smarter about its materials selection based on an energy-rich, metal-poor world, rather than relying heavily on iron products?
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How about magnesium? It might be available in that planet’s oceans, just waiting to be extracted by all that spare energy mentioned above.
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Carbon nanotubes? Diamond? Basalt fibers? Silicon carbide?
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Harvesting from volcanic activity, both natural and artificially induced? Your FTL ship must have some sort of shielding to protect it from micrometeorites, and the same sort of shielding whether it’s physical or energy-based might be able to protect your mines, smelters, and furnaces from intense geologic heat? You might be able to get enough titanium from igneous ores to make it worthwhile.
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Depending on the type of FTL you’re using, if it’s capable of warping spacetime, what about producing an orbital wormhole magnet that continually sucks in free meteorites, smelts them into aerodynamic slugs, and then shoots them at uninhabited continents on your planet? (That would make a really cool landscape, too… a desert bombarded by thousands of valuable space obelisks)
And on a broader scale, maybe it’ll help to remember that if you change one variable, a dozen other dependent ones would likely change with it.
As with the solar panels example above, changing the atmosphere could change your energy generation efficiencies.
Other examples:
The absence of life will dramatically alter your atmosphere and your landscape – maybe transportation is suddenly a lot cheaper without forests to get in the way of your equipment, and mining easier without biotic soils that cover and obscure raw minerals. And an ocean altogether devoid of life might have a lot of mineral settling from terrestrial wind/water erosion and no life to bind any of it. Can you trawl the shallower trenchers for materials?
FTL tech: You should certainly explain it, because whatever technology enabled that could help your colonists in other pursuits. If it’s able to generate the vast quantities of energy from some fuel source, can it do the reverse and act as a matter replicator-- but perhaps at a much lower efficiency, thanks to the First Law of Plot-o-Dynamics?
The planet’s surface temperature: There’s gotta be some combination of factors (atmospheric, stellar, volcanic, orbital, whatever) that makes it be roughly similar to Earth’s despite the planet’s abundant CO2 (which would cause runaway global warming on ours). What are these factors and how likely are they to cause environmental gradients from which energy and/or materials can be harvested?
Genetic engineering: If they can already create cyanobacteria that can live in a completely alien world, what else is possible? Can they create anaerobic trees/woody vegetation to use as lumber and/or fuel?
What is your star made of? What’s abundant in your galaxy? Are there nearby moons or planets? An example: If you have a super bright, super hot star, maybe your planet is only able to maintain its surface temperature due to a super dense atmosphere held together by a surprisingly dense planetary core. Maybe the planet’s moon is in geosynchronous orbit and possesses a thin atmosphere, but just enough of one to cause excessively violent winds between the light and the dark sides. From those winds you could harvest energy and/or airborne metal dusts that you could then railgun back to your planet at a fraction of the cost of interstellar travel.
Does a interstellar trade network exist in this world? If so, certainly the colonists must’ve seen SOMETHING of value on this iron-poor planet or they wouldn’t have bothered settling, right? Can they trade for their resources by selling services? Information? Cloned slaves? FTL internet services? Real estate titles (a kilo[gram] of iron for a kilo[meter] of land)?
Everything is connected, right?
Last thoughts for tonight (sorry for the triple post; this is just a fascinating topic to me):
If you’re going the genetic engineering route, maybe consider chemosynthesis in addition to photosynthesis. Without the moderating effects of planet-wide life, you’re bound to have some pretty extreme environments on that planet – perfect habitats for purpose-built organisms that eat energy and poop resources. Anaerobic archaea could perhaps live in geysers close enough to your settlement to make breeding/mining them more practical than oceanic cyanobacteria farming. And if you throw some anaerobic fungi into the mix, they could start to break down pockets of land into actual soil as they gradually eat up dead chemoautotrophs that seep into the water table. In this way you could slowly but more visibly terraform tiny little sections of the planet in controlled ecosystems; the benefit would be that this has the potential to become more biomass-dense more quickly than relying on photosynthetic greenhouses alone. Hope your colonists have a taste for slime and mushrooms.
As Reply points out, a planet with a high CO2 content in its atmosphere would be warmed by an increased greenhouse effect, so it would cool once the atmosphere was terraformed. You might need to add a soletta or statite mirrors to increase the insolation levels, or maybe just use weather machines.
As far as iron is concerned - the crust should have the same percentage of iron as Earth, assuming the planet is similar to our world except for the lack of living organisms. The concentration into ores would be different, and mining iron would be a matter of utilising lower quality ores. There is iron on the surface of the Moon, for instance, and it has been concentrated in certain locations by non-biological processes - see
so your colony would not have to abandon steel altogether.
I’m going to answer some questions and issues that people have brought up without quoting.
The oceans are indeed water (H[sub]2[/sub]O is an extremely common compound in the universe. It’s unlikely not to be on an Earth-like world). There is water vapor in the atmosphere, of course, although probably not quite as much as on Earth. Plants facilitate evaporation, so there’ll be less of that. There will be rivers and some lakes (not too many lakes, though, since the planet has not had an ice age).
Solar power will be used for some things, but it suffers from high levels of dust in the air. Not only does the dust settle on the cells, but it also makes it cloudier. So the main power will be hydroelectric. Yes, there’s other potential sources (geothermal, wave, tidal, etc), but each has costs. This colony is not supported by an agency with an indefinitely large budget, so they have to do things with costs in mind. I think hydro gives you the most energy for the buck, but I could be wrong about that.
They do use electrolysis, as I said in a previous post. It’s mostly used to make fuel for their shuttle. They could, and sometimes do, use the oxygen from that for other purposes, but they try to avoid that, since it takes so long to generate enough LOx and LH for a shuttle flight.
The FTL is somewhat like the Alderson Drive in Mote in God’s Eye, except it’s not necessary to go to the outer solar system to access the jumppoints. That means they don’t go to relativistic speeds, so they don’t have that tech to use for anything.
Greenhouse effect does happen because of the fairly high (by Earth standards) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But it should be noted that the early Earth had high levels as well as methane, and no one wonders why it didn’t go to runaway greenhouse effect. In fact, because the early Sun was much dimmer than now, the mystery is why it didn’t freeze over (talking about the first billion or two years here when there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. After O[sub]2[/sub] reached high levels in the atmosphere, it did freeze over for a while). This planet is somewhat younger than Earth (maybe 2.5 to 3 billion years) so it’s not in danger of runaway greenhouse yet. Note that carbon dioxide combines with calcium in the oceans, which progressively reduces the CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere. Methane will be lost by reaction with the oxygen from photodissociation, so there shouldn’t be much left at this time. I figure the planet will be somewhat warmer than Earth, but by a few degrees at most.
What a crapsack planet. Hope the colonists can sue the company back Earthside for sending them there.
No oxygen, no plant life, no soil, no mineable ores. So why colonize there?
You’d be better off tunneling into a frozen moon in hard vacuum.
I’m not sure that this is correct. Given that there are no predators of the cyanobacteria, atmospheric oxygenation might happen very quickly as the cyanobacteria spread throughout the seas. Of course, that’s still multiple human generations.
It depends on the situation. See Cost of electricity by source; geothermal is within the range of hydro if you look at regional variations. Hydro may be as affordable as it is only with Earth’s level of preexisting infrastructure (unlimited labor pool, ability to industrially produce massive amounts of concrete, ability to divert rivers and move huge amounts of dirt, etc.). Geothermal seems more conceivable for a small colony with a small labor pool but advanced technology and the ability to choose a landing site. Oh, and plain ol’ nuclear might be an option too if you think of it in terms of potential energy per unit of cargo weight carried by their spacecraft?
Would you be able to estimate this? I’m curious as to how long it’d take (say) a fishing boat’s worth of cyanobacteria to oxygenate an Earth-sized atmosphere from scratch.
Standard yeast-growth curve would apply.