[QUOTE=TriPolar]
The smaller it is, the less noticeable it would be, to some extent. Depending on it’s purpose, it doesn’t have to be that close. You could have an enormous mother ship that remains in the asteroid belt while a smaller landing craft debarks for earth entry without ever going into orbit.
[/QUOTE]
I might do just that.
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
There’s going to be some physics to work out that I can’t help you with. You could work up a more detailed explanation of the process and pose some questions in GQ.
[/QUOTE]
Is that the General Questions sub-forum?
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
You’ll get some incredibly detailed analysis of the orbital and entry problems there.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, good! Well, thanks for telling me.
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
Good luck with your book!
[/QUOTE]
Thanks very much! And thank you as well for the awesome feedback.
And you know what? I think I will scrap that “fear of darkness” idea after all, except perhaps for a very select few regions of the planet, if any. Because I was thinking, they and their ancestors probably encounter(ed) natural darkness all the time, in the form of clouds, storms, forests, and other such natural phenomena. And I’ve read that red dwarf stars can often be covered in starspots that can dim their emitted light by as much as 40% for months at a time. Not to mention they aren’t all that bright to begin with (although, admittedly, this planet’s sun is nearly seven times as close to the planet as our sun is to us, so maybe that makes up for it, but the thing about the starspots still stands). They might still be kinda freaked out in the kind of darkness that exists on the night side, but probably no more than the average human, and they have artificial light anyways. And before they had artificial light, they would have avoided the night side because of the storms at the terminator, and the cold, just as much as because of the darkness. Ah well, it was a fun idea while it lasted. As I said before, if an idea honestly doesn’t work, I do eventually let go of it. Thanks for disagreeing with it, or I might never have realized how unrealistic it is. XD
I missed the part about no tilt. My bad. And I was confused anyway. Axial tilt would just make the sun move left and right, not in a circle, like the person who mentioned it already said. I think axial precession, the axis itself rotating, might make it do like a figure eight, but if your planet has a perfectly perpendicular axis none of that matters. I’ve been playing around with a basketball with a dot on it off and on all day. It was fun but my brain is tired.
By all means, feel free to use anything I post in this thread, if you like it. I’m a compulsive world-builder, so it’s not like there’s a shortage of alien planets in my head. Remind me to tell you all about the lake-trees of Enkara some time. (Presumably when you’re inclined to die of boredom.)
Sunlight will be hitting mountains near the terminator at a steep angle–essentially, the range will look like a range of mountains at sunset. The nearest mountains will cast shadows on the ones farther toward nightside. Those shadows should shift noticeably as the terminator shifts–when the terminator is moving toward someone on the dayside, the shadows will appear to creep up the slopes.
This effect should be visible with smaller objects, too–the shadow a building casts on the ground, for example, should lengthen as the terminator approaches. Your natives could build sundial-like structures to measure it, but the effect would vary with location, so it wouldn’t be consistent until they figured out how to compensate. (And, of course, it wouldn’t work at all near the heart of dayside.)
Well, I’m not a climatologist, so I’m doing a lot of handwaving here. I think, though, that my guesses so far have retained too much of my initial “broken water cycle” analysis, in which the dayside would become a desert and the nightside a frozen waste. Since that wouldn’t support your aliens, it needs to be reexamined.
First, to maintain a water cycle, most of nightside can’t get too cold. That means there has to be a lot of heat retention and transfer from dayside. I think that would require a denser atmosphere, with more greenhouse gases. Fortunately, it’s a high-grav planet, so a thicker atmosphere is reasonable.
Next, we have to assume that the substellar point (the dayside location where the star is directly overhead) is pretty consistently the hottest place on the planet, and consequently has a very high evaporation rate.
That sets up our basic atmospheric circulation: hot air rising over the substellar point will produce a high-altitude outflow. Winds will blow outward in all directions, dumping heat and moisture, and sinking as they go, eventually converging in the middle of nightside. The sinking air over nightside would produce cold, dry, low-altitude winds blowing back outwards. I think this would still support the terminator-storms I mentioned; the contrast between the upper and lower winds would produce a lot of local rotation, and a sharp temperature drop in the high-altitude winds should induce them dump most of their remaining moisture near the boundary. It might be less a matter of massive thunderstorms than one of a high incidence of tornadoes, though.
That doesn’t speak to what’s going on at the substellar point, though. I think it may depend on the position of landmasses on dayside.
If you modeled it with Earth’s current landmasses, the substellar point would likely be over (or at least, close to) ocean. Under those circumstances, you’d get a tremendous amount of evaporation, producing rising masses of extremely hot, humid air. Add in the relatively cool winds blowing in from all directions, and you’ve got a recipe for fog and torrential rainstorms, not to mention a hurricane incubator that never shuts down. I imagine this is the scenario you read about, and if we assume that a life-bearing planet is likely to be a water-world like Earth, I’d guess that it’s the most likely scenario.
If the substellar point were over the middle of a very large landmass–like the Gondwanaland supercontinent of Earth’s Triassic period, for example–things might be quite different. With no ocean to provide effectively unlimited moisture, all the region would have is what came in on the low-altitude winds. Cooler air can’t hold as much moisture, though, and even if they were nearly saturated, there’s no reason for them to dump it as they warm up over the middle of the supercontinent. You probably wouldn’t get much precipitation except on and around mountains; if a range between the ocean and the substellar point deflected the inflow upward and caused the layers to mix, you’d probably get heavy rains there. Otherwise, the moisture would just be carried along as the air warmed, rose, and blew back outward. With high temperatures and little precipitation, the region would be a desert.
I haven’t figured out whether the tidal bulge makes it more or less likely for the area to be covered by water.
Well I wasn’t referring to a general fear of the unknown. I just think that a specific fear of the dark that hasn’t been overcome by an advanced society seems unlikely. They would have to have an incredible environment that would keep them out of caves and stop them from constructing buildings with minimal lighting. It could happen somehow, but it’s like assuming humans were aquatic animals from aliens point of view because our planet has so much water.
It is the different mindset that I find interesting also. In Nori’s world time will have a very different meaning. The concept of days and fixed intervals like weeks and months could be very different than ours. Even if they have clocks, there’s no cycle of day and night, and society may not cycle through regular meals, working hours, and weekends as we do. This could be pretty cool.
Okay, then, that being the case all you need is to decide that the planet has a noticeable axial tilt, and voila, you have astronomical seasons even without significant changes in weather. In the northern hemisphere summer (north pole tipped toward the sun), the sun will appear farther north in the sky, and in winter (north pole tipped away from the sun) it will appear farther south. Given that earthly Druids built giant astro-clocks out of standing stones, I think it’s fair to assume that even primitively intelligent creatures would notice this. This would also create external cycles for plant life (and by extension, animal life) to sync their lifecycles to.
Although I’d be willing to bet that there would, at least, be some noticeable changes in weather, too, for the same reason that it’s warmer in summer on Earth. Maybe not snow in winter, but temps would definitely be cooler.
Nori, a randomly firing synapse in my brain brought forth an old memory. Burrough’s Pellucidar series toyed with the concept of an endless day and non-time based philosophy. This series took place inside the hollow earth, constantly bathed in light from a tiny sun suspended at the center. There was a tiny moon I belive, but it’s position was fixed, causing a circular area of darkness over one location. I believe at some point he extended the lack of a time measure to relative time. Of course it isn’t what would be considered hard science fiction now. But you may find additional resources in addition to that and Nightfall to form concepts of a world without a day/night cycle.
Well, let’s just say that I’m not quite 20, I’ve been working on this and other things since grade 11 or 12, and that I have a lot of ideas but not a lot of talent or knowledge. Maybe once I have my diploma I’ll go into some kind of writing program or something.
If this ever gets finished, it may well be my first book. Unless I finish something else first. But none of the other ideas that I still work on regularly are actual novels, so I’m not sure if they count. XD
If it were that easy I would just decide to give the planet whatever traits would make worldbuilding easiest for me. The planet I’m using is based on an actual (well, it’s unconfirmed, but whatever) planet, and it doesn’t have axial tilt. When it comes to unknown things about the planet, like libration, I might just decide, “It has this much libration, mmmk?”, but when it comes to known things, like “The planet has no axial tilt”, I’m not just gonna be like, “Well, it does now.” I want my science fiction story to be as hard as possible, so I’m trying to stick with what’s real.
However, Balance’s idea about libration might let me implement the rest of your idea:
[QUOTE=Kaio]
In the northern hemisphere summer (north pole tipped toward the sun), the sun will appear farther north in the sky, and in winter (north pole tipped away from the sun) it will appear farther south. Given that earthly Druids built giant astro-clocks out of standing stones, I think it’s fair to assume that even primitively intelligent creatures would notice this. This would also create external cycles for plant life (and by extension, animal life) to sync their lifecycles to.
Although I’d be willing to bet that there would, at least, be some noticeable changes in weather, too, for the same reason that it’s warmer in summer on Earth. Maybe not snow in winter, but temps would definitely be cooler.
[/QUOTE]
If I use libration rather than axial tilt and precession, I think the seasonal changes would only be noticeable near the terminator, but that’s still something. Thanks for your ideas — now I’m probably going to look up Druids. XD
Yay!
[QUOTE=Balance]
I’m a compulsive world-builder, so it’s not like there’s a shortage of alien planets in my head. Remind me to tell you all about the lake-trees of Enkara some time. (Presumably when you’re inclined to die of boredom.)
[/QUOTE]
TELL ME TELL ME TELL ME. Dude, that sounds so call. “Lake-trees”? I need you to be my co-author or something. XD
[QUOTE=Balance]
Sunlight will be hitting mountains near the terminator at a steep angle–essentially, the range will look like a range of mountains at sunset. The nearest mountains will cast shadows on the ones farther toward nightside. Those shadows should shift noticeably as the terminator shifts–when the terminator is moving toward someone on the dayside, the shadows will appear to creep up the slopes.
[/QUOTE]
Ohhhhh now I get what you mean.
[QUOTE=Balance]
This effect should be visible with smaller objects, too–the shadow a building casts on the ground, for example, should lengthen as the terminator approaches. Your natives could build sundial-like structures to measure it, but the effect would vary with location, so it wouldn’t be consistent until they figured out how to compensate. (And, of course, it wouldn’t work at all near the heart of dayside.)
[/QUOTE]
That sounds like a really cool idea that I will probably use!
[QUOTE=Balance]
Well, I’m not a climatologist, so I’m doing a lot of handwaving here. I think, though, that my guesses so far have retained too much of my initial “broken water cycle” analysis, in which the dayside would become a desert and the nightside a frozen waste. Since that wouldn’t support your aliens, it needs to be reexamined.
[/QUOTE]
Well, I think you did say that there could be an area between the substellar region and the terminator that would be habitable. But I prefer the idea of a rainy substellar region to a desert one (that I can have habitable jungles at the edge of the substellar region, no? :D), so by all means, reexamine:
[QUOTE=Balance]
First, to maintain a water cycle, most of nightside can’t get too cold. That means there has to be a lot of heat retention and transfer from dayside. I think that would require a denser atmosphere, with more greenhouse gases. Fortunately, it’s a high-grav planet, so a thicker atmosphere is reasonable.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly.
[QUOTE=Balance]
Next, we have to assume that the substellar point (the dayside location where the star is directly overhead) is pretty consistently the hottest place on the planet, and consequently has a very high evaporation rate.
That sets up our basic atmospheric circulation: hot air rising over the substellar point will produce a high-altitude outflow. Winds will blow outward in all directions, dumping heat and moisture, and sinking as they go, eventually converging in the middle of nightside. The sinking air over nightside would produce cold, dry, low-altitude winds blowing back outwards. I think this would still support the terminator-storms I mentioned; the contrast between the upper and lower winds would produce a lot of local rotation, and a sharp temperature drop in the high-altitude winds should induce them dump most of their remaining moisture near the boundary. It might be less a matter of massive thunderstorms than one of a high incidence of tornadoes, though.
[/QUOTE]
Whoa. How do you know all this stuff??? And you said you’re NOT a climatologist??
[QUOTE=Balance]
That doesn’t speak to what’s going on at the substellar point, though. I think it may depend on the position of landmasses on dayside.
If you modeled it with Earth’s current landmasses, the substellar point would likely be over (or at least, close to) ocean. Under those circumstances, you’d get a tremendous amount of evaporation, producing rising masses of extremely hot, humid air. Add in the relatively cool winds blowing in from all directions, and you’ve got a recipe for fog and torrential rainstorms, not to mention a hurricane incubator that never shuts down. I imagine this is the scenario you read about, and if we assume that a life-bearing planet is likely to be a water-world like Earth, I’d guess that it’s the most likely scenario.
[/QUOTE]
Cool! And I don’t know about the landmasses, either. I said in my last post that I’m terrible at visualizing things in my head, so I keep picturing their whole planet as one vast, featureless landscape. ><
[QUOTE=Balance]
If the substellar point were over the middle of a very large landmass–like the Gondwanaland supercontinent of Earth’s Triassic period, for example–things might be quite different. With no ocean to provide effectively unlimited moisture, all the region would have is what came in on the low-altitude winds. Cooler air can’t hold as much moisture, though, and even if they were nearly saturated, there’s no reason for them to dump it as they warm up over the middle of the supercontinent. You probably wouldn’t get much precipitation except on and around mountains; if a range between the ocean and the substellar point deflected the inflow upward and caused the layers to mix, you’d probably get heavy rains there. Otherwise, the moisture would just be carried along as the air warmed, rose, and blew back outward. With high temperatures and little precipitation, the region would be a desert.
[/QUOTE]
Hmmm. You mention a supercontinent in Earth’s Triassic period, which made me realize — what about tectonic plates? If my planet has supercontinents in its early history and then they shifted, I’m guessing that would have ramifications for what the climate’s like in different regions. But then again, I’m not sure what the inside of my planet’s like — like whether is has or ever had a liquid mantle that would make tectonic plate shift possible.
[QUOTE=Balance]
I haven’t figured out whether the tidal bulge makes it more or less likely for the area to be covered by water.
[/QUOTE]
Hmm.
Yeah, that’s why I more or less decided to scrap it. See my last post.
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
It could happen somehow, but it’s like assuming humans were aquatic animals from aliens point of view because our planet has so much water.
[/QUOTE]
Well, I don’t really think that’s a good analogy, but I understand where you’re coming from.
[QUOTE=TriPolarIt is the different mindset that I find interesting also. In Nori’s world time will have a very different meaning. The concept of days and fixed intervals like weeks and months could be very different than ours. Even if they have clocks, there’s no cycle of day and night, and society may not cycle through regular meals, working hours, and weekends as we do. This could be pretty cool.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I think it’s pretty cool, too! I try to play up the ways they’re different from us for all they’re worth. They don’t sleep, but they do rest, but they don’t use any external cues to tell them when to rest, they just rest when they’re tired. So they definitely don’t have regular working hours and probably not regular meals (though they might have internal clocks for resting and eating that sync up when they spend a lot of time together as a group, kinda like the theory that women can sync up their periods with pheromones or something; who knows). I doubt they’d even have a concept of a day or a week, let alone a weekend. Whatever external method I end up giving them to track time with (such as libration) might end up being their day, but it could be longer or shorter than ours, I’m not sure. And if, once they get a good enough understanding of astronomy, they start using libration to track their sidereal year, then their concept of a year will be very different from ours because their sidereal year is only 37 Earth days.
Whoa. You know what I just realized? There are three planets between my planet and its sun. And all the diagrams I’ve seen of the system, and my Celestia application, assume that all their orbits are coplanar. If that’s accurate wouldn’t these planets eclipse the sun at regular intervals? Their orbital periods are really short (the longest one is less than 13 Earth days), so they should eclipse it all the time. Oh. My. God. facepalm
Ah, but maybe they’re too small and too far away. The one second from its sun is about 16 times more massive than Earth, but it’s also about one tenth of an AU away from my planet, so it would probably show up pretty small, if at all, considering how small our thousands of times more massive sun looks from Earth at only ten times the distance. And maybe my planet’s sun would look even bigger than ours considering how close it is… Argh… And here I thought I might have something…
But who knows, maybe the eclipse idea could work. shrug I’ll ask around. Even if it doesn’t work, there’s still the super-cool libration thing.
Well maybe you could set it up like Nightfall where eclipses occur in intervals of millenia (I forget the actual timespan, but long enough for people to forget about them before achieving an advanced civilization). I don’t know how this affects the physics of your planet, but you could have them in non-coplanar and/or elliptical orbits that would have taken them a long time to predict the eclipses.
(Hollow Earth with a tiny sun suspended in the center reminds me of PlaneShift. XD)
I was thinking of the eclipses more so as a timekeeping device. And with the nearest planet orbiting around the sun every 12 days I doubt an eclipse would take millennia to occur. Plus, as I said, it might be too small and too far away to even be noticeable.
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
I don’t know how this affects the physics of your planet, but you could have them in non-coplanar and/or elliptical orbits that would have taken them a long time to predict the eclipses.
[/QUOTE]
The planet I’m using is based off a “real” (unconfirmed) planet in a real star system, and all the diagrams I’ve seen, and Celestia (a space simulation app), show all the orbits to be coplanar and circular.
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
Also, do they have clouds?
[/QUOTE]
Probably. I don’t know enough about climatology to say for sure whether they do or not, but I don’t know of any reason why they wouldn’t. The atmosphere would be denser than ours because of the triple gravity, and I don’t know how that would affect things. Plus the planet might not have much in the way of oxygen or an ozone layer, and I don’t know how that would affect things either.
Enkara is a planet in a pulp-esque setting I toy with. Its star is very energetic and prone to producing large flares at pretty regular intervals, and the native life has developed a number of adaptations to help survive the resulting radiation spikes. Glassward, for instance, is a symbiosis between a diatom-like photosynthesizer that builds stalks of crystal “grass” and a fungoid that thrives on radiation (similar to a fungus found in and around Chernobyl). When the flare starts, the pseudo-diatoms retreat underground, and the fungoid takes its place in the stalks.
The lake-trees, on the other hand, have a passive defense. On the top of each trunk is a large, bowl-shaped photosynthetic organ. This catches rainwater and is supplemented by water pumped up from the roots, forming a small pool at the top of the plant. The water is full of fronds to capture the sunlight and filter any stray nutrients that get deposited in the pool. The water shields the vulnerable parts of the plant from the worst of the radiation, when the sun is at or near its zenith. As the tree grows, it sprouts secondary trunks, supported by flying buttress formations of dead wood, with the lower “lakes” supplying water to the upper ones until they become self-sufficient. Large trees have communities of secondary plant life and small animals in and around their crowns. During flares, when the glassward begins to turn black, ground-dwelling animals take shelter in the shadows of the trees to wait out the worst of the flare.
If the aliens can’t stand darkness, how did they build an interstellar spaceship (and the supporting technological infratructure) without mining? Or or all the minerals they need on the surface of their planet? For that matter, how do they feel about tunnels in general?
Would photography baffle them as well? We needed to develop film in darkness, so would the concept be unknown or handled with a work-around?
That’s so cool! You seem to know a lot. Can you telepathically transmit your knowledge into my brain, please?
The other day I was thinking about my planet’s plants, and since they need to be black to absorb a lot of radiation, I thought, “Maybe they could use melanin as a pigment”. Then I found out that melanin absorbs UV rays. And red dwarfs emit very, very little UV rays. But then I found out about how red dwarfs emit strong solar flares with a lot of UV rays, so I thought, “Hey, maybe they thrive on solar flares.” But then I found out that a sun as old as the one in my system probably doesn’t flare that often or that strongly, so I was like, “Meh”.
Thanks.
I’m guessing you didn’t read the whole thread — I’ve pretty much decided I’m going to scrap that idea. Those of my aliens who live in areas where darkness is the least common probably don’t like the darkness, but they’d be a minority, and they probably don’t fear it as much as I originally stated. Plus they have artificial light so it’s basically a moot point.
And people react differently to different kinds of darkness. Photographic darkrooms aren’t totally dark — you can still see, because of the safelight. That’s different from a dark room where you can’t see, which is different from a dark forest, which is different from polar night, which is different from a cave, and so on and so forth.
As for photography, I don’t know if they have that or not. They have video. I don’t know if you need to develop traditional photography as a stepping stone to that.
Alas, I’m creeping toward middle age, and my transmitter doesn’t have the range it had in my youth. Instead, I will offer advice:
Read. Read a lot. Read books, read science articles, read threads over in General Questions, read the backs of shampoo bottles, whatever. When you’re not reading, think about stuff you’ve read. Wonder how things work, and why they are the way they are. Come up with hypotheses–both about real-world things you can verify later and about fictional things that only need to be plausible.
You, too, can be the proud owner of a vast archive of useless trivia.
The thing is, I already do almost all those things. I don’t want to be middle-aged before I can finish my book.
The only thing I don’t really do is the hypothesis thing. I’ll try to start doing that, although I’m already crunched enough for time as it is without testing hypotheses… And I’m not sure exactly what kinds of hypotheses you mean. Can you suggest a hypothesis for some kind of starting point?
Wow. What a wonderful thread. Nori I wish you all the best on your quest.
When I was about your age, and working as a computer scientist (yes, that early), when asked what I wanted to be when ‘i grew up’ I would answer, ‘I want to be a science fiction writer’.
I apparently haven’t grown up yet, but I have two or three stories in the incubator.
Keep at it. Read and write. Posting here hones your narrative skills. But, write every day. Even if just a few sentences or a paragraph or two. Doing makes it real. There is nothing that can replace it. When you get an idea, write it down. Either on your computer or on paper. Do not delay. Memory degrades and shifts. That isn’t a bad thing but it is a real thing. If you dream about this stuff, like I do, then keep a dream journal. Even a few words scribbled down when you get up to go to the bathroom at 0230 can prove to be a key to hidden gems in your mind. If nothing else, it will make going to the bathroom more interesting.
Honestly, I wish you the very best on your quest. Your concepts, though not completely formed, are intriguing. I love the concept of a ‘timeless’ culture. We have them here on Terra as well. Do you know that? There are still scattered hunter-gatherer tribes who have no words for days of the ‘week’. You might wish to study them as well.
Well, that’s what specific research is for. My advice was more for becoming a long-winded know-it-all like me.
It’s not so much the testing as the thought process. You’re (probably) not going to get peer-reviewed on it. It’s a way to encourage yourself to piece together bits of knowledge you already have. You almost certainly know more than you realize, it’s just a matter of teaching yourself to use that knowledge, rather than just leaving it tucked away in the cupboards and drawers of your mind. My analysis of weather patterns was mostly founded on very basic knowledge: warm air rises, warm air can hold more moisture than cold air, and storms form where different air masses meet. There was fluff–like the bit about Gondwanaland–but it wasn’t necessary information, just flavor text. The more you connect the things you know into a whole, the more easily ideas will flow.
For an example, take the glassward plant I described in my post. It’s pretty obvious what the fungoid gets out of the symbiotic relationship–it gets a structure to inhabit where it can get periodic doses of radiation, and it gets fed sugars from photosynthesis the rest of the time. Something I didn’t go into, though, is what the green plant gets out of it–so think about it. Come up with some way the fungoid can contribute. Since it’s fictional, there is no “right” answer, you just want to come up with a plausible one using what you know about plants.
Pick a bit character from something you’re reading, someone you know almost nothing about. Make up a little backstory for them–what their job is, why they’re present where they are–based on what you do know. Speculate about where they’re going after the scene is over. Maybe they’ll turn up again later, and you can see how close you came to what the author intended, but that’s not as important as the mental exercise.
If you read an article about an animal with an unusual trait, try to come up with a reason why the trait is (or was) a competitive advantage. Again, it doesn’t really matter if you’re right, since you’re not doing zoological research. It’s just something to train your analytical abilities. It’ll help you devise more believable fictional critters.
Above all, I want to encourage you to keep at it. You have a good, creative mind, and that is a joy in itself. I hope you make the most of it.
