22 December, 2019

SCIENCE&ARTWORK | PLANET OREGON

A  long  time  ago  in  a  galaxy  far,
far  away. . . .


... More specifically, one named NGC 1365, and on the outer edge of one of it's inner spiral arms, there was this small red star, with about half the sun's mass... Which around it, existed seven major planets.



The first, was an Mercury analogue, so close to it's star it would take little more than twenty days to complete an orbit...



The second, was large hot-Neptune, holding three Mars-sized moons on it's shoulders...



The, third, fourth, and fifth, were similar looking barren worlds, with thick layers of frozen water and carbon dioxide, frozen worlds with the size of Earth, and as much as the triple of it's water content...



The sixth was a ringed gas giant, larger and heavier than Jupiter, carrying two major Mercury sized moons and millionths of asteroids and other small bodies...



And lastly but not more important, an ice giant, as large as Uranus, slowly patrolling the outer edge of this star system from afar as 18 AU.



The third moon of the second planet of this specific red dwarf, was about 10.220km in diameter, made mainly from yttrium, zirconium, tin, zinc, copper, nickel, iron, potassium, calcium, magnesium, manganese, oxygen and silicon, among other materials.

With a mass 1/3 that of Earth, it's surface gravity was about 0,56G. 
At the time we're referring to, it's atmosphere was composed of 46% Oxygen, 53% Nitrogen, 0,5% Carbon dioxide, 0,3% Argon, 0,1% water vapor and 0,1% trace gases.


The planet receives 56,68% the light Earth receives from the Sun. it's equilibrium temperature would be -24,5°C, but because of it's atmosphere - it's average surface temperature is actually around 16~20°C, it's pressure being almost halved from ours.



This world, were once called by it's inhabitants - Oregon.


On Oregon, most of it's fauna at the time were composed of what we would classify on Earth as arthropods, pseudo centipedes, millipedes, flies, wasps, cockroaches and beetles, butterflies, shrimps, crabs, lobsters, along with other creatures which mixed up characteristics from all of those and more. Think mostly of what Earth looked like during the carboniferous, but with a lack of amphibians... Except, it's fauna and flora were growing over piles of trash, plastics, wires, glass, scrap metal, and ancient ruins of long abandoned spaceships, left behind by the Shiwa - another species we will talk about later on.


This ambient turned the land life fairly hazardous for delicate skin creatures while made new niches and interesting ambient for, well, "insects".



Even though me and my brother had defined these before... This was what we came up with for the top tier - Oregonian civilization...



That's it... It's like 2 meters tall, large, kinda chubby and has big bug eyes underneath this googles and fly-like wings - actually, the inspiration for the main attributes were based on flies - believe me. It's easy to draw, these guys were actually my first attempts to an upright human shape and a sense of tridimentionality, since I would care for it's legs and eye position according to how it's watermelon shaped head would be tilted and stuff. The design changed a lot since, but the average of them all is this one which I drew a couple days ago.


Yep, pretty 1800s excuse, we were young and stuff - caring for science as much as Star Wars did, also as much as James Cameron's Avatar as well, meh...



So, based on the given environment and other lifeforms that may inhabit this planet, I thought I could come up for some more 'Scientifically Accurate' design.



So taking a look at what body plan options we have, inside the arthropod realm - we have:



Insecta


Chilopoda


Crustacean



As proportionally, the 'lobster' example has a bigger brain than that of centipedes or a generic insect.
If a crustacean brain is about 1/16th of it's length wide (rolled up in a coil in total) - is probable that the brain is nearly 2,4% of it's body volume.


Now here is a matter to scale up our oregonians, and set up a scale margin for our fauna.

A planet with half Earth's gravity exerts half the force on animals and stuff, and having as well much air to compensate for it's slightly lack of pressure relative to Earth. BUT, as long as we have doubled the oxygen content, we can ignore much of it and work with gravity and oxygen.
The Meganeura, was an ancient giant dragonfly the lived in the carboniferous, whereas oxygen levels were at 32,3%, and could be up to 70cm in wingspan, in a ratio ~2:1, it's body length could be about 35cm - despite that, it wasn't as densely packed as modern dragonflies - which can reach up to 19cm in wingspan and 12cm in body length.

The Meganeura sets about 2,91x the size (lenght) of modern dragonflies. Is currently hard to derive a direct relationship between oxygen levels and animal size, but it's indeed related.
Lobsters can in theory - grow forever, but mostly die out after a certain point because either they turn out to be too big to feed themselves as the amount of food they need exceed the amount they can catch per body weight, or the oxygen content in water is too low for an animal that big.

Let's assume there IS a direct relationship...
Working out with half the gravity would maybe give us an animal 5,8x bigger, but since 46% is 1,42x greater than 32,3%, we can work out an animal that could be as big as 8,26x an ordinary Earth animal - since we're still talking about arthropods this may be fairly accurate.


SQUARE CUBE LAW

Double a cube's length, and the surface is squared up, as well, it will fit 8 initial cubes inside the new bigger cube.
Double the size, square the length, cube the volume, that's how it works.
An animal scaled up twice the size will be as about 8x as heavy because it has 8x more volume and consequently this much as more mass to fill up that space.


Our arthropods could be in theory as heavy as 563,5x their earthly counterpart.

If the largest grasshopper can weigh 75g, assuming it can fit in a 1:0,25:0,25 block (where 1 = 10cm, this is equal to 62,5cm²) - an oregonian pseudo-grasshopper with same proportions -
82.6cm×20.65cm×20.65cm - would fit in 3,52m³, and by the insect volume we find it's density about 1,2g/cm², and thus the oregonian pseudo-grasshopper we are looking for should be as massive as 42,26kg.

For sake of curiosity, how big would a Meganeura be? 2,89m long by 5,78m wide... A real DRAGONfly.


Based on that:

I wasn't able to find the data corresponding the volume of a lobster - neither have access to lobster in order to measure it myself - I will be using this website which can evaluate the volume and nutrients contained in food, which I will be measuring - crustaceans.


For 1kg of lobster we have:

V = 1.631,64cm³ or about 0,163m³
As well, it is 78% water.
Then this lobster meat (no carapace) density is ~0,61g/cm².

If we make our oregonian plan dimensions 3.5m×0.85m×1m, we get 18,14kg - which is absurdly light for an animal that big. Let's give this animal a 2,5cm thick chitin armor (~4x thicker than lobster armor) over it's body, chitin density is about 1,6kg/m³, the armor itself would weigh about ~300g, while the whole animal would now weigh ~18,44kg... Which, still pretty much - AbSuRdLy LiGhT... Since we used insect chitin which is not part of a crustacean armor.
Crustacean armor is composed of:

biocomposite of organic matrix (60–80%) and CaCO3 minerals (20–40%) as Amorphous Calcium Carbonate and Calcite [...]

the organic matrix is predominantly chitin with the remainder as protein (≈5–7%) and small organic molecules [...]

So we may try with 70% chitin, 25% calcium carbonate and 5% copper - because why not?.
Looking for their respective densities we have an overall density of ~1,24g/cm³.
Then the armor weighs about 230g.


The interesting thing it's that the force of a lobster pinch is around 18kg per cm² - or about 1,76 MPa, now if our animal had a similar structure - it would be 18,2x bigger and stronger, about 32,16 MPa, 30x more than a human bite. Little more than the Saltwater crocodile and less than the Nile crocodile.


Now let's reflect a bit about what we are doing...
We calculated the approximate ceiling size scale for animals on this planet, and then we choose a lobster for our model and then basically scaled up this lobster to a given size.
Though, our animal isn't a lobster. See, no such animal exists on the mainland with the same build as a lobster, we need to adapt that shape and some more biology.


Base basic body plan.




Alien shrimp.


Now that we have roughly defined in what base visual traits our animal do diverge from our base animal, we may ponder - how do I make this aquatic build a terrestrial one???
The obvious and maybe the most recurred answer is "duh, give him some decent legs and lungs bro", BUT we are just trying to avoid the 1800s way of thinking about aliens.
Land dwelling arthropods have developed stronger hydraulic legs over time, see spiders and grasshoppers. Going further into the past, sea-floor arthropods occurred from soft body creatures, who needed to avoid competition on the upper waters and even whose turned to filter feeders like the ancient Ovatiovermis - 500 million years ago.
Assuming something similar would have occurred in Oregon's past would be not improbable and not impossible, by then, have we define the rise of oregonians as direct descending from this or these early soft body animals, a full armor may be disposable, if all attacks may come only from the front or directly above, then the oregonians in general may have a soft belly from where to breathe and sense their environment.

Have muscular limbs with a thin yet protecting layer of chitin, on the upper part of the body, thick plates of armor as described above to avoid fish or other similar animals to themselves - let's call them Inferiustoma, "mouth under" since they patrol the seafloor, maybe pretty much like an elongated horseshoe crab.


As the life above in the seas develop more complex and even with armor, Inferiustomes may develop stronger frontal limbs in order to penetrate and move around carcasses while they scavenge for food. By this point they may differ in three ways, the ones whose limbs kept blunt like those of velvet worms, the ones whose developed pointy structures to saw through flesh or even grab stuff and the ones who developed their frontal member into long grasping tentacles. Brachiomollia, Brachioculmus and Brachiocrinis - respectively.

From that sort of tool, we may have a turn from a scavenger array of species to passive or even active predatory style, like sea slugs. From that basic concept we can build several species with those basic traits adapted to specific niches like reefs, straits, open sea, and etc.


Like sea scorpions, this class of animal which I will refer to as Pertentopoda (probing feet) may develop other segments and arms to specific roles, just between 'arms' and 'legs', a pair or two of paddles for better swimming and another pair for larger gills or even turned into gill filaments so their breathing turn into passive breathing as water flows through it while the animal constantly swims around - notice how we went from four types of animal to eight types an their iterations by adding paddles which may evolve early as they diverge or through convergent evolution...

By growing larger and larger some pertentopods may either develop large arrays of gill filaments and look like a fancy elongated sea-lion or develop active breathing pads like horseshoes, which as they could invade shallow waters for easy prey could turn into internal lung-like organs, by this point the only types of animal that could beat such clade are pertentopods themselves, cephalopods which can turn then on their bellies as well, and armored fish that can crush through their armor. The rise of fish may force some pertentopods in continental waters or into sea floor again, in which case, they may either return into the obscure realm of deep sea floor predation and risk their lives into river beds and finally, colonize the land.


Through this line, I came up with one design based on the Brachiocrinis branch.




So far, that's it...


- M.O. Valent, 22/12/2019

FOLLOW UP

Calculating if the animal can properly feed is a great thing to point out, even if your planet can sustain such a creature like a Sarlacc (Star Wars) or Sandworms (Dune), what does the biosphere have to sustain it's existence??? I mean, a blue whale and elephant are some of the largest animals currently alive, but the current Earth's biosphere can sustain them.
Take the albatrosses for example, which can have wingspans of 3,5, not to talk about the Quetzalcoatlus - a 200kg pterosaur the size of a giraffe, the big difference between the two is that the albatross is more suitable to our current ecosystem, by among other screaming reasons, being smaller.

As you double the size of the animal, it now have 8x more volume - 8x more mass / living cells - and need 8x as much energy to sustain itself, if on the same biological rhythm as before.
A 75kg human male has to take around 2500kcal daily for the average day to day life - which is around ~33,3 kcal/kg, let's round that up around 35 kcal/kg for a well fed and exercising human, which gives us an average consumption of 104 kcal/h and 1,45 kcal/kg*h.

As well our species and the oregonian fauna are made of 3/4 water, so we can pick up the water heating values to estimate energy consumption, since the objective of your metabolic rate is among other stuff is to keep you warm - about 900kcal is what it takes to heat 75kg of water up to the human body temperature, 37°C - if the average temperature around is about 25°C, of course is more than that actually since we're always losing heat to the ambient, but remember - that's about 36% of the human energy intake.

Assuming our fauna would be mainly made from arthropods makes their body temperature pretty much around the ambient temperature, still, the energy density of a large arthropod would indeed heat it up by a few degrees.

Let's start with a target body temperature of about 22°C - a 4°C difference from the ambient, throwing in the numbers for energy we get about 36kcal for 18kg of water, if that's roughly 1/3 of energy intake it would need them it gives us ~100kcal daily:
4,16 kcal/hour, 5,5 kcal/kg and 231 cal/kg*h. Which would mean they use about 16% of the human energy needs.
Which according to our data on crustaceans, about 150g of lobster / oregonian meat are more than enough to satisfy it's daily energetic needs (that's about 134 kcal).
A single dead creature like that could provide a decent meal to about 120 other animals.

Even if we make this generic oregonian about 100kg in weight, we get 198kcal for body temperature, 550kcal daily, ~230 cal/kg*h. Feeding on 650g of animal material daily is enough.

The conclusion I draw from this - is that the oregonian fauna is absurdly energy efficient and I do imagine a vicious environment, were these giant crab and insect like creatures ravage each other for food and dominance over territory.

Picture giant carcasses being disputed by several, if no, dozens of smaller scavengers, and add other predators actively sweeping those animals, and some flyers trying to prey on the land predators while also being preyed by long range grabbing animals with mantis like arms or tentacles, definitely, in absence of chemical defense, intimidation through colors or sprouty appearance options, the definition of the average oregonian creature is a fast, tank build that crawls among the dangerous swampy scrapyard that is planet Oregon.

Where a few species may use social structures to increase their chances of survival, some with a non-passive predatory style (that eventually hunt and explore outside their current territory) may even develop further their society into using forward planing into other colonies or groups of animals days before they arrive in striking range, as the develop of planning ahead of time and reflecting over past errors lead humanity aside from other creatures to rise up as hunter-gatherers in a similar world - set in the African Savannah instead. Such a race, or set of races would use their knowledge of the ambient to set traps and steal valuable minds during raids, and maybe even establishing peace or neutral zones with other friendly groups, the use of traps and simple technology like stones and sticks may lead to the concept of common use of the intelligence among a people.

The consciousness of time and the passage of time may lead to early astronomy and the noting of seasons as planning for long periods of time, and for beyond their own lifespans to teach their brood what they have learnt outside the colony. Once they have established a society of their own, is open the door for further exploration of the outside world, with their own basic technology to help them, survival is not an immediate priority, as now they can pounder about the world and curiously explore wherever place they go, and one day light up a strange wall of monitors, one among several crashed and abandoned spaceships in their world, the misuse of that technology may lead to the downfall of several colonies, and the curious intent of comprehending those structures may create vast and richly advanced civilizations, united through the force that they guarantee to their possessors - or through the religious artifacts built by their gods...



- M.O. Valent, 30/12/2019




 

11 December, 2019

OTHER CONCEPTS | THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF THE UNIVERSE ???

THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF THE UNIVERSE (?)

In the blink of an eye, an infinitesimal point (nowhere, since time and space haven't been created yet) which contains everything... Suddenly becomes EVERYthing, just 1 second after the Big-Bang, the early Universe expanded to a trillion light-seconds across, or 33.889 light-years in diameter...

The ambient temperature of this baby universe is about 100 billion kelvin, but don't worry it will cool down over time, and grow bigger... 1 minute and 40 seconds later, the universe temperature is about a billion degrees kelvin... 56 thousand years after, the universe is now at about 9000 K, when it is ~380 thousand years old - the universe becomes transparent and the temperature go down to 3000 K... [source]
At about 15 million years after the Big-Bang, the room temperature of the universe is within the range to maintain liquid water [source]... Even so, there is no oxygen or heavy elements to bound together and make water or either rocky planets. Even if something of the kind did happen somewhere it is short lasted to even support the chemistry that leads to life for more than 2 million years.


The Oldest Stars 
It's fairly dark for at least another 97 million years, until the first generation of stars is born, feeding from hydrogen, growing as heavy as 20 up to (theoretically) a thousand solar masses, stars this big may be up to 1,5AU across, given mass-diameter formula.
Those first stars were absent of metals, which were yet to be fused in their cores and spread through the cosmos as they died in the first supernovas.
As astrophysics tells us, bigger and hotter stars live shortly, and so it is almost certain that such called Population III stars died in a few thousand years after forming. We would need to wait for some more million years for metals to occur in sufficient amounts so planets and Population II stars appear in the record...
As we can take from the Life-Span formula, such a star with 20, 100 and 1000 solar masses would live for approximately, 5,5 million years, 100 thousand years and 316 years, respectively.
Even though second generation stars would be able to form in a hundred million years after the first supernovas, still we have plenty of heavy radiation emission like UV and Gamma Ray from nearby Population III stars and their dead remnants everywhere.


Then, we push the earliest life could have arisen to a billion years afte the beginning of time, the end of the Dark Ages...

The star in which may support such an early life-bearing planet is prolly a 11th generation star, stars like this are still alive today, see Cayrel and Sneden stars.
For Sneden's mass, we have to use a Magnitude Calculator in order to get it's luminosity, and the  derive the mass, which is ~99,12x that of the Sun, what gives us ~3,71 solar masses.
And for Cayrel we find it's luminosity around 94x that of the Sun. which gives us ~3,66 solar masses.


Our hypothetical star will be the average of those, and then we have 3,68 solar masses, 96x the luminosity of the Sun, and it burn at 10.720ºC (sky blue).

Such a star would emit only about 34,4% in visible light, 52% in UV, and 13,6% in IR and Radio, with a color index B-V of little less than ~0,10.
Still, this star would only live for about 340 million years, not even enough for the formation/cooling of Earth-sized planets.


A world around this star would not bear more than 53~55 elements (all the table down to Cesium and a few Uranium and Thorium), still it would have to orbit it's star as far as 9,8AU (as far as Saturn is from our Sun) to be in the Habitable Zone, and would have a 16 year orbit.



As we can see, neither Cayrel or Sneden stars share the same stats as our calculated star, which imply they work slightly differently. Maybe - being so poor in metals, neither all that mass is dense enough that it can get so compact it burns at insane 10.000ºC, ironically, they're more similar to our Sun, being around 4720ºC, (light orange/yellow).



The planet would still have to orbit in a Saturn-analogue orbit (9,2AU for 94 Lsol) to receive as nearly as Earthly possible of sunlight, any closer than 8,2AU and it falls inside the calculated Venus Zone for it's brightness.



I'm afraid to even wonder by what means such stars are still existing, if some star like Cayrel burns at the same rate as our sun, it's initial mass for a 12 billion year long run should have been about 10% more than it is today (about 4 Msol) - for a matter of curiosity.



If any civilization or life ever managed to live around these early stars, my best guess would be low mass stars in low density regions of space away from the larger star clusters, probably on the early galactic edge, and as the galaxies grew up they probably "moved" near the galactic center (as more stars are added on upper layers it "migrates" inward).

Low mass stars can live enough for being around for dozens of billions of years and still if they formed from low density clouds they're probably safe from the immense radiation from nearby novas and early population III stars energy output.


In order to be at least 12,7 billion years old and have at least 2 billion years of life remaining, such a star would need to be 0,8545 Msol or less... Not too far from our Sun's mass, yet, being so massive we can say it would follow a similar path to our Sun, being this old - an enormous and uninhabitable Red Giant or long gone White Dwarf...



Then our next best guess is to opt for a type of star that can live as long as the universe is currently old and still be "habitable"...



Red Dwarfs

Red Dwarfs have amazing properties, they are small and can live for up to trillions of years, a hundred times more than the universe's current age, the only two down sides of red dwarfs is that they are currently very active and thus they vary a lot in brightness, as well doubling it or halving it because of their giant spots generated by their active magnetic fields, which could potentially be harmful for life as we know it - the second down side is that they evolve very slowly, increasing in brightness as their hydrogen burns out - leaving helium behind, and thus when such a star is calm enough to not randomly burn their planets, most of the galaxy's stars will be long gone, and as far as we know it - no red dwarfs are near this phase.


So as we stick with a red dwarf that is as old as 11,5 billion years for example (I'm giving it some time to gather metals and stuff for it's planets, making it younger).

Make it 0,14 Msol and it will likely live for between ~3,5 trillion years, and only then, at the end of its life spend about 5 billion years as a blue dwarf and cool down to a white dwarf.


As we discussed before, red dwarf flares can be 10.000x as powerful as our Sun. Move away 10 AU, and still the atmosphere of an Earth-sized world would be blown away in 6,7 million years, double the world gravity and it will double the effort to rip the atmosphere away, still - 13,4 million years aren't enough, you may quadruple the amount of atmosphere and it will just get to 53,6 million years, even the activity attenuation in this time-scales is negligible.



Using the prediction model for a star like Barnard's Star, it will stay on the main sequence for 2.5 trillion years, followed by five billion years as a blue dwarf, during which the star would have one third of the Sun's Luminosity.



Let's assume that this model holds for the overall population with masses around 0,16 Msol, a little bit above and bellow that.



The model tells us that these stars will be on main sequence for between 559 billion years (0,20 Msol) and +10 trillion years (0,075 Msol). Which means that red dwarfs are on main sequence for a minimum of 99,991% of their lives (99.998% for Barnard's Star).



Going with 0,2 Msol, have about 30% of the Sun's diameter, it will be as hot as 2480 K and will likely live for about 1 trillion years, and this star will have about 9% the Sun's surface area, and shine with 0,357% the Sun's luminosity.

It's theoretical habitable zone would expand from 0,053AU to 0,18AU. While planet formation would not be much probable closer than 0,02 AU.


Gliese 3470 - based on Kepler's Third Law and it's only known planet's orbital data, has a mass of ~0,35689 Msol, and then a luminosity of about 2,7% that of the Sun.



Our then calculated Red Dwarf (which I will refer to as AMB3R for now) is much more dimmer than Gliese 3470, 7,5x dimmer and thus could we say it is emitting much less radiation and particles to space than Gliese 3470, instead of being 10.000x as much active than the Sun, it could be about 1.326x as much active or even less -  a quick look at red dwarfs around 0,14~0,27 Msol show that they are flare stars.

The closest in mass I was able to find was Ross 614, which may flare almost once per hour, though it had not much further information about it's flare period, Kruger 60 B whoever, doubles in brightness and returns to normal over 8 minutes.


So AMB3R flares once an hour, doubling it's overall brightness and returns to normal in 10 minutes after the pulse, it's overall brightness over long periods would be around 0,416% Lsol (1/6th of the time at double intensity and 5/6th at normal intensity), peaking at ~0,714% Lsol.



Building a 360ºx360º grid on the star's surface we get a 129.600 square degrees of surface, and as our planet would only be exposed to 360 degrees on it's orbit, there is a 0,0027% chance of it being hit if the star is equally likely to fire at any direction each time, 24 times a day - it is about 0,0646% chance.


Assuming only flares fired directly at the planet would be harmful - and that it would, the planet may be hit 23,25x per local year (for a planet at 0.095 AU).


Now considering flares are pretty slow, about 1500km/s, for a planet that takes 25 days to move around it's star, it would take about 6,6 days for it to reach the planet, when it will be nearly as 95 degrees ahead of the flare, still, if we now consider only the ones fired at the right inclination and towards to where the planet will be in 6,6 days, the chance still pretty much the same, this world would be certainly exposed to 1 flare a day.



Now, solar magnetic activity is more common and intense from the 30° latitude on both sides of the equator, updating our grid, it gives us 21.600 square degree to pick from, which takes our odds of being hit by a flare to 138,24x per local year, or at least 5,5x per day.


Flares that would reach levels of energy on the order of 1,32E23 J (132 zettajoules) or greater. Coronal matter of our sun is about 1 million K, though, the black body radiation calculator only accept inputs up the order of 10.000 K, which seems good enough as heat radiates away in space and the amount of mass in a flare may also distribute the heat and our star isn't that hot as well, according to that model then, AMB3R's flares would emit 2.01365e+16 photons per joule on the 400 picometres wavelength, and looking at how many joules we have, the flare generates up to 4.43003e+36 photons of X-ray, which if we distribute towards our planet using the inverse square law and the given value of 5.5691e+20 phot/s/m² as a base, gives us 0.0137x what we started with - or about 7.6297e+18 phot/m², which is incredibly dangerous, as this is 8,47... S E X T I L L I O N times more intense than an X9 solar flare.

~3,792 KJ per square meter, a human body area facing the star at this moment may be around 1/2 it's total body area, or about 0,95m², and may weight about 75kg, which gives us an exposition to 48 Grays of radiation - per second... for about 10 minutes... 29.100Gy in total... That's taking about 41,5 million X-ray scans, in just a couple minutes... Tobe exposed to an event like this, for just one second, is already 10x the required lethal dose of radiation for a human. It is even enough to kill the archaea Thermococcus gammatolerans.


Even if biology on this world somehow miraculously evolved to survive such radiation levels - electricity technology would be a struggle, if not impossible, they'd have long collapsed under their scientific limitations or be swept away by time eons ago...

X-rays and UV radiation emitted by solar flares can affect Earth's ionosphere and disrupt long-range radio communications. Direct radio emission at decimetric wavelengths may disturb the operation of radars and other devices that use those frequencies [...]

Short answer to ultra ancient civilizations, NO, long answer, I dunno, but as far as we know, it is a big NO.


Fun Fact

The most voluminous red dwarf is on the AU Microscopii, which is on the constellation of Microscopium (Microscope).

And today it's my 18th birthday :)
- M.O.Valent, 11/12/2019
 

18 September, 2019

GEOGRAPHY | PART 1 | ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION AND FIRST CLIMATE DRAFT

PURE DESERTS, RAIN FOREST, OR ICY PLANETS? PROBABLY BUT QUITE UNLIKELY...

Hello there, Valent here, lets go down to climate/biome definitions before we make a map of our planet and stuff, and if you already have it, well, it may need some changes in it's climate.



Well, just before we go down to practical stuff, I would recommend a look into Edgar's (Artifexian) material on the topic, so here a list of his videos, not much more than an hour of watching videos and taking notes:





  

4. Worldbuilding: How To Design Realistic Climates 1

5. Worldbuilding: How To Design Realistic Climates 2

6. Worldbuilding: Climate Zones Of RETROGRADE Planets

7. Albedo: Mapping with Temperature

Nice, with that in mind, you might already have hand drawn your planet, or digitally made a map, I want to present you with Donjon SciFi World Generator, it creates customized maps and gives you a sample of stats to work with, like planet mass and atmosphere composition, all generated within a seed which could be random, or copied for later recover of the map stats.

The first map of Paart was been generated using Donjon, I will work it forward and backwards in time in order to represent each Era of Paart. So let's start with Paart during the Eoepertonian Period, which came looking like this:

If you haven't saved any of your seeds or stats, don't worry, we can recover much of that using the Image Color Summary, which tells you what are the color proportions in an image, since I haven't saved any stats, I am expecting to get landmass area (orange), icecap cover (white) and ocean area (blue), from it:

Oceans 66,6%

Landmass 23,3%

Icecaps are 10%

This method can be very useful in figuring out how much area a climate covers of our planet, after we color each climate.

Let's first take at look at our planet physical stats:

With a rotational period this long, 22,094h, we can much expect Paart's winds to behave pretty Earth-like, divided in 6 cells.

I also divided the planet's crust into 12 plates, that will be 1,8x as active as Earth's.

Plate Map: 

 

Here a globe gif:

Seems alright to me, so this are the Paartene Winds Cells:

And then, here are the Simplified Currents Map:

 

And now with enhanced relief and currents, ready to work on climates:


Here is the final climate map, as following the videos instructions:

The color purple is a new 'biome' native to Paart, is rocky sterile land of titanium/bismuth and aluminum/ferric compounds.

And here is how it ended up as the final approximation of natural color, note the grey tones of natural rock of titanium carbide in the deserts sand and the blueish shades of green of local vegetation.

 

Based on this rough albedo model, average and medium channels are 66 and 47 respectively, on a scale of 255, it means our values fluctuates roughly between 25,88% and 18,43%, by area 37,24% of our planet surface is responsible for directly reflecting light, clouds and land/ice.

By color code, the minimum albedo is  9,4% and max is 55,6%.

Since 18,43 our lowest average, and is 71,21% of 25,88, we could extrapolate a maximum of 33,12 for our albedo, and average Paart's albedo at 25,81%.

Which means Paart reflects ( 25,81 / 29 = 0,89 - 1 = -0,11 ) ~11% less light than Earth does...

Updating climate data for these new conditions:

Paart's average temperature would wander around 38ºC, 311K, or 100F, way hotter than the previous calculations on atmosphere (13ºC).

As such, atmospheric data at Sea Level: 0,948atm, ~38ºC, 37,13 moles per m³, air density 1,083kg/m³.

Composed of 81,34% N²; 16,51% O²; 1,2% Ar; 0,855% CO²; 0,065% CH⁴; 0,023% Other trace gases, an oxidizing atmosphere. Note the greenhouse situation with 36x more methane 2x as much CO² than Earth does.

Given the amount of work this took to accomplish, I consider making maps in 85~120Myr intervals.

Here are some pictures I took with my phone (oof reasons) rendered with PlanetMaker.

Paart's Western Hemisphere

Paart's Eastern Hemisphere

And a little bit of spoiler for what comes next in 38Myr...

 

 Bye, and good modeling ^.<

-M.O. Valent, 18/09/2019

HIGHLIGHTS

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