PAART | MESOCAMBRIAN | CAMBRIAN | PART 2.5

Water-Carbon based Life | Why is it the way to go?

THE 6TH BEST ATOMIC FLAVOR - CARBON

Ah... Carbon, the Periodic Table's main subject for most high-school students together with Oxygen and Hydrogen.

Carbon is an interesting sort of element, and I think the vast majority of you are used to its amazing properties. Carbon is an extremely stable element, it is able to form different lattices, which vary from graphites to diamonds, when in the presence of other elements it can make up to 4 electronic bonds with them. For the industry apart from these characteristics, carbon is extremely important in base reactions to refine metals, build polymers, and drastically increase the heat resistance of certain components, among other uses.

In general, carbon plays an important role in our society, and as it is of common knowledge at this point, our ecosystem and life as we know it.

There is one question that utterly bothers me about carbon, and has kind of always been in sci-fi writer's heads for quite a while, "is carbon-based life is the only way to go?".

That often if not ALWAYS come with the extra of questioning the place of hydronium oxide as well, a stable and highly corrosive substance - also known as Water - as a solvent for life.

A SUBSTITUTE FOR CARBON?

Wikipedia cites at least 17 hypothetical alternatives to the Water-Carbon based life (among other affairs) we have on Earth. Talking about building blocks, ie, substitutes for Carbon, we often stumble upon Boron and Silicon, some outliers go as far as to consider Arsenic and Sulphur too.

BORON

Boron and Borane are interesting interactions, but their abundances nonetheless rule them out as a likely possibility at all, Boron is even rarer than Fluorine, akin to Vanadium.

Take for example diborane (B₂H₆), it is only liquid between -164,8°C and -92,5°C, a 72,3 K window in the energy spectrum and a very low energy window. Needless to say, diborane cannot exist in an environment with oxygen or water too, as it reacts violently to form boron trioxide (a powder) and boric acid (also a powder).

SILICON

Silicon is notable for making 4 bonds like Carbon does - but unlike carbon, organosilicon reactions have to take place at low temperatures because the optimal medium for these reactions are alkenes, alkynes and ketones. If the medium is acetylene, the temperature of the world has to be stable at -80°C and at 1,27 atm. For ethylene, the temperature must be between -170°C and -103°C. And for Acetone, it is between -95°C and 56°C. 

The major problem here is that the most energetic molecules that can be derived here need a lot of energy to be broken and release their energy in exchange, see Ketoses for example, way above the boiling point of many of the proposed solvents.

Si-C bonds are weaker than C-C and C-O bonds, but Si-O bonds are stronger than the others, hence why we find silicon mostly in rocks bound to a given amount of oxygen - and even if somehow there is any free silicon around the planet, we can discard its viability as building block as it is substantially less electronegative than hydrogen. Which helps maintaining molecules together but not so close, in which case Silicon becomes the positive end of the molecule. It is so "useless" for base life chemistry because it is very damn stable, and silicon chemistry requires lots of energy and sometimes even Platinum catalysts.

ARSENIC AND SULFUR

These two elements oxidize each other, and react with water and oxygen as well, both are unstable chemicals and their basic compounds are like time-bombs that run faster the hotter it gets (really fast at +100°C), from which Arsenic is the most interesting. Arsine is stable at narrow range of temperatures (-111°C to -62°C). Arsenic compounds tend to also form metallic complexes and crystals which are by default absurdly stable and nonreactive given the planetary conditions. Arsenic is also a billion times rarer than Carbon.

A SUBSTITUTE FOR WATER?

Oxidane, or chemically H₂O, is a very peculiar molecule in several ways, in general that is linked to its electronegativity differential.

Oxygen is one of the most electronegative elements in the periodic table, that is, it has a strong tendency to attract electrons to itself when bonding, that's what gives oxygen its oxidative properties. In turn, hydrogen cannot hold its single electron near the oxygen, so the electron pair is mostly present around the oxygen while the nude protons cluster on one side of the molecule, giving the molecule an overall positive and negative ends. This is an important quirk of water, because it allow water to stick to itself through hydrogen bonds. So in water, every water molecule is connected to at least other four molecules, and so forth.

From this, water is particularly resistant to atomic motion - that is - resistance to heating up. Water has an absurdly high heat capacity (4,2 J/g°C), and it helps it to remain liquid in wide array of pressures and temperatures.

But let's look at other elements near oxygen, if those characteristics are from polar substances, sure of water's neighbors might be just as good.

If you add Hydrogens to Nitrogen, Oxygen and Fluorine - you get Ammonia (NH₃), Oxidane (H₂O), and Fluorane (HF).

Based on sheer electronegativity and bonding strength, fluorane should be stronger than other substances. Except it is not, because molecule geometry also matters, for the maximum strength of bonds, fluorane would have bond linearly with other molecules, which it doesn't because fluorine is so much electronegative that it keeps from bonding with more than 2 molecules at a time - instead bonding in zig-zag patterns, like so:

Likewise, when we look at Ammonia, its molecule can only bond with 3 others...

So actually, the boiling point temperature goes like: H₂O > NH₃> HF because of the number of bonds they are able to make.

The polar nature of water also makes it an optimal solvent for the majority of molecules, because the water molecules can nudge themselves into the weaker bonds of substances and separate their components through hydrolysis, take for example how paper dissolves in a water because the water molecules break the cellulose bonds separating the glucose monomers.

Oxygen is also way more abundant in the universe than any of the other two elements, oxygen is tens of times more abundant than nitrogen, while nitrogen is hundreds of times more abundant than fluorine.

WHAT ARE POSSIBLE EXOTIC WORLDS?

Given what we've seen here so far, there is reason to believe that Water-Carbon based life is, if not dominant by a vast margin (say like, "90%"), the only type of biochemistry possible in the Universe as we know it.

Besides the small-scale chemical properties of oxidane, it also serves a huge temperature buffer substance, narrowing down the temperature variation in the atmosphere of the planet because of its high specific heat capacity, the other fluid that is just as good in this is Ethanol (and it is just half as good). Any planets sporting other volatiles would have wild temperature variations between day and night or throughout the year unless they were extremely distant from their stars with circular orbits.

Silicon is still narrowly up to debate because how it still holds potential for the genesis of proto-organic molecules.

The only other water-analog molecule I cannot find strong evidence against for possibility biochemistry is hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) - all other hydrides can be easily destroyed by the primary atmosphere of a young planet, such as how selane can be created by aluminum compounds and water in the early crust, but dissociated into fine selenium ash and water when reacting sulfur dioxide from volcanic activity.

So we have team of carbon as a building block, and either oxidane, ethanol, and sulfane as solvents (heat capacity 4,2 > 2,4 > 1,0 J/g°C), each with decreasing boiling points and decreasing commonality.

OTHER TYPES OF EXOTIC BIOCHEMISTRY...

Within our established limitations here, we can have:

ALTERNATE CHIRALITY

Chirality is an asymmetric property of certain molecules, that is, if your superimpose the reflections of this certain molecule on top of another, they won't match.

In the example above, molecules 1 and 2 have the same structure and chemical formula - but they are mirror images of the other, molecule 1 has the red radical on the Right side while molecule 2 has the red radical on the Left side.

It might not be that big of a deal at first, after all, it is chemically identical, right? Well, it happens that molecular machinery in life will not be able to fit the lock&key mechanism of their chemical reactions half of the time, and so it adapts to only accept and use one chirality of a molecule at a time, and sometimes molecules have drastically different effects if they are flipped on their chirality to one organism - and so the ecosystem of Earth has adapted to use only one chirality of glucose, only one chirality of ATP, and only one chirality of vitamin B, and so on so forth.

Because of this, had luck or the conditions of our planet been any different, it is possible that life worked its way around other sets of chiralities, and so the same may be valid for other planets. Imagine Earth food being poisonous to aliens because it reacts different within their organism, and vice-versa - there is N possibilities within this field.

ALTERNATE DNA STRUCTURE

Under general circumstances, a DNA or RNA world is a given to form with 4 base pairs, ATGC - but these are not the only possible base pairs for a DNA-like structure, under very specific conditions (a lab as far as we know nowadays), the base pairs PZBS or d5SICS-dNaM may be included, partially mixed, or be the only base pairs akin to ATGC is in our DNA, and so depending on the nature of life in a certain planet, DNA may be partially compatible or not compatible at all.

If this really holds true, assuming 4 bases is the minimum optimal number of bases you need, there are at least between 4 and 15 other possible DNA alphabets than our own, opening a world of exotic amino-acid synthesis and gene expression.

"CARBON CHAUVINISM"

Carbon chauvinism is a relatively recent term to designate the quality of those who assume that extraterrestrial life must be similar to life on Earth. In particular, the term applies to those who assume that the molecules responsible for the chemical processes of life must be based on carbon as the main structural element.

This attitude suggests that humans, as carbon-based life forms that have never found life beyond their planet, may have difficulty conceiving the existence of alternative biochemicals. The term was first used in 1973, when Carl Sagan described this and other human chauvinisms that limited his imagination about possible distinct forms of extraterrestrial life in his book The Cosmic Connection.

However there is sufficient mathematical and experimental proof of carbon's superior thermodynamic and chemical properties. Such ideas are not akin to Eugenics or the belief in Miasma, but more like the theory of relativity, which holds its predictions, and has taken several decades for the nearly full understanding and observation of described phenomenon, such as space curvature and black holes. It is such a fundamental property of chemistry one would need to completely re-write physics in order to make non-carbon based life possible at all.

It is not a matter of preference, but a matter of understanding that the surrounding chemistry of life, such as energetic molecules like ATP and structural cell membranes can only exist within the boundaries of water-carbon chemistry. One cannot completely rule-out the possibility until we have explored a substantial number of planets, but recognize other hypothetical biochemistries as significant possibilities is outright foolish and a pseudo-skeptical posture - alike people that "doubt" the existence of outer space like planets and other suns because the sky is so "fundamentally" different from the earth that our physics should just break. Or doubting the existence of atoms, despite chemical and physical phenomena being accurately described by atomic theory.

Now, I'm not willing to touch on the subject of aplanetary life, like microscopic string-particle things inside stars or in deep space, because it is not scientifically falsifiable, and thus one cannot put themselves through the problem of discussing it.

But I can see how one sees faces carbon problem like how we see today the ancient Greeks discussing the possibility of atoms in the first place. The problem with the idea that we may only be on the tip of the iceberg is that nowadays, we have methods and a vast disparity of technological superiority. We do understand the fundamentals of physics, and arguing against those fundamentals is like arguing against trigonometry - one just can't...

- M.O. Valent, 14/11/2021

OTHER CONCEPTS | SPACESHIP DESIGN & SPACE WARFARE | PART 3 - A PRACTICAL APPROACH

OUT TO THE BATH TUB FIELD TESTING

It's been one year since the last time we talked about Space Warfare here on Hard Sci-Fi.

Let's recap what happened of the course of the previous two posts:

PART 1 - MOST SHIPS IN SCIENCE FICTION MAKE NO SENSE

PART 2 - WHY COMMON COUNTER ARGUMENTS MAKE EVEN LESS SENSE, EVEN IN-UNIVERSE

In Part 2, I left the post on a cliffhanger about disruptive camouflages - highlight to a more sci-fi approach to Dazzle camouflage.

Amongst other types of camouflage, I had also included chemicals that disguise the ship as another object like a comet, and reflective panels that can be tweaked in order the flash light-rays into or away from the enemy (also known as mirrors).

This time, I'm willing to test some of those approaches, in a simple observation test, simulated in a 3D modeling software.

So, meet our test ships:

NSC 042 - SCITALIS

This design is inspired by the myriad of accurate and cool-looking spaceships created by MarkPoe

The Nuclear-Powered Support Cruiser 's role is to ensure the security of high-value targets by supporting the escort effort with massive suppressive firepower, hence why it has a ridge along it's hull, from where 75x 80mm Fast-Pace Artillery guns (FPA), and 6x 300kg Kinetic-Kill Disperser weapons (KKD) - per side.

So basically each broadside holds 75x machine guns and 6x shotguns.

Why this ship carries relatively small machine guns and a couple of shotguns are because of two reasons.

1. The sharp acute holes of the bullets are meant to be very hard to find and repair compared to the amount of damage to O2, electronics and heatsink systems on the enemy - firing along a path line grants more potential hits and suppressive fire. 

2. Shotguns are crude in space, and mainly if the enemy is accompanied - granting sector clearance nearby because of the nearly invisible but deadly pellets (and there is 300kg of them per shot), such weapons can also intercept HTK vehicles and drones inbound, making very large projectiles or missiles not so useful from certain angles.

The name Scitalis, refers to the medieval beast that sports beautiful shiny marks - pretty straight forward.

The four plates are shielding the fuel tanks against debris and projectiles, the two skirts are sections of parabolic surfaces, so incoming kinetic projectiles are ricocheted away from the ship's hull, the internal reflection angles were carefully chosen so any shots fired against them wouldn't redirect the bullets to sensible parts of the beaming and engines.

The standard combat instance for this ship would then be facing the enemy at 3/4, with minimal exposition of sensible parts and maximum weapon coverage (like the top-right window view).

OTHER CONCEPTS | FTL DEPICTION PART 2

 ...BUT THERE ARE NO SEAT-BELTS, SIR

In the last post, we talked about how we should accurately depict Faster-Than-Light travel.

Using doppler shifts and various >cough< plot devices >cough< methods of choice.

Now, this is also a guide on how to gauge the mean age of an interstellar civilization, by it's size - you will see how in a moment.

First, let's pose a problem.

Imagine how many stars there are in a 50ly radius, 100? 1k? 10k? Let's stick with 1k for now - let's say that 20% of those stars hold habitable planets we wanna settle, so 200 places to go, quite a schedule, isn't it?

So a bubble of 50ly has a volume of ~523.598,7ly³ (593,6 thousand cubic ly), or roughly 13,78ly in between stars with habitable planets (cube root of volume divided by amount).

If we plot a perfect route, that lines up every star in these roughly 13,78ly space, we get (200)*13,78 = 2756,47ly to travel.

Theoretically we could launch 200 missions at the same time, now, is it feasible? Not really, because of the sheer amount of personnel and resources to do so.

Let's say we launch a mission every 4 years, and that we take about 1 year to establish a decent outpost over there (being extremely optimist).

That gives us +1.000 years of work.

Now, the final touch is know at what speed are we traveling - let's calculate for 0,1c, then do the same for 1,0c and 10c.

(2756,47ly / 0,1c) + 1000yrs = 28.564,7yrs.

28,56kyr ago mankind had just invented pottery, who knows if we will even be around back on Earth in 28,6 thousand years?

That goes down to 3,75kyr for 1,0c - then 1,27kyr at 10c.

We see that - in very simple words - traveling at subluminal speeds sucks to an awful lot.

But when traveling at the speed of light and beyond, that time is only determined by how fast we can do stuff after getting there, once there is a point that travel is nearly instant to the destination, but people still do work at people-speed.

Now, settling all planets in a space with double the radius would take not double the time, but 8x the time (square-cube law), so even at the best of 1,27kyr at 10c, it would take ~10 thousand years to do so.

Again, it's a hell of a pain to go further and further from home even at superluminal speeds.

Things like this are the reason that - I, personally - don't believe we have been, and won't be for a long looong time, visited by any aliens. It's so unimaginably hard to do so that is just so improbable to happen, simple like that. If one wanna believe anyone has been ever able to build an empire that's 100ly in radius, well, they aren't even close to us because their radio-bubble would be at least 20kly across, and more realistically detectable in the whole galaxy by such timescales.

What I would use to explain UFOs? WHATEVER, whatever but aliens, extra-dimensional beings are 2nd in line, but I really doubt the shapes they present for a number of other reasons, leaving it blank for either a complete hoax or someone's experimental aircraft despite the denials.

TIME DILATION AND CAUSALITY ISSUES

The above equation works to figure the time dilation relative to one traveling at subluminal speeds - in other words - the time one left on Earth experiences (t'sec) during your travel time tsec.

For our first example at 0,1c, we expend over 27,56kyr traveling from our perspective, however on Earth it will be over ~27,7kyrs.

It gets worse if we wanted to go faster, at 0,95c that time for one on Earth becomes over 88,26kyr.

At 0,99962c, the perceived time would be of 1Myr.

If we want to go at superluminal speeds though, we must invert the sign to:

The above form tells you how much time has passed outside the ship while traveling at some multiple of lightspeed.

The problem is that any dilation for superluminal speeds is negative - that means if any traveler at 1,5c for 1 day, would arrive at their destination 1d19h (1,80 days) in the past relative to departure time.

That clearly violates causality, if one did such a trip to the outer Kuiper Belt and back to Earth they could interact with themselves and mess their own timeline which shouldn't be possible.

The same goes for instantaneous travel or communication.

Imagine that I sit down for a small lunch listening to the radio before flipping the switch on my spaceship, then, I travel to Saturn at 10c, and from Saturn I beam an INSTANTANEOUS message back about my experience.

The distance to Saturn in light-units is about 1h17min, so it would take me little over 7min42s to get there are 10c, relativity tells that I arrive at Saturn about 1h17min23s in the past relative to Earth's departure time...

Now, when I beam my instant message back to Earth, it will catch with my past self before the launch.

If I decide to go back 5min after or beam another message at 10c instead of instantaneous, the time dilation will cancel out plus the time it took between my arrival and the action - giving people on Earth the impression that me or the second message came back 5min after I left, even though for both of us it would have taken about 7,7 minutes.

so, yea - that's really big problem right there

THE 'PLANET OF THE APES' EFFECT

Another thing is that if you accept there is no way to travel faster than light without violating causality, then you cannot travel at THE speed of light as well, because not only it would require infinite energy to do so - but because it imposes infinite time dilation, ie, instantaneous travel, at the cost of also arriving by the End of Time.

Traveling very close to c, at 99,999...99% could be virtually instantaneous to the crew but cost thousands to billions of years for those "stationary".

Which by itself is an interesting plot, oh wait, Planet of the Apes (1968) did that already.

The point I'm trying to make bringing up causality is that one crew that travels at such a considerable portion of the speed of light or/and uses cryosleep is, by default - anachronistic in nature.

Society's logistical apparatus as we know can't survive in such an environment, not in practice.

Imagine you people of present day USA, traveling to Epsilon Eridani (10,5ly) to retrieve whatever amount of tons of unnobtainium, say at 0,5c, it would take you 5,25 years to do so, while 6 years go by on Earth, then 12 years later for your family on Earth (and 10,5yrs for you) you finally come back - except now half of the US now belongs to China and the New Malasyan Federation, in other words, your boss probably isn't around anymore and all that ore now belongs to the Chinese people. GREAT, ISN'T IT? :D

Now, the faster you travel, the greater the chance of some weird shit messing up with the world you knew before you left - you are essentially a Time-Traveler, and the only constant environment and people you will ever know from this point onwards are your ship and crew.

This stability may not be really a problem for short-term effects like one or two decades, but once things get to life-time lengths - things start to get really complicated with the logistics of it as I already said. Because of this, there is no real reason for like alien invasions to take place because they need water or some super valuable mineral, because when they return home their people will be long gone already.

5 QUASI-RULES FOR A NEAR-LIGHTSPEED TRAVELER

#1. The ship and crew are your only home and family now.

#2. What belongs in a system, stays on that system - in general it's just not worth bringing it to your homeplanet.

#3. Only departure from a system when you are absolutely sure you are done with business - there is no time for mistkaes.

#4. Every jump means you will find a new world, both geographically and culturally different, be cautious and comprehensive with the people of the future, you're the caveman there.

#5. Your words have absolutely more power than everyone else's depending on one's perspective, your experiences are always fresher than everyone else's and your knowledge and even equipment will have a high-value for various groups - be careful and have minimal interaction whenever possible.

#6. Your ship is a literal Relativistic Weapon, so NEVER under any sane circumstance aim your ship directly at any planet or moon. 

 

THE SILVERLINING FOR ALIEN OVERLORDS...

If from the perspective of enthusiasts and explorers, it really sucks to expend thousands of years away from home - for the ones with questionable morals and motives, it's the perfect tool for oppressive conduct.

WHAT? But you just said that traveling at such speeds and long distance sucks and how it totally disproves interstellar empires and aaaaaaaaaaaaa

- probably you right now

I'm not contradicting myself - in fact - the same principle still apply, to travel for such a big volume of space such as a 100ly radius bubble it would take over thousands of years - still, way less than for people "stationary" on those worlds.

Let's imagine that I want to secure my brand new stellar empire doesn't fall short - well, I prepare a set of highly trained personnel and commanders (maybe even myself) and create a society in space, constantly traveling between points at near lightspeed.

The planets I conquered will tend to deviate from the norm and that's a fact, look how's the US and Russia compared to how it was 50 years ago, but instead of me and my comrades die in 50 years time, I just come back having aged only 15,6 years after traveling at 95% lightspeed to put things back in line.

Like this, if such one leader or ideology would have crumbled after 50 years, it can now survive 3x as long because of this tiny detail.

Now boarding a society in an alien planet, giving them 10 years to surrender and actually coming back in 10 years (~3yrs for you) with an entire orbital bombardment armada becomes really practical.

The downside of this is that your society has now gone totally space faring, so no permanent surface settlements unless one wants and manages to abandon such weird way of life :b

... AND SPACE FLOOD-ARKS

Also if for some reason your species really need long storage of DNA and other sensible specimens because of a cataclysmic event such as Nuclear War, Gamma-Ray Burst, or Asteroid Impact - well the long-term effects those leave on the planet can be easily overlooked because you can feasibly fast-forward to centuries in the future when the environment has recovered back to normal. Of course, assuming you have already mastered near-lightspeed travel in the first place.

- M.O. Valent, 11/06/2021

OTHER | MOUNTAIN HEIGHTS

TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD

When worldbuilding we are lead to add a couple of big mountains on the map and just call it a day - but, how tall should they be? *cue music*

That's a rather complicated question, to put it on simple terms, it mostly depends on the compressive strength and density of the material used on the mountain, and planet gravity.

The amount of weight above the mountain base shouldn't exceed the compressive strength of the material, ie, stress - or else the entire thing will collapse back to stability.

Let's assume our mountain is made of granite, which have a density of ~3g/cm³, and a compressive strength of 200MPa.

Let's make our mountain a cone of base h and radius r - it's volume will be given by:

Since (1/3)*π approaches ~1 (1,03669), we can get rid of that part for simplicity sake, leaving us with r²h.

The weight of our mountain can then be calculated by multiplying it's density, planet gravity and volume altogether.

Now, our mountain is a cone, which means that it has a round base, to get how much force it exerts on the base, we need to know the base area, which is a circle of area = πr².

So the little count below should give us the stress exerted by our mountain.

Switching to solve for hmax, we get:

Solving for our granite mountain, we get just over 6,79~7,84km, within the density range of pure granite.

If something seems wrong to you, knowing that the Everest is 8,8km high, you're not alone - first of all, this model assumes uniform density, which let's be realist - don't really exist in most natural formations, because the Earth's crust exist in layers, which are twisted by geological processes over the eons.

Another very important factor people seem to glance over is the stable shape of our mountain, we can't just throw any r and h in our equation too.

For any material that's being piled, there's a certain angle base-to-top up to which the pile is stable - the Repose Angle - which is defined by the specific material's static friction and grain-size.

The repose angle of a pile is an important concept in Civil Engineering because it helps saving material and funds when building earthen structures, bases, and grain silos. The smaller the repose angle the better the flow properties of the material used - by opposition, the higher the repose angle the worse the flow properties, and thus, more rigid is our material.

Okay, knowing the angle of repose of our mountain helps us to better understand it's dimensions.

There are two ways to easily get to those values:

    1. Figure out a way to find the exact materials in question, mix them, and then pour over a plane to a determined height or base width, and take the measurements yourself.

    2. Take the data from someone that has gone through method 1.

On relatively small piles, we can assume dry grain size to be the most important factor, such as:

Although mountains are made of grains and crystallized material, it's much more cohesive than a pile of sand or muscovite clay.

Also, the grains within rock are compressed by their neighbors along the very vast majority of the rocky structure. So rather than considering grain size, we will be using static friction coefficients, and determine fault planes along which will form our mountain's slope - ie, an inclined plane problem.

Through a series of transformations, we get to this:

The angle (in degrees, not radians) at which a body/grain will roll downhill is equal to the inverse tangent of the static friction coefficient.

The problem here arises from the fact that it varies a lot from the materials used - you see, a piece of glass will slide more against concrete than a piece of rubber.

Concrete-to-Rock friction coefficients, depending whether it is wet or dry rock and what rock was tested varies from 0,50 to 0,70, with Concrete-to-Concrete friction having an average of 0,53.

With this in hand, our mountains can have slopes between 26,56º and  34,99º.

Now, we get to the though parts.

We know the angle of our slope, let's pick 32,47º, and determine that the base of our mountain is 16km wide, the crest of our mountain is at half that distance so 8km - to figure out the height, we just have to multiply the tangent of our angle by the base length (8km).

We get just about 5km, which, thrown into our stress equation, becomes 150MPa - which is little bellow our granite compressive strength limit, and so, just about okay.

I can't resist but to estimate things on Paart, so using the same constraints, this mountain could be 373m taller before having the same pressure at the base, implying a slope angle of 34,36º.

Calculating for a mountain that's just over the strength limit but with the apparent density of the Everest, we get about 9,5km tall, with a base width varying between 19,0 ~ 13,6km in radius depending on whether it's slope is less or more steep - compared to Everest's approximate 11,4km.

A simple image showing the proportions of the two mountains, the one on Paart has been temporarily named to Caelum (sky) mons.

(relative to immediate surrounding terrain, measured from Everest Camp I at 6km to summit gives 3,7km, following the steepness to sealevel takes that to 11,4km).

Of course, mountains aren't just giant rocky cones that elevate above plains of terrain, mountains like the Everest originate from mountain ranges full of convoluted systems of canyons sculpted by the drainage of snow over the ages.

surrounding terrain to Everest in the Himalayas

Be sure to give your world's top a couple of sister mountains that branch away into more and more along the entire mountain range.

Below a table of reference materials that you could use to make a mountain out of.

Theoretically, you could define the different layers of material in your planet's crust where the mountain forms, and then, calculate mountains within mountains for every material and thus determine what it's made of (relative to a cut at sealevel). But that's up to you now.

- M.O. Valent, 04/06/2021

A Detailed Approach on District 9's Prawn Language | Part 1 | The Script

MNU SPREADS LIES!

Unfortunately, the original blog that this title refers to has been taken down by Sony Pictures.

ANYWAY - this is actually a pretty sudden idea I had earlier this day (saturday 5) while in the shower - District 9 is what I consider the masterpiece of Neill Blomkamp's work as writer and film maker. It is out of the bat an outstandingly complex, bold and action and drama intense movie from start to finish. It has so much to offer that I'm sometimes afraid of what could come out with a possible sequel if it ever gets to happen - say it's like to wait for Half-Life 3.

District 9 is an 11yo sci-fi drama/action movie by now, and why does it still deserve a lot of attention from the public? - by that I mean, us sci-fi nerds... The Alien Language.

Keep in mind that most of the information and material used throughout this post is sourced from the movie itself, and not by interviews and obscure blogs - for the reasons bellow.

Like I said, District 9 is a decade old already, pretty much like No Man's Sky (which I plan to study the glyphs of), it had the time to build on a solid fanbase, at least for a while (seems like at most 4yrs after the movie came out), and it actually impresses me how little there is actually about how deep does the rabbit hole goes on it's language affairs - the alien language is a solid aspect of the movie, not just a background quirk of pure gibberish in an alien key-set like some movies and games do.

The Non-Human Glyphs

In the movie, the aliens have been around for 28 years, landing in South Africa by 1982, and so the humans had nearly 3 decades to learn the alien language and them to learn english - and both species seem to understand each other with reasonable if not great success - without needing one to actually speak english or the alien tongue, Han Solo style.

What does impress me a lot, of course, in the context of the movie it makes a lot of sense, in general that humans are stupid and racists, but is that the alien glyphs have been around for a long time, and still, people just label it as "gang marks" and stuff of the kind - it's never said on the movie, but it's rather probable that the name of the alien species, or at least, that specific group landed in Johannesburg is called Poleepkwa (Polip'qua? Pa-le'ep'kva????).

Back to my shower thoughts, I recall that by the time I had watched District 9 for the first time, I had become really interested by making and writing alien languages as well of designing cool visuals for tech in general, but I've never saw much more than an already well known key-bind of the Poleepkwa glyphs so far:

Notice that F, ', -, &, @, and / , are all the same glyph

Also, here is how Hard Sci Fi look like in Poleepkwan:

It's actually pretty tricky and hurtful to look at - a lot of people like to compare it as techno-version of Chinese or Japanese, I can see why - but it isn't as simple as that, however, like us humans do - we could suggest this is just a font choice for their tech inscriptions - pretty much, we are not looking at Sans type of script here, but more like a stylized version of those - what make things not that much easier to read.

Also, the keybinding is much of an over-simplification, to assume on the aliens would use exactly 26 symbols each for a letter of the english alphabet, there is just too much going on for the amount of information people assume it is giving. There isn't enough context for us to infer what is the exact meaning of each symbol yet.

Is there any extra material around?

Not really, every mention I could find to the Poleepkwa glyphs leads back to the keybind already shown, another fan-made font also based off that key can be found here. I also stumbled upon one particular person that worked on a small expansion of the glyphs from 2011 to 2012 - but it's a non-cannon porn fanfic. Another instance of fan-made work takes us back to a russian table of characters.

 

At first, I got pretty happy in finding this, after all, Russian has 33 characters, so we would have more glyphs to work with and even sounds.

So yep, not any useful extra material really.

Ok, what about what's in the movie then?

Yes, there are about 30 occasions any symbols are somewhat readable, in full view or significant throughout the movie, ie, not going through every blurry alien screen frame-by-frame.

The funny thing though, is that many of the symbols ARE NOT listed in the key given - and since it's been 11 years since the release, Sony Pictures has also taken down the original font download page - so, unless I happen to stumble onto someone that happens to still have that, we won't ever know if the image we have as a source includes ALL the symbols or if it's just the ones that match with english characters in the keyboard.

Some other symbols happen to appear inconsistently in pieces of tech/weapons and screens - unless you consider it in a very general way, it's just there for the visuals.

From now and on, I will use sketches for the symbols for simplicity - as of the original pictures are sort of blurry and unclear.

How much readable content there is?

First, the material I've used will be available at my Google Drive.

The exosuit/mech chase scene had given me some clues to how the language works - still, one would have to own a blu-ray or HD copy of the film and analyze the scene frame-by-frame to record each of the Poleepkwan glyphs - I'm not that person, at least for now, I have managed to get only two glyphs off that scene.

As we will see, the clue I've got links back to my original hypothesis that the glyphs are actually too complicated for a simple english-alphabet key.

Notice how this glyph has parts from both A/V and S. The other one sports parts of M in different order. Hinting and odds are that the Poleepkwan writing system works with glyphs made of smaller parts, kind of how Kanji and Hangul works - though, we would need to analyze a ton of other glyphs to know exactly which are separate parts and which are diacritics or floating elements of certain glyph parts.

My attempt to explain Poleepkwan Script

So here is the way I found to dissect and write Poleepkwan.

First, I tried grouping look-alike glyphs:

There is much probably other ways I overlooked when making this

 

And then I dissected the elements shown in the letter glyphs - there are about writing 37 elements, or just 20-ish to 30-ish elements if you consider rotations and repetitions to stack up.

I made small notes on each marking and questioned for a bit - there is also the problem of reading direction, which we see not many hints of whatsoever (for the individual glyph parts), every alien text is either a single glyph or bulk text. In scenes showing Christopher's computers in the hut, we see that at least, they read it top to bottom, left to right, when arranged in paragraphs (presumably, on how the text is generated on the screens).

In the hiatus time i took away from this post, plus investigation, I couldn't much progress in trying to read the script in any meaningfull way - we would need a couple of written words and their sounds to try make out a few of the sounds of this language.

Val, out...

- M.O. Valent, 13/12/2020 

- M.O. Valent, 20/01/2021