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