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| Cairn; Just a discussion of Cairn, a extraterrestrial planet. | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Oct 28 2013, 01:48 AM (412 Views) | |
| JaggerTheDog | Oct 28 2013, 01:48 AM Post #1 |
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Cairn is a Earth sized planet, about several light years away from Earth, orbiting a red dwarf. Due to geological conditions, Cairn's tectonic plates aren't as active as Earth's tectonic plates. With the slow tectonic plates, Cairn's landmasses are bounded together into a super-continent called Rodianne, which most of the planet's lifeforms reside in. It has one satellite, which is the size of Luna, and steadies the planet's rotation significantly. Geology As mentioned before the planet's tectonic plates aren't that active as Earth's tectonic plates. With this, the planet is mostly metal poor. The planet's sapient inhabitants commonly use the wood of the metal-trees, Opliaphyton sp, rather than true metal. The crust is significantly thicker than Earth's, a majority of the layers are made from the dead lifeforms that once lived in the planet's shallow ocean surface. The dead animals form the rock limestone and will contain fossils occasionally, which are useful for the native inhabitants. Metals, whenever they find them use them for power as the metal-tree isn't resistant to electricity. The interior of the planet aren't unlike Earth's. The only exception is that the planet's inner core is much larger compared to Earth's core, thus forming a stronger magnetosphere and the planet is much more protected than Earth, making the existence of lifeforms on the planet much longer. Geography For most of the part the planet is a cold and frigid world, with it's poles both north and south covered by extensive and vast glaciers. The planet is encircled by a large super-continent, Rodianne. The super-continent contains the following continents. The continents are all, attached together but a part of some continents have sunk and thus form islands. The largest of the three continents is Galleon. The mentioned continent host a variety of lifeforms, and is far the warmest. It's mainly centered around the equator, the continent doesn't have any rainforests, as it's far too cold for the planet to sustain them. Galleon supports immense forests, these forests are actually plants that are mostly related to algae, filling broad-leaf tree niches, grass niches, and conifer niches, the bush's niche is filled by the metal-plant instead. Along with this, there is a vast system of rivers, streams and lakes. The northern most and coldest continent is Orlando, as far being the coldest, it also the continent that hosts the least numbers of native fauna in the planet, though species that've migrated from the southern continents can be found. Vegetation is not as abundant here as compared to the vegetation from the southern continents, all of them are covered by a thick layer and has hair like strands that grow from the stem to keep their temperature in balance. The smallest continent is Cretenne, it's the least inhabited place and is the center of the super-continent. There no plants in the surface, the plants reside inside the caves and caverns. The continent supports little life and unlike earth's desert continents, it's rather like a freezing, frigid world, it resembles the Gobi desert with no vegetation. A majority of the continent is under water, even though if the submerged areas are up risen, Cretenne still doesn't even rival Orlando in terms of size. Species and Biology The planet's species is similar to earth's species, despite them being ear-less. They're carbon based, just like earth's creatures. The major groups include, Cairniaphyta, Gigantopoda, Mammaliatheria and, Orinthoforma. These groups are all successful. The planet's fauna doesn't have any ear bones, hearing through a system of small slits that were remnants of their ancestor's gills, these structures are just as efficient as true ears but Cairn's species have an advantage as their gills are flat and doesn't get injured when the animal passes through the brush. The planet's flora are unique, but they still resembles Earth's plants. The planet's flora is most likely related to algae. Cairn's plants are far less diverse as Earth's plants, though the differences in size is much larger than found in Earth's plants. A plant could range from the size of algae to three times the size of the redwood tree, but this plant is commonly found on the shallow parts of the ocean. Also, the roots actually make up half of the length of that plant. The largest terrestrial plant is the size of the redwood tree. The planet's fauna is rather similar to Earth's fauna, being tetrapodal, but a key feature is that all of them don't have any signs of true ears, they only have slits to take the ear's place. Another key feature is that all creatures have bones, and there isn't any known creature that is equal to insects. A number of earth's fauna is introduced here, though humans are long extinct in the planet's surface. This unexpected collision with one of the asteroids had made a minor extinction, but a number of Earth's fauna still lives on, and most are identified by having true ears or ear bones. Footnotes The bones of the animals are actually hollow just like birds so that they can grow to larger sizes than their terran counterparts, this is true with the sparrow-head, with their counter part is the bison, the sparrow-head can grow up to three times as large as the bison. The most similar features between the planet's fauna are so similar. Even the basic body shape of the fauna are greatly similar, this suggests that either that it's a great work of convergent evolution, when two creatures are remarkably similar even when they're not related or they share origins. The sister planets theory has much more evidence than the convergent theory. The largest type of tree that lives in Cairn takes a few thousand years to grow it's size, as the plant can't breath under the water. Once it's seed finds a place for it to stay, it digs down with a number of roots to go upward but most of the roots go downward, sometimes going down until a few hundred feet. Once this root system is established, the plant grows slowly, but most just reach the size of Earth's redwoods. |
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| JaggerTheDog | Oct 28 2013, 01:51 AM Post #2 |
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Anything that's inaccurate? Also, you can join Spec-Evo Wiki to see other projects such as "Future of The World", "Cairn", "Rix", "Carbocene" and "Future is Far". The link: speculativeevolution.wikia.com/wiki/Special:WikiActivity |
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| Zirojtan | Oct 28 2013, 05:39 AM Post #3 |
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What is your native language? |
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| Zerraspace | Oct 28 2013, 06:46 AM Post #4 |
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As the self-identified local astrophysicist, I can spot a major hole already:
Chances are, if the planet orbits a red dwarf, then to get enough heat to support life it must be close enough that it’ll be tidally locked, with one face always facing the sun and the other always pointed away, which has tons of implications for your setting. For one, it throws your climate for a loop: the night-side will be perpetually frozen while the dayside will be dominated either by a vast desert and a habitable twilight rim or an unending equatorial storm depending on whether land or water is at the substellar point (directly facing the sun). You can get around this with a thick enough atmosphere, or one with sufficient concentration of certain greenhouse gasses, but this will almost homogenize the climate on either side, and it will definitely be toxic for any human arrivals. That being said, if you don’t find this objectionable, you could also use a thick enough atmosphere to keep the planet warm at a much greater distance from the star, possible far enough that it wouldn’t become tidally locked. Because the strength of the magnetic field is related to the square of angular velocity, and your planet’s rotation speed is synchronized with how quickly it moves around the star (which will have to be upwards of a few days), it will inevitably have a weaker magnetic field than Earth regardless of how you try to bolster it, although I am sure it could still maintain a magnetic field strong enough to protect its atmosphere. Thirdly, it will be unable to host a satellite for any length of time, due both to its proximity to the star and tidal effects. Allow me to demonstrate by using the Earth and moon as an example: the moon is tidally locked to the Earth (and as far as we know all but the farthest or most recently captured moons are also tidally locked to their primaries), but the Earth revolves more quickly than the moon does around it, so the two faces of Earth and moon do not always face each other, causing each to drag on the others’ surface, essentially to try and tidally lock both bodies to one another. As the moon drags on the Earth, Earth loses rotational energy and spins more slowly (hence the slowly lengthening day), while the moon gains orbital energy to move farther and farther away. Unfortunately, in the case of Cairn and its moon, the effects are reversed: Cairn, taking several days to rotate, would spin more slowly than its moon, hence the moon would impart its own orbital energy to try and “spin up” Cairn, causing said moon to spiral ever closer till it collides with the planet. Even if it’s only a few kilometers across that won’t be pretty – I daresay past a diameter of some 500 km the collision would be enough to fully sterilize the planet. You could overcome this by placing the moon above geosynchronous (or rather, Cairn-synchronous) orbit, so that it takes longer to orbit the planet than the planet does to spin, but that can’t happen here, simply because you’re so close to the star that Cairn could no longer hold onto any moon that got that far. Now, as a couple of setting notes:
The metal-trees will be limited in how much metal they can obtain by the quantity in the soil: what the trees are really providing is a means of concentrating the metal so that the natives don’t have to comb through the equivalent amount of soil, but the plant will have to have done so (which I suppose is an argument for the vast root systems). What this means it that the plants can’t provide more metal than the sapients could have found if they’d bothered to dig up the area in the first place. I’d appreciate if you could identify a function for such metals, but moreover, they’re likely to rust or react with various organic and fluid compounds in the plant, so you’ll need a coating to protect them (perhaps some kind of oil – you’ll have to look into it). This also has implications for the sapients’ technology – if the native flora regularly incorporate large quantities of metal, chances are the native fauna have adapted to consuming such metal, and they may find local machines and cutlery deliciously edible.
You sneak that in almost casually, as if it is an unimportant detail, while I feel you should draw attention to that, because again, this has huge implications. Firstly it implies that the environment is, or at least once was, habitable to humans, which puts limitations on the planet’s conditions. Secondly, unless the native biochemistry is similar enough to our own that Earthly fauna could derive nutrition from it, such fauna could only have survived if humans had brought along Earthly flora, and this could have caused ecological calamity: if the plants weren’t palatable to the Cairnians, and even one could survive the Cairnian conditions through to development, there would be nothing to limit its growth, and it would take over the surface, running out the native plants. Earthly and Cairnian animals would, for a while, develop almost separately, with the main grounds of competition between them removed, until (or even if one could) one figured out how to eat the other, while the two plant systems would have to either drive the other to extinction or establish some form of equilibrium, its effects cascading down to both planetary fauna: I daresay this would have caused a more major extinction than the asteroid. Suffice to say, it’s something you should think about.
That is equivalent to saying that all animals on Earth are tetrapods: I don’t think that’s what you meant to say, but it would be better to say the planet’s dominant terrestrial fauna is similar to that on Earth, which is not perfectly true (since arthropods are clearly contenders for amniotes) but much clearer and closer. When you say that there is no creature equivalent to insects, is this so far as size goes (there is nothing bug-sized), or so far as physiology (nothing exoskeletal)?
Is this to say that there exists a specific plant species that ranges in size from that of algal cells to Sequoia trees? That's what strikes me on a preliminary reading: I may go into more detail later. |
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| JaggerTheDog | Oct 28 2013, 12:55 PM Post #5 |
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What? I couldn't understand, I'm ten. Anyways I do understand your point, I'm making Cairn a bit larger. Thanks for telling the inaccurate things. About the language thing, are you talking about my language or the corvine's language. Corvines are the native inhabitants. |
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| Zirojtan | Oct 28 2013, 05:49 PM Post #6 |
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Ah ok. I meant YOUR native language, buddy. There were a lot of grammatical errors in what you posted that I were confusing me cuz there didn't seem to be any consistent pattern. For example, when someone who speaks Spanish as their native language types in English, and they're new to speaking English, they forget verbs that we use for modality a lot. A verb is a word that tells you about an action or state of being. So things like "do, have, take, come", those are all verbs. A modal verb is something like "do" in English, where we say things like: "Do you have anymore questions?" In Spanish they say: "¿Tienes más preguntas? - Have you more questions?" So a Spanish-speaking person who is new to speaking English might type it out like that, saying: "Have you more questions?" instead of: "Do you have anymore questions?". So when I read your post, I noticed grammatical errors that didn't seem to fit any patterns that I'm used to seeing, so I was confused, that's all. |
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| Zerraspace | Oct 28 2013, 07:40 PM Post #7 |
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I'll try to start from the beginning. I think tidal effects would best be described by a metaphor: imagine that you're trying to swing a ball by a string. Do you notice how the same half of the ball will always point towards you? Astronomical bodies that are close enough together can act like that, with gravity acting like that string. Our moon is tidally locked to the Earth, showing the same face to us all the time, and as far as we know most moons are tidally locked to their planets too. The same thing happens to a planet that gets too close to its star - the star tidally locks it, as if it were spinning the planet around by a string, so that the same face always points to the sun, making it forever day (and probably very hot), and the other always points away, making it forever night and freezing. Red dwarves are small stars and don't make much light or heat, so you'd have to put your planet very close to it to keep it warm, and unfortunately it would have to be close enough that the star would tidally lock it. Your planet is still spinning somewhat - it has to spin to keep facing the sun - but its day is now as long as its year. Planetary magnetic fields are essentially created by their spinning, so because your planet is spinning so slowly compared to Earth, Earth will always have a stronger magnetic field, no matter how big you make Cairn. Cairn spins quickly enough to make a field that will protect itself - it just won't be as strong as Earth's. Unfortunately, this causes problems for your moon. This time imagine you tied that rope to a car and tried to spin it. You won't spin the car - you'll just end up spinning around it, and as you wind more and more cord around it, you'll get pulled in. That's what's going to happen to your moon. Its gravity is trying to make the planet spin, and it's pulling itself in by doing so. Eventually, it'll crash into the planet. Hence, you can't have a moon around this planet. What I was saying about the metal trees is that, chances are some animals evolved to eat them, which means they can eat large amounts of metal. The sapient here will have trouble making metal objects because the animals might try to eat them. If humans brought animals to the planet, you have to consider whether or not Earthly animals are toxic to the Cairnians, and if Cairnian plants are toxic to Earthly animals: if they are, then the Earthly animals will only be able to eat Earthly plants, and for a while they will evolve without being affected by the Cairnians, till one figures out how to eat the other without getting poisoned. If Cairnian animals can't eat Earthly plants, then Earthly plants can grow wild, because there won't be anything to control them, and that will damage the Cairnian ecosystem until something does. |
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| JaggerTheDog | Oct 29 2013, 08:06 AM Post #8 |
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Thanks. I'm Filipino, I rushed the page though. Don't worry, I study in a international school, so I could perfectly understand you. I also have Spanish, and Chinese blood. You do have many points. I might change the star to a sun-class star. And also remember, the atmosphere of Cairn is similar to Earth's atmosphere. Not only that, I deleted the part that says earthly fauna is introduced there. Yep, I might put an animal that eats the metal-plants. |
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| martiitram | Nov 3 2013, 01:31 PM Post #9 |
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Metal plants!? ... Awesome! |
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| Sheather | Nov 24 2013, 05:03 AM Post #10 |
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Flamethrowing Walrus
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You're only ten years old? Really this is - despite its accuracies which I wouldn't even have thought of - a very interesting concept! I love the idea of earthly and Cairnian faunas intermingling and evolving alongside one another and how that would work. It sounds very neat and I hope to see more of this. |
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