World Building Questions

[Lord Anubis]

I have no idea if this is in the right forum, I looked around but it seems that the Fan Fic forum was for story threads and not ideas/suggestions so I'm taking a chance. If this is in the wrong forum could a mod please move it. Thanks.

For a potential story that I might one day get around to actually working on. I've been reading up on Jovian Moons lately and I've tried to do some research on orbits, timing, and various other minutiae and was unable to find any true answers. Would a Jovian moon be able to sustain a standard or near standard 24 hour day night cycle like we have on Earth, or would the orbit need to be several atypical to avoid the shadow cast by the constant presence of the Jovian blocking off the sunlight as it took dominance between the system primary and the moon.

Super continents, at one point all the landmasses on the planet were combined for the most part. What would this do for the oceans, would the hurricanes and other ocean storms be affected/altered in some manner without the presence of continent sized landmasses to alter the weather patterns. Also, which would be better, a super continent as the starting point or the end point. For clarification would it be better to have the moon old enough for the continents to have shifted and come back together, and if so would they continue to crunch themselves together or would they split back apart again?

Terraforming. It'd probably be a multi century to millennia long project to fully terraform a planet/moon sufficiently to have it be self sustaining but the ideas that I've had to help it are ones that I wanted to test. Assuming sufficiently advanced cloning, bio tech, if the soil had some of the necessary nutrients already you could possibly seed valleys, canyons, and river banks with stuff like grass, moss, pine trees, anything that didn't require pollination to spread. Valleys and canyons would give protection from the elements and force the flora to compete for nutrients and give it time to spread. Rivers and lakes providing sources of water and allowing the seeds to spread. Even if only a fraction of a percentage actually survived it would eventually flourish outward and like a growing forest it would fill in the gaps. Various terraforming stations could provide a physical base to release cloned animals in large quantities to create a viable animal population.

A protected bay, beach, cove or whatever could be a place to create coral, algae and other aquatic material. Again only a percentage needs to thrive, eventually all the projects would hit a threshold and become self sustaining.

If anyone could think of other ideas, or answers to some of the thoughts I raised here I would greatly appreciate any input.

 

[somebuddyX]

If a mod doesn't get around to moving it, maybe just repost in the fan fiction section. even if it's not trek related you could just pretend that it is. otherwise i would suggest reddit. i've never posted there but in reading different threads of star trek, the expanse, galactica etc there's a lot of smart people that could help you find the answers you're looking for.

 

[jaime]

I have no idea if this is in the right forum, I looked around but it seems that the Fan Fic forum was for story threads and not ideas/suggestions so I'm taking a chance. If this is in the wrong forum could a mod please move it. Thanks.

For a potential story that I might one day get around to actually working on. I've been reading up on Jovian Moons lately and I've tried to do some research on orbits, timing, and various other minutiae and was unable to find any true answers. Would a Jovian moon be able to sustain a standard or near standard 24 hour day night cycle like we have on Earth, or would the orbit need to be several atypical to avoid the shadow cast by the constant presence of the Jovian blocking off the sunlight as it took dominance between the system primary and the moon.

Super continents, at one point all the landmasses on the planet were combined for the most part. What would this do for the oceans, would the hurricanes and other ocean storms be affected/altered in some manner without the presence of continent sized landmasses to alter the weather patterns. Also, which would be better, a super continent as the starting point or the end point. For clarification would it be better to have the moon old enough for the continents to have shifted and come back together, and if so would they continue to crunch themselves together or would they split back apart again?

Terraforming. It'd probably be a multi century to millennia long project to fully terraform a planet/moon sufficiently to have it be self sustaining but the ideas that I've had to help it are ones that I wanted to test. Assuming sufficiently advanced cloning, bio tech, if the soil had some of the necessary nutrients already you could possibly seed valleys, canyons, and river banks with stuff like grass, moss, pine trees, anything that didn't require pollination to spread. Valleys and canyons would give protection from the elements and force the flora to compete for nutrients and give it time to spread. Rivers and lakes providing sources of water and allowing the seeds to spread. Even if only a fraction of a percentage actually survived it would eventually flourish outward and like a growing forest it would fill in the gaps. Various terraforming stations could provide a physical base to release cloned animals in large quantities to create a viable animal population.

A protected bay, beach, cove or whatever could be a place to create coral, algae and other aquatic material. Again only a percentage needs to thrive, eventually all the projects would hit a threshold and become self sustaining.

If anyone could think of other ideas, or answers to some of the thoughts I raised here I would greatly appreciate any input.

My personal tip for worldbuilding is don't forget to have characters that live in it, and that's how you see the world. Tolkien built a massive world, but we mostly saw it through his characters and how they were shaped and acted...Rowling is another good example of this tip of the Iceberg approach, maybe more so...and Pratchett did it so well, the world in discworld seems all the more real for almost being something that has the appearance of happening by accident.

 

[Christopher]

For a potential story that I might one day get around to actually working on. I've been reading up on Jovian Moons lately and I've tried to do some research on orbits, timing, and various other minutiae and was unable to find any true answers. Would a Jovian moon be able to sustain a standard or near standard 24 hour day night cycle like we have on Earth, or would the orbit need to be several atypical to avoid the shadow cast by the constant presence of the Jovian blocking off the sunlight as it took dominance between the system primary and the moon.

I take it you're using "Jovian" in the generic sense rather than speaking of Jupiter specifically. If it's a Jovian system similar to Jupiter's, then the moons would be tidally locked, with rotation periods identical to their orbital periods around the Jovian. So the moon in question would have to be at the right orbital distance to complete an orbit in 24 hours. For comparison, Io's day (also its "month") is 1.769 Earth days, Europa's is exactly twice that (3.551 Earth days), Ganymede's is twice that (7.155 Earth days), and Callisto's is 16.69 Earth days. This is problematical if you want a moon with a 24-hour orbit, since it'd probably be way too close to the Jovian to be habitable, superheated by tidal stresses and engulfed in a deadly magnetic field. But you could go for something more like Saturn, which has a much milder magnetic field and gentler gravity. Saturn's moons Mimas and Enceladus both have orbital periods close to one day.

You can observe the motion of Jupiter's moons using a program like Celestia, which is free. The kind of event you're talking about is called a shadow transit, when a moon passes through Jupiter's shadow, and it only happens briefly to each moon, since Jupiter's umbra just overlaps a narrow portion of their orbits. Callisto is far enough out that even its slight orbital tilt is enough to allow it to occasionally avoid a shadow transit completely.

Anyway, is it really so important to duplicate Earth conditions like a 24-hour day and rare eclipses? Wouldn't it be more interesting to explore the ways an alien environment is different from Earth's?

Super continents, at one point all the landmasses on the planet were combined for the most part.

That's actually happened as many as seven times in Earth's prehistory -- there's even something called the supercontinent cycle, as the Earth goes back and forth between a single supercontinent and multiple fragmented continents. (More: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987112001570)

What would this do for the oceans, would the hurricanes and other ocean storms be affected/altered in some manner without the presence of continent sized landmasses to alter the weather patterns.

Oh, definitely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangean_megamonsoon

Also, which would be better, a super continent as the starting point or the end point. For clarification would it be better to have the moon old enough for the continents to have shifted and come back together, and if so would they continue to crunch themselves together or would they split back apart again?

A Jovian moon wouldn't necessarily have plate tectonics anyway. I think Earth is pretty close to the minimum size that allows a planetary body to have plate tectonics. It's questionable whether life could even evolve on a planet without plate tectonics to cycle carbon out of the atmosphere and cycle minerals useful to life (e.g. iron) up from the core. But it's possible that the tidal stresses imparted on a Jovian moon by its primary's gravity might crack its crust enough to allow a smaller world to have plate tectonics.

Terraforming. It'd probably be a multi century to millennia long project to fully terraform a planet/moon sufficiently to have it be self sustaining but the ideas that I've had to help it are ones that I wanted to test. Assuming sufficiently advanced cloning, bio tech, if the soil had some of the necessary nutrients already you could possibly seed valleys, canyons, and river banks with stuff like grass, moss, pine trees, anything that didn't require pollination to spread.

That's kinda the easy part. The hard part in terraforming is converting the atmosphere and temperature to Earthlike conditions, which would require either long-term macroengineering of some sort or long-term bioengineering with microbial or algal life to convert the soil, produce oxygen, etc. If the planet already has an oxygen atmosphere, then obviously it already has its own native life, and then the challenges of terraforming move more into the realm of ethics: Should you supplant the native biosphere for an Earthly one?

 

[psCargile]

If you want to be realistic about world building as I have been, you'll need to learn orbital mechanics as they pertain to planets—the math isn't that hard, especially when creating a spreadsheet—and download a copy of Celestia, and use their wiki to learn how to edit the data files to create your own systems. Celestia doesn't calculate, so you have to know how to create correct orbits for an accurate presentation. It will allow you to make impossible planetary systems. It also hasn't been updated in a long time, but I think it's still available.

Things I've learned attempting to create optimal conditions for story telling planets:
if your star is a red giant, the hab zone is many AU out, so it will look just a little bit larger than the sun, and the ambient light should be pinkish, not a lot of blue light. If you want a large red sun in the sky, go with a red dwarf.
For gas giant moons, the closer they are to the planet, the faster the orbit. I found it better to put earth sized moons farther away and take tidal locking into consideration, as that will most likely be a fact. Plus the farther away from the parent planet, the less large the planet will be in the sky, and the less your moon will be in the shadow.
Planets without moons rotate fast. Planets with lots of moons rotate slow.

You can try to tinker around and get the perfect planet for your ideal setting, or let the characteristics of your planet determine elements of the story. There might be other worlds out there with rotations close to 24 hours, but it probably more true to expect to find many that aren't. I use a world that is 20 hours, and for people used to the 24 hour cycles, it means restructuring the days and nights and how people live and work when the actual days and nights are shorter than we are used to. It means creating calenders and keeping track of time throughout the story—you will sleep at night some days, and in the daytime at others. I could have settled with a 24 hour day to make it easier, but by using 20 hours I've created a world that demands distinct adaptations that gives it its own character. The parent star is a red giant, and the world has a 40 year revolution, so if you've seen your second birthday, you've lived a life.

The things I use in my spreadsheet are solar mass( real or fake star), an arbitrary distance for the planet outputs the length of a year. For accurate orbital information of the planet (for moons and spacecraft) I use inputs for mass, and radius—and also calculations for density to arrive at a size based on composition. I calculate for Hill radius (loss of gravitational attraction), and Roche limit (how close before a massive object with be broke apart), barycenter. I can input the semimajor axis of a spacecraft or moon to determine its period. It's a bit of work, but worth it. It's not the kind of detail anyone will read in a story, but it's helpful to know the environment to better describe it.