It’s been a while since I talked about the worldbuilding for The Long Dark.
Last time, I delved a bit into the single superorganism covering a large part of the planet’s surface, and I mentioned something about the internal structure. Given the extremes of temperature through the seasons, thanks to the planet’s 90 degree tilt, any life has an obvious major problem to contend with - temperature control.
Much of Sponge’s structure is related to solving this problem. Its enormous thickness provides natural insulation, but the surface layers are still in danger of baking during summer, and intense frostbite during the long spells of darkness. To solve this, Sponge moves water around to shunt heat from where it’s overabundant to where it’s needed. Short term local movements between the surface and reservoirs in the depths help to even out the day/night cycle, while vast subsurface rivers shunt heat back and forth across the equator.
These mechanisms protect the plant tissue from thermal damage, and also help moderate the climate extremes in the atmosphere. And, as well as photosynthesis like Earthly plants, Sponge makes good use of the temperature gradients to generate chemical energy from thermosynthesis.
Finally, as an aside, what does the sun look like from the surface?
I had no idea what a red giant star might look like from an orbit in the habitable zone, so I did a rough mental calculation. A star similar to the sun that evolves to the red giant stage will swell up to swallow the orbits of the inner planets. It may or may not reach as far as Earth’s orbit, but that’s a moot point. At best, Earth would be grazing the surface of the star, so you can bet things would be somewhat toasty.
Anyhooo ... that makes a “typical” red giant anything up to 200 times the diameter of our sun. And orbiting somewhere out near Saturn, say 10 times the distance away, that means the star would appear anything up to 20 times the size in the sky.
That’s one whopping big sun! No wonder the colonists call it “Big Red”!
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7 comments:
That is a big sun...
Clever way to us water to keep the life form at a livable temperature.
Alex, it would be a massive presence in the sky, not as intense but still too bright to look at I think.
It sure sounds like the planet and life on it would need that Sponge.
Chrys, Sponge has some unique solutions to some pretty unique problems!
Wow! Can you imagine how breathtaking sunrises and sunsets would be with an sun that enormous?!
Unfortunately, our own planet may need some of those water-distributing and temperature-controlling solutions before the end of the century.
Very interesting! I love speculating on this sort of thing. One of my worlds had a binary star system. The smaller sun began to consume the large one and went nova.
Susan, I did wonder. The only thing I can say for sure is that they would be quite long affairs, but I suspect the colors would also be quite intense, given that the star is already quite red.
Cara, it's fun to speculate on worlds very different from our own. I take it the planet would not have survived the nova!
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