Sol 3 is a Class-14 Deathworld on what used to be a thirteen-point scale until they found it.
Not only is the planet very geothermally volatile with active volcanic systems AND feature violent and chaotic weather systems…
“Earth” is the deepest gravity well they’ve ever witnessed chemical rocketry successfully achieve orbit from.
The biosphere is teeming with pathogens, so much so that the sapient population’s own bodies rely on symbiotic microbial colonies in order to digest nutrients among other tasks.
And the macroscopic fauna are ALMOST as scary as the microscopic stuff: every biome packed with highly adapted predators.
At the top of this complex carnal carnival of carnivory, the “humans” who live there are unstoppable pursuit and persistence predators highly naturally gifted in ranged combat that historically used to just WALK their prey to death. The animals which ancient humans consumed could sprint to temporary safety, but humans will catch up, ALWAYS catch up, and the prey will still be tired when they have to sprint again. Eventually the fatigue outpaces them, and humans catch up for the last time. Just walk right up and bash them with a rock, they might not even have to throw it: dinner is ready!
Furthermore, it’s not just the highly volatile oxygen that all the animals there breathe… Sol 3’s atmosphere also even contains a constant background presence of radon. The biosphere is passively resistant to some levels of radiation. One of the cities was consumed in the fallout cloud of an exploding nuclear fission reactor(they STILL use water to cool their municipal fission reactors even now!), and although the humans fled, the animals that stayed there are FLOURISHING. Deformed and mutated, but thriving.
NOBODY SANE CHOOSES TO GO TO SOL 3.
Sol 3:
HarmlessMostly harmlessMore of this please
Over on reddit there’s an entire genre of this sort of fiction in /r/hfy
The entire ecosystem is also part plastic.
complex carnal carnival of carnivory
Beautiful.
Thank you mitochondria for allowing us to respirate the death element.
Truly the powerhouse of the death breathers
We are all the death breathers, my fungi, my bees, we’re powered with the miti-c
Everybody in this thread needs to read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
Came here for this comment. Also the great oxidation event.
I’d add that the audiobook is amazing also.
Reading this I start to miss r/HFY again
Yeah, if one is so inclined,the Jenkinsverse is well worth the read.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/wiki/ref/universes/jenkinsverse/
Me too :(
Is there an active one on the fediverse? Id contribute but I can barely write my name.
There seems to be one but it’s still a bit empty
I might have to consider starting up my own story or something. I’ve had the base of an idea rolling around but haven’t gotten much farther than that
Do it. I’ll be your first up vote.
So you’re telling me if I stop breathing I’ll never get older? I’m in!
Aliens would need an oxidizer to metabolize as well, even if that oxidizer isn’t oxygen. If they want to actually efficiently get energy out of things, it’ll need to be a strong one. Even fermentation is a oxidation-reduction reaction that just doesn’t use oxygen.
If we ever found a species that was made of alcohol we would absolutely dominate, err domestic them as quickly as possible.
Oxygen is so crazy that once microbiology in the ancient oceans started producing it, all life on earth nearly died. Like very nearly sterilized the earth.
At high concentrations, its still fucking awful for us. Easy to forget that the atmosphere is still only 21% Oxygen and 78% Nitrogen. Even setting aside the risks of fire and explosion at higher concentrations, this highly reactive substance degrades the nervous and musculature system.
You wouldn’t want to wander around in a fully oxygenated environment for the same reason you wouldn’t want to drive your car through a lake of gasoline.
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Cellular respiration is sugar + oxygen -> water + CO2
Combustion reactions are often characterized as anything that is something + oxygen -> water + optionally something else.
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‘claim’
Lmao that’s a strong word for an off-the-cuff conversational riff you saw on social media.
There’s always someone that takes things way too literally
does lemmy have an equivalent to/r/hfy ? This has big /r/hfy energy.
Explains why we tend to spontaneously combust at times
Death breathers are made of electric thinking meat. Life is fucking rad.
Reminds me of the short story podcast ‘The Truth’ episode - “They’re Made out of Meat”. In fact I think it may have been a short story I once read online beforehand, that they may just have dramatized. (?)
In Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series, there is a species who actually breathes methane. The focus though is less on how that actually happens and more on how they navigate as the only species for whom oxygen is toxic. It’s a great series, btw. It’s a not-quite-as-optimistic as star trek future, but still optimistic and with a vast range of species who are all intermingling as learning how to get along.
Added this to my reading list, looks good. Thanks!
Rusting your insides
They say a planet like earth I’d very rare. Rarer still to find life on one. I believe life is as abundant in the universe as it is here. Which means to me, in our neck of the universe we are an oddity.
