ISOLATION SUIT:#scifi A suit, rather like a space suit, designed for complete biological isolation. Isolation suits are completely self-contained, carrying their own air and temperature control systems. Even with levitation circuits to take some of the weight, they are very uncomfortable to work in.
Archive for August, 2010
SCREAMER: an electronic device that emits a burst of telepathic noise. It is possible to use esper abilities through a screamer, but it is not easy, and it takes training. #scifi
JUMP GATE #scifi: A small region with a preset mechanical teleport to another small region. Most commonly, they have the form of a door or archway, but it is perfectly possible to have a jump-gate with no markers, or with natural markers such as trees.
GALACTICA (LANGUAGE): The common language of the Confederation. Although people from different planets have substantially different accents, the written forms of the language are reasonably consistent, and two speakers of Galactica can generally understand each other with a little practice.
SKIES (TINERAL VARIETY): Tinerals with feathers shaded from white near the skin to shades of blue, gray, lavender-blue or blue-green at the tips. They are somewhat smaller than the other two varieties, and often retain their ability to fly well into adulthood.
AUTOGROOMER: A robotic device that removes dust and mud from a horse’s coat, brushes it, and combs out the mane and tail. Horses must be trained to accept it, and it does not work well on a really dirty horse, or on a tangled mane or tail.
The green sun, easily five times the diameter of the moon of old Terra, dropped slowly toward the horizon. Wine-colored shadows stretched away from Jim’s feet, and the gentle warmth of the alien sun on his face was a welcome change from the blandness of the ship. He wasn’t supposed to leave the ship unprotected, yet – not until he’d watched for a full local year. But that was three Earth years, and he’d finally decided the hell with it, he couldn’t stand the claustrophobia . . .
Oops.
This is supposed to be a habitable planet?
There are certain basic principles of astrophysics, optics, elemental abundances and visual perception that have to be taken into account when building a planet suitable for human habitation. The brightness, color, apparent size, warmth and stability of a star are all closely related to the mass and age of the star and to the distance between the planet and its primary. So is the year length. If you change any one parameter, the others will change as well. And the combination in the opening paragraph is simply not possible.
Let’s begin at the beginning, with a cloud of gas and particles slowly collapsing under the gravitational force of its own mass. Most of the mass is going to be composed of hydrogen, because the original makeup of the universe was mostly hydrogen and a little helium, and these two elements still make up some 98% of the mass (and considerably more than 98% of the atoms) of the universe. As the mass falls together and is compressed, gravitational potential energy is transformed into kinetic energy of the atoms and molecules making up the cloud – into heat. This is a very fast process in geological terms. A sun-sized mass of collapsing interstellar matter would be a hundred times brighter than the sun – and much redder and larger – in only about a thousand years. Obviously this is not a suitable primary for a habitable planet. It is not even a safe area for hands-on investigation.
If hydrogen is subjected to enough heat and pressure, four hydrogen nuclei can be pushed together to make a helium nucleus. In this process, less than one percent of the mass is transformed into a very large amount of energy. This is basically what occurs in a hydrogen bomb. The process is often called hydrogen burning, though it has nothing to do with the chemical oxidation process we call burning on Earth. A collapsing protostar continues to collapse until its core temperature is high enough to allow this fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium to occur – a few million degrees Kelvin. If the collapsing mass is too small – less that 8% of the solar mass – the temperature never becomes high enough for hydrogen burning to occur. Even so, a body the size of Jupiter (about 0.1% the mass of the sun) radiates more energy from gravitational collapse than it receives from the sun. If the mass of the protostar is more than 80 solar masses, it becomes unstable as gravitational collapse continues, and blows itself apart.
The exact course followed by a collapsing protostar depends on its mass. If the mass is several times that of the sun, the protostar becomes hotter, but at the same time shrinks to a smaller size. The two balance each other, and the total energy output of the protostar, its luminosity, stays nearly constant. The temperature changes very rapidly – a protostar fifteen times the mass of the sun will evolve to the point that hydrogen fusion begins in only about ten thousand years. If the mass is small, a fraction of that of the sun, it still becomes smaller, but its temperature does not change much. If its mass is half that of the sun, it will take more than ten million years to start hydrogen burning, and its luminosity will decrease substantially during the process. Regardless, the collapsing mass eventually reaches a temperature and pressure at which hydrogen fusion begins, and heating from that fusion stops further gravitational collapse. The process is not peaceful – the protostar may blow away a substantial portion of its mass during the collapse, and the initiation of hydrogen burning may occasion a few hiccups. Not a good neighborhood for a planet.
Next time (weekend of Aug 22)—the part of a star’s lifespan that is suitable for it to have habitable planets.
HICONTROL: A drug that blocks esper abilities. A small dose of the refined drug will wear off in a few hours. An overdose of the raw drug will not wear off, and has to be countered with the antidote. Since one use of the drug is to control criminal use of esper talents, the antidote is a controlled substance.
CONDITIONAL PRECOGNITION: An esper talent that allows a person to evaluate the probability of various things happening if the person follows various courses of action. Very useful in some situations (e.g., identifying the probable effects of attempting weather modification or whether a new species will be invasive.) Very little use if the person’s actions have little impact on the future.
OUTER COUNCIL: An advisory body made up of those with Çeren indices between 108 and 120. They are normally assigned off-planet, working as part of the Outer Council when they are on Central. Since the Çeren index is normally distributed (bell curve) around the average of 72, there are far more Outer than Inner Council members.
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