And you think Seattle is getting rain...

[gridlore]

Been reading Life Not As We Know It, and getting some very good ideas (as well as a boost to my knowledge of biology, which has always been a weak point in my science knowledge.)

The book had a section discussing the heavy bombardment period (roughly 4.4 - 3.9 billion years ago.) Late in this period, Earth was already an ocean world, but each massive impact pretty much vaporized the oceans and left us with a steam-bath environment for a few thousand years before things cooled down. As things cooled, and those megatons of water rained down, refilling basins.

Until the next impact.

Which made me wonder... Imagine a colony on a young world still experiencing this cycle. A young world won't have lost all it's radioactives and heavy metals to the core yet.. the mantle is still active enough to keep them close (relatively) to the surface. Since there's no ecology, mining corporations would be free to be as destructive as they like in pursuit of these elements.

Put the colony in during the cooling phase, and you get a wonderful setting. Rain, torrential rain, all across the world. Rivers that defy the imagination tearing channels as they flow to the lowlands, carving nightmarishly deep valleys. A world of perpetual gloom and unending clouds.

I like it.

Comments

[bunyip.livejournal.com]

Who is the author?

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Peter Ward.

Here's the Amazon page on the book (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670034584/qid=1135552723/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-6931433-3806555?n=507846&s=books&v=glance)

[grimmwire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sounds like a killer backdrop. I've long wanted to set a story in a young proto-system full of chunks of rocks and ice crashing into each other, but I was thinking of a space-based setting rather than on-world.

My only problem is the (annoyingly nigglesome) question, "Why mine the planet when there are zillions of handy chunks of metals and ice orbiting the star?" I mean, if you've got the tech to travel to, and survive on, a still-cooling proto-Earth, you've got the tech to survive in space and mine asteroids instead. Which sounds a tad safer, neh?

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

The radioactives will be on the planets. If you're after chunks of nickel-iron, you can find them anywhere. I'm thinking this world is seen as a rare chance to mine rare elements in huge amounts.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

It depends on what you're after. For many things it'd probably be better to go after much smaller planetesimals, or -- better yet -- smaller ones that were once near the cores of bigger ones but were liberated by a shattering impact. The latter way you get the advantage of density sorting without the bother of a big gravity well.

The only thing a planet like Earth has going for it in the mining category is that weathering and the action of water concentrates ores in ways that you can't get on an airless body. Unfortunately these take time, which hasn't been available in the early days of a system.

There'd be a sweet spot of rare radioactives that would have half-lifes long enough to be concentrated by wind and water, but not long enough that there hasn't been time since the system formed for the process to work and not long enough that they'd be fairly plentiful on regular earth-like planets. Without actually attempting to figure out what those might be, I'd guess there aren't a huge number of these, and that they'd certainly be a small fraction of the rare isotopes out there in general.

[10binary-cats.livejournal.com]

Then there's the problem of self starting nucular reactors forming when the big rains wash a critical mass of isotopes into the low ground and evaporation reduces the moderating water.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Not much of an issue. There aren't very many reasonably long-lived, reasonably common isotopes that can self-sustain. U-235, U-233, Pu-239, and Th-232. That's about it, I think.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

A world of perpetual gloom and unending clouds.

You should come up to Oregon or Washington this winter, for research.