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And you think Seattle is getting rain...
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.
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.
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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)
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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?
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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.
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You should come up to Oregon or Washington this winter, for research.