Detcon 1: My Schedule at the NASFiC

Jul 14, 2014 21:28

Detcon 1 is the name of this year's North American Science Fiction Convention. Detcon will blossom in my old home town, Detroit, Michigan, from Thursday, 17 July, through Sunday the 20th. I've agreed to participate in a bunch of programming.

Physics, Mechanics, & Logistics of Flying Cars
Fri 10:00 AM -- Mackinac East
What would it be like if ( Read more... )

physics, sf, aircars, cons

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Comments 14

seawasp July 15 2014, 16:45:30 UTC
If the sulfur-breathers are as cool as the Sarrians I hope they're out there.

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seawasp July 15 2014, 16:45:51 UTC
And yes, "cool" was a deliberate choice of words.

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beamjockey July 15 2014, 17:07:40 UTC
Spoiler for the talk: I was very pleased to find, in the Kepler data, a confirmed planet that is quite Sarr-like for the parameters that can be measured: diameter and black-body temperature. So there is hope. (Sure, the biochemistry of sulfur-breathers is a BIG handwave.)

Io is covered with sulfur and sulfur compounds, and its volcanic hotspots are hotter than Sarr. Might be a better spot for a base than the 2014 version of Mercury.

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beamjockey July 15 2014, 17:09:36 UTC
Your admiration for the Sarrans is a bit unsettling, since most of the Sarrans you know are vicious criminals dealing in phenomenally addictive drugs.

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agrumer July 15 2014, 18:02:41 UTC
Before long, we'll have access to the alchemist's dream: the ability to manipulate molecules.

Wasn’t the alchemist’s dream the transmutation of elements, which would involve the manipulation of sub-atomic particles?

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beamjockey July 15 2014, 18:31:16 UTC
Like so many of the rest of us, recently alchemists have had to lower their expectations.

"When I was young, we were promised the Philosopher's Stone!"

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neowolf2 July 15 2014, 18:44:04 UTC
I have to wonder how Clement's sulfur-breathing aliens could exist on a planet. It would be tidally locked, so shouldn't the sulfur condense out on the night side? And if it wasn't, the rate of heat loss to radiation to space goes as absolute temperature to the 4th power. The boiling point of sulfur (at 1 bar) is 718K, so the rate of energy loss should be 33x that of a surface radiating at 300K. Night had better be really short on that world or the atmosphere is going to condense.

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beamjockey July 15 2014, 19:40:43 UTC
So you expect a much larger temperature swing on very hot planets. Would you have argued this in 1951?

It's 19th-century physics, I guess.

But the presence of a global fluid, such as an atmosphere, will moderate this effect. If it snows on the nightside, hot fluid will flow in from the dayside.

Anyway. The system I found is very, very close to a dim dwarf star, so it's probably tide-locked.

Clement had Sarr orbiting a much brighter star, an A, so perhaps he would have argued against tidal locking. Indeed, according to him, the planet's rotational period is 13 hours.

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del_c July 15 2014, 20:23:13 UTC
But the Earth itself is 300K on the ground only due to greenhouse effect: at the top of the atmosphere it radiates into space at 280K. Venus only radiates at 330K, but its temperature on the ground is 735K.

I don't understand the physics of it at all, but researchers this century have assured us that hot planets can have clouds of lithium and sodium sulphide, magnesium silicate and iron, or even perovskite and corundum, raining out in a hot carbon monoxide atmosphere.

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neowolf2 July 16 2014, 14:31:07 UTC
Those would be planets with extremely thick atmospheres, with sufficient thermal inertia that the atmosphere does not condense out at night (although, as you note, things would condense at high altitude.) The atmosphere of Jupiter, for example, is so thick that primordial heat from the formation of the planet is still important ( ... )

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