Quote:In other words, there would be areas we'd consider fairly temperate, except for the insane day-night temperature difference and the winds blasting back and forth between the plateaus and the deserts.
First of all, the weather on the shores of the local water features are going to be heavy on the precipitation. You can get noticeable microclimates in California by watering lawns with imported water. You can definately get that out of small seas.
Hm. You might even get something wet, where the prevailing wind was blowing up onto the continent - all the water the air had picked up would be forced out on the slope and left to run back down. In the other direction it'd be a lot more gradual - that'd be where most of the farmland'd be - but... Hm. That sort of soil would be so easy to destroy - if the original colonists had any sense, and I think they must have, they'd have made sustained land use and such high on their lists of 'things not to forget, no matter what'.
All of which would make arable land unspeakably precious, which, after a couple of hundred years of population growth, would put a real pressure cooker on local politics.
...
Good.
Quote:The mid-basin ridges would have softer slopes, too - their lava outflows would take longer to cool and flow farther.
I suspect that you wouldn't see the same kind of continental shelf, either, but I don't know enough about the topic to say for sure. It is certainly the case that hotspot volcanoes (like the one that's responsible for hawaii) would be *enormous*.
There might not be a continental shelf, but I think that wind and chemical erosion and the various sorts of mass wasting would make the slopes behave similarly.
And yeah, Scour likely has its very own Olympus Mons, several times over.
Quote:As mentioned above, everything slopes down to the trenches eventually. How much water is tied up in endless cycles of frost and evaporate is pretty much irrelevant... It all gets back eventually.
Third, you're going to want to work on your water cycle a bit. If your ocean trenches are maintaining anything like a stable level of water, then they're going to need to get back all of the water that the burning sun evaporates during the day. You probably don't need to much, but you do ned enough that it's a plausible skeleton.
Quote:*nodnod* And keep going for a little longer and you might as well be on the surface of the moon. The inner reaches of the plains, the tops of the continental plateaus... there is nothing on Earth to compare.
Fourth, people are going to be living almost exclusively on the bits that would be our ocean floor (however that winds up). It's the major available source of water - which means it's also the place that has most of the *life*. Head too far away, and you don't have enough water or enough local food supply to sustain more than a few aboriginal types.
Quote:Not neccessarily water, as such, at least at this technological level, so much as arable land. These seas of theirs... probably the closest thing on Earth would be Lake Baikal. There's a lot of water there, by any human scale, particularly when compared to a society that's only a generation or two past achieving the industrial muscle to, as it were, make the desert bloom. It's just that, mostly, it stays where it is rather than getting out and, well, watering things.
There are going to be huge areas outside the control of civilization, and it's going to *stay* that way, because they just can't support enough people for civilization to be self-supporting. The primary nation-building resource will not be Land, but Water.
Most conflicts at this point in their history would, I think, be more about habit and power and old hatreds than deadly-serious survival... Which would emphatically not have been the case in the past.
Quote:You're right about the seperation of civilizations - and I'll get into their possible origins later - but there are a couple of serious points of difference from that metaphor. First, however little they might know about their ancestors' technology, these people's historical record, their classical antiquity, includes the knowledge that those other potential living sites do exist, perhaps even has a few, much copied, terribly sketchy maps. They don't have to work blind. Second, one nation to one sea would, I think, be much too optimistic. Third, those same seas would provide a fairly convenient connection within civilizations - cities need water, and all the water in a given basin is going to be connected to its sea.
Civilizations that have no contiguous water-routes (or at least, no points of water within a few days travel of one another) will not naturally have any contact at all, and setting out across the trackless desert in search of them would have been very much like Columbus's trip in our world - they are smaller, and further apart, likely a bit greater in number, and possibly may be found by looking for weather, but serious similarities remain.
And finally, of course, there's the fact that it's been at least decades, probably centuries since they regained the technical know-how to solve the practical problems of crossing those distances... which isn't to say it's trivial, just economic.
Quote:No, I don't think it would be. Any rock in the immediate area of a convergent plate boundary - as all of our livable areas are - is going to be either relatively new or not long for this world. Coal formation requires taking peat - which I don't think you'd likely get in any of these environments we're talking about anyway - and lithifying it, which takes time.
I'm not sure how much oil there would be on the world - IIRC, it is believed that oil forms predominantly in sedimentary rocks forming under water. Coal might be more common as that involved land-dwelling plants.
So, my conclusion is that, with water levels not having changed appreciably since the development of multicellular life, there are really just no usuable fossil fuels to be found.
This will neccessarily produce some serious changes in tech base.
Quote:The situation I've been working out is that you have three main sources of people around when star travel collapses and the system is thrown to its own devices. First, and by far the largest demographic group, you have the first wave of colonists who had been bound for Iden - call it one to five ships, size as-yet-undetermined, some of which made it after Disaster Struck and some of which had to abort to Scour... Say also that perhaps one or two had to abandon ship and scatter lifeboats all over the place. These were hardy, healthy, positive minded people, but the tools and such they'd brought with them were more aimed at building houses and clearing farmland to prepare for the arrival of the majority of the colony. So, they were fairly well set up to survive, but didn't have any of the tools or expertise to hang onto advanced technology. Second, you have corporate prospectors and such - who had been hired to look for commercially viable mineral deposits, useful biota, etc. And third, you have the 'real' scientists, who've been in place for years, possibly decades, cataloging, mapping, essentially going over the two worlds with the finest-toothed comb they can. Among other things, they're the only ones with any sort of preestablished infrastructure, and would also have the 'domesticated-by-way-of-test-tube' variants of the native plant and animal forms that the colonists were supposed to be farming.
Also, where did humanity get it's start here? If they all start at the same place then they'll have expanded following water and the deserts between water sources will be somewhere explored for new oases. If they landed scattered then the deserts would be barriers to warfare between them - the logistics of getting an armed force across them and then forcing your way into a water source would be challenging, to say the least.
Hm. Say that... two ships made it down safely on Iden, one made it to Scour, and the other two broke up on their way down, leaving varying percentages of their survival pods scattered hither-and-yon.
Now, the prospectors have transportation, but only limited supplies of food, fuel, and spare parts. The scientists have some small machine shops and various other tremendously useful gadgets, if at a very small scale. And the colonists have the manpower and enough genetic variation for a stable population. It would be possible to combine the three before the remaining fuel for the prospectors' aircraft ran out.
But only by abandoning the vast majority of the people in the survival pods to die.
Which they didn't, couldn't, wouldn't.
Instead, there were a couple of trips made delivering seeds and useful critters to the grounded colony ship... and then the prospectors spent their fuel - and, often, their lives, when they ran out in mid-flight - ferrying as many of the survivors as possible to the nearest scientific base-camps (which were deliberately located in watered zone).
(Incidentally, Iden's situation was much better - besides being a much nicer place to live, overall, it started with a concentrated population. Its tech base never fell nearly as far, but its native fauna and microbes found Terran life much tastier, so that slowed them down considerably. They're only up to about what we'd call the early nineteen seventies.)
Exactly what happened next, and what effects it'd have down the line... I'm not sure.
Quote:*nod* Right, noted, I hadn't considered that. Good catch.
With a little water, you won't get anything quite that dramatic, but there will be bigger earthquakes at the ocean trenches and fewer volcanos along the mountain chains neighbouring them. The hotspot volcanos will be bigger, since the plates will be moving more slowly.
Quote:Essentially, I think it'd be these two between them. The local system is rather younger than Earth - about in its equivalent to the Pennsylvanian Epoch - and the rate at which laden water trickles in from outside the seas' immediate drainage basins is quite slow.
- less salt being eroded out of the rocks by the local water cycle
-- this ties back into the question of how the local water cycle works - which in turn depends on some bits of planetary topology.
- less time to accumulate
-- realistically, "fresh" would mean "less salty than blood" - and our blood was ocean-normal as of the point where we left the waters for the land. You wouldn't have much if anything in the way of native land-critters if this were the case.
Quote:Diesel is for unbelievers, electricity is wrooooooooooonng
Random note; it's kind of difficult to have internal combustion engines practical enough for a 1930's-style biplane without some form of at least basic radio being developed.
Steam has got the power that will pull us along
^_^
Actually, high power-weight applications like, oh, aircraft, are likely to be diesel-types, running off of vegetable oil or something similar. I figure that the fact that you have to either grow or make your own fuel is going to be a bigger issue.
Like, 'that scout plane's fuel costs twice what its spare parts do' type issue. Extensive use of chemical engines of any sort would be, I think, a military monopoly.
Electrical and industrial energy would have to come from sources we'd consider renewable - wind, hydro, geothermal, solar (updraft towers, energy towers, Stirling engines).
Quote:There's a limit to the range I can use, though - because Iden is there, too, and equally livable in temperature range... but has a much stronger greenhouse effect.
On the subject of average temperature, you can make that average whatever you want by placing the planet closer or further from the sun. However, less moisture in the air (and fewer clouds to block or trap heat) tends to result in wider swings of temperature over the course of a day, producing hotter afternoons and colder nights.
Ja, -n
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