| Bullet Magnet |
04-30-2006 09:25 AM |
For those who can't stand highly detailed yet half-baked scientific answers, look away now.
As an example, look at the solar system. The only planet known to be inhabited, and indeed with a climate anything like Oddworld's, is Earth.
Let's start with the sun. The larger a star, the further away the habitable "green belt" is. The green belt is the area in which a planet is the right distance from its star to be able to harbour conventional life. However, the larger the star, the faster it uses up it's hydrogen reserves, so the shorter its life. This is due to the gravitational effects on solar nuclear fusion. So we can probably expect out sun to continue burning in its current fashion for at least 10 billion years. If it were ten times bigger, it would have exhausted its supplies after just 10 million. To get to where we are now, life has had nearly 4 billion years, so the right kind of star is needed for a planet like Earth or Oddworld to have complex multicellular life.
The green belt itself is very narrow. From Earth's distance from the sun, it extends 5% nearer to it and 15% further away. Look at Venus, which is only 25 million miles closer to the sun. Light reaches it just two minutes before it reaches us. Venus started life similar to Earth, only slightly warmer and it probably had oceans. But those few degrees of heat meant that it couldn't hold on to the water, it evaporated and the hydrogen atoms disappeared into space, and the Oxygen atoms combined with carbon. This created a thick layer of green house gasses that escalated the heat on the planet until it became hotter than Mercury, which is closer to the sun. It now has a surface temperature of 470 degrees Celsius (compared with our range of -60 degrees to 60 degrees) and the atmospheric pressure is ninety times Earth's.
Mars, being just further out, suffered the opposite fate for the same reason, and now has lots almost all of its water. What remains is mostly in the northern icecap, but the mark of its oceans still remains.
So that's our green belt. Based on what we've seen of Oddworld, it is about the same distance from its star as we are, and the star is the same kind as ours. But that is only half the story. The climate of Earth is dependent upon its moon, oceans, rotation, atmosphere, size, and even the presence of life itself. Living organisms made the current atmosphere what it is now, and have kept it steady for the past three and a half billion years. The atmosphere also stops the light side of the planet roasting while the dark side freezes, and the effect of the oceans is huge. Moving heat around the globe and creating milder winters and cooler summers near the coast. The rotation and angle create the equatorial tropics and polar icecaps, as well as all the climates in between, and the moon keeps the rotation steady. How the many moons of Oddworld affect it, I don't know, but predicting the tides must be a bitch. And the size of a planet affects it's gravity, which in turn affects the atmospheric pressure, boiling point of liquids and the way organisms grow. Tall organisms cannot exist in high gravity, whereas low gravity organisms could sprout to unearthly heights. We've been told that Oddworld is ten times the size of Earth. If this is literally true than the gravity must be much stronger, explaining it's ability to catch so many moons, but making a mystery of its life forms. Either it is not quite so big, it is imaginary so all this information here is obsolete, or there must be some exotic material in the planet's crust, mantle and core that exerted antigravity. I heard this theory in a fan fiction, where it was supposed that floating objects are built with this stuff. However, an antigravity material should blow itself apart with the same force that holds every thing together. Hmm. A dilemma.
Anyway, that's what I think. You can get back to your discussion now.
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