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The Silence of Life; my exobiology book
Topic Started: Jan 31 2009, 02:13 AM (751 Views)
Canis Lupis
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.

My new book goes something like this:
In the 2050's, miners are sent across the galaxy to mineral rich planets to obtain minerals that Earth does not have anymore. A team of ten miners is sent to the planet Cavernia and disaster ensues.

That is what I need your help on: Cavernia. Cavernia is a planet orbiting a sun just a little bit smaller than our own. It orbits at the fringes of its star's habitable zone. Its core has cooled, meaning that the magnetosphere, atmosphere, oceans, most organisms are dead.

The lithotrophs (rock-eating bacteria) are the only things that survived this event (I call it the "Big Vent"). They can withstand mass amounts of radiation and as long as rocks exist, they'll survive.

Now, under Cavernias crust, lies a network of caves and caverns, carved by these bacteria. They eat the rocks and produce methane as a waste product. As a result, all the caverns are filled with methane.

The planet is about the size of Mars and hardly any light reaches the caverns. Water is reduced to small trickles. Not very abundant.

All organisms on this planet have three different kinds of symmetry:
1. cut the organism through the center from the head to the butt, the sides will be identical.
2. cut the organism through the center from left side to the right side, the sides will be identical.
3. Create a plus sign and cut the organism with that (the place where the two lines meet should be placed at the direct center of the organism.

Basically, the head is the same as the butt, the left is the same is the right, and the head-left is the same as the head-right, butt-left, and butt-right and vice versa.

The "plants" are mushroom-like creatures with an intricate root system penetrating through the rocks, absorbing as many nutrients as it can. They don't photo- or chemosynthesize anything: they just break down rocks and the nutrients they find. Some "plants" filterfeed the lithotrophic bacteria as they move from wall to wall (the bacteria have cillia around their head and butt that they move to stick in microscopic holes in the wall).

Not sure about the "animals" yet, but they will be quadropeds (though some organisms (particularly the predators) evolve tentacle-like structures around the middle of their bodies).

If you have some species concepts for Cavernia, please tell me. I'd like to see them.

And I've got a question for you all, concerning respiration in the "plants" and "animals": how would an organism that inhaled methane be different than one that inhaled oxygen?

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Sliver Slave
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I'm going back to basics.

So the animals are radially symmetrical?
Something is upsetting the ostriches.

Spoiler: click to toggle

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Canis Lupis
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.

Somewhat. I'll explain:

Almost all animals (called Scinrefarians) reproduce asexually. They are divided up by how they reproduce asexually.

Here are the phylums I have so far. They are quoted to seperate them from other text:

Echinoparalius:
Quote:
 
These are scinrefarians that resemble Echinoderms of Earth. The vast majority of these species are filter-feeders (eating bacteria, which there is a lot of). They have radial symmetry and reproduce by shedding part of their body (usually an arm). This arm falls to the floor below and begins to grow into a seperate organism.


Speculabestia:
Quote:
 
These scinrefarians have the most complex reproduction of any scinrefarian on Cavernia. They have three brains: front, middle, and back brain.

The middle brain is located at the dead center of the body. It is divided into four lobes, each controlling one of the four legs: lobe 1 (front left leg), lobe 2 (front right leg), lobe 3 (back left leg), and lobe 4 (back right leg). The middle brain also switches the other brains on and off at certain times.

The front brain controls the front half of the body. The front body contains one pair of legs (front left and front right), a mouth, four infrared eyes, and chemical receptors (so it can communicate with other members of the owner's species). When the front brain is in use, the back brain is switched off by the middle brain.

The back brain controls the back side of the organism. It looks exactly the same as the front part. To avoid conflict between the brains at each end, the middle brain switches one brain off when the head one of the brains controls is not in use.

This produces interesting running patterns. In carnivorus species, a predator will charge its prey with one end of its body, which is the end nearest their prey (in this example, it is the front half). Now, say the prey moves around behind the predator, as far away from the front end as possible. As per instructions from the infrared eyes and chemical receptors, the predator's middle brain will shut the front brain off and turn the back brain on, so that the head nearest the prey will always be ready to kill.

When ready to reproduce, a plate (similar to the cell plate plant cells use in mitosis) will bisect the middle brain, so that all of lobe 1 and 2 will be in the front half and all of lobe 3 and 4 will be in the back half. This phylum has a larval stage (with only one half of the body) and an adult stage (with both halves of the body fully formed).

The larval stage walks around bipedally, and can't switch control to the opposite brain, due to the fact that none exists yet.

The second half will grow itself out of the plate into a back half that looks EXACTLY like the front half, complete with a back brain.

Lithoplant eaters exist as well.


Does that answer your question Sliver Slave?
Edited by Canis Lupis, Feb 5 2009, 02:40 PM.
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Viergacht
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faceless fiend
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That's pretty amazingly cool.
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mnidjm
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King of Mars
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You should probably change the year. I doubt that we would develop intergalactic space travel in 40 years. Maybe 90.
Edited by mnidjm, Feb 7 2009, 01:47 AM.


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