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| A naturally occuring astronaut; How could a living creature get to space by organic means? | |
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| Topic Started: Sep 16 2017, 05:03 PM (344 Views) | |
| lippischh | Sep 16 2017, 05:03 PM Post #1 |
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Zygote
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I have recently discovered Sigmund Nastrazzurro's blog, and was peculiarly interested by ballonts (living creatures that use an organic lighter than air balloon to fly). I then immediately thought about high altitude balloons and then about how an actual living creature could make its way to near space, as high-altitude balloons do. I came up with this scenario : in a planet with a dense atmosphere, a certain type of ballonts exists which possesses specialized cells that extracts Hydrogen from water and excretes it into a semi flexible balloon, let's call them H-cells. Now imagine a specimen that has cancer touching especially these H-cells, and we have now a dysplastic H-cell population growing exponentially which leads to an overproduction of Hydrogen. We assume that the balloon's volume growth is physiologically correlated with the amount of Hydrogen it contains. Such a cancerous ballont could grow to an exagerated scale, condemning it to an everlasting altitude gain. The more altitude it gains, the less nutrition it gets. A nutrition that is, in majority, sucked up by the high metabolism cancerous H-cells. Fat is burned and weight is lost which in turn facilitates the gain in altitude, at some point the balloon won't grow but there would still be some room provided by its tissue's elasticity. A cancerous ballont as the first naturally occuring astronaut! Now there's another scenario that would be even more effective. This type of ballont has a life cycle in which for the first half of its life, it is fixed to the ground by a nurturing appartus ; a cordiform organ that reaches deep into the ground. This way, the cancerous ballont is still nurtured while developing its oversized balloon. When the second half of its life declares itself, it would straight up thrust into the sky directly into near space! I'm curious about what you guys think of this idea! |
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| Tartarus | Sep 16 2017, 05:11 PM Post #2 |
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Prime Specimen
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Do you want it to just go up into space and then die or do you want it to have some way of surviving? If the latter then there's a heap of problematic issues such as the lack of air, the extreme cold, the presence of deadly cosmic radiation and so on. |
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| lippischh | Sep 16 2017, 05:40 PM Post #3 |
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Zygote
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My scenario is just here to propose a possible way for a living creature to get into space without the use of technology, which is for me fascinating enough to consider. I don't see how an anomaly like this could benefit the creature, for it to be passed on to other generations. |
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| Setaceous Cetacean | Sep 16 2017, 08:07 PM Post #4 |
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Insert Funny Creative Title Here
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Interesting idea. I love balloon creatures, and I too have read the Furaha blog on their plausibility and limitations. Another way for this natural astronaut to be overly-buoyant would be if it used massive quantities of ballast, in the event of a rapid downdraft. Some mutation would cause it to produce too much ballast, and it would have to produce more hydrogen to compensate. When it lets go of the ballast it would rapidly float up and enter the stratosphere. |
If you like balloons, the color red, or mixotrophic plants derived from photosynthetic vertebrate-analogues, then check out my xenobiology project Solais
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7:50 PM Jul 10