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Questions that don't need their own topics vol.2; New and fresh
Topic Started: Jan 4 2018, 11:18 AM (26,864 Views)
Akurian452
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On a water world, would large icebergs be a viable substitute for dry land in terms of a habitable surface and creating the geochemical and elemental cycles necessary for life?
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ZoologicalBotanist
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I am trying to calculate a few things for a planet, but can't quite figure out the air density and air pressure. The planet is 65% larger than Earth, but my problems are compounded by the fact that it is a gas planet. (Given this, all of my other calculations are probably off anyway.) Does anyone know how I can figure these numbers out? What I have found so far refers to terrestrial planets, seeing as things like surface gravity require an actual surface!
Edited by ZoologicalBotanist, May 4 2018, 11:45 AM.


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Russwallac
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Air pressure on a gas giant is difficult to calculate since it varies depending on depth; there's no surface to use as a basis. The upper atmosphere will have a significantly lower pressure than the deeper layers, which eventually become compressed liquid towards the core.
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Terraraptor411
May 3 2018, 11:51 AM
Also, besides feral horses, are any Perissodactyls in a fair spot to survive the Holocene extinction? As far as I know all rhinos, tapirs, and wild horses/zebras are endangered or threatened, or their habitat is as massive risk.
I would say maybe some of the south american tapirs if they are very lucky depends of how bad you made the human extinction
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lamna
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Why, in Britain, did bears die out hundreds of years before wolves did, while in Japan bears continue to survive long after wolves have died out? Similarly wolves have be exterminated across most of the USA, but black bears are still doing well.

Bears seem like more of a threat to human life, and also more obvious. Is it just wolves have more of an economic impact? And why was it reversed in Britain?
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Cool_Hippo43
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What causes an animal to become eusocial? what leads one to adopt this style of behavior?
One any right statement, any clade can actually have an eusocial species?
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Russwallac
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lamna
May 6 2018, 06:03 PM
Why, in Britain, did bears die out hundreds of years before wolves did, while in Japan bears continue to survive long after wolves have died out? Similarly wolves have be exterminated across most of the USA, but black bears are still doing well.

Bears seem like more of a threat to human life, and also more obvious. Is it just wolves have more of an economic impact? And why was it reversed in Britain?
Wolves are more predatory than bears are and attack livestock far more often, hence the deliberate attempts to wipe them out. I'm not sure why wolves survived longer than bears did in Britain though. I would assume it's because they had a higher starting population and the relatively small size of the island meant that bears came into contact with humans more commonly than elsewhere.
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Flisch
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Cool_Hippo43
May 6 2018, 08:22 PM
What causes an animal to become eusocial? what leads one to adopt this style of behavior?
One any right statement, any clade can actually have an eusocial species?
Apparently shared broodcare is a major contender for "necessary pre-adaption for eusociality". But it's still largely shrouded in mystery.

Akurian452
May 3 2018, 06:28 PM
On a water world, would large icebergs be a viable substitute for dry land in terms of a habitable surface and creating the geochemical and elemental cycles necessary for life?

Water worlds are tricky. The rpoblem is that water is an excellent heat conductor. This means that a planet that mostly consists on water (or at least 25% like several of the moons in our solar system) would have a more even distribution of temperature across the surface. So you'd either have no ice at all (except snow) or you'd have the entire surface frozen, like with Europa, Titan and so on. You wouldn't have "continents" or "islands" of ice, like you have on continental worlds.

This problem might be able to be mitigated a little bit with a technically rocky world with enough water to cover the entire surface, but even then I'd wager a guess that the heat distribution is in full effect as once you pass a certain depth the water gets cold anyway, so there would not be much difference for whether your world is 25% water or just 1%.
Edited by Flisch, May 7 2018, 07:06 AM.
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Russwallac
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There's also the issue that ice is, well, ice. It doesn't really provide a good substrate for organisms to grow in, and the cold would seriously inhibit the chemical reactions necessary for abiogenesis.
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CaledonianWarrior96
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I don't think the surface side of the ice could support an ecosystem but the underside might. In Future Planet I had grass-like algae that grows on the underside of antarctic ice and relies on nutrients washed up from upwellings like detritus the algae feeds on. There's algae that grows on the underside of ice there today which is how I got the idea. So maybe you can base an iceberg-inhabiting ecosystem with that type of algae/photosynthetic life growing on the underside.

You can even zonify the environment by having different photosynthetic species that rely on different wavelengths of light growing at different depths of the iceberg
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Flisch
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Russwallac
May 7 2018, 08:52 AM
There's also the issue that ice is, well, ice. It doesn't really provide a good substrate for organisms to grow in, and the cold would seriously inhibit the chemical reactions necessary for abiogenesis.
I mean, in a sufficiently cold environment ice would act like any other solid substrate. Just how early land was only bare rocks and soil had to form over the ages through various waves of pioneer plants (and lichen!), a similar thing could happen with continental ice floes.

The problem is actually getting these as the thermodynamics of water worlds is not very conductive of having both ice and liquid water on the surface. (Unless we're talking about subsurface oceans, but that's clearly not what Akurian was going for.
Edited by Flisch, May 7 2018, 10:25 AM.
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Talenkauen
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Is there any way of theorizing what an ancestral basal xenarthran would look like?

Furthermore, why do so many bird and mammal groups only seem to appear after the KT entinction, when they should realistically be far older?
Edited by Talenkauen, May 7 2018, 11:41 AM.
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Akurian452
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I was going for a world that's possibly tidally locked as that may be the case for the Trappist-1 worlds. Apparently recent research suggests that the innermost worlds (b & c) may have less than 15% water mass and the outermost worlds (f & g) over 50% compared to Earth only having 0.02 percent (they didn't say what percentage d & e could have). I was hypothesizing that if there was no dry land on any of these worlds that some organisms could adapt to (temporarily) live on the ice like some animals in Antarctica do. I actually just thought of another question. If water worlds are tidally locked would a large portion of their water mass be frozen on the night side thus exposing some dry land?
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Flisch
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Talenkauen
May 7 2018, 11:38 AM
Is there any way of theorizing what an ancestral basal xenarthran would look like?

Molecular studies suggest that xenarthrans split from wherever they came from around 100 million years ago during the cretaceous. The first anteaters were found 55 million years ago, armadillos 45 mya and sloths 20 mya. Considering there's (allegedly) a gap of ~50 million years between the shared ancestor and when anteaters and armadillos had already split, it's hard to say. Personally I entertain the idea that the shared ancestor was arboreal or semi-arboreal and an insectivore/omnivore. I'm thinking of a coati. That to me sounds like the most sensible thing to assume.

Talenkauen
May 7 2018, 11:38 AM
Furthermore, why do so many bird and mammal groups only seem to appear after the KT entinction, when they should realistically be far older?

I assume this has something to do with the fact that mammals at least tended to be relatively small compared to the sizes they frequently reached after the KT. Sure there were sheep-sized mammals during the cretaceous as well, but they weren't nearly as common as afterwards. Remember that most fossils of cenocoic mammals we find are either teeth, because the skeletons are too fragile and don't fossilize or of bigger animals. OR we get lucky and find something like messel pit which conserves even bats. But that is relatively rare. Still, messel pit is probably skewing our perception of the fossil record. Take that away and we'd find as many "small" animals of the cenocoic as of the mesozoic.

To be fair, I'm not that knowledgeable about how complete our fossil record of the cenocoic is compared to the cretaceous, so take what I just said with a grain of salt.

Akurian452
May 7 2018, 11:43 AM
I was going for a world that's possibly tidally locked as that may be the case for the Trappist-1 worlds. Apparently recent research suggests that the innermost worlds (b & c) may have less than 15% water mass and the outermost worlds (f & g) over 50% compared to Earth only having 0.02 percent (they didn't say what percentage d & e could have). I was hypothesizing that if there was no dry land on any of these worlds that some organisms could adapt to (temporarily) live on the ice like some animals in Antarctica do. I actually just thought of another question. If water worlds are tidally locked would a large portion of their water mass be frozen on the night side thus exposing some dry land?

I think this largely depends on the depth of the water. (Or rather the percentage of the planet mass being water) Say, you had an europa-like planet, with like 25% water mass, then the heat distribution would be too efficient to elt ice form on the cold side. The cold water would sink down and the warm water would well up, causing an enormous vertical gyre between the day and the night side.

On planets with less water and oceans about as deep as earth, I could see ice actually forming as water wouldn't be able to flow as freely. But even then I remain sceptical. Still, I'm not that knowledgeable about thermodynamics in such detail, so I'm not sure.
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