More Planetary ecology

[kingtycoon]

Having come up with my lego ecology based on protozoans, I thought maybe I'd go toward an inorganic ecology. 

Here's what that's about: 

A planet, rocky, metallic core, but say its rotation is quicker than earth's and it has a stronger, much stronger magnetic field.  We'll say it's tectonic activity is equally aggressive, so that it has very active volcanic events.  The gravity is less and the air pressure is very low, the atmosphere is thick, cloudy, but made of lighter stuff, low in Oxygen. 

Now the magnetosphere is pretty rigid, about as firmly planted as that of earth's, so it shifts, every few thousand years, north and south swap.  Meanwhile there's a tremendous volcanism that's producing slow 'seeps' of liquid iron, this creates many substantial structures of crystalline Iron, big rusty cubes.  Now the strong magnetism of the planet comes in here, and as you know, crystals, when formed, are magnetically polar according to the polarity of the planet.  So these big, big crystals, they're either positive or negative - north or south oriented.  Based on when they came to be. 

From there - we go to the atmosphere, it's a thick and likewise magnetically active atmosphere, lots and lots of lightning is being generated, a tremendous quantity of it.  A good bit of the lightning arcs up off of the surface - out of these crystals, and the lightning follows between these crystal structures - following the magnetic polarity.  Following it a long, long way sometimes.  This causes a few things to happen - first, there is a 'memory' forming, of the path of arcing lightning along like-polarized structures, sometimes 100 deep - 100 arcs, in 'memory'.  The arcs tend to originate with taller, higher crystals and move on down the line, so these smallest crystals are the least electrified, but the hardest to come to - they're the grounds, in the end, the ones where the buck stops.  This network of lightning becomes a series of pathways that's 'remembered' in the rock in the form of scarification (sure) and in the form of a persistent charge.  This charge is a switching sequence based on it's order in the arcing lightning chain. 

When rocks break off or are eroded they retain these designations on the chain, binary polar state and numerical electrical sequence - they're also magnetic and probably electrically charged - so in time the debris makes its way across the landscape to find the like and sequential parts of its sequence.  These bits and pieces of magnetized iron dust then form up into sequenced strands, strings - or whiskers, if you prefer.  These then start combining based on their magnetic poles -/+ not +/+ or -/- and there you have the beginnings of a natural computer, after a few million or billion iterations of this there are digital computers in the air made of rock and dust.  After a few million or billion iterations of that -there are thinking dust-clouds and conscious rocks.



This way there a

Comments

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

I still am trying to put a point on how "hard" or "soft" you are going for with your science. I mean-- this is (fairly) plausible, but the natural computing would happen at a...I want to say "glacial" pace, but I literally mean "at the same pace as glaciars, as crystal nodes build & recede."

A possible shortcut is for the "sentient" computers to upgrade themselves, the same way genetic computers on Earth have gotten to the point where they use brains, where the biological computers have gotten to the point where they use electronic computers? Maybe the natural computers developed some secondary, meso-scale systems?

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

This is probably going to appear to people, the inhabitants of this planet, as a system of ley-lines and the voice of the sky-god, it's a continental consciousness that offers a very limited kind of guidance but that attracts a zealous kind of adherent.

It'll be slow, like you say, and maybe a meta-plot point will be advancing or hybridizing these consciousnesses - but for the moment - no.

The Powerful EM activity on this planet and on the star will also have a secondary effect that I really am going for - and that's EM spectrum static. Wireless comms are going to be very, very limited - only a couple of functioning bandwidths, heavily used/controlled, high power necessary.

Wired communications and a reason to go from place to place are drivers for drama/story and so I was looking for a way to interfere with the radio. This is a big one - and the consciousnesses here are likely to respond to radioed messages more than any other kind of message - maybe in a hostile way.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Well then there you go. A plausible "religion," a plausible "alien," a plausible metaplot & a plausible macguffin for limiting tech level, all in one swoop.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

This is how I roll.

But I guess I'm looking at making more.

Do you think I should have a straightforward ecology? With animals and plants and etc...?

Going forward there are a few planets with terrestrial ecologies - a couple that are basically pliestocene.

I don't know if you've looked at much of the flava-text but one theme is that during the 1,000 year Hajj, the software is attacked and changed by other pilgrims - these from Ceres or Pluto - sabotage on the long voyage. Earth-based software reboots taking 5-600 years meant that some of the terraforming code is irrevocably broken.

I want this to be the reason for a planet of poison-dinosaurs. And also an explanation for one of the metaphysical villains of the setting - the Ceres trickster, or Pluto- - haven't decided yet.

Don't read this if you play in my Oubliette game.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Like I said-- this is literally the plot of my current campaign in a lot of ways. The weird chimeras are the gene banks trying to "fix" the holes in the genetic library by grafting stuff together.

Your "diversity bloom" Klial logic was good; at least, I bought it for the non-humans, but the human-types never sat right with me. Human admixture seems inevitable...unless there are planetary boundaries. I think the mental ability to categorize means that planet to planet ecology can be NUTS.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

I think you're discounting regionalism and genetic provincialism too much - why do we have any ethnicities? Why not just make them more extreme in difference? That's not a huge leap.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Nah, the human species fucks each other too much, even in the most extreme cases of segregation. The Neanderthal-Human divide is a weird case that supports some idea of a diversity gulf...except I don't think you want to jump to the species level. Anyhow, the idea of qualitative differences based on ethnicity is one of those persistant racial biases in science, & one that has been thoroughly put down time & time again; maybe it is the Franz Boas admirer in me, but I don't cotton to it. I say: it IS a huge leap, & it is one the breaks the suspension of disbelief for me.