I mean can we be sure it could happen at least as much or in larger quantities on a planet so different?
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likely yes, as chlorine has a lower oxidation potential than oxygen and thus should be easier to rip that extra electron away from than oxygen with its two hydrogens in water
the problem though is if there’s also hydrogen being produced close to the chlorine, as it could react before it bubbles up to the surface
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Well hopefully there’s more chlorine being produced than hydrogen then
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that is pretty much impossible but that’s not the only way for it to work, or even the best way
ya just need some reaction to use up the hydrogen, and the hydrogen and chlorine to be produced far enough away from eachother to have some of both not combine with the other before leaving the water
once ya got the chlorine in a methane dominated atmosphere, it will react with the methane just as surely as it would with hydrogen
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Besides this have you come up with any new stuff regarding this silicone life setting?
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well, it’d rely on a silicate planet winding up in a primarily carbonaceous asteroid belt
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Shouldn’t a planet clear that belt or do we talk about it’s very early history here?
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yes, and that’s part of the point, you need the planet to get hit by a lot of carbon asteroids
that causes a lot of carbothermal reduction of the silica
and the planet should not start in such an area as if it does, it will lose most if not all of its hydrogen to space before it can cool down enough to accumulate much water, as a result of the methane dominated atmosphere being pyrolysed into hydrogen and graphite
though, water can be delivered by asteroids, but that would not deliver as much water to the planet as an earthlike planet has by default
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Speaking of the planet’s position in the system, I presume it is absolutely necessary to prevent it from getting too much hydrogen. So it would probably need to start migrating towards the drier inner system soon after reaching the amount of hydrogen we’d want on it
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why would that be necessary??
with the escape velocity of pretty much any rocky planet, at worst it’ll help the impact sites and fresh volcanic rocks get reduced, and then become water, or reduce carbon monoxide into methane, and become water
which does mean it’ll have some Thicc oceans,(either similar to or bigger than earth’s) due to the carbon meteors bringing oxygen into the water cycle from silicate rocks, but aside from that, as long as it has enough insolation, hydrogen gets stripped from the atmospheres of rocky planets rather easily, that’s why they’re not gas giants
once a planet gets massive enough to be able to hold onto hydrogen, it accumulates hydrogen until it becomes a gas giant
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Is there a way to distance the chlorine and hydrogen production sites or would that depend on pure luck?
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luck and highly saline water, to maximize its conductivity
said waters would become very high in hydroxide ions though, which would capture CO2 into the ocean
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Which would also be for the better since I recall the planet could be a victim to greenhouse effect with all the water going into the atmosphere
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it’s also gonna be in an asteroid belt, and thus probably outside the habitable zone for earthlike planets
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Yeah but excess unwanted greenhouse event could still happen under an overabundance of the trapping gasses right?
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yes, eventually, but the greenhouse effect also tends to self-balance, especially when there’s water oceans that want to remain liquid
before the oceans boil away you have to give them enough thermal energy to boil all of it, which is about 2 kilojoules per gram, and as they get more concentrated they will increase in salinity, which increases their boiling point, and there is a thing called the reverse greenhouse effect, where saturated greenhouse gasses will emit heat as light just as effectively as the greenhouse gas in question absorbs light, but in a Very specific frequency, and the hotter a ball of greenhouse gas gets in the sunlight, the more intensely it will emit that light in the shade
venus is just the way that it is because it’s really close to the sun and has an atmosphere almost entirely composed of greenhouse gasses, but yeah, greenhouse gasses do still move the habitable range further out, but some nitrogen can help with that
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Would hypersaline oceans be a major problem for a silicone based lifeform or could they handle it like some carbon based lifeforms do?
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that’s less a problem of the base you use and more a problem of your biochemistry
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By the way is this the only evo-related space you posted this silicone stuff in?
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