I don’t know how much this variant on this topic has been discussed, but I can’t find anything on it from skimming articles here or on the developer wiki. What are the opinions and thoughts people have on “living planets” in Thrive in the future? Think something along the lines of Phazon from Metroid, the proto-molecule from The Expanse, etc. I think this could be an interesting space stage gameplay for sessile organisms which would utilize panspermia in some form in order to spread. This would tie into the Living Ships discussion, which I know has its problems, but reproduction at the space scale could be caused from asteroid impacts, and chunks that get thrown into space could have life on it specifically evolved to take over new celestial bodies to make another living planet. This definitely feels like a softer sci-fi topic at times due to how they are usually executed in media, but it also seems plausible in the same vain as panspermia being possible. We also have individual organisms that take up a massive amount of square miles on Earth, such as the Pando aspen tree grove, or the individual Armillaria ostoyae fungus that takes up a large surface area under ground. This concept is taking the extreme end of this biological strategy, and could be a neat end goal for sessile gameplay.
Pretty sure “Living Planets” are under the category of “Sci-fi” for a good reason…
Yeah, this sounds like a very scientifically implausible suggestion, which would exclude it from considering putting in the game. But anyone is feel free to prove me wrong with actual plans based on current scientific knowledge on how this could work.
It could be inserted into the game as a planet desciption thing saying something along the lines of “While it may look like a normal planet, many beings believe that it’s in truth a lifeform of unbelievable size”
Being at the bottom of a gravity well the like earth’s is a terrible idea. You can’t get anything out other than light, and unless transmitted genetic code by radio is a viable means of reproduction (new idea for non-LAWK but it’s still a bad one) then it is evolutionarily impossible for an earth scale entity to exist. But… on the way there is something like the polar geysers on Enceladus, which are able to eject the fluids of the subsurface ocean into space. At that scale one could orbit a planet like Saturn or a star or another of it’s kind for reproduction. Is this a good idea? no. Is it better than a sentient earth? yeah.
I wonder what would be the gravity limit for geysers to still be able to escape a “living planet”'s gravity. I guess somewhere around the size of Mercury?
a potential way for a planet to become ‘alive’ is for a thermotrophic or electrotrophic species that can make siloxane based lipids (probably still with a carbohydrate head) so all its membranes are primarily siloxane based to make a pool of diluted hydrofluoric acid under itself, probably keeping part of its body in that so it can fix the silica into a silicon alternative to a carbohydrate, so that can be used to make the siloxane based lipids(or burnt for energy, or potentially even made into a cellulose analogue), to make a pit deep enough for the rocks to start boiling the mixture of water and HF, so the species can be a geothermotroph(for the electrotrophic species, magnets, coils made of nanowire bundles, and a condenser would be involved), which would not only allow, but incentivize it to dig deeper and grow its roots/mycelia into the rocks surrounding its pit (for the direct geothermotroph, but both would still have the incentive of fixing silica to make more siloxane based fatty acids)
the ‘stomach’ of such an organism would be the perfect place for an obligate cyclic thermotroph to live, assuming it’s able to handle boiling water, probably even providing it with sufficient energy to fix a good portion of the silica and other minerals in the organism’s ‘stomach’ acid
since such an organism would have every reason to dig deeper, become more heat resistant, and expand itself (and that’s not even considering that, like plants, they must make sure their offspring are sufficiently far from them, so they’d need to produce more energy than they use if they use fruits and pollenation, just like fruiting plants), and smaller ones would quickly be outcompeted by their larger neigbors, even two of such a species competing would start an evolutionary arms race to be bigger, more efficient at storing energy, more heat resistant, grow deeper, and be better
oh, and such a species would make the crust of its planet grow until there is no mantle left, and then once it’s started using the core’s heat, it’s gotta either start maneuvering its planet so the planet can eat meteors or other planets, or the species has to start spreading to other planets, and it’ll more than likely do both, and if an obligate sapient species arises on such a planet, it would probably use the holes left behind by the geothermotrophic species to make geothermal power plants, as well as many other geothermal things, like perhaps a boiling lead geothermal forge!
and such a species would probably only not have to worry about its planet cooling too much on a planet with like 5 moons
Are we sure such lifeforms would have the mental capacity to do that? Also wouldn’t running into meteors risk ejecting more materials than what is gained?
individually, definitely not. collectively, as long as they can communicate.
it’s not the materials they’d run into meteors or planets for, it’s the heat created by the collision
I’d still think it would take a miracle for such organisms to figure out where they should guide the planet to find meteorites.
more than likely it’d be whatever sapient species arises on such a planet that does the planet moving
How long would it even take them to move a planet?
The thing is they’d get hit by a lot of meteorites even if they did nothing. Planets tend to get hit by those. It’d be advantageous to know when meteor storms are coming, so they would probably evolve to see or perhaps use some form of radar to detect them. by comparison the orbital mechanics to predict where they’re going is easy. Then you could shut down any vulnerable body parts or being you are in communication with, and maybe prepare some other entities that know how to take advantage of meteor material. If your preperations are very, very effective, you could quite prefer to be hit by meteors, and you’d see lots of potential meteor storms that just miss. So, you’d want to dodge into those, right (and of course if you even kinda understand orbital mechanics, fly into all Trojans, and find an asteroid belt)? Well, could you?
Ages. It’s probably not gonna work, for the most part. Planets make awful spaceships. You could possibly get a baby protoplanet into space and it could use solar sails or something to fly towards a good location with lots of materials and other things, and then grow to planet scale, but an adult even the size of a small moon would have a lot of trouble flying anywhere.
And the chances of such lifeforms emerging are probably too low to be considered viable for a Thrive Addition…
I think that the only required change to thrive, that is, if it’s programmed very scalably, would be to allow pre-space-stage lifeforms to effect orbital mechanics. And, yk, space whales, planet eating bacteria, etc, might also like that feature. While it’s obviously low priority, it would basically just be backporting from space stage. So, yk, once we have a space stage, why not put it in?
Eh, probably too much effort for something which would make a tiny impact anyways
If it is not realistically viable to evolve naturally, it shouldn’t be put into the game.
Unless there is some developer who REALLY wants to have it in the game… Which probably isn’t happening.
Yeah it’s cartoonishly unlikely, but, counterpoint, its a cool idea
That doesn’t apply to scientifically unrealistic ideas, they are not getting into the game whatsoever. If someone wants they can make a fork or a mod with their unrealistic ideas. So while a lot of really outlandish suggestions don’t have the problem of scientific unrealism (instead having the problem of not enough programmers to do them), this is one of the more rare ideas that are so unrealistic that their problem is being unrealistic and not just us not having enough programmers to work on every single idea someone suggests.