Space whales

[willow (they/her or yours are was/were)]

an asteroid becomes a moon if it’s own gravity starts affecting it’s shape if i remember correctly

[TwilightWings21 (Death From the Shadows)]

Pretty sure it’s just a moon if it orbits a planet (and is below a certain size) but idk for sure tho

[OoferDoofer (Certified, Authorized, Qualified, Recognized, Ratified, Formalized)]

@willow

an asteroid becomes a moon if it’s own gravity starts affecting it’s shape if i remember correctly

An asteroid starts becoming spherical after it passes about 500km diameter. If an asteroid grows larger than 800 km it becomes a dwarf planet.

@TwilightWings21

Pretty sure it’s just a moon if it orbits a planet (and is below a certain size) but idk for sure tho

Size doesn’t matter. A moon can be as large as it wants, but as long as it orbits another planet, it is a moon.

[TwilightWings21 (Death From the Shadows)]

I was thinking of things such as Pluto and Charon, where they orbit each other(maybe with one orbiting the other a bit more)

Then it’s not a moon I don’t think

[OoferDoofer (Certified, Authorized, Qualified, Recognized, Ratified, Formalized)]

Charon is Pluto’s moon, I think because it is smaller.

One of Jupiter’s moons is larger than mercury I believe, so size doesn’t really matter.

[50gens]

quotes

@willow

drag based propulsion system

what is that

@willow

all it would require is code

only things that can exist in real life will be in thrive, and i think there can be space whales

@willow

gravity of this planet is not yet defined

gravity is defined

@willow

asteroids could most definitely house life if they were in any sort of goldilocks zone asteroids have plenty of gasses and water

goldilock zone is for planets, asteroids don’t have atmospheres

@willow

hollow asteroids are a thing and can contain gasses and water

how would a hollow asteroid be filled with presurised gas and water(it didn’t form in a pressurised enviroment), and even if it was, it would be dark inside and there wouldn’t be photosynthesis

@willow

i wasn’t done writing it

you should have

@OoferDoofer

Then it wouldn’t be an asteroid

I wish this was constructive critisism

@willow

a large asteroid spinning asteroid would also work for that

edit: earth’s magnetic field is caused by moving electric fields, how could that happen in an asteroid?

@willow

gas giants do i meant it would be orbiting a gas giant which would heat it on the dark side by pulling on it and protect it from radiation

“dark side” doesn’t have anything to do with being heated. And gas giants heat only large moons close to them, because the closer side and farther side would be subjected to different gravity ^[1], the shape of the moon would elongate and friction would cause it to heat

@TwilightWings21

At that point if it was large enough it would no longer be an asteroid, but a moon, which is a different conversation entirely

its nice that we know what we should be talking about

@OoferDoofer

At which point it would become a moon - even if it was tiny. Which is exactly what I said previously

then why did you say it again?

Now I want to make a summary of the solutions to the problems of space life, not a lot of people seem to have believed in its possibility. I will attempt to stop the asteroid talk, and then convince you for the possibility of space whales starting from a planet.

A cell is a mixture of molecules in water surrounded by oil, so it needs liquid water. The triple point of water is at 273 kelvins and 0.006 atmospheres, which doesn’t exist in space. It needs to be hotter and denser than that to to remain a liquid.

• Temperature and heat

Heat generated is proportional to the volume and heat lost is proportional to surface area, so only a big creature can stay warm. That also means a space whale has to start from a planet and then go to space, there wouldn’t be the water to support a microscopic colony on an asteroid as it evolves into larger sizes, it has to carry its own water. The creature can also change its albido to or use insulation in addition to just being big.

• Pressure

It can have an exoskeleton/shell that works like a mechanical counterpressure suit. It also protects against micrometeorites.

• Radiation

@50gens

It can carry a lot of copies of its original dna in stem cells in its center, covered with a thick layer of water(protecting against radiation) so that it could replace its cells as old ones mutate into cancer or become disfunctional.

• Oxygen and carbondioxide

The oxygen it breathes would be disolved in its blood, and it would have an organ dedicated to storing it. Plants would be self sufficiant (instead of infinitely growing like our plants) and have photosynthesis speed equal to respiration. All space whales may end up being plants, a way to create oxygen when you don’t have immediate acces to it would be handy even to herbivores or carnivores, the other option is to hibernate very hard between the resupply points. Since getting into space requires movement, many of the space whales can start as animals with plant symbiotes with the plant characteristic slowly getting predominant from there on. Also, only the living parts of the creature needs to be hot, it can have parts carrying liquid oxygen or dry ice ^[2]

• Getting to space in the first place

I can think of 3 ways of getting of planet.

1. Running too fast

Flying wouldn’t work^[3] but what about running in a mountain above most of the atmosphere^[4], no?

2. Geysers

@Deathwake

My earlier post mentioned that some moons of gas giants have geysers with the strength to blast a life form into space. Those moons also happen to be theorized to have liquid water oceans for mantels. These oceans may have life, and that which lives in the crust may be quite resilient. Think water bears. And protists. A geyser could send them into space.

A geyser can send a large creature too. It can use a parachute to increase drag while standing in a geyser

3. Rockets

If humans can make rockets can go to space, why can’t nature? In a planet with lower gravity, rockets would be much more useful, since you could actually lift yourself. Imagine a jellyfish moving in air (not always, just when it wants to jump), pulling air from above and sending below like how our digestive tracks have two openings. It could later swich to carrying fuel instead of relying on musclepower to move air.

@Gotor

For it are needed Oxidizer and fuel. But no one known creature can survive at temperatures, which are in nozzle of rocket, when it goes up. Ok… Where will it store all the reagents? Right, nowhere. Most part of time it will be useless

The parts that would get hot could be made from dead tissue, and the creature can store reagents away from its body, only loading itself before takeoff.

On earth, the primary producers are plants and the biomass of everything that feeds from them depends on their biomass. But in space (at least before a journey to an asteroid is made), things are different. There is constant daylight and high energy wavelenghts, but your biomass is limited to the mass you brought from the planet. The creatures that make the journey between the planet and orbit would be the like the primary producers, and would trade water and calcium carbonate(or another source of carbon^[5]) in return for glucose synthesised in space^[6]

@Deus

so barren of immediate advantages for an organism

This wouldn’t come out of nowhere. Once enough organisms stay in the air for extended periods of time, wouldn’t letting a moss grow under your transparent skin make sense?

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1. an asteroids closest and farthest sides are practically the same distance away from the gas giant ↩︎

2. like backpacks ↩︎

3. at least on its own ↩︎

4. or if the atmosphere is only in canyons and that is where life appeared ↩︎

5. a lot of elements would be in high demand ↩︎

6. especially when a dyson swarm is being built ↩︎

[Abominable]

Why is there so many space whales

[50gens]

Do you think we are almost guaranteed to not have space whales in the final game?

[fralegend015 (Shroudmaster)]

we are guaranteed, not almost, ARE to not have

[Nigel]

i mean, unless somehow you BLJ into space while you’re a whale so fast that the game doesnt register that you then are in space, then…

[C009 (Least favourite developer)]

@C009

tree creatures uplifted with ftl technology

tree creatures uplifted with ftl technology

are they considered space whales?

[50gens]

It could be a bioship, but the focus here is on creatures that exist in space not because of any technology.

[Deus (The Alpha and the Omega)]

@fralegend015

we are guaranteed, not almost, ARE to not have

Agreed.

Let’s make things simple and pose some major design flaws problems with the idea of macroscopic space life in question format.

1. What would said animal eat? It definitely wouldn’t have any biotic life to sustain itself on. It would have to be autotrophic in some capacity. One idea is some symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic life, akin to what some simpler animals, such as cnidarians, do occasionally. Then, several issues arise. The animal’s membranes would have to be thin enough to actually integrate photosynthesis; how could that protect said animal from the radiation and cold of space? How would that provide any support for any sort of advanced mobility? How could an animal have enough surface area to actually facilitate enough photosynthesis to power any sort of meaningful metabolism, without having that surface area be found in membranes so thin that any abrasive impact at all will be incredibly damaging? There’s also the fact that, even if an animal could somehow get photosynthesis to work, there would be an incredibly unrewarding energy yield. This doesn’t even consider how said organisms would get essential limiting nutrients, such as nitrogen or phosphorus.

2. How would said animal have any tolerance to the environmental hazards of space, most specifically the vacuum, the cold, and the radiation? Again, the organisms most able to deal with space’s hazards are those which enter a comatose state under some sort of protective, cocoons-like layer, such as bacteria, cells, and water bears. These are all microscopic organisms, and even then, they don’t survive for long at all in space-like conditions. How would a macrsocopic animal be able to sustain any meaningful sort of lifestyle active enough to, for example, reproduce? And, again, how would such an animal be meaningfully autotrophic, considering the design questions we’ve discussed above?

3. How would such an animal have a meaningful form of movement? It would need to get to space in the first place; there are so many issues with the idea of reproduction in space that we shouldn’t even address that prospect. Wings would be useless in space. Any form of propulsion would only be useful on a planet with gravity so low, that the atmosphere would have floated off into space very soon after the planet’s birth. Any analogue to solar sails would be absolutely useless on a planet. This means two things; that transitioning to space is impossible, even if said animal is already well-prepared for space travel; and that transitioning back to a planet for important functions such as reproduction is impossible (an adult form adapted to space would absolutely be crushed by gravity, the atmosphere, etc.) I also realized while writing this that I doubt a space whale could just go to any random planet and do what it needs to do because there are different gravitational fields, atmospheric concentrations, levels of life, the sheer distance between astronomical objects, etc. Such a species would be rooted to the same planet.

4. How would such adaptations emerge through the iterative nature of evolution in the first place? There are no grand schemes in evolution; there is only an immediate benefit or an immediate detriment. Why would an animal evolve a solar sail structure in the first place? Why evolve some advanced propulsion movement system when you can just evolve a wing-like structure from limbs? Why evolve to tolerate space-like conditions if there are no similar conditions on a planet? Why evolve photosynthetic capabilities when the yield is so unrewarding and when so many concessions around things that actually work well have to be made? It’s impossible enough for the directed, purposeful, and rigorous field of astronautical engineering to get things to space safely; how is a natural, immensely slow, and iterative process such as evolution going to make that same leap?

Given the amount of sheer liberties that will have to be taken to solve these important questions, it is safe to say that there won’t ever be the potential for anything like a “space-whale” to evolve in Thrive without compromising the scientific base this game prides itself so much on. And I’m not even well-versed of space and space travel; there absolutely is more trouble waiting for any animal that tries to adapt to the conditions of space under the surface of the iceberg.

[fralegend015 (Shroudmaster)]

@Deus

the cold

Actually, the only way objects cool in space is by emmiting infrared light, as such the real problem would be producing too much heat.

[Deus (The Alpha and the Omega)]

Didn’t know that. But minimizing heat profile would be even more problematic for an organism to deal with in overcoming the dangers of space than adapting to cold in the traditional sense.

[50gens]

@Deus

@fralegend015

we are guaranteed, not almost, ARE to not have

Agreed.

Why don’t you go on and say “its so non lawk^[1] that we don’t want to add it”, instead of using 20 adjectives to describe how it is unbelievably complicated?

This isn’t like mobile plants, they don’t exist on earth which means there must be a reason why they can’t, earth also doesn’t have space whales but earth’s gravity isn’t as low as it could be

@Deus

The animal’s membranes would have to be thin enough to actually integrate photosynthesis; how could that protect said animal from the radiation and cold of space?

If there was a terrarium in space^[2], the plants in it would have no problem photosynthesising.

@Deus

How could an animal have enough surface area to actually facilitate enough photosynthesis to power any sort of meaningful metabolism, without having that surface area be found in membranes so thin that any abrasive impact at all will be incredibly damaging?

That is an interesting question. When they talk about a micron thick solar sails, they never talk about all the space dust it may hit. Of course, that’s not the thickness a terrarium can have, there wouldn’t be abrasion.

@Deus

There’s also the fact that, even if an animal could somehow get photosynthesis to work, there would be an incredibly unrewarding energy yield.

10% of the energy moves between trophic levels, that would mean that 90% of the cells of a space whale would have to be plant cells^[3]. This would limit the thickness of the space whale, it would be like a giant leaf and a thinner strip of animal matter behind it, there is no limit to the non living material around those, which could be the majority. All the animal parts don’t have to be spread out, they would be concentrated at one spot^[4]

I can imagine a spherical species, the surface of one hemisphere contains all the living material, and the remaining 99% is like a giant vacuole, filled with fat, wood or material to eject during movement.

@Deus

This doesn’t even consider how said organisms would get essential limiting nutrients, such as nitrogen or phosphorus.

Most of it would be recycled, the total biomass in space grows very slowly

@Deus

How would said animal have any tolerance to the environmental hazards of space, most specifically the vacuum,

@50gens

• Pressure

It can have an exoskeleton/shell that works like a mechanical counterpressure suit.

@Deus

the cold,

The creature, like any plant, would be absorbing light in visible/ultraviolet spectrum and emitting infrared light.

According to the information I was able to find in wikipedia^[5], an object 2.2 AU away from our sun would become 200 kelvin, at 3.2 AU it is 165 kelvin. As the light gets away from the sun, it loses its energy proportional to the distance squared (since the photons are spread in 4πr^2), but the energy an object loses is proportional to its temperature to the power four, so an objects temperature decreases proportional to the square root to the distance to the sun, and it fits the data in wikipedia, 165*(3.2/2.2)^(1/2)=198.99, they must have did some rounding. 200*(2.2/1)^(1/2)=296.6 kelvin (23 celcius), which allows for liquid water^[6]. A species as away from the sun as earth, would be as hot as earth. But we can get better than that, if the creature can drop the temperature that isn’t facing the sun to 3 kelvin^[7] by slowing the conduction with that face, it would almost halve its radiation and get 2^(1/4)=1.19 times hotter. 273/1.19=229.5, (x/1)^(1/2)=296.6/229.5, x=1.67. A creature 1.67 AU away from sun can still keep its water liquid just at the tripoint of water without burning any fat (not considering the heat it would normally generate)

@Deus

and the radiation?

@50gens

• Radiation

@50gens

It can carry a lot of copies of its original dna in stem cells in its center, covered with a thick layer of water(protecting against radiation) so that it could replace its cells as old ones mutate into cancer or become disfunctional.

@Deus

How would a macrsocopic animal be able to sustain any meaningful sort of lifestyle active enough to, for example, reproduce?

The metabolisms would be very slow, like the fishes at the bottom of our oceans. They^[8] would divide like plant cells, creating the layer that protects them from the the lack of pressure and gas loss right through the middle of the organism, then seperating into two.

@Deus

Any form of propulsion would only be useful on a planet with gravity so low, that the atmosphere would have floated off into space very soon after the planet’s birth.

@50gens

What about a moon of a gas giant? Its core would be heated with tidal forces, and it would be protected with the magnetic field of the gas giant. Maybe it could be big enough to support life, but small enough to allow it to exit the planet (with geysers or biologic rockets)

@Deus

Any analogue to solar sails would be absolutely useless on a planet. This means two things; that transitioning to space is impossible, even if said animal is already well-prepared for space travel; and that transitioning back to a planet for important functions such as reproduction is impossible (an adult form adapted to space would absolutely be crushed by gravity, the atmosphere, etc.) I also realized while writing this that I doubt a space whale could just go to any random planet and do what it needs to do because there are different gravitational fields, atmospheric concentrations, levels of life, the sheer distance between astronomical objects, etc. Such a species would be rooted to the same planet.

There would be different niches in space

@50gens

The creatures that make the journey between the planet and orbit would be the like the primary producers, and would trade water and calcium carbonate(or another source of carbon[5]) in return for glucose synthesised in space

the creature adapted to high gravity is different than the one which always lives in space, so this

@willow

a creature capable of surviving and moving in space while reproducing on a planet

isn’t likely

@Deus

Why evolve some advanced propulsion movement system when you can just evolve a wing-like structure from limbs?

The species can have an extra lung which it no longer uses, and repurpose it

@50gens

Imagine a jellyfish moving in air (not always, just when it wants to jump), pulling air from above and sending below like how our digestive tracks have two openings. It could later swich to carrying fuel instead of relying on musclepower to move air.

I admit this would be rarer than wings

@Deus

Why evolve to tolerate space-like conditions if there are no similar conditions on a planet? Why evolve photosynthetic capabilities when the yield is so unrewarding

@50gens

Once enough organisms stay in the air for extended periods of time, wouldn’t letting a moss grow under your transparent skin make sense?

If creatures launch themselves into air to make long travels(to upper atmosphere or space), they wouldn’t have to keep moving body parts like fliers or runners, it would make sense to hibernate/sleep to not waste energy. Low energy consuption=>photosynthesis

@Deus

It’s impossible enough for the directed, purposeful, and rigorous field of astronautical engineering to get things to space safely; how is a natural, immensely slow, and iterative process such as evolution going to make that same leap?

Evolution has millions of years, not decades like we humans did

@fralegend015

@Deus

the cold

Actually, the only way objects cool in space is by emmiting infrared light, as such the real problem would be producing too much heat.

You're Technically HOTTER Than The Sun (with XKCD!)

replace radioactive elements with living cells(cells generate at least 10^−21 watts https://www.quantamagazine.org/zombie-microbes-redefine-lifes-energy-limits-20200812/), and you get a maximum size for space whales

@Deus

But minimizing heat profile would be even more problematic for an organism to deal with in overcoming the dangers of space than adapting to cold in the traditional sense.

Uh, there is a thing called “increasing the surface area”. Just be a dimetrodon. It is possible to do it without getting too thin.

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1. “Given the amount of sheer liberties that will have to be taken to solve these important questions” ↩︎

2. that doesn’t explode ↩︎

3. that are illuminated ↩︎

4. it doesn’t need to be all muscles to move a leaf, there would be long tendons ↩︎

5. Interplanetary medium

   ↩︎

6. and it would be the temperature of earth if it absorbed all of the light ↩︎

7. the temperature of cmbr ↩︎

8. multicellular ↩︎

[TeaKing (The modTEArator)]

now its time for a dreadful question
can space whales form a civilization in space?
because if they cant
i dont see why yall would want the devs to waste their time working on implementing them, and implementing a whole (bunch of) patch(es)/environment(s)/biome(s) for space

[TwilightWings21 (Death From the Shadows)]

Again it pretty much comes down to can photosynthesis fuel sapience if we have photosynthesis on a large enough scale?

Or is there some alternate source of nutrition these would be sapients would use?

Because the common argument seems to be here that surviving/thriving in space would likely need at least some level of photosynthesis

[fralegend015 (Shroudmaster)]

@TeaKing

now its time for a dreadful question

The dreadful question is “can space whales exist?”

This “response” from 50gens completely ignores the counter points and when he “addresses” them he just misinterpretes them.

It doesn’t even deserve a response more articolate than “you are wrong”.

[50gens]

Think what you want to think