Apart from a deadly burning wasteland, what sort of terrain could you imagine a planet very close to the sun, like Mercury, might be able to contain after being terraformed?
I'm not asking what's scientifically possible, just what you could imagine a science fiction setting might be capable of.
The only thing that's right out is something to deal with the heat: it'd kind of make the entire premise pointless.
In some Arthur C. Clarke novel, I remember Mercury was habitable only around the longitude perpendicular to the sun, where the eternal dusk provides a reasonable temperature between the scorching day and frozen night (Mercury is tidally locked, so one side is always facing the sun).
boiling metal swamp
People would be living underground near areas that are not facing the sun. If there are large cities then they're have much of the population working on maintaining the city. But before any of that you'll have to get rid of the thick green house gases that are covering the planet out because the pressure from the gases are so strong and hot it would kill you and burn you alive at the same time before you would even see the any ground
> 800 f during the day
> -280 f at night
jesus christo
>each Mercurian day lasts for 176 Earth days
The rotation of mercury is a big issue. I feel like if the planet had a better spin though, the heat wouldnt be quite as extreme.
Getting enough water and keeping it would also be an issue. No matter what, it'd be insanely hot. I feel like the ideal though would be tropical jungles in deep canyons amd valleys that are more cool and shaded from the sun, so that they're only a balmy 120 degrees instead of 300 like the surface.
Not sure how accurate that is, but you get the idea
>I'm not asking what's scientifically possible, just what you could imagine a science fiction setting might be capable of.
Just a really awful, horrible, humid, muggy, wet, Jungle Planet. Where the global average temperature is 37 degrees Celsius and the only seasons are: rainy, spring, and summer.
Naturally, though, the planet isn't ENTIRELY covered in jungles: there's also awful hot volcanic marshes where nobody goes, shallow hot oceans absolutely TEAMING with life, and the occasional savanna which exists between states of being either too damn dry or a horror show of massive thunder-storms.
Have the thick atmosphere infused back into the soil from all the plants or something, the magma layers cooled down, and everything is just rich and fertile to such a degree that the entire planet is absolutely fucking inordained with overwhelming and horrifying flora and fauna: dinosaurs, giant insects, sea monsters GALORE, maybe even a few fantasy creatures, etc.. People live by the ocean(s), not because the other places aren't flush with resources and fertile land, but the sea side just has a defensible, livible, break from all the monsters and megafauna.
It's not quite tidally locked - 1 day passes every 2 years, so you couldn't just live around the dusk line. You'd have to have some kind of mobile city which travels around the planet, perpetually chasing the dusk.
I'm pretty sure that's already a setting. It involves giant city-tanks that eat each other. I forget the name, though.
You're thinking of Venus. Mercury is the gasless wasteland.
Don't forget, the major issue with megafauna won't be diet in this setting, but heat. Sea monsters make their own lives easier, but everything else has to push heat out of their bodies and do so hard. Expect the easiest way to avoid megafauna to be running away.
Further, there would be extremely aggressive plantlife. Think thorny kudzu trees.
Someone who can science for real might be able to answer this one, but, even if terraforming was possible, wouldn't the solar winds just blow the atmosphere away?
Another question, if a strong magnetic field was put in place, by restarting the rotation of the core, would it be enough to protect it?
Now, if I would come out with a setting I would say start it's core and then bombard it with an absurd amount of water, making a hot flooded planet with almost constant rain, kinda like Kamino.
I'll stick to "scientifically possible".
The entire surface could be covered in a biotech mix of tree and bubble habitats. Most of the foliage acts as solar panels, absorving insane amounts of energy. Orbit-reaching trees act as orbital elevators and global heat radiators. Their foliage is actually a highly sophisticated optic phased array. They export energy through laser beams of varying focus. Any hostile powers will simply receive more energy than they can handle, be it a ship or planet. Their entire economy and legal currency is defined in "watts".
Just for kicks and horribly wrong developments of memeplexes, mercurians redesigned themselves as elves through cosmetic gengineering.
Until someone makes reliable antimatter, they could dominate the solar system, specially if lagrange point stations capable of redirecting the beams are available. Those could look like space trees fixed into asteroids whose leaves also act as an optical phased array.
Mercury has the second hottest surface temperatures in the solar system, but people forget that it also has the coldest. Even Pluto is warmer than the dark side of Mercury. Mercury is too small to possess a magnetic field to shield an atmosphere from the intense solar wind that comes with its closeness to the sun, or the gravity needed to hold onto more than a smidgen of trace gasses.
There are a few conceivable ways a sic-fi book could do something with a planet as close to its sun, if not closer. One way would be to have the planet somewhere between .75 and 2 times Earth's mass. This would leave humans able to develop physically and walk around on the planet's surface, and allow it to possess a magnetic field and atmosphere (in theory; in reality it would need a VERY strong field to overcome stellar wind). If the atmosphere was thick, surface temperatures would be distributed by winds, especially if the planet is partially or completely tidally locked, as is often the case. Imagine huge wind farms harvesting massive amounts of energy along the dawn-dusk circumference where the mixing wind is strongest and the temperatures reasonable to some degree.
Secondly, imagine a hot Jupiter whose magnetic field is strong enough to protect the moons that orbit it. If, by chance, the volcanoes that erupt on the moon due to tidal forces do not release greenhouse gasses, as they do on Earth (perhaps because of the moon's composition lacking the necessary elements or compounds), then a perpetual smog blocking sunlight just might lead to reasonable temperatures.
But you said these ways to deal with the heat were right out. Pointless. Good thinking OP, nobody likes to think about science.
Aahhh, I'm just Joshin' ya. In that case, I imagine the civilizations would have to be underground, of have so much water added that it can't just boil away because the atmosphere is too thick and humid.
Yes and yes to your questions. Venus, for example, has a tail like a comet's due to the amount of gasses that are blown off. We don't know how magnetic fields are generated in cores, like, at all. We call it a dynamo effect but thats literally the bulk of the knowledge. Geophysicists are working on it. If there is a way to restart a core it would likely involve adding absurd amounts of radioactive elements to the planet's interior, since radioactive decay is what causes most of the latent heat in a planet like Earth.
same user btw. ill answer any questions people have
Personal interest or for a job or both?
both. I'm a geology major going into planetary science
Neat. Without trying to derail the thread too much, what kind of job do you plan to get out of that?
>Sorry for replying late
I'm looking to study various bodies in the solar system, Mars being the most likely but I really want to do something involving Europa when the time comes to send a mission to it. NASA has quite a few geologists, and they're the main scientists responsible for the experiments done on other worlds.
Alternatively, I could just sell my soul to oil and start making 120k a year fresh out of grad school.
Predator Cities? (If you're in NA you might know them as The Hungry City Chronicles)
What if it was essentially identical to Earth - same size, magnetic field, rotation - only as close to the sun as Mercury?
Different science user:
The oceans would boil off, producing huge amounts of water vapor, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect. The end result would probably look something like Venus, but even more hellish.
Just go full Stanislav Lem and make it settled by a feudal society of robot knights.
First science user here. This.
Natural Science major here. Thinking of geo or earth sciences for similar reasons. Currently doing some swamp stuff. Pic related from today. Dive Beetle larvae.
>Restarting core rotation
For what purpose?
All you need a satellite network of MRI machines and you'll be fine.
Maybe.
Heavy cloud / particle cover to reduce how much sunlight reaches the planet
This could be so hard to control that it could lead to the planet Ironically becoming and ice ball.
Mercury still have blackbody temperature of 440 K. For comparison Earth is 254 K.
Atmosphere and water help reducing temperature variation but also increase average temperature.
Just pump Sulphides into the atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface?
Or just throw up a solar satellite swarm and do some orbital megastructures.
The Poles should be fine. You could build one city on each pole, and two cities on giant tracks around the equator, the tracked cities could be propelled by sunlight expanding the tracks as they heat up.
The cities catching and eating each other dosn't seem feasible because the only places you could build these cities would be away from each other on the other side of the planet. Even communication between them would be hard. Rockets or insulated buggies traveling over the dark side.
>communication would be hard
What are satellites?