Alien: *come from Nifelheim during Earth's winter* Tour guide: "… and so that's a basic tour of the town. Now if you look to your right you’ll see the amazing ice pans that appear this time of year." Alien: *has a panic attack* Tour guide: "What's wrong?" Alien: *grabs tour guide by the collar of their shirt* "Your ENTIRE ocean is freezing solid and you’re _CaLm AbOuT tHaT!?"_
@Oleg Oleg Sir this happens once every orbit/year and I forgot to mention that it’s only the top getting ice the rest of the water underneath the ice is just cold
Niflheim is exactly the kind of thing that fascinates me from a functional perspective. As long as the system works chemically, it doesn't matter how likely to exist it is, it's fiction, you can ignore that part. I mean, you should probably avoid anything that doesn't prominently include hydrogen and compounds with it, because it's the most abundant element in the universe by a ludicrous margin, but practically anything else can be handwaved with minimal suspension of disbelief.
Well, he doesn’t have chlorine-based weapons, so n- *wait a second* **looks at profile picture** *YOU STOLE MEMEMAN’S ID! IM GONA CALL THE DIMENSIONAL POLICE!* D:
"[Fluorine is] super, super chemically active so it probably wouldn't hang around very long." Can this actually be used as an argument? Oxygen is the second most chemically active element after fluorine, yet our ecosystem uses it just fine.
I imagine all of the atmospheric Fluorine would have came about in a similar way to our Oxygen (See the Great Oxygenation Event) by that version of photosynthesis.
Without live the Oxygen levels would quickly drop. That is why we tend to look for free O2 molecules in atmospheres when looking for signs of live. The idea being that it needs to be replenished constantly to stay at a given level. In the Niflheim case you'd need something breaking apart the Flourine compounds too. Else you are going to get Venus or Mars version of the planet.
Yes, this argument is fine. Fluorine is *much* more reactive than oxygen. If you were going to design an element that was as reactive as possible, you'd end up with fluorine (it has the highest electronegativity of any element, a very weak diatomic bond strength, small atomic and ionic radius so high lattice and bond enthalpies on forming compounds, etc.). Also, arguably chlorine is more reactive than oxygen. It's not just reactivity as well - biochemically you're rather limited by replacing oxygen with fluorine, as you can't have C-F double bonds, so anything resembling proteins, carbohydrates or any other biochemical macromolecule is going to be a challenge. Plus teflon is essentially unreactive (hence why we use it for coating non-stick surfaces in cooking), so trees made of it wouldn't biodegrade, and therefore you wouldn't be able to support a food chain.
To add to the conversation, I would like to remind hard sci-fi worldbuilders: you don't have to go through the trouble of creating an unusual atmosphere for your world in order to make it exotic. At the very most, all you have to do is acknowledge that the majority of the time the species of one planet won't be able to breath on another planet, so for realism's sake you would want to regularly work this in to your setting. Treat it as a default that most characters in an interplanetary setting will wear breathing apparatuses.
I know nothing about chemistry, I just put my planet around an F-class star, changed the atmosphere accordingly (as advised by people who know), and let evolution and the effects of life around this particular star do the rest. And I just know any humans that arrive will need breathing apparatuses and domes to live in, I don't need to know the exact chemical composition of the atmosphere (for now at least, because I don't care). The result is very much young (rebooted an old science fantasy project into an actual alien planet, flora and fauna, just last year), but delightful in being familiar and exotic at the same time.
IamMrRand00m953 and if I remember correctly that's because most life up to that point used anaerobic metabolic systems, and oxygen was toxic for them. Which would make earth the oxygen equivalent to the chlorine planet.
Exactly free Oxygen was toxic and radically restructured the planets biosphere While researching snowball earth events I had found some stuff on the great oxygenation event including what chemical reactions likely sustained it. It is fascinating that even today billions of years after the oxygenation of the planet that in sufficiently anoxic environments there are surviving anaerobic microbes with biology that use Nitrate, Hydrogen Sulfide and Ferrous Iron (Fe II) respectively as their electron donars with their own types of photosynthesis. And ancient rocks point to these now vestigial processes having once supported primary production. It is mind blowing how many different energy acquisition methods life has found to trap and release energy via chemical bonds Oxygen may have won out a little over 2 billion years ago but perhaps if things turned out differently a different type of photosynthesis would have dominated. Pretty much all of these methods are poisonous to other life forms using a different method so while Oxygen won on earth perhaps elsewhere something else could have won it is only a question of whether they would be capable of highly differentiated multicellular life as after all Eukaryotes seem to be the result of a complex predatory anaerobic archaea capturing and enslaving free living aerobic microbes to avoid oxygen poisoning with benefits.
More than "a while," it took over a billion years. And it didn't finish until past 4 billion years. It's one of the triggers for the Cambrian explosion (plus an ice age or 2 that lasted millions of years each).
"Chlorine makes fires smoulder"-surely you mean the high-chlorine nature of the fuels (PVC wood) rather than the really aggressive Cl2 in the atmosphere? Granted, the latter might make metallurgy a PITA (my guess at avoiding chlorine: make nitric or sulfuric acid, turn ore into sulfate or nitrate, heat to get oxide, heat with the equivalent of charcoal to get metal).
Apparently thermite reactions work with fluoropolymers and aluminum or magnesium, so theoretically you could do the same with chloropolymers to get metal. It unfortunately doesn't solve the issue of corrosion afterwards, although I imagine you could get away with that to an extent by using some sort of nonreactive coating.
unfortunately the locals on that planet will never know those options for metallurgy, the evolution of chemistry as a science would be very hard with the reactive atmosphere. even on earth our tamer atmosphere it took centuries to figure this stuff out. and sometimes it gets in the way, requiring sealed testing apparatuses to isolate chemicals and run experiments.
@@vecstrandedonabarrenplanet7343 nitric acid and sulfuric acid are both produced naturally by microbes which could be grown similar to yeast. In a sense, metallurgy here would be more like baking bread than the process we are familiar with. As for a non-reactive coating: copper would do. Assuming there is a deposit of native copper somewhere on this planet, metallurgy absolutely could develop. You can isolate native copper from the surrounding rocks simply by heating and then rapidly cooling it: because the metal expands at a faster rate than the stone, the copper falls out. From there, copper is soft enough to be shaped by hand.
@@golwenlothlindel But copper reacts with chlorine gas anyways, and layer of copper chloride isn't strong enough to prevent further corrosion. So I don't think it would work.
Does the same also apply to iodine? I really like to create a world where one per ent of the atmosphere contained iodine. Kind of a violet sky. But other world building wise, would iodine create large fires?
Artifexian, can you make a video about building "Eccentric Earths"? Their perihelion brings them near the inner boundaries of the habitable zone, and the aphelion near the outer.
I wish I knew more about how chemistry works. This reminds me of an idea a friend and I had decades ago; a terrestrial M-Class super-Earth with high concentrations of various noble gasses (mostly neon with high traces of the full spectrum of the rest) in the atmosphere. How would that even work? What would that look like? ( honestly do not remember what type of star we said. We did choose though.)
In artifexian's sky and plant color video he mentioned that neon would result in auroras being tinted yellows and reds. I'm no expert, but if you want to make a setup like this I'd recommend making a somewhat active m type star as this would result in crazy and extensive auroras due to the frequent flares. Then again, you'd have to deal with tidal locking and dangerously high UV levels from the flairs. Maybe have the creatures relegated to the regions affected by the auroras and have them use the auroras as a warning signal to take cover from the radiation. Again, no expert but it's a cool concept nonetheless.
@FlymanMS, hahaha. Or Billiant, or Skillshare. Audible will also have some great audiobooks on chemistry. And you can then put your own worldbuild on a website with Squarespace!
Could make a video detailing what different gases would do if we added it to an Earth-like via the tweaking-method? Im tryna build a planet that would have an atmosphere that blocks out a lot of the sunlight that in turn makes the locals on the planet evolve a slower heartbeat, colder body temperature, and monochromatic infrared vision to help search out prey. I cant find a gas that would hang around the planet long enough for the locals to evolve and also block out much of the sunlight
I'm not saying anything is right or wrong. I'm saying the idea of god is a thing that made the world. So a worldbuilding god, would be the idea of god.
I didn't really say anything about right or wrong either. It's just that different worldviews have different ideas of how the world and the rest of the universe came to be. Just look at Nirn, the Tamrielites believe that Nirn is a literal corpse of, if I remember correctly one of the Aedra. Meanwhile some scholars argue that Nirn is actually just another plane of Oblivion.
Is it possible for life to exist on a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere that contains boron instead of carbon? If so, how would this affect the life and the terrain on the planet? EDIT: Also, this just came to my mind since pretty much everything in our solar system (planets, moons, asteroids, etc.) contains carbon, as does Earth, if this fictional world had boron instead of carbon would the rest of the solar system contain boron, too?
Also, with silane/siloxane-based biochemistry, there are some other issues - for example, that silicon dioxide, which would be the "obvious" end product of respiration/educt for photosynthesis (assuming a SiOHN instead of COHN biochemistry) is solid until temperatures quite a lot higher than the stability limits of silanes or siloxanes. One way you could possibly get around this (though I am not sure how well that would work) is have it happen in a reducing, not oxidising, atmosphere. There, the main respiratory gases, instead of O2 and SiO2, would be H2 and SiH4, which are both gases at temperatures where silicon-based chains are stable. Though I am not sure if a reducing atmosphere could even theoretically permit complex carbon-based life, let alone complex silicone-based life.
@Neptune Neptune So, presumably the planet formed from some sort of planetary collision, leaving the core behind? If so, how would the high metal content affect the world built?
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 I suppose the animal lifeforms would eat or burn oxidizing compounds (possibly crystals of nitrates or perchlorate) for sustenance and warmth; possibly that made by plant lifeforms (as stores energy or reproductive organs like potatoes or fruits, not structural strength like awful disgusting celery)? edit: Plants would probably use Silicon Dioxide for structural strength, so if celery wasn't bad enough already, on this world, it would be made of sand and glass.
@Zuthal Soraniz SiH4 is more likely to stay in your planet atmosphere, though. H2 is way too light, so on most of terrestrial planets, the sole gravitational force cannot hold it for billion years.
Thanks for including Tennessine in your periodic table. It's named after Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee. Interesting video overall. The fluorine world in implausible for exactly the reason you stated, not enough fluorine in the universe. Clorox seems more likely. Earth has enough chlorine to be Clorox if that's how things went.
Sry for being a nerd but a B-type star with 3.8 M⊙ would have a luminosity of ~ 150 - 200 L⊙. The habitable zone of a star is determined by SQRT(L/1.1) for the inner and SQRT(L/0.5) for the outer edge. Doing that for this star gives us a habitable zone of roughly 12 - 19 AU. A planet orbiting at 5 AU would receive about as much energy and radiation as Mercury receives from the Sun. There is no way Niflheim would be so cold.
I feel like that image was meant to be sodium hypochlorite, and he just confused them when he was finishing the animations. Cause the river was flowing into the body of water that was labeled with the image, so it might've been meant to be the ocean.
I love exploring alternate biochemistries. Even with familiar carbon-based organisms that use proteins for structure, carbohydrates and ATP for energy, and lipids for energy storage and structure, and use water as a solvent, I do like to mix things up a bit. My primary spec evo project takes place in a low-gravity environment, so all creatures use chitin, which while much denser than hydroxyapatite bone, is far stronger. There are also bird-of-prey analogues that use methane sacs to provide buoyancy, and even an evolved clade that has adapted their methane sac into a fiery breath weapon. My second ongoing spec evo project takes place on a desert planet, and the animals there (referred to as lapitheres) use silica to construct their bones, because of the sheer abundance of silica. To help with incorporating silica in the water column, there is a fungus analogue (referred to as an cryptoradix) that uses acids to break down rock.
There also other external factors when making a halogen/other chemicals atmosphere. The solar wind as well as internal volcanic mechanisms can deeply shift the behavior of these systems.
Animals made of Titanium blood would live on NIflheim, eh? My immediate reaction is that Niflheim's version of Bob Ross is a literal Great White Hunter whose paintings are also trophies of the creatures he hunts, their blood ironically shaped into Happy Little Whatevers, which is a mental image I find both unbelievably metal and also slightly terrifying.
One of your most fascinating videos to date! How would you recommend someone going about researching the effects of certain elements on a planet? I am currently trying to figure out what a planet with large amounts of water and ammonia would look like. I know that this planet would have to be cold in order for the ammonia to be liquid and would have large amounts of alkali metals dissolved in the oceans, but I haven't quite gotten to the effect this would have on the topography or biology of the world.
Coming back to this, I suddenly wonder if the Breen from Star Trek might come from a world like Niflheim. It is the in-canon assumption of everyone else in the galaxy that apparently the Breen come from a cryogenic world, based on the highly insulated encounter suits they wear when interacting with literally everybody.
When it comes to plant colours, a lot of it is to do with light. But Earth has an odd history. The earliest 'plant' life, (algae) evolved to make use of the peak wavelengths the sun puts out. that is, it absorbs green light. The end result is plants that are 'purple', since they reflect red and blue light. However, some time after, mutated plants which absorbed Red + Blue developed, and because this was a complimentary niche (the purple plants did not absorb this light), they survived and thrived. They did so well in fact that they completely out-competed the purple plants, and the suitable chlorophyll for absorbing green wavelengths was more or less lost. (I'm not sure it's 100% gone, but it's quite rare regardless.) Technically this means on Earth the 'green light absorbing' purple plant niche is now available almost everywhere, but it would seem even though it's the brightest part of the spectrum it's not enough to outcompete the 'red + blue absorbing' plants. It does however suggest, but for a quirk of fate, we would've had a purple planet, not a green one. And but for a slightly different quirk of fate, we could (and may yet) end up with black plants. (since adding the green absorbing cholophyll to the red and blue ones would result in a black plant.) Weird to think about huh. But it shows that this is theoretically viable for alien worlds even sticking entirely to biology that has existed on Earth. Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Cyan, Purple and black photosynthetic plants are ALL possible entirely using known Earth biology. (I suppose you could also get variations depending on the proportions and concentrations of the different chlorophyll types) However, the black and monochromatic plants (Red, Green, or Blue) are the most likely overall, given competition between different plant types...
I don't know about more difficult but certainly different. I mean, snow and ice blanket the ground and plants and animals still survive. Maybe exo-fish burrow to avoid being frozen.
Water freezing top down is important as the top layer of Ice provides a measure of insulation for the rest of the body of water, so it doesn't freeze over entirely. HF freezing bottom up means that it'd be more likely for the entire body of HF to freeze over. So, life there would have to evolve adaptations to this. For example, some frogs can be frozen for months and when they thaw out in the better weather they hop away.
Cells would probably be fine as the freezing process would shrink them and thawing would return them to normal, so other than needing to be able to handle a small pressure increase from a bad thawing arrangement, they should be fine to freeze and thaw.
Would be amazing to think that the life there would evolve to survive being frozen for long periods of time. something few animal on earth actually also can do. but i'm sure life would find a way to master living in such a environment, because that is what life dose.
Zoltzy Zoltzy is similar to Earth in terms of mass, radius, and gravity and orbits an F star. Due to tidal forces from the star, Zoltzy suffered high volcanic activity in the past but has over time migrated out in the solar system and cooled down. During the migration, Zoltzy captured a moon roughly the size of Pluto. A layer of sulfur thrown out by volcanoes covers the surface, making it a bright yellow (similar to Io). The atmosphere contains large amounts of carbon dioxide, nitrogen gas, sulfur dioxide, and sulfur gas and other volcanic gases and has a high pressure at sea level, making it extremely toxic. The high amount of greenhouse gases causes a runaway greenhouse effect making the surface extremely hot (similar to Venus), and the sulfur melts in the extreme heat making red sticky lakes and rivers. Wind blow small particles of sulfur into the atmosphere making the sky a bright but a slightly hazy yellow. During sunset, all the yellow gets scattered away, making the sky blue. Simple life evolved in small pockets of water in volcanoes, but due to the harsh environment, it was almost impossible for more complex life to evolve. The most complex lifeform is a moss that exists on high altitude mountains where the pressure, temperature, and the amount of sulfur are lower. The moss can use photosynthesis and cleans the air, making oxygen. Tl;dr Zoltzy is a Ioish, Venusish, Marsish sulfuric desert and a total hellplanet, but a nice place for a moss
dont suppose we could get a video giving a rundown of elements with a high likelihood of being more or less abundant than on earth, and the general effects we might expect?
I wanted to make an alien world with a fair amount of sulfur hexafluoride in the atmosphere, so as to make airships far more bouyant. I need some tips about chemistry to make life possible in a higher flourine content world with earth like pressure and temp.
For the Spectral Type of the Star, I was wondering how you got the 8 for B8. Could you do a video for the numerical sub divisions for spectral types? I know the sun is a G2V but it would really help me out for building a Star with an accurate spectral type
Stars are divided as such: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M, a sequence from the hottest (O type) to the coolest (M type). Each letter class is then subdivided using a numeric digit with 0 being hottest and 9 being coolest (e.g., A8, A9, F0, and F1 form a sequence from hotter to cooler). a luminosity class is added to the spectral class using Roman numerals. This is based on the width of certain absorption lines in the star's spectrum, which vary with the density of the atmosphere and so distinguish giant stars from dwarfs. Luminosity class 0 or Ia+ is used for hypergiants, class I for supergiants, class II for bright giants, class III for regular giants, class IV for subgiants, class V for main-sequence stars, class sd (or VI) for subdwarfs, and class D (or VII) for white dwarfs. The full spectral class for the Sun is then G2V, indicating a main-sequence star with a surface temperature around 5,800 K.
That outro catch phrase was the exact same as drift0r’s but with your name instead of his. He’s a UA-cam gamer and at the end of every video he says, “until next time, Drift0r out.”
I am currently writing a sci-fi story myself but seeing stuff like this is a bit demoralising and intimidating when writers have created planets and eco-systems where the plants are plastic and other stuff i would never have thought about that. Any good tips?
This will probably get me burned at the stake as a heretic but... If the story is good it doesn't matter how normal or fantastic the planet it takes place on is. World building is a tool to help you tell your story and (probably) not the goal itself so if you are already knee deep into it I wouldn't worry about changing things just to change them.
There's a short story that became a novella by… Asimov, I believe, called "Nightfall." It's about a world with seven or so Suns that experiences nightfall only once every few thousand years or somesuch. Predictably, everyone goes bonkers when the daylight goes away and thus conflict, thus story. I bring all of this up, though, because there was a preface to the novella that's always suck with me where he talks about how this is very obviously a truly *alien* world that pretty much wouldn't be able to have humans, but the story is in many places short-handed as if there were humans, for the reader to have something to latch to. The meandering point I'm trying to make is that even if you decide to go crazy-go-nuts with the science, don't let it get in the way of a good story. And definitely don't feel your story needs the bonkers science. In Nightfall, it's 90% Macguffin, anyway.
To really get that diversity right you need deep chemistry knowledge, not only in the elements but also a comprehensive knowledge of chemical reactions. The basic reaction formulas shows how alien world design quickly develops into organic chemistry as well. I have been able to figure out ways of creating alcohol rich worlds via the tweaking method. The trick is in general to see what substances bacteria on earth can produce, and suggesting an alternative to the oxygen catastrophe. As very often a biosphere will lead to the composition of the atmosphere being different. This is the case for worlds like titan or subglacial biospheres too by the way. One evil idea I have (taken from the same book that chlorox appears) is that worlds dominated by nitric acid could exist in the same habitable range of earth. So the explorers go to that earth like world only to end up with a planet caked in thick, toxic orange clouds of nitric acid!
What do you think of a fresh water ocean planet covered in Rain-forests with most of its water being Vapor? And what about a planet with a large amount of Sulfur and Sulfur Based Life?
Can we please get a much more detailed exploration of the Chemistry required to do this? I know it's way outside of your normal fields, but some of your videos on more complex topics describe without explaining the how or why of it. Even with my education in chemistry I wouldn't have a clue where to start with something like this.
"please welcome our new organic polymer friends where all things are plastic... Jerry... the plant... umm..." (someone tell me if are we still getting payed? if not I'm turning him into a house plant.)
My current world basically had the change that the process of photosynthesis has an intermediate stage where hydrogen is briefly stored in the cell, this eventually created an organelle where it could be stored, making many species of photosynthetic organisms buoyant. After a while some single celled creatures from these floating sea-surface mats took to the air, their altitude being controlled by water concentration. The giant green clouds resulting from this tinted the sky green, causing other organisms to switch to using a purple-magenta pigment for photosynthesis. the hydrogen stores also aid further down the evolutionary tree, counteracting the higher gravity and allowing for large creatures.
wouldnt nilfheim's atmosphere of fluorine actively destroy every semblance of photosynthesys? I mean, fluorine and hydrofluoric acid would destroy any organic compound.
It's great to see you uploading some videos with a bit of biology in 'em. Will you be doing any more videos about biology, or at least partially about biology like this one?
It isn't just a PHD but a PHD in a variety of different fields. "How do plate tectonics work on Niflheim?" ain't something a chemistry PHD can necessarily work out. Nor does having a meteorology PHD help all that much with guessing what the weather will be like without also having a chemistry PHD. Pretty soon you need to be at least a serviceable expert in chemistry, biology, geology, physics, etc etc and we don't even have any people in this world yet.
Though to be fair, people are a bit easier because the standards are so low and you can usually deflect"that's not how real societies respond to internal forces in their class structure" with "shut up, alien psychology is different." Of course then they could counter with sociology being less than the sum of its parts, I.E. individuals are complex and difficult to understand or predict but societies follow far less complex rules of rational actors, tribalism, class character and such.
I'm making a planet with a nitrogen fluorine atmosphere and I've seen this video before... I don't know if I just subconsciously remembered Niflheim or something.
I liked most of the video, but not your finishing point... I just can't agree. What is meaningful or interesting is heavily subjective my friend. Maybe I'm the odd one out, but the idea of a radically different alien world is utterly fascinating to me. The "this could be us" stuff fits in with all other speculative fiction. Yes, it's interesting too. But the pattern again and again of "what if earth, but minor change X" is really common. The "what does a planet look like when Life-Having, but not like earth?" hasn't been done as much, so yes I do in fact find the completely alien world in all it's need to be crafted from the ground up, to be very fascinating. Anyway, thank you for talking about worldbuilding, I love your videos. :)
Hi Edgar. Huge fan of your work and the channel. Got a question. How do we know the repercussions of our choices? Do you have a worldbuilding cheat sheet of sorts?
Hey, since you seem to know quite a bit of this stuff, so maybe you can help a friend of mine. Her hobby is designing alien creatures, and she wants to try to expand her horizons and make some creatures that are different elementally. She also doesn't know that much about how different chemicals can be put together differently. So what if sodium was toxic to many of the lifeforms on a world? What then, could these creatures use, instead of salt? I wish there were some website that we could answer questions like this on, cause this doesn't seem like something that can be googled.
I doubt anyone will believe me but my friends and I are doing this SciFi spaceship crash RP, I thought of the world and atmosphere, and it came out extremely close to the tweaked method. Obviously I didn't think of it first, but I thought of it on my own. Woot
Hey the part wiþ the different chemistries 9f the alien life was extremely interesting to me, would you happen to know of any videos on the subject I've looked and couldn't find what I'm looking for.
-We need a planet, what do we do? -take a standard barren planetoid. -ok. -then SPAM fluorine in almost every single molecule . -uhhh... -finally make it around a blue giant the most active star available, but make it be hella cold. -... -... -why did I apply for this job...!? -oh right! I forgot your paycheck from last *week* **gives 99,999$** -oh right! It was for this. :D
Can chlorine-iron fires be used to start fires on Clorox/a Clorox equivalent? Or am i misunderstanding the phenomena? I was thinking iron dust or iron rich plants could be used to start fires, with the heat source being friction or even some sort of mistake like lightning? Also, fire can be used to extract more iron to make more fire, so you can argue that you only need one original source of fire, even if the chances are rare for a fire to accidentally start.
How do you know what kind of affect certain chemicals would have on the wildlife and planet overall. How do you research all of this, without getting several degrees?
I've noticed earth has a lot more argon than most other noble gasses. But, Neon is a far more common noble gas. So what if I took earth and swapped its argon and neon? Would there be any difference or would it be pretty much the same? Thx for reading :D
XenoLegend27 the sky would be a slightly different blue, but that's about it, oh and lighting would be a different colour, presumably more orange tinted.
This is why my sci-fi story is about exploring alien planets, both living and barren-I can't decide on just one, and I need an outlet for my creative energy + niche interest in exoplanets! >:)
♪ I'm a Clorox tree
In a Clorox world
I'm made of plastic
It's fantastic ♪
Also relevant: ua-cam.com/video/n5h0qHwNrHk/v-deo.html
Lol
comn clorox lets go party
♪ If you were here then you would die
the halogens are wh♪
Rhyming level 100.
Alien: *come from Nifelheim during Earth's winter*
Tour guide: "… and so that's a basic tour of the town. Now if you look to your right you’ll see the amazing ice pans that appear this time of year."
Alien: *has a panic attack*
Tour guide: "What's wrong?"
Alien: *grabs tour guide by the collar of their shirt* "Your ENTIRE ocean is freezing solid and you’re _CaLm AbOuT tHaT!?"_
Sir this is seasonal...
Read "calm" as "caim". Sans serif fonts are stupid.
Nolan Westrich fixed it a bit so it’s easier to read. The sans serif stays though
@@MrRhombus you see it as _NORMAL_ that your entire ocean freezes up every time???
@Oleg Oleg Sir this happens once every orbit/year and I forgot to mention that it’s only the top getting ice the rest of the water underneath the ice is just cold
Niflheim is exactly the kind of thing that fascinates me from a functional perspective. As long as the system works chemically, it doesn't matter how likely to exist it is, it's fiction, you can ignore that part. I mean, you should probably avoid anything that doesn't prominently include hydrogen and compounds with it, because it's the most abundant element in the universe by a ludicrous margin, but practically anything else can be handwaved with minimal suspension of disbelief.
Is Clorox the home planet of Mr. Clean?
:)
Great mystery solved.
Do tide pods grow in tide pools?
MR. PROPRE ! MR. PROPRE ! MR. PROPRE ! MR. PROPRE !
Well, he doesn’t have chlorine-based weapons, so n-
*wait a second* **looks at profile picture** *YOU STOLE MEMEMAN’S ID! IM GONA CALL THE DIMENSIONAL POLICE!* D:
"[Fluorine is] super, super chemically active so it probably wouldn't hang around very long."
Can this actually be used as an argument? Oxygen is the second most chemically active element after fluorine, yet our ecosystem uses it just fine.
I imagine all of the atmospheric Fluorine would have came about in a similar way to our Oxygen (See the Great Oxygenation Event) by that version of photosynthesis.
They both have to have continued renovation to sustain their atmosphere 😀
Without live the Oxygen levels would quickly drop. That is why we tend to look for free O2 molecules in atmospheres when looking for signs of live. The idea being that it needs to be replenished constantly to stay at a given level. In the Niflheim case you'd need something breaking apart the Flourine compounds too. Else you are going to get Venus or Mars version of the planet.
Yes, this argument is fine. Fluorine is *much* more reactive than oxygen. If you were going to design an element that was as reactive as possible, you'd end up with fluorine (it has the highest electronegativity of any element, a very weak diatomic bond strength, small atomic and ionic radius so high lattice and bond enthalpies on forming compounds, etc.). Also, arguably chlorine is more reactive than oxygen.
It's not just reactivity as well - biochemically you're rather limited by replacing oxygen with fluorine, as you can't have C-F double bonds, so anything resembling proteins, carbohydrates or any other biochemical macromolecule is going to be a challenge. Plus teflon is essentially unreactive (hence why we use it for coating non-stick surfaces in cooking), so trees made of it wouldn't biodegrade, and therefore you wouldn't be able to support a food chain.
There's a science dedicated to figuring out what kind of combinations of fluorine do not explode. I will not visit any planet made of fluorine
To add to the conversation, I would like to remind hard sci-fi worldbuilders: you don't have to go through the trouble of creating an unusual atmosphere for your world in order to make it exotic. At the very most, all you have to do is acknowledge that the majority of the time the species of one planet won't be able to breath on another planet, so for realism's sake you would want to regularly work this in to your setting. Treat it as a default that most characters in an interplanetary setting will wear breathing apparatuses.
well it's good thing everyone lives in o'neil cylinders
maybe the world has superplants that produce way more oxygen, so the aliens would asphyxiate if they tried to breathe in our world
@@wren_. we might even have trouble breathing after a few days do to us not being accustom to so much oxygen with it being so reactive
I know nothing about chemistry, I just put my planet around an F-class star, changed the atmosphere accordingly (as advised by people who know), and let evolution and the effects of life around this particular star do the rest. And I just know any humans that arrive will need breathing apparatuses and domes to live in, I don't need to know the exact chemical composition of the atmosphere (for now at least, because I don't care).
The result is very much young (rebooted an old science fantasy project into an actual alien planet, flora and fauna, just last year), but delightful in being familiar and exotic at the same time.
@@dontforgetyoursunscreen Too much oxygen can kill you.
It is these kind of videos that make me want to restructure my whole story world.
I know. :( I often pick up a work of sci-fi and think to myself why do I even bother.
I’m a huge nerd who found your channel and just kind of flailed excitedly because your channel is *exactly* what I’ve been looking for for ages
i know right
@@fallenstar780 same,I am making a spec evo project,and he is INCREDIBLY helpful,I do need someone for species creation tho /:
Oh boy the oxygen catastrophe but with Fluorine
Precisely.
Yellow Earth
*Entire atmosphere proceeds to somehow react with the vacuum of space*
I was thinking about it!
*HEAVY BREATHING CAUSED BY LACK OF BREATHABLE AIR* (This user has proceeded to boil away due to the vacuum of space)
but soooo awesome! Beings with Teflon bones?! Plastic trees?! ferking amazing! It makes my brain tingle, thinking that some of this could be possible
Sci-fi is epic isn't it.
@@Artifexian i am pretty sure this could be used in speculative evolution
That animal skeleton looks like a Lapras. Am I guessing right?
Bingo. :)
Lapras sound extremely alien now that you mentioned it...
I think this is my favourite video of yours, even surpassing the donut planet (about which I am currently writing a series of short stories).
Aw, thanks pal. Glad you enjoyed.
To be fair evidence suggests that for a while earth had little to no free Oxygen until photosynthetic life appeared
Yup, and that event (the oxygen holocaust/catastrophe) wiped out 99% of life at the time.
IamMrRand00m953 and if I remember correctly that's because most life up to that point used anaerobic metabolic systems, and oxygen was toxic for them. Which would make earth the oxygen equivalent to the chlorine planet.
Exactly free Oxygen was toxic and radically restructured the planets biosphere While researching snowball earth events I had found some stuff on the great oxygenation event including what chemical reactions likely sustained it.
It is fascinating that even today billions of years after the oxygenation of the planet that in sufficiently anoxic environments there are surviving anaerobic microbes with biology that use Nitrate, Hydrogen Sulfide and Ferrous Iron (Fe II) respectively as their electron donars with their own types of photosynthesis. And ancient rocks point to these now vestigial processes having once supported primary production.
It is mind blowing how many different energy acquisition methods life has found to trap and release energy via chemical bonds Oxygen may have won out a little over 2 billion years ago but perhaps if things turned out differently a different type of photosynthesis would have dominated. Pretty much all of these methods are poisonous to other life forms using a different method so while Oxygen won on earth perhaps elsewhere something else could have won it is only a question of whether they would be capable of highly differentiated multicellular life as after all Eukaryotes seem to be the result of a complex predatory anaerobic archaea capturing and enslaving free living aerobic microbes to avoid oxygen poisoning with benefits.
More than "a while," it took over a billion years. And it didn't finish until past 4 billion years. It's one of the triggers for the Cambrian explosion (plus an ice age or 2 that lasted millions of years each).
who says plastic dosen't grow on trees?
Me
The goverment
"Chlorine makes fires smoulder"-surely you mean the high-chlorine nature of the fuels (PVC wood) rather than the really aggressive Cl2 in the atmosphere? Granted, the latter might make metallurgy a PITA (my guess at avoiding chlorine: make nitric or sulfuric acid, turn ore into sulfate or nitrate, heat to get oxide, heat with the equivalent of charcoal to get metal).
Apparently thermite reactions work with fluoropolymers and aluminum or magnesium, so theoretically you could do the same with chloropolymers to get metal. It unfortunately doesn't solve the issue of corrosion afterwards, although I imagine you could get away with that to an extent by using some sort of nonreactive coating.
unfortunately the locals on that planet will never know those options for metallurgy, the evolution of chemistry as a science would be very hard with the reactive atmosphere. even on earth our tamer atmosphere it took centuries to figure this stuff out. and sometimes it gets in the way, requiring sealed testing apparatuses to isolate chemicals and run experiments.
@@vecstrandedonabarrenplanet7343 nitric acid and sulfuric acid are both produced naturally by microbes which could be grown similar to yeast. In a sense, metallurgy here would be more like baking bread than the process we are familiar with. As for a non-reactive coating: copper would do. Assuming there is a deposit of native copper somewhere on this planet, metallurgy absolutely could develop. You can isolate native copper from the surrounding rocks simply by heating and then rapidly cooling it: because the metal expands at a faster rate than the stone, the copper falls out. From there, copper is soft enough to be shaped by hand.
@@golwenlothlindel But copper reacts with chlorine gas anyways, and layer of copper chloride isn't strong enough to prevent further corrosion. So I don't think it would work.
Does the same also apply to iodine? I really like to create a world where one per ent of the atmosphere contained iodine. Kind of a violet sky. But other world building wise, would iodine create large fires?
Only an Artifexian update has me clicking to watch it without delay, every time.
Cheers, pal. :)
Artifexian, can you make a video about building "Eccentric Earths"? Their perihelion brings them near the inner boundaries of the habitable zone, and the aphelion near the outer.
You're such an inspiration, man.
Cheers pal. Glad you enjoyed. :)
I wish I knew more about how chemistry works. This reminds me of an idea a friend and I had decades ago; a terrestrial M-Class super-Earth with high concentrations of various noble gasses (mostly neon with high traces of the full spectrum of the rest) in the atmosphere. How would that even work? What would that look like? ( honestly do not remember what type of star we said. We did choose though.)
In artifexian's sky and plant color video he mentioned that neon would result in auroras being tinted yellows and reds. I'm no expert, but if you want to make a setup like this I'd recommend making a somewhat active m type star as this would result in crazy and extensive auroras due to the frequent flares. Then again, you'd have to deal with tidal locking and dangerously high UV levels from the flairs. Maybe have the creatures relegated to the regions affected by the auroras and have them use the auroras as a warning signal to take cover from the radiation. Again, no expert but it's a cool concept nonetheless.
It's always amazing to see an upload of yours pop up!
Cheers, Milan. Hope you enjoy.
Artifexian haha, I did
Nilfheim: exists
Teflon frying pan manufacturers: "It's free real estate"
Wow, my mind was blown. I need a video on how to figure this out!
Check the description. Talk to chemists.
If you want to figure out this video just subscribe to Great courses Plus... oh wait, wrong channel.
@FlymanMS, hahaha. Or Billiant, or Skillshare. Audible will also have some great audiobooks on chemistry. And you can then put your own worldbuild on a website with Squarespace!
For real though, they should consolidate and call it BrilliantSkillSquareCourses Audible Share Plus
@@FlymanMS They'll need a website. It's super easy to do with wix!
Could make a video detailing what different gases would do if we added it to an Earth-like via the tweaking-method? Im tryna build a planet that would have an atmosphere that blocks out a lot of the sunlight that in turn makes the locals on the planet evolve a slower heartbeat, colder body temperature, and monochromatic infrared vision to help search out prey. I cant find a gas that would hang around the planet long enough for the locals to evolve and also block out much of the sunlight
Just... The Best.
There are no words to describe the amount of joy I experence each time I rewatch this video or anyother of your video.
What about inert worlds? Could you make anything interesting with purely anaerobic life?
Never thought about it...perhaps.
Early Earth was this way. PBS eons has a great video on the great oxygenation event where Earth made the switch.
The GOE was before multicellular life right?
@@infiniteplanes5775 yes
Though the anaerobic guys are quite ineffective, so it's like steampunk
I'm 14 years old and i have no idea what this is but it seems hella interesting
I'm sure Radiohead would be very confused.
Is there an artifexian reading list?
I need this!
Check the dooblydoo for two very good works. I'll usually give my sources at the end so consider them on the reading list.
@@Artifexian I see you watch thought emporium too :)
The Worldbuilding *God* is at it again!
Technically, isn't (G)od the worldbuilding God?
Depends on your worldview.
I'm not saying anything is right or wrong. I'm saying the idea of god is a thing that made the world. So a worldbuilding god, would be the idea of god.
I didn't really say anything about right or wrong either. It's just that different worldviews have different ideas of how the world and the rest of the universe came to be. Just look at Nirn, the Tamrielites believe that Nirn is a literal corpse of, if I remember correctly one of the Aedra. Meanwhile some scholars argue that Nirn is actually just another plane of Oblivion.
True. The whole thing was for a joke anyways. But you are correct.
Is it possible for life to exist on a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere that contains boron instead of carbon? If so, how would this affect the life and the terrain on the planet?
EDIT: Also, this just came to my mind since pretty much everything in our solar system (planets, moons, asteroids, etc.) contains carbon, as does Earth, if this fictional world had boron instead of carbon would the rest of the solar system contain boron, too?
Also, with silane/siloxane-based biochemistry, there are some other issues - for example, that silicon dioxide, which would be the "obvious" end product of respiration/educt for photosynthesis (assuming a SiOHN instead of COHN biochemistry) is solid until temperatures quite a lot higher than the stability limits of silanes or siloxanes.
One way you could possibly get around this (though I am not sure how well that would work) is have it happen in a reducing, not oxidising, atmosphere. There, the main respiratory gases, instead of O2 and SiO2, would be H2 and SiH4, which are both gases at temperatures where silicon-based chains are stable. Though I am not sure if a reducing atmosphere could even theoretically permit complex carbon-based life, let alone complex silicone-based life.
Well, I'd suppose biological materials on such world would be more akin to Zip Fuels.
edit: grammatically correct
@Neptune Neptune So, presumably the planet formed from some sort of planetary collision, leaving the core behind? If so, how would the high metal content affect the world built?
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 I suppose the animal lifeforms would eat or burn oxidizing compounds (possibly crystals of nitrates or perchlorate) for sustenance and warmth; possibly that made by plant lifeforms (as stores energy or reproductive organs like potatoes or fruits, not structural strength like awful disgusting celery)?
edit: Plants would probably use Silicon Dioxide for structural strength, so if celery wasn't bad enough already, on this world, it would be made of sand and glass.
@Zuthal Soraniz SiH4 is more likely to stay in your planet atmosphere, though.
H2 is way too light, so on most of terrestrial planets, the sole gravitational force cannot hold it for billion years.
Thanks for including Tennessine in your periodic table. It's named after Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee.
Interesting video overall. The fluorine world in implausible for exactly the reason you stated, not enough fluorine in the universe. Clorox seems more likely. Earth has enough chlorine to be Clorox if that's how things went.
Sry for being a nerd but a B-type star with 3.8 M⊙ would have a luminosity of ~ 150 - 200 L⊙. The habitable zone of a star is determined by SQRT(L/1.1) for the inner and SQRT(L/0.5) for the outer edge. Doing that for this star gives us a habitable zone of roughly 12 - 19 AU. A planet orbiting at 5 AU would receive about as much energy and radiation as Mercury receives from the Sun. There is no way Niflheim would be so cold.
Something something The Lorax
I am the Clorax! I speak for the PVCees!
I'm Very Angry It's Not Butter!! You beat me to it
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter I am the Clorax, I speak for the Bleach
5:00
The grim reaper on Clorox is just a plastic toy skeleton in a big black garbage bag.
Great Video! Sorry to be nipticky... but at 5:15 the HCl has three atoms for some reason.
I feel like that image was meant to be sodium hypochlorite, and he just confused them when he was finishing the animations. Cause the river was flowing into the body of water that was labeled with the image, so it might've been meant to be the ocean.
Crap. Yes. I originally that it as HClO. I changed the text but forgot the change the molecule. Apologies.
this was a pretty interesting video to stumble upon. Thank you for it :)
Oh hell yes, this is the content I'm after. Both of these planets are amazing concepts.
I love exploring alternate biochemistries. Even with familiar carbon-based organisms that use proteins for structure, carbohydrates and ATP for energy, and lipids for energy storage and structure, and use water as a solvent, I do like to mix things up a bit. My primary spec evo project takes place in a low-gravity environment, so all creatures use chitin, which while much denser than hydroxyapatite bone, is far stronger. There are also bird-of-prey analogues that use methane sacs to provide buoyancy, and even an evolved clade that has adapted their methane sac into a fiery breath weapon.
My second ongoing spec evo project takes place on a desert planet, and the animals there (referred to as lapitheres) use silica to construct their bones, because of the sheer abundance of silica. To help with incorporating silica in the water column, there is a fungus analogue (referred to as an cryptoradix) that uses acids to break down rock.
Never clicked so fast
Me too!
There also other external factors when making a halogen/other chemicals atmosphere.
The solar wind as well as internal volcanic mechanisms can deeply shift the behavior of these systems.
Very true.
Animals made of Titanium blood would live on NIflheim, eh? My immediate reaction is that Niflheim's version of Bob Ross is a literal Great White Hunter whose paintings are also trophies of the creatures he hunts, their blood ironically shaped into Happy Little Whatevers, which is a mental image I find both unbelievably metal and also slightly terrifying.
One of your most fascinating videos to date! How would you recommend someone going about researching the effects of certain elements on a planet? I am currently trying to figure out what a planet with large amounts of water and ammonia would look like. I know that this planet would have to be cold in order for the ammonia to be liquid and would have large amounts of alkali metals dissolved in the oceans, but I haven't quite gotten to the effect this would have on the topography or biology of the world.
Coming back to this, I suddenly wonder if the Breen from Star Trek might come from a world like Niflheim. It is the in-canon assumption of everyone else in the galaxy that apparently the Breen come from a cryogenic world, based on the highly insulated encounter suits they wear when interacting with literally everybody.
When it comes to plant colours, a lot of it is to do with light.
But Earth has an odd history.
The earliest 'plant' life, (algae) evolved to make use of the peak wavelengths the sun puts out.
that is, it absorbs green light.
The end result is plants that are 'purple', since they reflect red and blue light.
However, some time after, mutated plants which absorbed Red + Blue developed, and because this was a complimentary niche (the purple plants did not absorb this light), they survived and thrived.
They did so well in fact that they completely out-competed the purple plants, and the suitable chlorophyll for absorbing green wavelengths was more or less lost. (I'm not sure it's 100% gone, but it's quite rare regardless.)
Technically this means on Earth the 'green light absorbing' purple plant niche is now available almost everywhere, but it would seem even though it's the brightest part of the spectrum it's not enough to outcompete the 'red + blue absorbing' plants.
It does however suggest, but for a quirk of fate, we would've had a purple planet, not a green one.
And but for a slightly different quirk of fate, we could (and may yet) end up with black plants. (since adding the green absorbing cholophyll to the red and blue ones would result in a black plant.)
Weird to think about huh.
But it shows that this is theoretically viable for alien worlds even sticking entirely to biology that has existed on Earth.
Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Cyan, Purple and black photosynthetic plants are ALL possible entirely using known Earth biology.
(I suppose you could also get variations depending on the proportions and concentrations of the different chlorophyll types)
However, the black and monochromatic plants (Red, Green, or Blue) are the most likely overall, given competition between different plant types...
But if the liquid freezes from the bottom up, wouldn't that make it much more difficult for life to evolve?
I don't know about more difficult but certainly different. I mean, snow and ice blanket the ground and plants and animals still survive. Maybe exo-fish burrow to avoid being frozen.
Why would it make life harder?
Water freezing top down is important as the top layer of Ice provides a measure of insulation for the rest of the body of water, so it doesn't freeze over entirely.
HF freezing bottom up means that it'd be more likely for the entire body of HF to freeze over.
So, life there would have to evolve adaptations to this. For example, some frogs can be frozen for months and when they thaw out in the better weather they hop away.
Cells would probably be fine as the freezing process would shrink them and thawing would return them to normal, so other than needing to be able to handle a small pressure increase from a bad thawing arrangement, they should be fine to freeze and thaw.
Would be amazing to think that the life there would evolve to survive being frozen for long periods of time.
something few animal on earth actually also can do.
but i'm sure life would find a way to master living in such a environment, because that is what life dose.
Thank you. Your channel is exactly what I need for my plana
5:17 Chlorine Does not React with salt and water under ordinary conditions, but at very high energies it can happen.
Zoltzy
Zoltzy is similar to Earth in terms of mass, radius, and gravity and orbits an F star.
Due to tidal forces from the star, Zoltzy suffered high volcanic activity in the past but has over time migrated out in the solar system and cooled down. During the migration, Zoltzy captured a moon roughly the size of Pluto.
A layer of sulfur thrown out by volcanoes covers the surface, making it a bright yellow (similar to Io).
The atmosphere contains large amounts of carbon dioxide, nitrogen gas, sulfur dioxide, and sulfur gas and other volcanic gases and has a high pressure at sea level, making it extremely toxic. The high amount of greenhouse gases causes a runaway greenhouse effect making the surface extremely hot (similar to Venus), and the sulfur melts in the extreme heat making red sticky lakes and rivers.
Wind blow small particles of sulfur into the atmosphere making the sky a bright but a slightly hazy yellow. During sunset, all the yellow gets scattered away, making the sky blue.
Simple life evolved in small pockets of water in volcanoes, but due to the harsh environment, it was almost impossible for more complex life to evolve. The most complex lifeform is a moss that exists on high altitude mountains where the pressure, temperature, and the amount of sulfur are lower. The moss can use photosynthesis and cleans the air, making oxygen.
Tl;dr Zoltzy is a Ioish, Venusish, Marsish sulfuric desert and a total hellplanet, but a nice place for a moss
Is there anything I need to change? Do you have any suggestions on making it even more sulfurious?
5:06 so all there valleys and lowlands are Death Valley
As in the song by Radiohead?
Please do... How to make different atmospheres colors
Pls 😃
I'm looking into this. High chance it make this video soon.
dont suppose we could get a video giving a rundown of elements with a high likelihood of being more or less abundant than on earth, and the general effects we might expect?
Jesus was this a good video. Both planets were super thorough and unique, this is macro worldbuilding at its finest.
Wow! This is almost exactly like a planet u have in mind!
"...it means the world"... What, just one world? I thought this was a worldbuildng channel!
Hehe
2:42 You misspelled Niflheim as "Nilfheim."
DAMN IT! :(
Okay, that IS mind blowing.
I wanted to make an alien world with a fair amount of sulfur hexafluoride in the atmosphere, so as to make airships far more bouyant. I need some tips about chemistry to make life possible in a higher flourine content world with earth like pressure and temp.
For the Spectral Type of the Star, I was wondering how you got the 8 for B8. Could you do a video for the numerical sub divisions for spectral types? I know the sun is a G2V but it would really help me out for building a Star with an accurate spectral type
Stars are divided as such: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M, a sequence from the hottest (O type) to the coolest (M type). Each letter class is then subdivided using a numeric digit with 0 being hottest and 9 being coolest (e.g., A8, A9, F0, and F1 form a sequence from hotter to cooler). a luminosity class is added to the spectral class using Roman numerals. This is based on the width of certain absorption lines in the star's spectrum, which vary with the density of the atmosphere and so distinguish giant stars from dwarfs. Luminosity class 0 or Ia+ is used for hypergiants, class I for supergiants, class II for bright giants, class III for regular giants, class IV for subgiants, class V for main-sequence stars, class sd (or VI) for subdwarfs, and class D (or VII) for white dwarfs. The full spectral class for the Sun is then G2V, indicating a main-sequence star with a surface temperature around 5,800 K.
You could make a lovely series just based on video's where you explain planeta like this one.
That outro catch phrase was the exact same as drift0r’s but with your name instead of his. He’s a UA-cam gamer and at the end of every video he says, “until next time, Drift0r out.”
I am currently writing a sci-fi story myself but seeing stuff like this is a bit demoralising and intimidating when writers have created planets and eco-systems where the plants are plastic and other stuff i would never have thought about that.
Any good tips?
Read loads and when in doubt contact experts.
what type of books? and any reconmandations?
This will probably get me burned at the stake as a heretic but... If the story is good it doesn't matter how normal or fantastic the planet it takes place on is. World building is a tool to help you tell your story and (probably) not the goal itself so if you are already knee deep into it I wouldn't worry about changing things just to change them.
There's a short story that became a novella by… Asimov, I believe, called "Nightfall."
It's about a world with seven or so Suns that experiences nightfall only once every few thousand years or somesuch. Predictably, everyone goes bonkers when the daylight goes away and thus conflict, thus story.
I bring all of this up, though, because there was a preface to the novella that's always suck with me where he talks about how this is very obviously a truly *alien* world that pretty much wouldn't be able to have humans, but the story is in many places short-handed as if there were humans, for the reader to have something to latch to.
The meandering point I'm trying to make is that even if you decide to go crazy-go-nuts with the science, don't let it get in the way of a good story. And definitely don't feel your story needs the bonkers science. In Nightfall, it's 90% Macguffin, anyway.
To really get that diversity right you need deep chemistry knowledge, not only in the elements but also a comprehensive knowledge of chemical reactions. The basic reaction formulas shows how alien world design quickly develops into organic chemistry as well.
I have been able to figure out ways of creating alcohol rich worlds via the tweaking method. The trick is in general to see what substances bacteria on earth can produce, and suggesting an alternative to the oxygen catastrophe. As very often a biosphere will lead to the composition of the atmosphere being different. This is the case for worlds like titan or subglacial biospheres too by the way.
One evil idea I have (taken from the same book that chlorox appears) is that worlds dominated by nitric acid could exist in the same habitable range of earth. So the explorers go to that earth like world only to end up with a planet caked in thick, toxic orange clouds of nitric acid!
HCl is diatomic, @ 05:10 you show a triatomic molecule. Got you!!
I am the clorax, I speak for the clean
Teflon bones are still pretty badass though
Is there any other exothermic reactions that could somewhat replace combustion on the Clorox planet?
What do you think of a fresh water ocean planet covered in Rain-forests with most of its water being Vapor?
And what about a planet with a large amount of Sulfur and Sulfur Based Life?
Great examples! Any recommended sources for tips making these kinds of things?
Yes. 'Worldbuilding' by Stephen L Gillet. It a chemistry heavy world building textbook. A must have. Links in the description.
Can we please get a much more detailed exploration of the Chemistry required to do this?
I know it's way outside of your normal fields, but some of your videos on more complex topics describe without explaining the how or why of it. Even with my education in chemistry I wouldn't have a clue where to start with something like this.
Imagine buying PVC pipe and noticing the label saying "organic"
"please welcome our new organic polymer friends where all things are plastic... Jerry... the plant... umm..." (someone tell me if are we still getting payed? if not I'm turning him into a house plant.)
My current world basically had the change that the process of photosynthesis has an intermediate stage where hydrogen is briefly stored in the cell, this eventually created an organelle where it could be stored, making many species of photosynthetic organisms buoyant. After a while some single celled creatures from these floating sea-surface mats took to the air, their altitude being controlled by water concentration. The giant green clouds resulting from this tinted the sky green, causing other organisms to switch to using a purple-magenta pigment for photosynthesis. the hydrogen stores also aid further down the evolutionary tree, counteracting the higher gravity and allowing for large creatures.
Pls do a series of vids about your ideas of planets
And use for them both metods pls
Yay, more planetbuilding!
I saw Artifexian uploaded a new video and put my fist in the air and went "YEAH". :)
I wanted to know where to find other worlds with this description and chemical realism
There's also a band called Plastic Tree. This doesn't have much to do with anything -- I just thought it was kinda funny.
Don't sweat the fluorine, just think about how much gold we have on earth
wouldnt nilfheim's atmosphere of fluorine actively destroy every semblance of photosynthesys? I mean, fluorine and hydrofluoric acid would destroy any organic compound.
Wait, no intro this time? Or am I just going insane?
Ye, I dropped it. Figured getting straight to the content is a better idea.
It's great to see you uploading some videos with a bit of biology in 'em. Will you be doing any more videos about biology, or at least partially about biology like this one?
It isn't just a PHD but a PHD in a variety of different fields. "How do plate tectonics work on Niflheim?" ain't something a chemistry PHD can necessarily work out. Nor does having a meteorology PHD help all that much with guessing what the weather will be like without also having a chemistry PHD.
Pretty soon you need to be at least a serviceable expert in chemistry, biology, geology, physics, etc etc and we don't even have any people in this world yet.
Though to be fair, people are a bit easier because the standards are so low and you can usually deflect"that's not how real societies respond to internal forces in their class structure" with "shut up, alien psychology is different."
Of course then they could counter with sociology being less than the sum of its parts, I.E. individuals are complex and difficult to understand or predict but societies follow far less complex rules of rational actors, tribalism, class character and such.
@@petersmythe6462 even with people their actions has to be long-mid term stable or pro-darwinistic.
Nice. I have a world like Chlorox, except it uses sulfur.
Where did you get this information from?
Clearly he uses Ligma
Check the description.
I'm making a planet with a nitrogen fluorine atmosphere and I've seen this video before...
I don't know if I just subconsciously remembered Niflheim or something.
I liked most of the video, but not your finishing point... I just can't agree. What is meaningful or interesting is heavily subjective my friend.
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but the idea of a radically different alien world is utterly fascinating to me. The "this could be us" stuff fits in with all other speculative fiction. Yes, it's interesting too. But the pattern again and again of "what if earth, but minor change X" is really common. The "what does a planet look like when Life-Having, but not like earth?" hasn't been done as much, so yes I do in fact find the completely alien world in all it's need to be crafted from the ground up, to be very fascinating. Anyway, thank you for talking about worldbuilding, I love your videos. :)
I fuckin love both of these. They’re so fucking interesting and I love it
Hi Edgar. Huge fan of your work and the channel. Got a question. How do we know the repercussions of our choices? Do you have a worldbuilding cheat sheet of sorts?
Hey, since you seem to know quite a bit of this stuff, so maybe you can help a friend of mine. Her hobby is designing alien creatures, and she wants to try to expand her horizons and make some creatures that are different elementally. She also doesn't know that much about how different chemicals can be put together differently.
So what if sodium was toxic to many of the lifeforms on a world? What then, could these creatures use, instead of salt?
I wish there were some website that we could answer questions like this on, cause this doesn't seem like something that can be googled.
Hypothetical types of biochemistry on wikipedia is a decent start, and biblaridion has a series all about that, it would be perfect
Thank you!
No problemo.
Clorox
Finally, a planet I can drink
I doubt anyone will believe me but my friends and I are doing this SciFi spaceship crash RP, I thought of the world and atmosphere, and it came out extremely close to the tweaked method. Obviously I didn't think of it first, but I thought of it on my own. Woot
Can you create your world with an atmosphere with a high concentration of bofa?
thats possible but the lifeforms would need to attain sugandese energy
Yeah, but that world is highly susceptible to a ligma outbreak.
That's only an issue if they don't develop a system capable of processing sugma.
yeah but what if instead they processed penne, that could lead to interesting weaknesses
That wouldn't work, they'd need updog
Hey the part wiþ the different chemistries 9f the alien life was extremely interesting to me, would you happen to know of any videos on the subject I've looked and couldn't find what I'm looking for.
What's even more interesting is the real world we live in.
🎵 Up on melancholy hill, there’s a plastic tree... 🎵
could you do a video on a world where methane plays a big part in the atmosphere?
-We need a planet, what do we do?
-take a standard barren planetoid.
-ok.
-then SPAM fluorine in almost every single molecule .
-uhhh...
-finally make it around a blue giant the most active star available, but make it be hella cold.
-...
-...
-why did I apply for this job...!?
-oh right! I forgot your paycheck from last *week* **gives 99,999$**
-oh right! It was for this. :D
Can chlorine-iron fires be used to start fires on Clorox/a Clorox equivalent? Or am i misunderstanding the phenomena? I was thinking iron dust or iron rich plants could be used to start fires, with the heat source being friction or even some sort of mistake like lightning? Also, fire can be used to extract more iron to make more fire, so you can argue that you only need one original source of fire, even if the chances are rare for a fire to accidentally start.
How do you know what kind of affect certain chemicals would have on the wildlife and planet overall. How do you research all of this, without getting several degrees?
Scribbling Joe probably from the books he mentioned
I've noticed earth has a lot more argon than most other noble gasses. But, Neon is a far more common noble gas. So what if I took earth and swapped its argon and neon? Would there be any difference or would it be pretty much the same? Thx for reading :D
XenoLegend27 the sky would be a slightly different blue, but that's about it, oh and lighting would be a different colour, presumably more orange tinted.
That`s really cool! Thanks m8 :D
This is why my sci-fi story is about exploring alien planets, both living and barren-I can't decide on just one, and I need an outlet for my creative energy + niche interest in exoplanets! >:)