This screenshot is an attack made by chemists with the intent to cause aneurysms on unsuspecting biologists.
Sol 3 is a Class-14 Deathworld on what used to be a thirteen-point scale until they found it.
Not only is the planet very geothermally volatile with active volcanic systems AND feature violent and chaotic weather systems...
"Earth" is the deepest gravity well they've ever witnessed chemical rocketry successfully achieve orbit from.
The biosphere is teeming with pathogens, so much so that the sapient population's own bodies rely on symbiotic microbial colonies in order to digest nutrients among other tasks.
And the macroscopic fauna are ALMOST as scary as the microscopic stuff: every biome packed with highly adapted predators.
At the top of this complex carnal carnival of carnivory, the "humans" who live there are unstoppable pursuit and persistence predators highly naturally gifted in ranged combat that historically used to just WALK their prey to death. The animals which ancient humans consumed could sprint to temporary safety, but humans will catch up, ALWAYS catch up, and the prey will still be tired when they have to sprint again. Eventually the fatigue outpaces them, and humans catch up for the last time. Just walk right up and bash them with a rock, they might not even have to throw it: dinner is ready!
Furthermore, it's not just the highly volatile oxygen that all the animals there breathe... Sol 3's atmosphere also even contains a constant background presence of radon. The biosphere is passively resistant to some levels of radiation. One of the cities was consumed in the fallout cloud of an exploding nuclear fission reactor(they STILL use water to cool their municipal fission reactors even now!), and although the humans fled, the animals that stayed there are FLOURISHING. Deformed and mutated, but thriving.
NOBODY SANE CHOOSES TO GO TO SOL 3.
Sol 3: ~~Harmless~~ Mostly harmless
More of this please
Over on reddit there's an entire genre of this sort of fiction in /r/hfy
The main contributor continued writing it on a full novel scale at https://deathworlders.com/ .
However...Imho after about 40 chapters, it really loses it's way (bar a couple of cool minor plots). And the author goes a bit right wing rhetoric/muscleporn-y.
God help me, I fought all the way through that 8,000 page monstrosity. I never want to read homoerotic fiction as long as I live, got quite enough of sweaty, muscly men and aliens rubbing all over each other.
complex carnal carnival of carnivory
Beautiful.
Thank you mitochondria for allowing us to respirate the death element.
We're also reliant on water and are mostly made out of it. water is such a "universal solvent", it's quite OP. It dissolves so much, that we don't even think about it
We're death breathers, but also basically have acid blood like xenomorphs
Powerful oxidizers are dangerous stuff!
One I’ve learned about recently (and used) is potassium permanganate. One of its uses is for improving water quality in fish ponds. It oxidizes basically all organic matter. It can simultaneously knock out algae, bacteria, parasites, hormones, and other excess organic waste. And the pathogens it kills can’t build up resistance to it like they would an antibiotic or poison, so it can be used preventively without creating stronger bugs. You can’t really build resistance to BURNING outside video games.
But that also means that if you add too much, you can just as easily sterilize all life in a body of water, including fish and anything else you want to keep.
AND it means you need to be careful when handling it. If you burn your eyes or your lungs, it makes them stop working!
If you burn your eyes or your lungs, it makes them stop working!
Top tip right here.
It feels like a loading screen tip, and I'm scraping my head as to for what kind of game it would be the tip.
Aliens would need an oxidizer to metabolize as well, even if that oxidizer isn't oxygen. If they want to actually efficiently get energy out of things, it'll need to be a strong one. Even fermentation is a oxidation-reduction reaction that just doesn't use oxygen.
Reading this I start to miss r/HFY again
Humans being the goofy, weird, but kind-hearted cro-magnons of the galaxy/universe is one of my favorite tropes.
Edit: if you want the exact opposite, try They Are Smol. It's an sci-fi, hfy-parody shitpost. Humans have just as much of a instinct for ultra-violence as the other sapient species of the galaxy, if not moreso. However, humans are about half the size and possess about a quarter of the agility, speed and strength of their Dorarizin (big space wolves), Karnakian (big space raptors) and Jornissian (big XCOM vipers) counterparts.
This means humans are utterly adorable and basically seen as cats if cats were intelligent apes.
It also makes everyone else very concerned that humanity's first response is to fuck things, and our second response is to fuck things. They're concerned about our lack of counterbalace (aka a tail) and think we look very wobbly and clumsy. Finally, they're very concerned about the fact that the entirety of the human race falls into the margin of error for the galactic census, which means that, like cats, they baby humans as much as they can without offending people.
They're also very amused (and sometimes very disturbed) by the fact that humans have a significantly higher penis-to-body ratio (still smaller than the aliens, but an alien-sized human would have a ridiculously large penis in comparison) and have a desire to fuck anything that moves (and yes, there is official interspecies smut on the author's patreon lmao).
I love this series so much.
There's also a more serious companion detective series by Frank Leroux (rip :c) called The Smol Detective (he also wrote some other, shorter Smolverse series as well as a standalone series called The Adventures of Iron Hu-man). It's absolutely phenomenal.
So you're telling me if I stop breathing I'll never get older? I'm in!
Everybody in this thread needs to read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
And also go in without knowing anything about it
That's what I did. Right after reading Artemis. PHM is way better.
For those who haven’t read it:
Jazz hands, bitches!
That’s all you get.
Oxygen is so crazy that once microbiology in the ancient oceans started producing it, all life on earth nearly died. Like very nearly sterilized the earth.
At high concentrations, its still fucking awful for us. Easy to forget that the atmosphere is still only 21% Oxygen and 78% Nitrogen. Even setting aside the risks of fire and explosion at higher concentrations, this highly reactive substance degrades the nervous and musculature system.
You wouldn't want to wander around in a fully oxygenated environment for the same reason you wouldn't want to drive your car through a lake of gasoline.
This reminds me of an excellent short story over on r/writingprompts. It's about how humans evolved in the harshest conditions as a forgotten experiment. They emerge and are basically gods.
Explains why we tend to spontaneously combust at times
Death breathers are made of electric thinking meat. Life is fucking rad.
does lemmy have an equivalent to/r/hfy ? This has big /r/hfy energy.
I wonder if you could something like a magnesium atomosphere where if a human it got a hole in their suit it would cause them to burst into flames as the outside pressure forced it's way in then reacted with the oxygen and water in our suit and body
In Becky Chambers' Wayfarer series, there is a species who actually breathes methane. The focus though is less on how that actually happens and more on how they navigate as the only species for whom oxygen is toxic. It's a great series, btw. It's a not-quite-as-optimistic as star trek future, but still optimistic and with a vast range of species who are all intermingling as learning how to get along.
So if this is true, why do we need it to live?
Same reason an alcoholic needs alcohol to keep from shaking, you're addicted. Go ahead, try to stop. You'll shake just like they do.
The short version is that life needs something that's at least a little unstable in order to extract chemical energy from things.
The post is correct when viewed in a particular light, on a technicality, if you squint. By that same technicality iron rusting is also burning very slowly. They're ignoring the rapidity which is implied by "burning". But yes, oxygen is unstable, oxygen helps burn things, and oxygen is toxic if you get too much at once. Though you'd need to be breathing pure oxygen pressurized to about 1.4 atmospheres, or regular air pressurized to about 7 atmospheres, for that last one to happen. It's a legitimate concern for deep SCUBA divers.
But why does life need instability? Chemical instability is, in basic terms, just stored chemical energy, and that energy wants to be released. The more reactive something is the easier it is to get energy from reactions involving it. There's a balancing act here where more reactive means easier energy, but also more dangerous. Oxygen is in a kind of sweet spot where it's stable enough that it's not generally going to explode or catch fire on its own, but can be coaxed into doing those things in controlled ways with other chemicals to extract energy when needed.
There are anaerobic bacteria that don't need oxygen to survive. That was the norm before The Great Oxidation Event when cyanobacteria started releasing oxygen into the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Prior to that there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere, and anaerobic bacteria ruled the world.
After the GOE the high concentration of oxygen killed off most of the anaerobic bacteria, and what was left were organisms that made a blood truce with oxygen. Aerobic organisms gained incredible power from utilizing oxygen for metabolism, but eventually die from the accumulated damage the oxygen does to them.
Because we evolved on the Death Planet, and life, uh, finds a way
talking out my ass, I'm guessing its because oxygen is an energetic and highly reactive element, and therefore it can do lots of things and it does them really well (or at least strongly), or in general was just the best most direct means to accomplish the energy intensive tasks that were required given the biosphere we evolved in? I'm not sure how common/ vital oxygen consumption was before that one mass extinction where algae became overabundant and oxygenated the atmosphere and caused a mass extinction, it could have been a result of adaptation to that new condition- though I doubt this is the case
If aliens exist they would probably have many things just as strange. They would also need a way to harvest energy via some cycle. It is possible they would require even more reactive substances to live.
I'm just going to ask because I think this is true but I'm not certain and nobody's talking about it. Antioxidants are BS right?
A bit Overblown, but not really bs, from what I researched a bit ago
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