Lehola Galaxy Megathread

[Khemehekis]

I just realized that there was a possible subconscious connection to quiche. Even though I don't like quiche very much.

I didn't even think of quiche (although I did think of Claudia Kishi from the Baby-sitters Club). And I love quiche!

[Arayaz]

I just realized that there was a possible subconscious connection to quiche. Even though I don't like quiche very much.

I didn't even think of quiche (although I did think of Claudia Kishi from the Baby-sitters Club). And I love quiche!

Perhaps my next language could be called Kwaič.

[Khemehekis]

I just realized that there was a possible subconscious connection to quiche. Even though I don't like quiche very much.

I didn't even think of quiche (although I did think of Claudia Kishi from the Baby-sitters Club). And I love quiche!

Perhaps my next language could be called Kwaič.

Like a reading of the word "quiche" by English phonetics?

[Arayaz]

I just realized that there was a possible subconscious connection to quiche. Even though I don't like quiche very much.

I didn't even think of quiche (although I did think of Claudia Kishi from the Baby-sitters Club). And I love quiche!

Perhaps my next language could be called Kwaič.

Like a reading of the word "quiche" by English phonetics?

Indeed.

In fact, I must make a world where every language has some connection to quiche. There would be Qhici, Kwaič, Ehkyuk, Abfotwasftwe, Kōkô...

[Khemehekis]

Is Kōkô cocoa, or is it chicken (kokaj^o in Esperanto)? The quiches I've eaten don't have either (they're made with ham).

[Arayaz]

Is Kōkô cocoa, or is it chicken (kokaj^o in Esperanto)? The quiches I've eaten don't have either (they're made with ham).

The Proto-Germanic etymology of quiche.

[Khemehekis]

Is Kōkô cocoa, or is it chicken (kokaj^o in Esperanto)? The quiches I've eaten don't have either (they're made with ham).

The Proto-Germanic etymology of quiche.

::Looks at Wikipedia article::

Huh, I learned something today. "Quiche" has Germanic roots, cognate to "cookie" and "cake".

[Arayaz]

Is Kōkô cocoa, or is it chicken (kokaj^o in Esperanto)? The quiches I've eaten don't have either (they're made with ham).

The Proto-Germanic etymology of quiche.

::Looks at Wikipedia article::

Huh, I learned something today. "Quiche" has Germanic roots, cognate to "cookie" and "cake".

And Portuguese cuque [ku.ki], referring to crumb cake.

[Khemehekis]

A new link:

"Kezin az Yalizeyas" -- Avril Lavigne's "My Happy Ending" with Reyzadren, in Kankonian + griushkoent

[Arayaz]

Hi,

I've been wondering a few things about the process of terraforming and applying a bioswath to a planet, for the development of Rekeni and Šolat.

• First of all, how does it work?
• How long does it take?
• Is it seeding life with the organisms already created, or is it seeding it with primordial life and accelerating evolution?
  • If it's accelerated evolution, are other features of the world, like tectonic activity, also accelerated?
  • If it's accelerated evolution, can the process of acceleration be applied without guiding it? That is, can you seed a planet for life without an end destination in mind?
  • Expanding on that, can one seed a planet with life and only guide it partway? That is, could a planet be seeded with the Terran bioswath but have the acceleration of the evolution left on, producing an evolved set of Earth lifeforms adapted to that planet?
• How are bioswaths created? Do they have to be taken (downloaded?) from an existing natural planet, or can they be artificially created?
• How expensive is it to bioswath a planet? Can one country do it? Does it take global effort from another planet? Could Elon Musk do it?

[Khemehekis]

First of all, how does it work?

It works as in the processes described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming , although it should be noted that actual terraformers in the Lehola Galaxy always start their organism hauls with bacteria. As the late science fiction author Brian D. Rush opined, the reason Biosphere II failed was that they didn't start out by colonizing their biosphere with bacteria and add higher life-forms later. After bacteria are added, next come the protists. The globeseeder, a giant ship that carries millions of organisms' DNA, then works together with actual plants and animals being brought over; animals are impregnated, and plants are both transplanted and seeded, so creatures in different stages of life (including plant seeds and animal eggs, sperm, zygotes, and fetuses) exist on the planet at the same time. After the protists come plants and their pollinators. Monera, Protista, and Plantae, and a liminal amount of Animalia together create a liveable atmosphere. Then come other non-animal kingdoms like fungi or bolsotetams, and then annelids, non-pollinator bugs, and the like, all brought in from a planet that has them. Macrofauna (as in, charismatic vertebrates like pandas, bald eagles, and jaguars) are added last. Over time, each region of each continent develops its own climate given its latitude, the mountains, the nearby bodies of water, etc., and terraformers take care to give each biome the plants and animals that would naturally have evolved there. Sometimes terraformers just can't find a niche for certain major species in the human bioswath (or whatever bioswath it is they're terraforming with); and sometimes botchy stupidity (like adding bees during the winter on that planet without already having a big supply of honeycomb) causes certain species to go extinct on the new planet; things like this have happened. And, it goes without saying, even any two planets that evolved the same bioswath naturally will have a number of differences (Kankonia has a human bioswath like Earth, and there are creatures like spotted rays, sac lizards, and bmosas that never existed on Earth; and then there's Junsu, another human-bioswath planet, which has bmosas too, but never had sac lizards, yet does have the juziqwa, a species of bird not found on Earth NOR Kankonia).

How long does it take?

It takes about 30 Earth-years to fully populate a planet when terraforming it.

The natural human lifespan is a little longer on the more advanced planets (people would die in their nineties (in Earth-years) instead of their seventies or early eighties (in Earth-years) if human life extension weren't used), but for many millennia, most human societies have had homolongeve (human lifespan extension technology), so we have millenarians (people who are over 1,000 years old by their planets' calendars -- that includes people who would still be over 1,000 if we counted in Earth-years). The planets aren't overrun by humans, though, since pretty much all the advanced human societies with homolongeve have ditched the social norm that tells people they're expected to marry and have children, and birth control is easy and accessible (preventing unwanted pregnancies). So the terraforming of a planet is well within the human lifetime in the Lehola Galaxy!

Is it seeding life with the organisms already created, or is it seeding it with primordial life and accelerating evolution?

It's seeding a world with organisms that already exist.

Expanding on that, can one seed a planet with life and only guide it partway? That is, could a planet be seeded with the Terran bioswath but have the acceleration of the evolution left on, producing an evolved set of Earth lifeforms adapted to that planet?

Yes.

How are bioswaths created? Do they have to be taken (downloaded?) from an existing natural planet, or can they be artificially created?

A mix of organisms taken from existing natural planets and seeds and genes from the globeseeder.

How expensive is it to bioswath a planet? Can one country do it? Does it take global effort from another planet? Could Elon Musk do it?

One country can do it, if that country is a one-world government. It basically requires enormous investment in animal and plant species from all over that planet. Two or three planets with the same bioswath are even better, because they have a greater selection of species to choose from; maybe the second or third contributing planet has a really unusual biome somewhere whose species would work well in one region of the planet being terraformed. Two planets with radically different bioswaths (like Doyatl, which has golden plants and a time-traveling sapient species called the glomas, and Kankonia, which has the human bioswath) could get messy, unless the people doing it are experts at creating natural environments (as the chais of the planet Keitel have created on their planet).

As for Elon Musk, with $211 billion, he might be able to buy a globeseeder, but Earth is still a long ways from one-world government; it's got conflicting countries, and I'm not sure New Zealand, China, India, Russia, Australia, AND Brazil would ALL be willing to coöperate with him to give him all the species of already-born/already-sproited organisms he'd need.

HTH!

[eldin raigmore]

Isn’t 1.4 Solar masses Chandrasekhar’s limit?
At that mass the star will go supernova, wouldn’t it?
And, don’t smaller-mass stars survive longer than larger-mass stars, as long as we’re considering only stars massiver than brown dwarfs?

Chandrasekhar's limit has nothing to do with this; it's just a meaningless coincidence that the same mass is the maximum mass of a main sequence star that lives long enough to give planetary biospheres enough time to evolve to the point where Earth is now. Chandrasekhar's limit is the maximum mass of a white dwarf; any more massive white dwarf collapses into a neutron star. Main sequence stars can be much more massive - but the more massive a main sequence star is, the shorter is its main sequence lifetime.

See https://www.space.com/chandrasekhar-limit.
Any star more massive than the most massive white dwarf, will eventually go supernova, and evolve into a neutron star or a black hole.

[WeepingElf]

Isn’t 1.4 Solar masses Chandrasekhar’s limit?
At that mass the star will go supernova, wouldn’t it?
And, don’t smaller-mass stars survive longer than larger-mass stars, as long as we’re considering only stars massiver than brown dwarfs?

Chandrasekhar's limit has nothing to do with this; it's just a meaningless coincidence that the same mass is the maximum mass of a main sequence star that lives long enough to give planetary biospheres enough time to evolve to the point where Earth is now. Chandrasekhar's limit is the maximum mass of a white dwarf; any more massive white dwarf collapses into a neutron star. Main sequence stars can be much more massive - but the more massive a main sequence star is, the shorter is its main sequence lifetime.

See https://www.space.com/chandrasekhar-limit.
Any star more massive than the most massive white dwarf, will eventually go supernova, and evolve into a neutron star or a black hole.

Yes. But we have been talking about which stars live long enough to allow a sapient species to evolve on a planet of theirs, and that has nothing to do with white dwarfs and supernovas, and therefore nothing with the Chandrasekhar limit. Also, the Chandrasekhar is an upper mass limit for white dwarfs, which won't have habitable planets anyway, not for main sequence stars. And before a main sequence star becomes a white dwarf, it goes through being a red giant, and sheds quite some mass before becoming a white dwarf (the shells of shed matter are called "planetary nebulae"), such that the white dwarf is much less massive than the star was in its main sequence stage.

What we can conclude from this, though, is that any star long-lived enough to allow higher life forms to evolve on one of its planets won't ever go supernova, and that was the point. The red giant stage, though, is bad enough for its planets, so a civilization on one of its planets will eventually have to move somewhere else or die, even though their sun won't go supernova.

[Khemehekis]

Today I created the ya ya nang, a red flower of Chatony that grows on graves, Chatony being where the nila bioswath (Dorsals) live. It's my first non-animal creation for that planet and bioswath. I needed the word to provide an etymon for "vulture", as in one who profits from another's/others' suffering or death.

The count of words in the Species Master List has gone up by 1.