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ArtOfAnrach — Sutesh
#alien #colony #extraterrestrial #planet #scifi #space #spacescape #world
Published: 2015-01-11 04:57:37 +0000 UTC; Views: 5777; Favourites: 79; Downloads: 0
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Another sketch... I think I'm getting better.Sutesh (also known as Set, Seth, Sutekh, Setekh, Suty, and a myriad of other names) appears from orbit to be an arid planet, but on the surface it is quite fertile in places. That being said large portions of it are similar to the Atacama desert of South America and because of this around 68% of the surface is uninhabitable. Native lifeforms never evolved beyond microbes, but waves of human settlers gradually introduced various organisms from across the galaxy (though oddly enough very few are native to Earth) and created a diverse, patchwork biosphere across the habitable zones. While Sutesh lacks the significant surface water required for plate tectonics it does have large, highly active volcanic zones which have produced mountain ranges that dwarf the Himalayas or Andes on Earth. This volcanism is what attracted human settlers to this wasteland world in the first place, and the population became wealthy from the mining of aluminum, nickel, gold, gems, and obsidian. The Suteshi people built magnificent, gleaming cities and provided nearly a third of the raw resources for the industrial might of the First Martian Empire. The fertile volcanic soil provided more than enough food to feed the exponentially growing population as well as many population centers in the local stellar cluster, and Suteshi vineyards produced award-winning wines that would continue to be coveted throughout the known galaxy long after the fall of both the First and Second Martian Empires. Ultimately this decadence would come to a violent end as the chaos following the Andromedan Invasion which caused the fall of the Second Martian Empire resulted in Sutesh becoming isolated from the civilized centers of the known galaxy, cutting it off from the trade that once provided them with the means to support their modern lifestyle. The inability to defend itself from outside influence led to Sutesh being conquered and sacked various times in the centuries that followed, ultimately leading the Suteshi to their current state of either pastoral nomads or isolated pre-industrial agricultural city-states. Recently a dynasty that has rule the most prosperous of these city-states has embarked on a march of conquest with the goal of reunited the scattered Suteshi people and restoring the planet to its former glory.
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Comments: 7
>>While Sutesh lacks the significant surface water required for plate tectonics it does have large,<<
I didn't know you needed surface water for plate tectonics to make a difference.
Sounds a bit like the history of one of the Silk Road states, like Khwarazem (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khwarazm… ), and that's a pretty cool history.
But where did their water for farming come from? Ice comets?
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Well we only have one known planet with plate tectonics, so nobody knows for sure but it's generally believed that you need large bodies of surface water (such as oceans) to have a planetary crust moist enough for proper tectonics. Venus for instance is believed to have once had surface oceans but doesn't any longer and there seems to be no evidence of plate tectonics occurring on the surface.
Yes, the history was inspired by the silk road states! Very cool stuff, it's amazing how many places that would otherwise be rather barren can prosper from large scale trade passing through certain areas. As for the water used for farming, yes it likely came from comets. Sutesh has plenty of surface water, enough to support a hydrosphere, but nowhere near as much as Earth, and not enough to be seen from orbit. The largest body of water is a massive river you can see in the picture, which is where most of the agriculture takes place. There are large lakes, rivers, ponds, and pools but many of them have high salinity levels. Lots of water vapor is released from volcanic activity though, so it's possible that in a few hundred million years there will be significant amounts of surface water.
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I never knew that about large bodies of water and plate tectonics! Crazy!
And oceans on Venus? Even crazier! I did a quick search and...CO2 oceans on Venus? www.space.com/28112-venus-weir…
I imagine water would be a very precious resource there. And desalinization technology a high priority.
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Indeed, water is so precious that after the fall of the Martian Empire it became the standard on which their currency was based. Don't ask me how, because I haven't actually thought that out. I just figured that if you lived on a planet with more gold than water it might make more sense to have water based currency, similar to how a post-scarcity economy may use a currency based on energy production rather than precious metals.
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Well, if water works like gold used to, bills (or coins or whatever their money looks like) will be promissory notes from the issuing authority (government or bank or both) that you can exchange x amount of money for y amount of water.
The weakness in such a system, however, is that it is vulnerable to rapid and uncontrolled changes in value (inflation or deflation) as new sources of water become available. In other words, if I horde water, I make water rarer, therefor more valuable, and drive up the value of currency (whatever it might actually say on the piece of paper). If I dump a lot of water on the market at once, the value of currency goes down and currency becomes worthless. A big problem if you're a government and collect taxes.
Something like that happened to both Spain (with gold) and China (with silver) after huge New World deposits of the metals became available in the 1500s, and both states fell.
The government might try to control the gold supply (through extremely draconian measures) but it's a losing battle that costs more money than it makes.
A more stable system is to make currency float (like we use today). The government tells you "this bill is worth one dollar" and it's up to you to decide how much a dollar is worth. Economists might seek to measure the value of a dollar by seeing how much of a commodity (like gold or oil) it might buy, but that doesn't equate gold to money. The value (and therefor) the price of gold changes without necessarily changing the value of currency.
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That's a good idea, but couldn't the problem be remedied through a mandate that states that all water, regardless of the source, belongs to the government? It would make sense in multiple ways seeing as water would be crucial to agriculture and basic survival in addition to being the basis for currency. Maybe they could do a blend of both? The government controls all the water and then floats the value of the currency based on only certain sources of water? Ah, this is getting a little too in depth for a simple one-time planet but it is interesting to speculate about.
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Well, "solved" to some extent. Similar laws have existed for gold (and probably for silver, too), but the problem is that they're unenforceable. It would be like declaring "no citizen may own property exceeding a thousand dollars in value," except that gold is physical and you can literally stash it in your back yard or sneak it across international borders. People WILL get their hands on this stuff, and they'll be willing to kill to keep it, so making it government property only creates a black market. Think the drug trade multiplied by the slave trade to the power of the bootlegger mafia.
Water is even worse than gold, now that I think of it. You can condense it out of he air (so THAT's what Luke Skywalker's family was doing to help the Rebellion!). Also...um...humans are full of it. So no, I would really prefer to live in a regulated water market
Although this setting is getting really interesting. Fallen trade-rout planet with black-market cannibal blood-traders? Watch out, boy, don't let those Dehumidifiers get you.
Note: the government might well sell water (tagged with deuterium for tracking purposes?) at a subsidized rate for humanitarian/political reasons, as well as a way to control the money supply (in the same way the US Fed raises and lowers interests rates to encourage people to save or spend). If so, black-market cannibal blood-traders will only be about as bad as loan sharks.
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