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Zerraspace [2013-07-20 16:54:19 +0000 UTC]

Being that you took this from Astroventure, it probably warned you about this, but I feel I should bring up the point again: blue stars are too short-lived for Earth-like planets to develop. It took some 3 billion years for Earth's atmosphere to change from a reducing state to oxidizing state which we could breathe, allowing more complex life; I won't bar the possibility of complex life in a reducing atmosphere, but if you want humans to live on it you need the latter, and I don't think you could really shorten the period down to less than some 2 billion years. Larger stars burn out more quickly than small ones, so it stands to reason that you'd want the smallest blue star possible for the best lifespan, a B type: however, even the longest lived blue stars don't make it more than a billion years on the main sequence before turning into red supergiants, at which point the possibility of life is probably nothing. Being that it took some 800 million years for the first unicellular life forms to develop on Earth, this is not encouraging...

As I see it, there are four things you could do to get around this. The first option is to change the star to something longer lived: an A white star comes to mind. They're the bridge between blue and yellow sun-like stars, fantastically bright compared to the latter yet long-lived compared to the former, able to survive the 3 billion years necessary to give this world a chance to develop. The second option is to have that the planet was actually terraformed into its current habitable state, which would bypass the billions of years needed for it to occur naturally, though by similar reckoning it would not have had the time to develop its own complex life; any of that would have had to be seeded during the terraforming process. That being said it might not be humans who completed the terraforming, but some race prior (even a hundred million years prior), allowing the seeded life to diversify and rendering the world indistinguishable from a naturally life-bearing one (and presenting a celestial oddity to human observers, as by all rights the world is too young to have developed in this fashion). The third option relies on that this planet is meant to serve as a penal colony, which strikes me as defining it to be of little value; in this case, maintain the primordial reducing atmosphere uninhabitable to humans, which would serve to keep prisoners from escaping their containment. In this case, the atmosphere would be dominated by hydrogenated gasses (methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide) and carbon dioxide, which may nevertheless be capable of supporting life, albeit utterly incompatible with that we are familiar with. The fourth option is to give the planet a relatively weak magnetic field, denying it protection from stellar radiation and allowing it to break down water vapor into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms; the former of these will be blown into space, but the latter will slowly accumulate, which may produce a breathable mix. That being said, the radiation will be of concern for any visitors: I hope you like SPF 3000.   

If you care, I'm good at dealing with astromechanics and creating digital planets: I can help you refine figures and the astronomy regarding this world, as well as make you an original map.

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space-commander [2013-07-20 13:06:33 +0000 UTC]

The first penal colony, glad to have you aboard   If you are interested in painting Zelgeria GIMP is a good free program. 

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