I wonder what would happen if you sautéed octonions in a cast octiron pan…
8 Likes
It’s happened, like all rural myths, but the curious thing about blasted-clean, magically-contaminated landscapes, *no one really knows the story of how they got that way.
6 Likes
I’m embarrassed! I had read the article but I hadn’t noticed 
3 Likes
That’s the special at the Lawrence Livermore cafeteria every Octeday.
4 Likes
The Grand Canyon is a MASSIVE QUARRY!
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_giant_silicon-based_tree_hypothesis
4 Likes
As a result, many silicon analogues of carbon cannot form,[4] making its chemistry much poorer than that of carbon.
Not only that, you can’t make a silicon chain bigger than about 8 silicon atoms in a row. You can make polymers out of silane to give (SiH2O)n; i.e., silicone, but those don’t dissolve in water; there would have to be another solvent around. Silicone oils? But where would those come from? Basically, if you have a lot of silicon and oxygen around (which the earth does), it forms quartz. Or sand. Or mixed with other metals, rocks.
IMO, this isn’t even a hypothesis, because it goes against so many things that are known. Maybe it isn’t impossible, but it’s so unlikely as to be not worth thinking about.
3 Likes
Yeah. But that story looks everywhere and says “These are not natural. Mountains are not natural. Deserts are not natural. Forests are but mosses growing in the ruins of the originals. Every land was once a great forest, destroyed by forgotten destroyers. Everything we call natural is an industrial wasteland.”
So it seemed highly relevant to AndyHilmer’s comment that:
3 Likes
The air pressure on Titan is 1.45x that of Earth, the density of liquid methane is 0.422x that of water, and Titan’s gravity is 0.14g, so its methane-based trees can grow 1.45/0.422/0.14 = 24.5 times as tall as Earth trees. That’s over 3km! Truly a sight to behold.
(Though nothing compared with the life forms in a certain other Saturnian moon’s subsurface oceans, of course…)
6 Likes
One of my favorite books as a kid was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees with 100km trees (where the humans have made their colonies) growing in free-fall in a torus of gas and water orbiting a star.
4 Likes
I’ll have to check it out. I remember fondly the tree ships from the Hyperion series, and the giant trees from the video game “Below the Root.”
3 Likes
8 Likes
Yeah! I loved the concept. The story itself though dragged, IMHO. Too many characters. The trees orbited a neutron star, IIRC, which makes me wonder – are neutron stars ever quiescent enough for life to live that near them?
6 Likes
It’s sort of possible. The magnetic axis of the neutron star would have to be really close to the rotational axis with minimal precession, otherwisem the magnetic field at the poles would sweep through the torus. Also, it should not rotate too quickly (which would be kind of a miracle), otherwise, decay in the rotation would cause the surface of the neutron star to occasionally reconfigure, resulting in a nova-like burst of energy.
7 Likes
I found an article that suggests super-Earths with significant atmospheres may be able to modulate the blasts from some neutron stars: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07688
4 Likes
Too many characters didn’t bother me as I was reading things like the Tolkien books and The Stand around then. It might’ve helped that I read it during the Golden Age of Science Fiction.1
I have a vague belief that there was some sort of explanation about the neutron star, either in that book or the sequel, so I went to the bookshelf to check and…there’s an empty gap where those 2 books belong! I think I might have lent them out to someone and it may be time to get a 3rd copy. 
(Someone recently gave me a book and I tried to thankfully decline because I already had the book, turned out they were returning one that they’d borrowed a couple years ago.)
1 “When was the Golden Age of Science Fiction?” “Twelve.” – Peter Graham
(Personally I’d say probably 10-14.)
5 Likes
I didn’t really get into it until about 13. … And still very much into it, though not so much into Golden Age SF.
5 Likes
I prefer a single first or third person character, so I can really identify with him or her, and have the story reveal itself as if it were happening to me. A little harder to do that sort of thing with multiple points of view.
I got into a kind of primitive sf in about 4th grade, with Tom Swift Jr., then widened from there. So that would be 10? But I remember seeing sci fi movies and TV from early days. The original Outer Limits was one of my favorite shows (as you may have guessed from my avatar).
3 Likes
Worms frozen for 42,000 years reanimate in petri dish.
Just don’t read the comments – a bible-thumper showed up.
10 Likes
Isn’t that, like, the first thirty-four Rules of the Internet?
9 Likes