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.
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.
complex carnal carnival of carnivory
Beautiful.
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.
I just got frustrated with it.
spoiler
You've got the battle for the survival of an entire planet after they all got biodroned.
How many chapters that actually detail what happened? It felt like all it did was go
spoiler
Attack announced, humans arrive and set up a beach head, daar flattens a few cities in the background.
Then spends more time talking about how he is burdened and manly as a result of doing it than the actual doing.
The Hell storyline after that gave me hope, as I trudged through chapters of "cor, look at Adam's muscular muscles muscling", but once that finished, and we started getting storylines like "Why can't we have guns in Folctha? Murica!", I kinda gave up.
The entire ecosystem is also part plastic.
In one of their multitude of inter-nation conflicts; two cities were consumed in nuclear fire. On any sane world; these areas would be abandoned and the area around them a quarantine zone; the humans obviously not being fully sane, rebuilt and flourish.
This is related to the fact that humans along with most of the inhabitants of Sol3, are highly resilient to damage; of all kinds.
Humans reproduce slowly; but even though they generally reproduce not far above replacement rate, their resilience means their population still grows at an exponential rate. And on top of that; their advances in medical technology are on the verge of massive life extension. Soon they will have to move out into space; the galaxy better get ready for them.
Cell respiration and oxidation involves exactly zero forms of ~~combustion~~ fire.
Cellular respiration is sugar + oxygen -> water + CO2
Combustion reactions are often characterized as anything that is something + oxygen -> water + optionally something else.
You're correct. It does meet the definition of combustion. I misspoke. The post claims that cells are being set on fire. That claim is categorically untrue.
'claim'
Lmao that's a strong word for an off-the-cuff conversational riff you saw on social media.
There's always someone that takes things way too literally
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.
The more you know! 💫
This screenshot is an attack made by chemists with the intent to cause aneurysms on unsuspecting biologists.
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.
If we ever found a species that was made of alcohol we would absolutely dominate, err domestic them as quickly as possible.
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
New loyalist chapter name
Everybody in this thread needs to read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
I'd add that the audiobook is amazing also.
So you're telling me if I stop breathing I'll never get older? I'm in!
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.
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.
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.
Death breathers are made of electric thinking meat. Life is fucking rad.
Reminds me of the short story podcast 'The Truth' episode - "They're Made out of Meat". In fact I think it may have been a short story I once read online beforehand, that they may just have dramatized. (?)
does lemmy have an equivalent to/r/hfy ? This has big /r/hfy energy.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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