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Apparently the ring builders in The Expanse books were supposedly squids from an ice encrusted planet/moon. It is an odd idea of how they’d even discover it. A

Apparently the ring builders in The Expanse books were supposedly squids from an ice encrusted planet/moon. It is an odd idea of how they’d even discover it. Assuming their natural habitat is a thermal vent on the ocean floor, they’d need pressure suits or probes to travel up to shell. Then they’d need to essentially create a Kola Superdeep Borehole in the sky, and there’s no obvious reason to do that, especially since drilling down into rock would be easier, and certainly more lucrative. (ie there aren’t any valuable materials in ice). This is assuming they don’t discover a 15 km deep fissure, which seems unlikely because I don’t think individual fissures discovered are that deep, all fissures are transitory, and probably randomly distributed. Sure a seismic network in the sky would could find evidence of fissures, but why are you building a seismic network in the sky?

sbierwagen 3y ago
It would be hard to tell if the rest of the universe even existed. No electromagnetic radiation or cosmic rays are going to make it through the ice. They'd have to get all the way to neutrino telescopes or gravity wave detectors to sense anything outside their ocean, and why would they spend the resources? Humanity could see our moon and it still took us thousands of years to get there. Really they'd only do it if they managed indefinite population growth without poisoning their biosphere with waste products, and had to mine out the ice shell just for more living space. That would be tough: the equivalent would be if every square meter of the Earth's surface, including oceans, was as densely populated as Manhattan. That gets us up to 14 trillion people. Now make every building 10 km tall.
eep_social 3y ago
> there’s no obvious reason to do that I think the reason would be that they’d realize they were in the middle layer of a multilayer ball. My assumption is that at some point they would explore the entire ocean-floor habitat, discover the world is an oblique spheroid, and wonder what’s up. As soon as that happens the impetus becomes “obvious” and it’s a problem of technology.

sbierwagen 3y ago

It would be hard to tell if the rest of the universe even existed. No electromagnetic radiation or cosmic rays are going to make it through the ice. They'd have to get all the way to neutrino telescopes or gravity wave detectors to sense anything outside their ocean, and why would they spend the resources? Humanity could see our moon and it still took us thousands of years to get there. Really they'd only do it if they managed indefinite population growth without poisoning their biosphere with waste products, and had to mine out the ice shell just for more living space. That would be tough: the equivalent would be if every square meter of the Earth's surface, including oceans, was as densely populated as Manhattan. That gets us up to 14 trillion people. Now make every building 10 km tall.

eep_social 3y ago

> there’s no obvious reason to do that I think the reason would be that they’d realize they were in the middle layer of a multilayer ball. My assumption is that at some point they would explore the entire ocean-floor habitat, discover the world is an oblique spheroid, and wonder what’s up. As soon as that happens the impetus becomes “obvious” and it’s a problem of technology.