3 ms·
Fun to imagine how a tidally-locked civilization would grow up seeing a lot more symmetry in their environment than we do, and how their myths might spring up a
by causal 3y ago
Fun to imagine how a tidally-locked civilization would grow up seeing a lot more symmetry in their environment than we do, and how their myths might spring up as a result.
Also funny to imagine their scientists dismissing Earth as possibly habitable- "spinning around and around like that would result in impossibly complex weather systems - no way that's stable enough to sustain life!"
- rob74 3y agoWhat would be fascinating is imagining how the permanent daytime would influence their perception of time. The day is after all the fundamental unit of all human timekeeping, along with the seasons, and a tidally locked planet would have none of those. Maybe, if they are lucky, a moon big enough to be visible during daytime?
- causal 3y agoYeah! Also the mystery that the night-side of the planet would hold. If permanent cloud-cover for the day side holds true, then star-filled skies might just be a legend brought back by those who braved the darkness and lived to tell about it.
- mangamadaiyan 3y agoInteresting parallels to Asimov's "Nightfall" there!
- QuadmasterXLII 3y ago"Can a tidally locked planet have a moon" is a fascinating newtonian physics problem- I am thoroughly nerd sniped
- saalweachter 3y agoIsn't that just Lagrange points?
- mshockwave 3y agoI thought that’s what happens on Pluto
- Terr_ 3y agoIn some cases they might also observe the "fixed" stars. (Depends on their habitat zone, atmospheric composition and weather, what kind of eyes they evolve, etc.) If so, they could easily measure "one year", and possibly subdivide it further, based on either consistent angle-measurements or roughly-similar chunks based on designating constellations and when they vanish or reappear.
- QuadmasterXLII 3y agoEspecially since their year would be much much shorter than ours
- Terr_ 3y ago> much much shorter My napkin math yields "as short as 1/3 Earth year", however I'm not sure I'd call that much^2 shorter, given some of the variety out there. I'm eyeballing the graph in the linked blogpost, which has a dashed line for 4.5by solar-system age versus the optimistic "habitable" ranges. In particular, minimizing the distance gives (distance=0.4, star_mass=0.4) and trading off a bit for a more massive star (distance=0.5, star_mass=1.0). The period of a circular orbit is proportional to (distance^3 / star_mass)^0.5 [0], so when I plug those pairs in I get orbital periods of ~0.4 to ~0.35 Earth years, respectively. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period
- QuadmasterXLII 3y agoI haven't done math, but my mental prototype of a "tidally locked potentially habitable planet" TRAPPIST-1e, which has a period of six days. Maybe it is unusually fast? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1#List_of_planets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1#List_of_planets
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RajT88 3y agoThere is a wild sci-fi which imagines a tidally locked planet, and all the weird crap that goes on there. It was a pilot for a TV show which never got picked up, but you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/mt90AYy8mvc https://youtu.be/mt90AYy8mvc
- a_gnostic 3y agoAlso a world in a 1970's French comic called Vinea (Yoko Tsuno –Roger Leloup)