this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
35 points (92.7% liked)

Science Memes

10885 readers
4663 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
35
Shower thought: To a creature from Titan, are we lava monsters? (lemmy.starlightkel.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
12 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 12 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

We sure are. We're walking around, being 70% superheated ice. We can melt normal solids like oxygen and carbon dioxide to vapour just by huffing on them. In fact, we breathe oxygen and carbon dioxide!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'm pretty sure oxygen would be a gas there.

It wouldn't last for long, as it's that incredibly reactive gas that corrodes everything, but it's a gas.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I had a similar thought for an OC the other day. I like scifi so a lot of my writing is set in space, and I thought it would be funny to have a character from a world that doesn't have rain getting freaked out when she sees rain on another planet for the first time.

"How can you all be so calm? There is water falling from the sky! That isn't natural!"

[–] platypode 12 points 8 months ago

Dune

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There's a scene in The Wheel of Time books where characters that lived all their lives in a desert region and were raised in a culture that treasures water more than anything venture out of that desert and see rains, rivers and lakes for the first time. The first reaction is basically "wait, all this water... is just free to take?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That sounds exactly like a scene in Dune, ha

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Oh, Robert Jordan definitely was inspired by Dune when he was designing that desert culture. Very much warmongering and ruthless and full or rituals and stuff. Oh, and the main character, of course, turns out to be their chosen one

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

just for a point of comparison, Titan's atmopshere does have 'rain'... it's methane, mind, but it does have 'rain'.

Most likely, without some for of extensive environmental suits (or possibly entire environmental climate chambers built onto semi-mobile vehicles,)(I'm imagining the space chamber used by third stage guild navigators in Dune.) such won't be able to survive anyway. So they'd probably look at the rain and go "oh, that's interesting to look at." while sipping whatever passes for coffee.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

I suppose it depends which creature from Titan you ask. Everyone knows that some creatures from Titan are racist, but that doesn't mean it's fair to generalize about all of them like that.

[–] EmoDuck 8 points 8 months ago

In Project Hail Mary there is an alien species that from our point of view are basically living rocks, living in a far hotter atmosphere with many times the pressure of earth.

But from their point of view, humans are leaky sacks of flesh that live in fridge near-vacuum

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Look up the book Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter. The first short story titled The Sun-People is exactly this scenario. It happens on a large asteroid in our solar system. Needless to say, that the creatures can't survive in our presence.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

If you want a book about hot aliens thinking Earth is frigid, try "Iceworld" by Hal Clement.