Theor climbs a mountain, hears a stream and wonders if he should try to catch a fish. In other words, when Poul Anderson wrote Three Worlds To Conquer in 1964, it was still thought possible that Jupiter was like a big Earth.
Differences:
a fall is more serious on Jupiter, even for a Jovian;
under Jovian gravity, the change of air pressure with altitude is several times greater than on Earth - a mile above sea level, Theor's spiracles get less than half the hydrogen that they need;
erosion and gravity counteract orogeny so that most mountains are low;
energies bursting out of the compressed core and mantle cause not only quakes, volcanoes and geysers but also a thirty thousand mile long permanent storm, the Red Spot.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I THINK the current thinking about Jupiter is that it does not have a rocky core at all, but a "core" of extremely compressed gas. I might be wrong, tho!
Sean
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