Earth is two thirds covered with water. Altai looks beautiful to Dominic Flandry. Altai also has a lot of water but most of it is frozen, more than half the northern hemisphere, and slightly less of the south, polar cap, snow tinged rosy by the sun Krasna, naked ice blue or green. The tropical steppes and tundra are bronze or gold. There are some big lakes, rainbow Saturnian rings and two small moons.
Can you picture it? How do you think it looks?
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I thought of wondering if Altai might look a lot like a terraformed Mars, except larger and having grass covered tundra and lakes.
As for flags we are never given any description of what the flag of the Solar Commonwealth looked like. I argued, based on the description of the sky display seen in Chapter 1 of ENSIGN FLANDRY, that the flag of the Empire was a sunburst in a royal blue field.
The flag of the UK is not usually called a tricolor, but it uses three color: red, blue, and white. As does the US flag.
Ad astra! Sean
The description is beautiful and the planet would be from space. Too bloody cold for my taste on the surface, though!
And it is reminiscent of Mongolia, most of which is bloody cold... except for a brief period in summer when it's bloody hot.
I do wonder what produces the oxygen for the atmosphere.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Darn! I never thought of that before, how did a mostly glaciated planet like Altai get an atmosphere humans could breathe? Would the Terran grasses introduced by the colonists be enough?
I would point out there were times in the past when Earth was entirely or mostly glaciated.
I agree, I too would find Altai uncomfortably cold!
Ad astra! Sean
If I recall the story correctly, the native life on Altai had plants with antifreeze sap living on the glaciers that produced O2. The Terran plants introduced would merely add to rather than create from scratch an oxygenated atmosphere.
As for the humans there finding it too cold.
The temperature here has been about -20 C for the last few days. Given reasonably abundant energy to heat well insulated buildings & multiple layers of clothing when outside, I feel fine.
Kaor, Jim!
Thanks for resolving the puzzlement Stirling's comments caused me to feel.
I still would find Altai too darn cold! I would prefer a warm planet like Unan Besar, as long as the antitoxin pills humans need to live there were cheap and plentiful.
Ad astra! Sean
A large majority of Earth's oxygen comes from oceanic algae -- far more than the 75% of the earth's surface covered in water. They're more productive than the land plants.
And while we've had "snowball earth", we haven't since the oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere reached anything like the modern levels. In fact, the global-glaciation events resulted in a sharp fall in atmospheric oxygen, followed by C02 and methane buildups that eventually melted the ice.
However, re-oxygenating the atmosphere took quite a while after the melt, and was accompanied by the spread of multicellular life.
In the case of Altai, the cold-adapted plants would be unlikely to produce -enough- oxygen.
Furthermore, most of Altai was barren of plant life (except for some sparse forms "struggling to readapt") when the Terrans arrived and released their grasses.
But if oxygen isn't constantly renewed by photosynthesis, oxygen in the atmosphere drops very rapidly, because oxygen is so reactive and forms solid compounds.
Poul had another story, where people return to find earth barren of organic life -- 'descendants' of self-replicating automated machinery have taken over the planet.
And the atmosphere is unbreathable because there isn't any photosynthetic plant life.
Poul tried to make odd worlds scientifically plausible, but later findings made things like Altai's glacial plants providing breathable amounts of O2 rather unlikely.
Analysis of the snowball earth events make partially glaciated Altai unlikely. Icecaps extending closer than 30 degrees from the equator unstable. They will either be growing to cover the whole earth or be melting back.
The sunlight reflected by ice & snow provides a positive feedback that tends to make the planet colder & so make the icecaps grow. This overwhelms any negative feedbacks when the icecaps cover more than half the planet, ie: extending to less than 30 degrees from the equator. If the planet is fully glaciated & enough CO2 (or other green house gasses) accumulate to bring the equatorial temperature to 0 C the darker meltwater & bare earth will result in a positive feedback that melts all the ice in a few thousand years.
This does suggest the existence of some planets that would be easily terraformable by large space mirrors adding enough sunlight to barely start the melting of a snowball planet.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Dang! I'm forced to conclude "A Message in Secret" was one of Anderson's less scientifically successful stories. Albeit I'm sure his designing of Altai was as scientifically plausible as possible when first pub. in 1959.
Ad astra! Sean
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