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To: Red Badger

Maybe a planet with deep oceans with volcanic vents.


7 posted on 03/11/2013 2:25:17 PM PDT by cripplecreek (REMEMBER THE RIVER RAISIN!)
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To: cripplecreek

It would necessarily need oceans, and it would probably have a fair amount of vulcanism. It would also need to be much closer to its ‘sun’ to get its radiated heat to keep it from freezing, say at the orbit of Mercury, and a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere with a mass near that of Earth’s.

Its ‘sun’ would block out most of the sky during the ‘day’ and just be a big, velvety black spot to us, but to ‘them’ it would be a blazing inferno, just as Sol appears to us, because of their sensitivity in the infra-red region of the spectrum.

Green plants would be practically non-existent, except as scientific curiosities. Fungal growth would be like forests, with mushrooms the size of redwoods. Grasslands would be replaced by carpets of fungal communities and small bush sized fungal growths.

Animals would have evolved more slowly, but still they would differentiate into fungi-eaters and meat-eaters to preserve the predator-prey balance.

A dark world , to be sure, but colors would still be found in the flora and fauna simply due to natural selection and the need for camouflage, like we have fishes of very bright colors but they cannot see the colors due to the sunlight filtering of the water.

Imagine a sentient species evolving that would be able to ‘see’ in infrared. They would have very large ‘eyes’ that would gather as much ‘light’ as is possible, just like our night creatures that have large eyes for night time hunting as well as for protection from predators. Kinda sounds like the ubiquitous space alien caricature with the small heads and over sized teardrop shaped eyes.........


23 posted on 03/12/2013 6:41:42 AM PDT by Red Badger (Lincoln freed the slaves. Obama just got them ALL back......................)
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