A REAL water world?!?

[rancke]

Someone (perchance an Ancient), dumps a teleportal into the deepest water ocean he can find and links it to another portal orbiting in the life zone of some world. (Well, maybe not the deepest. There has to be some oxygen and some organisms in the water. I'm not sure just what depth that would require. However, I want the pressure to be as big as possible in order to force as much water as possible through the portal).

How big is the new "planet" when the pressure reaches equilibrium?

Will it develop an atmosphere? Will it develop macrolife? What will it look like in 300,000 years?

What if some star travellers found it a couple of thousand years ago and seeded it with life?

Basically, can this notion be turned into an interesting "world"?

[And, yes, I did get this notion from Star Wars. So sue me )]



Hans

 

[HG_B]

However, I want the pressure to be as big as possible in order to force as much water as possible through the portal).

It's been a LONG time since I read anything about this device but, isn't there a velocity regulator when crossing the interface?

 

[Cryton]

There could be a velocity regulator in place, however if the person dumping the portal were an ancient, that could be easily overridden.

And as for the size of the world in question, about 70% of Earths surface is covered with water, HOWEVER, if all the water on the Earth were removed, it would only be enough to form a sphere several miles in diameter, and even with its removal, wouldnt effect its size characteristic. SO Id say, unless your water world were a size A+, and your target world was, say size 2 or less, you wouldnt be changing the size characteristic at all.

Now, should you be be dumping the portal into something like Neptune, which for all intents and purposes has more water on it than the mass of a hundred Earths, you could really change the size characteristic drastically

 

[far-trader]

Realistically all I see happening is a steady of stream of swiftly freeze-dried water coming out creating a ribbon of snow. Or something like.

Even being in the habitable zone the temperature is still close to absolute zero. You require something for the star's energy to heat before it'll be any warmer.

Until you have a very appreciable amount of something to create enough gravity you won't have anything forming into a local gravitationally bound collection. It'll come out with the velocity of whatever is transporting it there, and then be acted on by whatever other forces are in play. Such as solar wind, orbital velocity of the teleporter, and other gravity sources.

Then presuming you collect enough water to form a sphere held together by it's own gravity against other forces while remaining liquid (if that is in fact even possible) I'd have questions what the core would be like.

And that's just off the top of my head. Which is not to say you can't do it with enough Handwavium

 

[travlar]

Well, the formation of the world could be assisted by a gravity generator at the center, to make sure the water stays where it's supposed to be. But I have no idea as to what would happen.

 

[Andrew M]

My first thoughts are woahh.. could it even happen? I'll assume these Ancients were pretty smart and they had thought through what was needed to get the thing going.

Your water planet certainly would have an atmosphere. Our ocean contains a lot of disolved gasses, which would be forced out to balance the pressure. There would also be a lot of water vapour for the same reason.

The big question is whether it could hold onto this atmosphere. One factor is how fast would the gas molecules be travelling, and whether this is greater than the escape velocity for the waterworld. The reason we have so little helium is that the atoms fly so fast at room temperature they end up whizzing into space. I did some calculations and I reckon that for a planet with the density of water it would need to be over 10000km in diameter to hold onto water vapour. Given that the most of the planet is under a serious number of oceans worth of pressure, the density should be a bit higher. Oxygen, Nitrogen and CO2 should be safe too for a planet this big.

Solar wind would do add to our difficulties. The earth has a pretty strong magnetic field that keeps this at bay. This is because of its molten iron core. I really could not say whether a superfluid saltwater core would do the same thing or not.

I do not know how well sea life would cope. 300,000 years is probably long enough for watever macrolife got dragged through to adapt, as long as it survived the shock. This is the length of time it took for neanderthals to arive and then dissapear again.

There a definite sticking points that could scratch the macrolife thing altogether. Water currents could become unmanageable. Vital nutriants might disappear down the plughole into the superfluid core.

One thought was that you would wind up with a huge spherical lense. Sadly a sea as big as the earth would probably be a bit too murky.

 

[far-trader]

Idly daydreaming a bit more on it, how would this strike you...

...the teleportal is set up and as the water fountains into space in the new system it freezes in great balls and tubes* with the outer ice containing liquid water, briefly,before that also freezes. Eventually (eons) the ice-ring around the star collects into a conglomerate. Gravity and friction melting the ice from the core out. Long frozen simple life forms reanimate and prosper below kilometers of ice in the dark liquid core feeding on the thawing decay of higher life that was also teleported and frozen solid ages before. More time (eons) passes with sediments and byproducts collecting at the core, setting up a weak magnetic field that deflects enough of the solar wind that the off-gassing through the fissures of the ice world (over the deep sea core) begins to collect above and form an atmosphere. In time clouds form and the first rains fall. The ice crust thins as the temperature continues to climb under the cloud shrouded sky. More atmosphere builds up, more rains, more heat, less ice. With more open seas and warmer temperatures life explodes. The once primitive deep sea life evolves and multiplies. In time the last ice is melted and the water world is at last born.

Or something like that

* like how pillow-lava forms

 

[far-trader]

So, back to the original questions...

How big is the new "planet" when the pressure reaches equilibrium?

Small, too small unless you start with a really big ocean and it's really deep. Some small fraction of the original source. Probably too small for what you want.

EDIT: Here's a slightly late breaking thought though. Why just one teleportal? Why not ten? A hundred? A thousand? Whatever it takes, sourcing from many different worlds, until you get what you need. Some huge ancient alien aquaforming project, that they never lived to see completed. "Why I remember when Tatooine had oceans. Before that weird alien ship dropped those things in the deepest ocean trenches... "

Will it develop an atmosphere? Will it develop macrolife? What will it look like in 300,000 years?

See my musing above.

What if some star travellers found it a couple of thousand years ago and seeded it with life?

Accidentally or on purpose? In the first case one of two things, the life seeded would be incompatible with the local biosphere and quickly die out, or it would have no population checks and could well end up rewriting the local biosphere. In the second it would depend on their goals and skills.

Basically, can this notion be turned into an interesting "world"?

Of course it can

[And, yes, I did get this notion from Star Wars. So sue me )]

I wouldn't but Lucas might [And the lesson of the day is probably Star Wars is a bad source for science (i.e. REAL per your thread title/desire )]

 

[Icosahedron]

Pressure is a function of weight of water, which is a function of column height and gravity, so your source world(s) should be as big as possible, but even so, unless your source oceans are very deep they won't support much of a diameter for your destination world. Plus what FT and the others said.
Depends how much handwaqvium you can swallow...

 

[aramis]

At a certain point, the world gets big enough to have water deeper than the surface relief. Earth isn't big enough for that to be natural, probably. *

So, I got to thinking... how much more water do we need?

On earth, peak water depth of 10900m (marianas trench) and the peak elevation above MSL is about 8850m (Everest). That gives a total relief on earth of just shy of 20km...

20 km relief on 6378.16km radius...

But earth's mean ocean depth is about 4km... so we'll run some round numbers...

To cover the earth, we'll use a 6378km reference, that's ⁴/₃π(6378³-6374³)0.7≅1,430,423,138km³.... A good enough swag...

To turn earth panthalassic (cover everest) to deep shelf depth we need 6378+9km radius... an additional ⁴/₃π(6397³-6378³)0.7≅6,819,046,493km³... an additional 5x the water... and a mean depth of about 13km, and a peak depth of about 20km... an 1176km radius cometary body's worth, and maybe just a bit more... or 8 of about 600km radius...

——=——=——=——=——=——​

* Well, the various theories of earth formation differ on that. One of them presumes earth was panthalassic until smashed into by vulcan, and vulcan's core billiarded out Luna.... and about 5-10E9 cubic kilometers of ocean, most of which was blown away, before it could cool and rain back down, by the solar wind.

 

[atpollard]

The water world will need an atmosphere to protect the water from vaporizing in the zero atmospheric pressure of space (or freezing and then sublimating as the sun heats it). CO2 would be ideal since a little greenhouse action would be helpful. As an aside, a CO2 atmosphere might carbonate the oceans - a soda water world.

Since water has a much lower density than rock, for any given size 'true water world', the 'surface' gravity (and perhaps the safe jump distance) will be far less than a comparable sized 'rock ball'. This means that the true water world will need to be very large to hold onto its atmosphere. For example, the average density of the Earth is about 5.5 tonnes per cu.m. and the average density of water is 1 tonne per cu.m., so a water world with the same mass (and roughly the same gravity) as the Earth would need to be 1.75 times the diameter . IIRC, the smallest world able to hold onto an atmosphere is size 4, so the smallest possible true water world (equal in mass to a size 4 rockball) would be size 7. Smaller than that and the water will evaporate into space.

Setting aside the magic portals, one could also gather enough ice asteroids and transport them to an orbit in the liquid water zone of the star. I would suggest using a size 1 world as a core to build upon to simplify construction. By the time you reach a size A+ water world, there may be enough water to completely dissolve the core and hold it suspended in the water (like the salt in the Earth's oceans).

 

[inexorabletash]

One of them presumes earth was panthalassic until smashed into by vulcan, and vulcan's core billiarded out Luna....

Are you referring to Theia or is this a distinct name and/or Giant Impact Hypothesis theory?

Also, readers of this thread might want to check out this article about an exoplanet that may be a waterworld composed of up to 75% water

And, of course, there's wikipedia's Ocean planet article. Relevant to this thread, the core of the planet composed entirely of H2O is likely to be compressed into exotic ices, so the portal would have to be somewhere other than the core to remain functional past some point. The "supercritical surface" is a very nifty notion as well, ripe for SF/gaming possibilities.

Adventure seed: a rosette of 6 water worlds is discovered in a system. Speculation is that the ancients created them by taking a single natural water world and "draining" it to create 5 other worlds. This would indicate that at the frozen core of each world is a whopping huge portal (or network of portals) that might be considered rather valuable technology.

 

[Andrew M]

If people are interseted in water worlds I found this piece of work. (1500 references, the author did his homework). Among other things you will find that there are over a dozen different kinds of ice, and that warm water can freeze quicker than cold.

I have been struugling to hold onto the notion that the planet could still be completely liquid. It might be if the core was kept warm somehow. The critical pressure to turn to ice at 100 degrees Centigrade is just over 2 GPa. This is low compared to the 330GPa at the centre of the earth, even when you count the low density. The density of water maxes out at 1700kg/m^3, which is when it freezes as Ice VII. You could easily keep your portal out of the icy core by making it more bouyant than this, and keeping it at room temperature.

 

[aramis]

Are you referring to Theia or is this a distinct name and/or Giant Impact Hypothesis theory?

Vulcan was the name of it in the first few books on the subject I got hold of... and they predated the lunar landings by a few years.

Theia is a new name for the "Missing Rogue World of our System"; Vulcan was the old.

I suspect the name change was due to Vulcan also being used for the name of the world supposedly smashed to bits to make the asteroid belt under other theories of the time.

 

[Rigel Stardin]

Yesterday I caught an episode of the Universe on the History Channel. They were talking about Mars and why there was no water (well almost no water) on the planet. They basically came out and said, that without pressure water tends turn to steam but at the same time it will freeze.

The point here is, the water world must have a magnetic feild to protect it's atmosphere from the solar winds and the pressure of the atmosphere must be high enough to maintain pressure on the water to stop it from turning into steam/ice and burning off.

Therefore, for a true water world to exsist like it's been suggest in this thread, atmosphere and a magnetic field are necessary for its survival...

 

[travlar]

Which suggests that whoever makes it will want to put an artificially created magnetic field in. But then you have to power it...