Re: starship-design: Re: Aliens

[Antonio C T Rocha <arocha@bsb.nutecnet.com.br>]

Timothy van der Linden wrote:

> Kyle wondered:
>
> >I read about the thought of life on a gas planet. I think its
> possible,
> >but wonder (I know this will sound dumb): what would they build
> >spaceships out of? Its a logical question.
>
> They can use dead bodies to extract the materials from.
> Sorry to be so crude, but your question probably should have been,
> what are
> these creatures build of? If you know the answer, than you most likely
> know
> the source for spaceship material.
>
> Timothy

Hello again,
   Conditions under which microbial life has already been found on earth
- boiling hot, very acidic, very high pressures in the bottom of mines,
near volcano-shafts, near sulforous vents on the sea floor - possibly
also exist _somewhere_ on Venus and/or the gas giants. If primitive life
was indeed seeded from space, and is therefor similar in potential, it
might be as probable somewhere on Venus' surface as it is on the ocean
floor on top of a boiling sulfurous volcano-vent on Earth.
    Gas giants present growing pressures towards their centers, to the
point where the "gas" possibly liquefies and then solidifies. Conditions
at some "altitude" might resemble the above sulfurous vents or even the
surface of Venus itself.
    Supposing that lifeforms higher than just microbes existed there,
they might be, as Carl Sagan suggested, baloon-like in the gaseous
regions, and predators there might tend to be bird-like. Similar logic
might be applied to the liquid and solid (if any) regions of the gas
giants.
    If I had to make a spaceship while living on a gas giant, I would
try to spin very dense cocoons of polyamide/amine-like material (kevlar,
teflon, nylon, etc.) that might be "mined" from the surrounding nitrogen
hydrogen oxygen carbon compounds (that we know of - might be others).
Hydrogen or carbohydrates and oxygen would be the fuels of choice. If I
did have "force-field" or ZPE generators or space-time "bubblifiers", of
course, it would tend to be easier :-)