Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Ferochromon: the Ebisedian conworld

From:Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 24, 2002, 12:47
--- In conlang@y..., Barry Garcia <barry_garcia@C...> wrote:
> CONLANG@L... writes: > >I recall a SF novel (and a ST(NG? episode) that dealt with a planet > >orbiting > >its primary so quickly that in earth/ship time of one hour or so, life on > >the planet went from stone to bronze age; after another hour they were > >developing rockets. > > Well, that was a ST Voyager episode as I remember it. It was something > like every minute was a couple of days or maybe years (i forget the > specifics) there. By the end of the episode (a few days) the planet had > reached a level of tech equal to Voyager. Voyager also appeared as a star > in their sky.
At least Voyager used some sort of technobabble spacetime distortion to explain the effect, which isn't quite as ridiculous as a relativistic planet orbit... ;-) If you want a planet to go relativistic, you would have to place it extremely close to an extremely massive object, e.g. a black hole. It's hard to imagine a planet remaining in one piece, let alone inhabitable, in such an environment. As a quick reminder: The velocity of a planet on an orbit of radius R around a primary of mass M is given by v = sqrt(G * M / R), G being the gravitational constant. The formula comes from the simple comparison of the orbit's centripetal acceleration a = v^2 / R with the gravitational acceleration a = G * M / R^2. The planets in our solar system are all very much sub-relativistic. -- Christian Thalmann

Reply

Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>