Re: Ferochromon: the Ebisedian conworld

--- 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

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