Re: Planetary gravity question.

At 5:29 PM -0400 8/4/02, Laserlight wrote:
>The way it works with the Earth is that a lot of the heavy elements
>are in the core, which is dense.  You could have a world with a
>comparatively large core and thin mantle and have it fairly
>Earth-like.  It wouldn't necessarily affect the soil.

Too much of the heavy stuff and it gets hard expecting that there 
will be enough silicates in the mantle for conventional vegetation to 
take hold.

>     If you want to do some realistic planetbuilding, you ought to get
>Stephen Gillett's book called World-Building,	ISBN 0-89879-707-1.
>     If you just want to make it up as you go along, you could say that
>it has toxic amounts of thorium, uranium, whatever.  Or the local
>plants look a little plastic, because they incorporate chlorine into
>their makeup.	Whatever you like.

I've seen references to the fact that a moderate amount of isotopes 
is necessary to have enough mutation in order to have evolution 
working well. Too much and nothing lives very long due to radiation 
exposure.

-- 
Ryan Gill	       rmgill@SPAMmindspring.com
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'60 Daimler Ferret '42 Daimler Dingo '42 Humber MkIV (1/3)
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