Worldbuilding - A sulphuric acid sea

[becka_sutton]

Originally posted about a year ago on my tumblr.

So, I’ve obtained a copy of this World-Building book and it’s awesome and useful (though it lacks a section on designing biomes *sighs*). It’s going to be useful for the current project, but the book itself is spawning plot-bunnies. Science Fiction plot bunnies. It’s been a long time since I’ve had those.

You see in the book there’s a section called “not as we know it” which has suggestions for life-supporting worlds with some really alien (and by human standards hostile) worlds.

One of these was a world where the thalassogen is Sulphuric Acid rather than water. The author even suggests a mechanism by which Sulphuric Acid seas could form that involves the most original water ocean being lost via photodissociation and then a sulphuric acid one forming (there’s more steps to it than that). Now as he admits Sulphuric Acid reacts with most things which makes it an unlikely seeming solvent for life, unlikely but not impossible. He suggests that since most organic compounds react with Sulphuric Acid this might be where silicon based life develops. But I’m not sure that’s necessary. See this world had a water ocean to start with, so maybe primitive life got going before the water ocean all but vanished. Now the initial dessication and ensuing Sulphuric Acid downpour (is it just me or does this sound like a slightly cooler Venus?) would have killed off most everything in the mother of all mass extinction events but life tends to be tough to eradicate totally and even on Earth we have Extremophiles surviving in some really nasty (in our terms) enviroments including the highly acid. So maybe some of this world’s primative analogs of bacteria and archaea adapted quickly enough and manage to live in the sea. From there things carry on and eventually multicellular organisms, land life and so on develops culminating in an intelligent tool using alien race. Silicon is highly unlikely as replacement for carbon - it doesn’t form complex enough molecules.

So far so good. The problem is that Sulphuric Acid corrodes most metals like crazy so the author reckons an intelligent race on such a planet would be stuck as they wouldn’t be able to break out of the stone age. No bronze, no iron - yes, the noble metals but they aren’t much good for tools and weapons.

My reaction to this is something along the lines of okay, so what might they develop instead that we wouldn’t think of? Metal is easy for us, what might be hard for us but easy for them? I mentioned this on Twitter and @Charnigans suggested glass and ceramics. I’m not sure how they’d work chemically with a Sulphuric Acid environment but that’s worth looking into. Maybe they’d develop a flexible glass like the one Tiberius is supposed to have repressed though that’s probably hyperbole since even today we can’t make glass that ductile. It would be cool if it weren’t though. I think I need to find a list of things that don’t react with Sulphuric Acid so I can work out if a tech tree leading to space travel is even remotely likely without the metal ages. (More about that in this post on my tumblr which I haven't copied here yet).

Wow, that was a ramble…