Planet Creation Help: Ice Age Type Planet

ACK! Multi post problem. Sorry about that. Uhm... please leave your replies on this one and just ignore the other 2 threads. It's easier to keep track of things when it's all on one thread. Thanks!

(PS... is there a mod out there who could lock or delete the other 2 threads? sorry.)

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How I Reached 50k
Creating Character Profiles
Create a Fantasy Realm
Some Thoughts on Writing Fantasy

I feel like kind of a killjoy coming on all these threads and disagreeing with everything on the basis of realism, but I guess I'm a stickler for things being plausible.

I think if the planet was entirely covered in ice, it just wouldn't be able to support complex life - antarctica, for instance, is one of the most hostile environments on Earth. Sci-fi authors generally get away with it by just leaving their 'theme planets' completely unexplained. The one that comes to mind is Hoth from Star Wars, a planet with dangerous megafauna despite an apparent lack of vegetation. If a planet was that cold and barren, it probably wouldn't have a breathable atmosphere, never mind life. If it were freezing at the equator, then at the poles the temperature could be so low that the atmosphere freezes. To make a comparison, on Mars the equatorial temperature can sometimes reach a pleasant 20 degrees, but the poles are generally so cold that carbon dioxide freezes.

I think realistically your best bet is to have a planet like Earth during the ice age - warm around the equator, but with large ice caps (technically we're still in an ice age, because there is still polar ice). Just set all the action in the cold northern or southern parts.

I'm just brainstorming here...

I agree that it would be hard for the whole planet to be covered in ice so maybe the people could be somewhat nomadic, moving from the cool equatorial regions in the summer to deep caverns in the long winter.

I'd say move everything underground and think about organisms on Earth that survive without sunlight or heat. Could there be a form of fungus that grows without light, pulls nutrients from the rocks, and is the staple of the people's diet? Make it really rich in vitamin D to combat the whole scurvy thing. Maybe make it hard to harvest- dangerous or difficult- and build a social structure that holds winter harvesters in as high, or higher, esteem than the summer hunters.

Any society with that level of survival pressure is bound to have an extremely complex and probably rigid religious/ and civic structure. That doesn't mean it's not a cooperative society, it's just that it's likely to be full of rules and taboos. Survival is the rule and if the environment, as opposed to wild animals or warring groups, is the enemy then I bet it has some sort of personification in their teleology. Then again, maybe there are warring groups. How does the culture feel about population expansion? Lots of dark cold time could potentially mean lots of babies, but limited resources would limit survival rates.

Maybe have some way to harvest the ocean which would have to stay liquid in places year-round to keep any sort of livable climate viable. Maybe they could have technology that lets them use tides and wind to create energy.

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From a purely story-telling perspective, why do you want an ice-planet? What does this environment do to shape your character? What challenge does it pose to the primary plot? Could your objectives be accomplished using a slightly more hospitable environment?

I also agree that you could take a bit more of a fantasy perspective and just make it so. Don't try to explain it or make it particularly realistic if it doesn't add to your story. Remember, your book probably doesn't hinge on the actual planet itself, but on the people. I'd say, at least for Nano's first draft, don't let the science get in the way of a good tale.

Good Luck- I can't wait to read it!

Rebeccca
2007 "folly"
2008 "gravity"

Have a rogue planet or some large object perturb your planet's orbit. Then you can have extreme cold or even eat. It would have to be just right though, and still might require an evacuation of the colony or whoever lives there.

The "Completely Ice Planet" doesnt work if you are also looking for "realistic" -

But what about this: a planet that is mostly ocean, with the large continental landmasses clustered around the poles - Then throw in an ice age that covers much of the existing landmasses with glaciers.

As far a fauna, I am thinking wooly mammoths and sabretooth tigers and the fantasy staple of giant wooly spiders, and lots of big ocean fish and whales and sharks.

I agree with Vacillator and other posters -- an all-ice & snow planet seems unrealistic to have complex life. Were your people transplanted there and adapted somehow? There could also be reasons why people don't live in the warmer regions if you need everything to be cold -- it's too polluted, they can't get there, etc.

Indigenous life on the surface of an ice planet is rather unlikey unless there was life before the ice age, as was the case on earth. If people were brought there then I agree a nomadic tribe would be the best way to go. However, life under the ice might have developed. Scientists think that if Europa (a moon around Jupiter with an ice sheet covering a liquid ocean), was able to shield its ocean from Jupiter's radiation, life may have developed in the water. Just food for thought.

While natural adaptation to a completely frozen world would be pretty much impossible, if you're writing a science fiction novel - rather than fantasy in space - then the survivors may have adapted with the aid of technology. While those in the temperate zones would have been flash frozen like the English characters in The Day After Tomorrow, some might have escaped or evacuated the planet, and those in the tropics and the equatorial regions would have had time to prepare. As the world went into global freeze, they could have found ways to create shelters underground; built up food stocks and cultured fungi, algaes and lichens; devised means of cutting and shoring dwellings within the ice and tunnelling to the surface; and even made genetic alterations to themselves and their livestock to help them survive in the cold and dark (for which seek out Simon Bovey's sci-fantasy audio play, Cold Blood).

The resulting society would be dwelling in and on ice, subsisting on engineered crops and stock. There would be almost no life on the surface - which would be pretty featureless - but possibly still some beneath it, in the oceans. There might remain a small strip of unfrozen land at the equator, or perhaps somethign preserved under glass or in orbital habitats (a la Silent Running), for variety's sake.

As other posters have noted, it would be better to go for the ice age rather than an ice world, but there are ways if you're prepared to soften your SF a little, especially if this ice world is your equivalent of the Beast's time-locked castle.

I just got a book out called "World Building" edited by Ben Bova... OMG! I should have started there to begon with. It is soo helpful. If anyone else is building a planet go get that book!

I'm thinking Ice Age Planet rather than Planet Made of Ice; because it's got places where there are still trees growing (warmer equator regions) but the ice is sort of spreading over everything and so the people are being forced into a smaller and smaller region, as the ice age spreads across the planet, freezing everything in it's quake. Under the ice, everything is still there, it's just now frozen.

I'm thinking maybe the planet has some how change orbit slightly, not enough so life dies, but enough so that the planet is now starting to freeze over. Which is why I was thinking maybe a comet had hit it, knocked a chunk out of it and altered the orbit enough to freeze over most of the planet.

I'm trying to think of what earth would be like if we were tomorrow thrown into a sudden ice age. And than a 100 years from now, when the ice had spread out and really changed the culture worldwide so that people are really going backward technically now, because they have to focus on survival against the spreading ice, and have no time to do more leisure type studies to advance themselves anymore. (Maybe days are really short now so no time to study, with a lot of focus just on staying alive??? Don't know, I'm still working on that bit.)

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What Genre is My Vampire Story?
Creating Character Profiles
Create a Fantasy Realm
Some Thoughts on Writing Fantasy

Indigenous life could certainly exist on a perpetually icy planet (there are new theories that ice may actually have been the 'cradle' for the first complex organics on Earth), but you probably wouldn't get macrofauna (large animals), except perhaps in the oceans. It's hard to write gripping fiction when the most menacing thing your characters meet is lichen.

A danger with icy worlds is that they're at risk of a runaway snowball effect, which is something like the opposite of a runaway greenhouse effect: as the planet cools, water precipitates out of the atmosphere as ice and snow, which is highly reflective (high albedo). Incoming solar radiation is re-radiated to space, the planet cools further and more of the planet's surface and atmospheric water (and ultimately, gases) freeze out, until the planet basically 'whites over' and loses most of its resale value on the galactic real estate market.

That's assuming that the planet has a lot of water to start with. If you had a dry planet whose surface is mostly darkish rock, plus a dense atmosphere, it might stabilize at some intermediate point, because the amount of water available for icecap formation is limited. Most of the interesting biological action would probably take place at the margins between the desert and the permanent icecaps.

At first I was afraid we were writing the same story, but then I remembered that my people were fleeing their Ice Age planet for earth. Whew!

I like the idea of having only a small amount of landmass, or a small amount of habitable landmass, close to the poles. Not sure how this will affect your story, but there could be other dominant species or hostile species on the planet that are pushing your characters to the poles, or a major catastrophe that has the same effect.

I also kind of like the cheekiness of doing some Stan Lee-style hand-waving and saying, "It's an ice planet because it's an ice planet. Yes, there are people. No, I don't know how they've managed to survive on it long enough to evolve a culture." Though that, of course, would be fantasy and not science fiction.