User blog:Cerne/Truth and Reconciliation

And now for a proper update. I forgot to mention in my last entry why I have not been to the Conworld Wikia site or done anything to my profile in such a long time. Namely, it is opportunity. We had a relatively mild autumn last year but I had to prepare for the upcoming winter. I do not heat my house with a gas furnace; our providor is a company called Hydro 1, and before my folks moved closer to town a few years back, they cancelled their service with the company in favour of using a couple of wood stoves to heat the whole house. They had actually been doing this for years while I was away in Nanaimo, B.C., attending university, but the real work started two years or so after I came back to Ontario. Since then, winter has been a very busy time. First I would need to acquire the wood from somewhere, then chop it up, then stack it, then - when I needed to use it - bring a few armloads inside. And when I finally got both wood stoves going, I would have little free time between refueling them. So I couldn't expend a lot of time doing other things without frequent interruptions. We also had a cols, wet, late spring this year so I continued to use the wood stoves well into April. That is why it took me so long to return to my contributions on this site. No need to take anything personally; I didn't get bored of using the Conworld Wikia and decide to stop using it, I just needed more free time. We have been going a few weeks in now with some decent weather (albeit rainy much of the time) so now that I am finished with the wood stoves until the upcoming winter, I will have much more free time to work on my conworld stuff.

Like I typed in my last entry, I do need to start learning to type shorter entries whenever I can in an attempt to post them more frequently. Or, as might not be the case with this entry, I need to remember not to prolong and compile the entry the way I did in my last entry. Compounding is fine, as long as I know where my limit is and I can reach it. In another blog that I have on a non-conworld-related site, I came to the conclusion that I might be more productive if I typed the entry into the text box rather than into a seperate word document. That way, I have a better idea how much I have typed and I can exact a more reachable time limit. Before I post the entry, I cut and paste the text into a seperate word document to save if something goes wrong, but for the most part, I only post what I can type at that moment instead of saving, then typing a bit more. Blog entries weren't really meant for that anyway, and if I forget something, I can always put it into the next entry. This might happen rather frequently, though, as unless I jot down my ideas as I come up with them, I often do forget them while I type the entry. Oh well. We live and we learn.

Now, onto the topic of this entry.

I noticed that I have come up with almost a dozen blog entries and have edited my profile page a bunch of times by now, and still no conworld articles. I hope to fix that soon, but the main thing that is holding me back is acquiring all of the necessary data to describe my conworld's physical and orbital characteristics. There are two problems with this: first I need to find out how to determine a certain characteristic, like rotation velocity, then I need to do the necessary calculations for it. On the Zompist Bulletin Board (there is a link on my profile page somewhere) you will see board members coming up with a complete collection of statistics on everything they need just like that. Statistics on star mass and luminoscity, and even stats on the moons of their planet. It took me a while but I feel I can say confidentally enough that I can't do that. Maybe I could, given the time, but not as quickly as those people can. Most of them are mathematical experts anyway, so if they tell me it is easy, then I'll just tell myself otherwise. Which is not always easy, because assuming anyone can do what you can do is a lot better than assuming you are the only person who can do it, but there comes a time when you just need to tell yourself that you shouldn't expect yourself to be as proficient as some other people are. That is not to say that you are unable to do it at all - far from it - but it does mean that you shouldn't expect yourself to rise to other peoples' standards; nor does it mean you should see those standards as a measure of self-worth. Standards are all relative, anyway, so why I am expecting myself to be a physics or mathematical expert is beyond me.

So what does this mean for me right now? Well, I am still working on the statistics for my conworld but I am starting to realize that there is nothing wrong with omitting some characteristics or making them much more generic. For my main conworld, I have come to two conclusions: 1) rotational velocity is probably determined and/or affected by more than just density or mass; and 2) axial tilt can be more-or-less whatever you want them to be (I think both of these can be, actually).

On a thread I once posted on the ZBB, I hypothesized that rotational velocity, axial tilt (or obliquity) and polar flattening are all inter-connected. Moreso, if I can determine the rotational velocity of my planet, then I could probably use that in some way to determine the degrees of tilt and flattening my planet will have. I use the spinning top analogy: a top that has just been spun will go faster and will stay relatively straight perpendicular to the surface it spins on. Meaning, if my planet spins faster than Earth does, then it will also be less tilted. As a fun fact, while some sources state that the planet Venus only has an obliquity of 3 degrees and spins retrograde, it actually has an obliquity of over 170 degrees (look it up on Wikipedia). This implies that it is actually upside down. Hence it would make sense to say that the planet is spinning so slowly that it has tipped over backwards. So pole-wise, it is not spinning in the opposite direction at all. It it just spinning "on its head" so to speak. And this makes sense because a Venerian year only has one complete solar day. All this really says is that whatever I decide to have for my planet's rotational velocity and axial tilt, if the former is more than that of Earth, then the latter should be less.

Incidently, I believe I may have decided on a better way to determine - at least initially, since other factors like moons will have an effect later - how long my planet's day will be. In his second book What If The Earth Had Two Moons?, author and astronomy professor Neil F. Comins writes that the length of rotation in the core of gas giants like Neptune is typically 17 hours long. Given that the rotation of gas giants does not seem to be affected very much by its satellites - most if not all of their core is composed of liquid gases like Hydrogen and Helium - I would feel safe enough to call this a default for planetary cores made of gases. Neil also writes that very shortly after our moon was formed, Earth had a 5-6 hour long solar period. Given that Earth is a rocky planet, it would also be reasonable to assume that a higher density of material in the core would lead to faster rotation (liquid Iron vs. liquid Hydrogen). Therefore, I would assume that if you were to acquire the relative density of hydrogen to water - water being set at 1 - and then divided the relative density of the element most commonly found in your planet's core by Hydrogen's relative density, you could then use that as a relative approximate of how much faster your planet will spin. Or something like that.

Maybe I am complety wrong here; I know that for some inexplicable reason some people get overwhelmingly angry when they see someone else type something they don't agree with or think is true (which may in part be the reason behind a lot of anti-religious sentiments today). What I am typing about is not an erroneous fact. It is a hypothetical means to determine something I am yet unable to find the information for.

On that note, I feel I should say that both axial tilt and polar flattening will be rough approximates in relation to Earth. My planet's axial tilt will probably be much less than that of Earth. Likewise, via the spinning top analogy, there will probably be faster rotation that will in turn determine the degree of obliquity to some extent. The two moons orbiting my planet will probably add more friction between land tides and the planet's core, consequently leading to more "drag" and hence more "lag" in rotational velocity, and the length of a solar day on my planet will eventually get closer in duration to a day on Earth. In conclusion, if I don't have rotational velocity and axial tilt down by now, I will probably just make them up (in relation to Earth, of course). There is still the length of the solar and sidereal day and the degree of polar flattening to come up with but I have already typed entries about those so I can just look at them again.

Upon thinking about all of this and how much it seems to have delayed displaying the rest of my conworld, I have started to reconsider exactly how important all of it really is. I am already having enough trouble trying to come up with the stats for my main conworld; in addition I have a whole con-galaxy to come up with, which will require stats for all of the other worlds too. I have decided to omit many of the more extensive statistics and use numbers that are in relation to Earth's own statistics for the rest of them. And when I can't do that, I can just use more generic answers that have at least some level of determinacy and let other people figure out the rest for themselves. Or I can figure them out on my own when they come to me later.

In retrospect, the whole reason why I made this conworld was to have fun with all of the things I was interested in and wanted to speculate about. If I can't do that, then there is no reason for any of this additional stuff that I don't want to do, either. So it is a curious irony that any conworld you make up will only be truly complete if you truly want it to be; if it isn't - and most conworlds aren't - then this will be solely because you didn't want it to be. Keeping in mind that "completeness" is another relative term, every conworld is essentially complete straight from the beginning and can only become more complete as iyou work on it. I suppose it could become incomplete if you then took something away from it, but that is the only instance I can think of where a conworld could be complete. And assuming you intended to replace what you took out with something else, it wouldn't really matter anyway.

Looking at the length of this entry, I think I will end it while I am still able to. Hopefully I have covered everything I wanted to cover. Thanks for reading.