Shower thought: To a creature from Titan, are we lava monsters?

12 comments

We sure are. We're walking around, being 70% superheated ice. We can melt normal solids like oxygen and carbon dioxide to vapour just by huffing on them. In fact, we breathe oxygen and carbon dioxide!

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- I'm pretty sure oxygen would be a gas there.
  
  It wouldn't last for long, as it's that incredibly reactive gas that corrodes everything, but it's a gas.
  
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I had a similar thought for an OC the other day. I like scifi so a lot of my writing is set in space, and I thought it would be funny to have a character from a world that doesn't have rain getting freaked out when she sees rain on another planet for the first time.

"How can you all be so calm? There is water falling from the sky! That isn't natural!"

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- There's a scene in The Wheel of Time books where characters that lived all their lives in a desert region and were raised in a culture that treasures water more than anything venture out of that desert and see rains, rivers and lakes for the first time. The first reaction is basically "wait, all this water... is just free to take?"
  
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  That sounds exactly like a scene in Dune, ha
  
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- Dune
  
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- just for a point of comparison, Titan's atmopshere does have 'rain'... it's methane, mind, but it does have 'rain'.
  
  Most likely, without some for of extensive environmental suits (or possibly entire environmental climate chambers built onto semi-mobile vehicles,)(I'm imagining the space chamber used by third stage guild navigators in Dune.) such won't be able to survive anyway. So they'd probably look at the rain and go "oh, that's interesting to look at." while sipping whatever passes for coffee.
  
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I suppose it depends which creature from Titan you ask. Everyone knows that some creatures from Titan are racist, but that doesn't mean it's fair to generalize about all of them like that.

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In Project Hail Mary there is an alien species that from our point of view are basically living rocks, living in a far hotter atmosphere with many times the pressure of earth.

But from their point of view, humans are leaky sacks of flesh that live in fridge near-vacuum

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Look up the book Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter. The first short story titled The Sun-People is exactly this scenario. It happens on a large asteroid in our solar system. Needless to say, that the creatures can't survive in our presence.

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If you want a book about hot aliens thinking Earth is frigid, try "Iceworld" by Hal Clement.

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