roughentumble | (no subject)

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just saw that NASA said on their website that even if the sun became a black hole, it would have the same gravitational pull as before and the existing planets would orbit around it instead of being sucked into it, and now i cant stop thinking about a star system where instead of a star all the planets are orbiting a black hole. that sounds tight as fuck that should be a setting for a sci fi story

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From:

ysabetwordsmith

That is a cool idea for a setting. There would be no light from the center of the system. Gravity drives volcanic activity in some cases, so geothermal would be an energy source. Chemical is also still an option. You'd wind up with a totally different ecosystem.

From:

roughentumble

Right?? It'd be so COOL, the only light to see by would be distant stars and what you get from volcanic activity, most things would probably be blind because what's the use in seeing, and extremely cold resistant because you don't have a sun to heat up the planet. Maybe if it was like Io it could be heated up by its own volcanic activity? But I don't know how anything could survive long enough to evolve when the volcanic activity is everywhere and constant...

You could maybe change some of that by making it a sort of binary star system, but instead of two stars it's a star and a black hole, which would also be a really fun setting, but it's maybe more interesting to try and imagine what could evolve in a place so hostile to the kind of life we know and understand on Earth. No light, no heat, they'd be sort've like cave dwellers except that they exist above-ground. Unless it was actually hotter UNDERGROUND because of volcanic activity, and so they all lived in caves near volcanos in order to stay warm enough to thrive? IDK, lots of potentials I haven't given full thought yet.

You could also make it a fun "people surviving in hostile places" thing, where humans have expanded to this system where by all accounts humans shouldn't be able to live, but they have portable fake "suns" and special equipment to fight the cold and they've built structures to carve out a home in this desolate place that's actually very beautiful when you look up at the sky.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

And here is where I went with this:

A discussion with

roughentumble inspired the free-verse poem "A Darkness in the Sky." A solar system has a black hole instead of a sun at its center.

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