Gas Giant Life

[LaserRifleofDoom]

I'm wondering how life on gas giants could even develop technology.

It's fairly common to have advanced lifeforms hiding within all the gas giants in the universe. Or at least to have life forms of some kind that are worth the human heroes bothering to deal with. There are gas-whale/squids who reside near the surface and float around giving sage advice. And there are gas-sharks which fly through all the layers and have fancy gas-filled spaceships with which they hunt people. I have no problem with these (if they were given the tech by someone else).

The problem with this is that there is no logical reason for life in gas giants (as it is represented in these sorts of stories) to have developed technology at all. The life forms always seem to reside in the low pressure upper layers. But this makes no sense, since there would be nothing there but gasses. Anything heavier (metals, organic cells) would sink to the high pressure zones. And going deep into those zones is not cool for your average human spaceship.

Now, technological life could exist, but it seems that it would need pressure suits/ blimps to get into the upper atmosphere of its gas giant of choice. (Though I have doubts about the feasibility of life at the sorts of pressures where they would have access to metals.)

This is relevant to me writing some SciFi short stories regarding life on Saturn ('cuz it has awesome rings to fight in).

Do we have any explanations for me?

[Zor]

While i could see life arising in gas giants, How would such a civilization be able establish a civilization beyond mere herding while being unable to building sturtures, without mineral resources to mine, let alone have need for dexterous manipulator apendages.

Zor

[LaserRifleofDoom]

While i could see life arising in gas giants, How would such a civilization be able establish a civilization beyond mere herding while being unable to building sturtures, without mineral resources to mine, let alone have need for dexterous manipulator apendages.

Zor

That's kinda my point. I want you to explain how the Saturnians could start sending radio messages to Earth one day in the near future.

I can't figure out an explaiation.

[Shroom Man 777]

They could be, like, giant semi-gaseous cloud-like electric eels and when it's mating season for them, they gather in such concentrations that as they do their merging and splitting and diffusions and shit, the emissions they make can be detected from quite far away.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

The idea is ridiculous. It is incredibly difficult for life to form there, unless it is made of some polymer that can withstand the superhurricane winds, immerse pressures etc. Let alone the fact that all the heavy elements sink right to the core. If civilization ever takes root there, it's because our technology itself isn't advanced enough to fathom it.

[Zor]

While i could see life arising in gas giants, How would such a civilization be able establish a civilization beyond mere herding while being unable to building sturtures, without mineral resources to mine, let alone have need for dexterous manipulator apendages.

Zor

That's kinda my point. I want you to explain how the Saturnians could start sending radio messages to Earth one day in the near future.

I can't figure out an explaiation.

It would be best just to abandon the idea all-together as any life that lives there would have no need to evolve into creatures capable of establishing a civilization and even if they could, it would be practically impossible for them to develop any civilization. Even water would be a better place to put it than fire. If you apsolutly must have baloon sapients in Saturn, make them uplifts/purpose engineered critters created by an extraterrestrial sapient species for some reason which built for them artificial baloon cities in saturn's atmosphere. I can not see any other way around it beyond foreign intervention.

Zor

[Junghalli]

Go the biotech route.

I know it's a horribly overused and usually stupid cliche, but it actually has some merit here. We're talking an environment where there's no fire, no solid inert matter, the only abundant solid stuff is floating and flying lifeforms. Those are the only things around that would really be useful as tools.

The species could start out domesticating some other lifeforms and selectively breeding them for docility and certain tasks, as we do cattle or sheep dogs. Over time they might breed creatures for more and more specific tasks, creating a great variety of specialized living tools. Their tech would be ridiculously clumsy and inefficient compared to ours, and advance incredibly slowly until they discovered genetic engineering, but it's not impossible that a sophisticated technological civilization could be achieved eventually.

I really can't think of any other tech base that would be viable in that environment.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Don't you need advanced mechanical science for genetic engineering, things like microscpes and incredibly small needles to insert the DNA into the vectors?

The best way I can see for a gas giant life form to develope manipulators is if it spends a lot of time clinging onto other, bigger life forms.

[Lord of the Abyss]

For Junghalli's floating, biotech gas giant civilization, I think you'd have to postulate some sort of built in version of genetic engineering. The natural ability to modify their DNA-equivalent in a directed fashion. Either they got really, really lucky in the area of evolution, or they are artificial and the ability was granted them.

[Dartzap]

There is an Ian Banks novel called The Algebraist in which the main background species are gas world inhabitants called The Dwellers, who are rather, uh..eccentric when it came to technology.

[NoXion]

Is it explained how the Dwellers in The Algebraist got their technology? It's been a long time since I read that book.

[LaserRifleofDoom]

No. I was actually thinking of them when I wrote the OP. They're supposedly the most ancient of all species, and have had advanced technology almost as long as the universe has been around. Which is a cop out.

[speaker-to-trolls]

It's said in The Algerbraist that it was very difficult for the Dwellers to acquire high technology and that the only way they could get heavy metals is from asteroids falling into their planets atmosphere. It's never explained what the difficult method of getting this technology was or how they managed to get the metals from the asteroids.

[Sarevok]

Dophins are pretty smart even though they cant build any tools. The Slyrando in Star Control 2 game were inspired by this situation. These sentient slyrando abandoned tool building when curious individuals got dragged down by tools they fashioned out of carcasses. Unable to advance technologicaly they spent many years debating and argueing about pointless things untill a star faring race sold them space probes with which they can finaly explore other worlds.

[Teleros]

New Scientist had an article on alien life recently, thought I'd quote the bit on gas giants for you...

Cloud living
In his 1980 book Cosmos, astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that Jupiter's atmosphere might harbour gas-inflated organisms that float like dirigibles among the clouds. Might life based on bubbles of gas - instead of water - be possible?

Metabolism depends on enzymes converting one molecule into another; this is how food is digested to extract energy. In Earth life, one of water's most important roles is to provide a medium for transporting all sorts of organic molecules such as sugars and amino acids within the cell.

These molecules can diffuse and drift freely in water, allowing enzymes to grab them and perform their biochemical reactions, such as breaking down a sugar molecule to release energy. But in bubble-aliens, gas might serve that purpose. Simple molecules such as ammonia, formaldehyde, or propane might drift about inside the bubble, and enzymes attached to the bubble's inner surface might metabolise and extract energy from them.

"We know that enzymes can catalyse reactions in the vapour phase," says Douglas Clark, a biochemical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. For example, some freeze-dried, powdered enzymes can still function when they are exposed to substrate molecules in gaseous form.

Roy Daniel of the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, found that an enzyme called liver esterase can still convert gaseous ethyl butyrate into ethanol even after the enzyme is dried so that less than 1 per cent of its mass remains as water. The enzyme functions at only about 1 per cent of its normal rate, but remember this is a pig enzyme, adapted to cushy life in liquid water.

In a world where water exists only as vapour, a few water molecules might condense onto the surface of an enzyme, lubricating it and making it more efficient. It's entirely plausible, says Clark, that enzymes in such a world could evolve specific sticky sites on their surface for capturing water molecules out of the vapour - allowing them to operate much more efficiently than that pig enzyme.

Gas life still presents problems. Although the water inside cells can transport hundreds of different organic molecules such as sugars, fatty acids, and RNA molecules, the gas inside a bubble organism could only transport the very smallest organic molecules, such as ethanol, formaldehyde and propane. Gas life would need a simple metabolism that did not depend much on large molecules.

[Patrick Degan]

I was thinking of the example from Cosmos of gas-giant lifeforms. Dr. Sagan was relating from a study done by a university astrophysics department speculating on what sort of lifeforms might thrive in a Jovian environment and they suggested three types: Sinkers, Floaters, and Hunters. The Sinkers would be simple organisms taking in nutrents from the atmosphere but doomed to eventually fall deeper into the atmosphere until the pressure in the lower layers crushed them. Then there would be the Floaters —the living gas balloons who would drift with the winds and feed on the Sinkers as well as the same atmospheric chemicals as the Sinkers. Finally, there would be the Hunters —the "advanced" creature on this world which would actually have manta-like wings and able to fly (or glide) at will to seek out their prey, the Floaters.

Keep in mind that it's been years since I've seen the series, and my copy of Sagan's book was lost in the New Orleans flood, so I'm speaking from imperfect recall. But that's the gist of what I remember after all these years. It was a quite fascinating segment of the episode.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Here's an idea - they evolved on a solid surface known as other creatures. Imagine giant fleas floating on the backs on mammoth, multi-kilometer-sized gas-whales, eventually gaining sentience. Each community on a whale would be like its own city. Eventually these parasites begin husbanding the whales, and over the course of millions of years they develop biotech, while becoming smarter and smarter (with plenty of nourishment in the air and blood of the whales, their evolution becomes more and more directed towards intellect and cunning). Think of it like a merger of Junghalli and Speaker-To-Troll's ideas. I think it just might work.

[Junghalli]

Don't you need advanced mechanical science for genetic engineering, things like microscpes and incredibly small needles to insert the DNA into the vectors?

With a lot of work you might eventually be able to take a shelled creature and breed it to have more and more transparent shells until you have a critter with what amounts to a piece of glass on its back. You would probably start out using them as mirrors (they'd be handy for semaphore communication), and eventually you might be able to adapt them as telescopes or microscopes by breeding them for certain qualities of the "glass". Most other major difficulties could probably have similar Goldberg-esque solutions. It'd take an incredibly long time, but the solar system's 4.5 billion years old, these guys could easily have had a much longer time to do it than humans.

You actually could do quite a lot with biotech I imagine, it's just that in most environments there are vastly easier and better alternatives.

I like the idea of having the creatures be parasites on city-sized floaters too.

[Zixinus]

This blog has some entries on the topic you are looking for.

http://worldsofpossibility.blogspot.com/

Sadly, it is very unlikely that a star-faring civilization can come out of a gas giant. There are two main barriers: gravity of a typical gas giant and pressure. A gas giant has hundreds of atmospheres of pressure. Getting out of them will kill any creature.

[NoXion]

[Emphasis mine]

There are two main barriers: gravity of a typical gas giant and pressure. A gas giant has hundreds of atmospheres of pressure. Getting out of them will kill any creature.

Getting out the atmosphere is harmful for humans too, but that didn't stop us, so I don't really see your point

[Teleros]

Well we used machines to protect us. Still, if a species of gas giant dweller can naturally evolve a thick enough skin to protect it from the radiation and lack of pressure in space, it might be able to leave the atmosphere for short periods of time - although manoeuvring and food supplies etc will be a problem.

[Zixinus]

Getting out the atmosphere is harmful for humans too, but that didn't stop us, so I don't really see your point Confused

The critism is justified.

Making one atmo pressure in a vacuum environment is difficult enough. Making hundred plus atmo pressure is a daunting, if not impossible task. Add the fact that making strong enough materials that can withstand the pressure without access to heavy metals and we are looking at a ridiculously impossible engineering "problem".

Then again, this is sci-fi we are talking about.