World Building Questions

[Lord Anubis]

For a potential story that I might one day get around to actually working on. I've been reading up on Jovian Moons lately and I've tried to do some research on orbits, timing, and various other minutiae and was unable to find any true answers. Would a Jovian moon be able to sustain a standard or near standard 24 hour day night cycle like we have on Earth, or would the orbit need to be several atypical to avoid the shadow cast by the constant presence of the Jovian blocking off the sunlight as it took dominance between the system primary and the moon.

Super continents, at one point all the landmasses on the planet were combined for the most part. What would this do for the oceans, would the hurricanes and other ocean storms be affected/altered in some manner without the presence of continent sized landmasses to alter the weather patterns. Also, which would be better, a super continent as the starting point or the end point. For clarification would it be better to have the moon old enough for the continents to have shifted and come back together, and if so would they continue to crunch themselves together or would they split back apart again?

Terraforming. It'd probably be a multi century to millennia long project to fully terraform a planet/moon sufficiently to have it be self sustaining but the ideas that I've had to help it are ones that I wanted to test. Assuming sufficiently advanced cloning, bio tech, if the soil had some of the necessary nutrients already you could possibly seed valleys, canyons, and river banks with stuff like grass, moss, pine trees, anything that didn't require pollination to spread. Valleys and canyons would give protection from the elements and force the flora to compete for nutrients and give it time to spread. Rivers and lakes providing sources of water and allowing the seeds to spread. Even if only a fraction of a percentage actually survived it would eventually flourish outward and like a growing forest it would fill in the gaps. Various terraforming stations could provide a physical base to release cloned animals in large quantities to create a viable animal population.

A protected bay, beach, cove or whatever could be a place to create coral, algae and other aquatic material. Again only a percentage needs to thrive, eventually all the projects would hit a threshold and become self sustaining.

If anyone could think of other ideas, or answers to some of the thoughts I raised here I would greatly appreciate any input.

[Adam Reynolds]

In terms of the day night cycle you have to deal with the fact that most moons, and all of those large enough to even have gravity, are tidally locked to the planet. This leaves them with much more irregular day night cycles based on their orbits. I don't know exactly how this plays out for each case, but it is virtually impossible to have anything resembling an Earth day-night cycle given this fact.

Growing plants without artificial lighting or extreme genetic engineering is entirely out of the equation even on Luna, and that is not accounting for the fact that Jupiter only gets 4% the solar radiation of Earth, which is why Juno is the first probe there to use solar and it has truly massive panels and relies on a chemical rocket as opposed to an ion engine because of this. With such low solar output, I would not count on being able to grow plants of any sort in any kind of natural environment.

A major problem with terraforming in general, even on the far better candidate of Mars, is that by the time we can do that, it would be far easier for humans to be the ones to adapt through genetic engineering and other enhancements. With such low gravity(the Galilean moons all roughly the same level as Luna), humans would be unlikely to be able to live normally anyway.