Up to now, in the Master Blasters series, I have concentrated on the physical threats to a planet. Megavolcanoes, solar flares, and such. Biological threats have come under the heading of “We don’t worry about catching Dutch Elm disease, and we evolved on the same world as elm trees.”
The theme of the series is ‘blowing shit up with nukes to save worlds.’ Blowing up a germ or a virus with a nuke is a little excessive. Or … is it?
Elsewhere in this blog I have mentioned Stephen Gillette’s book, “World-Building”. For the record, I have no connection to him or the book except as a satisfied reader.
In it, he mentioned a class of world he called Clorox worlds. What would create such a world is the evolution or introduction of a plankton-like organism with a very different take on photosynthesis on an otherwise Earth-like world with an oxygen – nitrogen atmosphere and oceans of salt water.
This organism would use the energy of food, generated of course by photosynthesis, to take the chloride ion (Cl-) in sea water and convert it to free chlorine gas. The effects on other competing organisms would certainly be devastating. The processes by which the life form might do so would no doubt be very different from the norm of our world.
The atmosphere would wind up with about 1% chlorine in addition to the oxygen and nitrogen, with other compounds such as phosgene in the mix. For the historically minded, both of those gases were used as weapons of war in WWI.
Chlorine dissolves in water to produce hydrochloric acid and sodium hypochlorite, the active ingredient of bleach. The oceans would be corrosive sinks of acid and bleach. Any life which actually survived would have to evolve defences against such conditions.
A similar event actually happened early in Earth’s history, in the era known as the Paleoproterozoic. A new type of life evolved which used the energy of sunlight to release a savagely corrosive gas, lethal to all other forms of life. Previous forms of life were wiped out almost completely, with the few survivors driven into isolated niches.
Here on Earth, the gas was oxygen. Ultimately, the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE, for short) gave rise to the biosphere of which we are a part and which we are strongly disposed to consider the norm for advanced life. The evolution of that organism was chance. Just how improbable a chance it was is not knowable, at least not until we know a great deal about life on other worlds of our Galaxy.
Would advanced life have arisen without the GOE? The answer to that question can only be found out among the stars. My own suspicion is that the answer is no, but I have no hard evidence to back up my opinion, nor even knowledge in the field.
Dr. Gillette is of the opinion that advanced life could still evolve on such a clorox world, though the materials making it up would be very different (PVC bones!). From a storytelling standpoint, that’s good. Microbes are boring.
In his book, which was written in the 90’s, he says that such worlds have had no attention in science fiction. I certainly haven’t seen anything. Well, I’m paying attention.
Literarily, he saves the best for last. If such a plankton organism was introduced into the salty oceans of a planet with a biosphere and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, it wouldn’t really be affected by the local biosphere. The ‘Dutch Elm Disease’ argument wouldn’t apply. It would go about its business, absorbing sunlight, releasing chlorine and reproducing itself, and there wouldn’t be any local predators to keep it in check.
It would spread out from the point of contamination, producing chlorine, wiping out the local life, and leaving lifeless devastation in its wake. How fast it would spread would depend on the rate of reproduction. Going by the rate at which a plankton bloom can spread in Earth’s oceans, it would be pretty fast.
A cloud of chlorine spreading across the face of a living world in an unstoppable tide. That’s a planetary disaster, all right.
What would you do about it if you were a race faced with such a disaster? Well, in the Portal Authority universe, you would post a Request For Proposal on the PortalNet, and cross your equivalent of fingers that an Entity accustomed to working against a clock on a planetary disaster could come up with a fast and dirty solution, in time to save your world.
Of course, there would be problems …
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