Alterations to Existing Posts (Last 30 July 24)
This is a page to keep track of major changes to posts that have already been, well, posted. I intend for Worldbuilding Pasta to act more as an encyclopedia than a journal, and as such I'll update old posts when I learn of new relevant information, or if I just want to spruce up their formatting. I won't bother tracking typo fixes or site map updates, and I won't note new posts here, but if I make any substantial changes to the content or layout of old posts then I'll add a dated note here. That way, once you've read a post you can just check here every now and then to see if there have been any changes you should know about.
30 July 2024
Big update on Part Va. Didn't think I'd change much with this one but got a bit carried away.
- The "Patterns of Plate Motion" section has been essentially entirely rewritten, trying to more clearly place each example within the context of the overall supercontinent cycle rather than just relying on the reader to piece everything together themselves.
- Dozens of new diagrams added for clarity and consistency between examples.
- Special cases like flat-slab subduction and slab rollback parceled out into their own sections
- Funky subduction behavior like subduction jumping and polarity reversal also get new sections
- And added some new things I've encountered over the years like continental megashear
- The rest of the post is largely the same save for a couple tweaks for updated sources, better wording, and consistency with the changes in patterns of plate motion
22 May 2024
Big update on Part IVc. Not quite as comprehensive a rewrite as some previous updates, but still some substantial changes and additions.
- General reordering of sections to neater categories, now more clearly breaking down the post into an orbit-focused section and a planet-focused section.
- Various minor tweaks based on new research (e.g. it’s no longer clear if Earth will reach a moist or runaway greenhouse at the inner HZ limit).
- Excised the somewhat odd opening about biases and replaced it with a more straightforward discussion of real habitability vs worldbuilding
- Added some extra figures for different habitable zone boundaries.
- Added a section of “contracting the habitable zone”, which provides a space to discuss various possible issues towards the edges of the habitable zone such as the onset of limit cycling or issues with initial atmospheric cooling after planet formation.
- Trimmed down a lot of minor details and asides that get repeated in later sections.
- Parceled out all the math on habitable zones into its own section, with a good sampling of different boundaries standardized in the form commonly used in current literature, and made a few little charts for them.
- Rewrote most of the composition section based on several new sources and a better reading of my old sources.
- Moved the bit on estimating internal heat flow to an appendix, I’m not super happy with the bit on primordial heat specifically in retrospect.
8 May 2024
Added some new info to the ExoPlaSim tutorial, including a potential fix to the exoplasim.pyfft issue and a more straightforward approach to installing ExoPlaSim on Ubuntu via WSL2.
6 February 2024
Added a section to Part VIIc covering some...variably functional extra features I've added to the wilbur erosion script.
8 June 2023
Added formula for gravity at the poles of a rapidly rotating planet to Part IVb.
10 May 2023
Big update to Part IVb. This is perhaps the most substantial of these I'll do, bringing the surfaces list much more in line with my original vision for it.
- Added more detailed breakdown of resources for determining mass-radius relationships, with sections for solid planets, waterworlds, and gas giants.
- Added dedicated section on estimating surface temperature (not that there are many good ways to do that).
- Added a number of new possible surface types, including (but not limited to):
- Feldspar-dominated or ultramafic rocky crusts.
- Sodium-metal, iron oxide, or metal sulfide veneers over rocky crusts.
- Long-lived icy bodies in the inner system.
- Silicate veneers over carbide interiors or graphite veneers over silicate interiors.
- Obsidian glass from a rapidly cooling lava ocean.
- Ultra-dense strange matter or strangelet crystal planets, potentially with normal matter crusts.
- Carbon monoxide atmospheres.
- Deep water atmospheres with supercritical, ionic, and superionic phases.
- Potential Na-, SO2-, or HCl-rich warm atmospheres.
- >1000 km deep oceans of hot waterworlds
- Seas of sulfur compounds, ammonia, HCN, methanol, nitrogen, and halogens.
- Found newer paper suggesting formation of large near-pure iron planets by impact is indeed feasible.
- Reworked the introductory section on atmospheres to more clearly lay out the major sources and sinks of gasses and found a nifty chart of the most likely types of common atmospheres.
- Switched over all atmospheric pressure units to bar because I can’t be bothered converting to atm anymore.
- Reworked a lot of the section on hydrogen atmosphere colors.
- Added a couple new possible origins for abiotic oxygen.
- Added a bit more discussion here and there of what runaway greenhousing looks like.
- Added a big chart of phase changes for most of the discussed materials.
- Found some sources on the likely survival time of lava oceans after formation or large impacts.
- Put in a link to Luke’s cool alien skies chart.
- Decided Teacup Ai should get some nice nitrogen lakes.
- Added a nice solar system chart I got out of Stellar System Creator.
10 April 2023
Added a note in
Part VIIa
on the appearance of hotspots on land with an example image.
16 November 2022
Added a note in Part IVa regarding how relationships between a planet's orbital period and Hill radius implies a fixed maximum ratio for the orbital period of its moons and the planet's orbital period (0.198 for prograde-orbiting moons and 0.519 for retrograde-orbiting moons).
Also, moved useful resources from the sidebar into
their own page.
30 October 2022
Added some clarification in Part IVa about why tidal-locked planets have effectively no tides, and some musings on what this implies about the maximum achievable tidal height for a mature planet (around 3-8 meters depending on the specific restrictions).
23 October 2022
Updated wording in Part IVa to reflect that recent studies tend to predict fast, prograde rotation for planets, but late impacts can still result in basically any outcome.
21 April 2022
Added an explanation to
Part IVa
for why all planetary rings are likely to have very low inclination.
30 March 2022
Big update to Part IVa. Essentially the entire post (save for the last couple sections) has been retouched to some extent, with a focus on providing more specific numbers and examples:
- The formation section has been reworked from a meandering story about the history of planet formation theory to a more clear summary of current models, including more information on variations in the planet formation process for low-mass stars and more emphasis on the role of icelines and rings.
- Broadened the discussion on post-formation instability to talk more evenly about different models rather than treating the Nice model as the default.
- Parceled out a subsection specifically on the common sorts of system architectures we're likely to see and roughly how common different planet types should be.
- The orbits section has also been rearranged:
- Reworded a lot of the discussion of the mean-motion resonances to try and make their mechanisms a bit more intuitive.
- Parceled out discussion of co-orbital planets into its own section with subsections for each type; lots more discussion of their specific limits, and addition of trojan orbits with more than 3 bodies (which I'd incorrectly thought weren't possible before), retrograde eccentric resonances, and inclined resonances.
- Added new subsections for tides and synchronous rotation. Makes some of the discussion in Part VId a bit redundant, but I can fix that later, and maybe it's good to have a refresher anyway.
- Replaced "time to tidal locking" formula with a more up-to-date and flexible alternative.
- Parceled out different models for moon formation into their own subsections, with a bit more information on the limits of each type and addition of pull-down capture.
- Added some more information on likely limits to moon stability for close-orbiting planets.
- Parceled out rings into their own subsections, with more description of how they might appear in detail.
- Added numerous diagrams (and some videos), too many to list out.
5 March 2022
Started adding reference lists to the ends of posts to mitigate link rot, starting with Part I28 February 2022
26 February 2022
- A new ExoPlaSim script configuration and creation tool.
- A couple new features in my koppenpasta.py script, including:
- Loading all .nc files from a directory
- "Binning" months together to treat an input file as if it had fewer months.
- Adjust interpolated temperature by topography to better depict temperature variations caused by small mountains and valleys.
18 December 2021
- Added some nice animations of 2 bodies of different masses orbiting their barycenter.
- Added a new section regarding orbital motion of 3 or more bodies, including brief discussion of hierarchal orbital systems, Hill spheres, and Lagrange points.
-
Learned that it's at least marginally plausible for a figure-8
trinary star system to form naturally, so that's cool.
8 September 2021
- Parceled out all the math into its own section, with several alternate methods for estimating the properties of stars of increasing accuracy and complexity.
- Softened a lot of the language regarding the minimum timeframe for the development of complex life, such that ~4 billion years is framed not as a hard minimum, just a convenient benchmark.
- Reworded some of the discussion of red dwarf habitability so the bits about XUV radiation and oxygen are a bit clearer and incorporate a couple new sources.
- Greatly expanded the discussion of black hole planets, with a somewhat better conclusion for the habitability of those orbiting supermassive black holes.
- Added some discussion of Milankovich cycles for S-Type planets.
- Added a couple cool images of a black hole and the 6-star Castor system.
21 August 2021
- Expanded my conclusions on the earliest plausible appearance of life with the help of a couple new sources.
- Noted some possible benefits of AGN for galactic habitability.
- Added some more detail to discussion of habitability in the galactic central bulge.
- Added a couple more sources supporting habitability of globular clusters, and found a cool render of how the night sky near one might appear.
- Noted possibility that capture of dark matter may heat the interior of rogue planets in the distant future.
23 July 2021
19 July 2021
25 May 2021
24 Dec. 2020
Page created. Merry Christmas
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