Leo1 thinks the dense core is a "ridiculous postulate" yet hardly provides any alternative.
Is it more ridiculous than, say, never spotting the problem with the scales or knowing about them but just choosing to ignore them and then focus on the big explosions, like most people of SBC do?
We still get WR
trying to bait Mith on a firepower debate. It's like, what? five times in a row in this thread?
And obviously Heliostorm also
fails to provide a smart alternative to the dense core hypothesis.
Rama's post was more constructive, although he also failed to provide an alternative.
Ramapedia wrote:Unless it possessed an incredibly dense core with a high surface escape velocity thanks in part to a naturally occurring material with a ridiculous density and high spin due in part to magic. Of course the problem is that the planet would be geologically dead thanks to a higher surface-to-volume ratio that would cause it to bleed energy at a rate that would make it incapable of supporting surface life through thermal emissions, plus the air would have to form a fully tiered atmospheric strata (if Mith's assumed scaling is accurate) where barometric pressure would be incapable of supporting accumulation past a hundred meters if at all, so atmospheric pressure would drop off to unacceptable levels of sustainability at tolerable baseline Earth levels.
You would need an Oxygen tank and Arctic winter gear just to climb to the top of the average City apartment building.
You don't even really need a high spin in theory. That said, it does have a relation to the convection in the core of a planet.
But the spin just provides a small effect that affects to a very small degree the gravity of the planet.
The ground and its solidity is what largely keeps one from falling towards the core.
The near-lack of acceleration due to the spin at Earth's poles has little effect on one's weight. In fact, the ovoid shape of Earth has far greater effects.
Where is it said that the planetoid has to have the exact same angular momentum as Earth's, or anything near?
So I don't see why there's such fuzz about the planetoid's spin.
The magnetic field and convection will require some spin, but nothing silly, and that's based on compositions we know. Clearly, a super dense core like that would be full of oddities.
The real problem I can see is that the crust around it just doesn't have the same density at all. The crust's lower mantle might have had some angular velocity greater than the core itself (and cause lots of friction, heat and some magnetic field I guess), but that's how far I can speculate cause I'm not an astrophysicist.
AS such, the planet doesn't have to be considered geologically dead either, it all depends on the materials inside the planet. Let's just remember that there's just a bunch of theories about what's going inside Earth thus far, and nuclear decay is often advanced as the most likely theory. A dense core doesn't preclude anything like that, especially since we wouldn't know what's inside the planet. Obviously the material would be one of its kind. We don't know how old this world is either. It's totally possible it bears a shorter lifespan.
As for the barometric pressure, gravity will precisely be capable of acquiring and maintaining an atmosphere just like on Earth. The pressure is nothing than a measure of the column of air above one's head, really. That you have a billion 50 km tall columns or just a thousand only changes the total amount of atmosphere. The real problem is due to the spin.
I'd be a good thing for Rama to detail his claims, really.
