Building a world
Hello, hello everyone.
First of all, this isn’t a tutorial but instead just an overview of my creative process on how I’m doing this project. Don’t take it as a tutorial but instead as a guide at most… If I or you can claim it will be as much. I don’t believe so, but hopefully I can make it good enough that it will inspire people to try and reach beyond their typical depth while worldbuilding.
I repeat, this isn’t a tutorial and it isn’t thought to be, though you can ask me as many questions as you like, and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. This is just an example and as such I remind you that it isn’t made to teach as much as to inspire. I’ll try to be as faithful as possible to calculations as well as to the real world, however, due to my nature as a human being I will most likely commit some mistakes in the process and many of these are theoretical concepts and so I will find myself going into speculative territory.
In honour of my inner guardians, those who represent concepts in my soul; or, if you wish to call it by its real name, the characters in my psychodrama, I shall name this project for the greatest of them. I welcome you all to Xen…
Part I: Of the Stars:
Chapter I: City:
Where are we? Well, let’s start with the largest and then go smaller, shall we? Galaxy is large enough for me and I hope for you. No need to design the superclusters and such if you don’t wish to… And I think I might have lost many people already… Let’s just say I need a galaxy. Which one? Well, amorphous/irregular galaxies are more chaotic and are smaller, giving us less space to play with and an easier time having out system or planet ejected into outer space. Elliptical and Spiral seem like better options. Spiral galaxies seem lovely and the Milky Way is a good example. However, I will go with a Giant Elliptical galaxy for varieties’ sake.
But don’t you need Heavy Elements for life? Not really if you go with other types of life different from Earth’s, but I won’t go into that (yet). So, yes, we need heavier elements and Elliptical galaxies don’t often have them as much as Spiral galaxies thanks to their range of stars being centred on the older stars. For those that don’t know, older stars are smaller stars. Lower mass, lower temperature but much, much longer life. Orders of magnitude longer. However, they can’t fuse together lighter elements up to the point we need and even some of the elements we need are created in the chaos of a supernovae. Therefore, we need larger mass stars, those founds in young galaxies. Elliptical galaxies aren’t young galaxies in almost all cases, but we do have a way of them receiving heavier elements: galactic cannibalism. And said interaction should have happened in the recent past but not recently enough so as to have both galaxies still colliding. Remember the size of these things and you’ll realize that collisions can take millions of years.
The Giant elliptical just finished swallowing a small, dusty galaxy where many new stars are being birthed and go novae. Maybe it could have been a galaxy that had a decaying orbit towards the Giant Elliptical it spun around. I think I’ll go with that and just to add more spice into the mix, it wasn’t the only one.
This should have created complex star systems with new and old stars combined as many of the stars were scattered around and also revitalized the older galaxy by supplying it with dust: a starburst galaxy. But galaxies don’t stay in starburst state long and so it stopped birthing giant stars a while ago. So, no supernovae to eradicate life in their neighbourhood. Mostly.
Now, where is the Xen system? The Xen system shouldn’t be in the centre, too much radiation, nor be in a place where the polar radiation of the Supermassive Black Hole in the centre of the galaxy should be able to reach it. Therefore, it should be the farthest away it could, in the ecliptic plane of the galaxy relative to the spin of the central black hole. Now, I should state that most recommendations that apply to a Spiral galaxy don’t apply to the Elliptical ones in terms of where to search for life. This brings me to Shell Galaxies, and that our Giant Elliptical should be one of them due to it having just absorbed another galaxy, making their central black holes resonate with each other enough to create “shells”.
Imagine a group of Matryoshka dolls, that is a Shell Galaxy and is caused by the same phenomenon that creates concentric ripples in water and sound in the air. Actually, the second one is a much more accurate analogy, especially in three dimensions of space and one of time. Forget the typical image of wave they teach you at school! Sinusoidal? Bah, that is an example of electromagnetic wave. Sound waves aren’t sinusoidal because they aren’t perpendicular; they have their oscillations parallel to the line (or plane, but I’m not going to go into that much detail in the example here) in which they move. They are longitudinal waves and the typical image you associate with a sound wave isn’t.
Thus, the Xen system should be in the lower density zone of the galaxy. In between shells.
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And this concludes the first Chapter! Don't worry, not everything will be as astronomical (and thus dull for many people) as this post has been. I'm working already on climates and such, but to get there we must go through a few other things first, I have already planned a lot of things, up to the langauges the civilizations on the planet will be speaking. You are free and encounraged to ask me anything about the project! I will reserve the right to answer some of your questions in the chapter that are relevant to them so as not to spoil them, but still, ask away!
Hopefully this was interesting for you and hope to see you again soon, in my next post.
