The Order of the Stick

Marine life is even more primitive and even more common. Lack of marine life generally implies lack of life period.

It's also possible that the land was just shaded green without any serious thought behind it.

The continental surfaces are composed almost entirely of peridot and jade.

You forgot that there's emeralds. You can't forget the emeralds.

Of course you can diss plants, the little twerps can't do anything about it.

Wonder if Laurin's gonna come back from that purple-eyes thing. And if she'll come back right.

Could be she was scanning the wrong ocean.

or the wrong part of the ocean.

Or perhaps some catastrophe happened to kill off marine life withohut touching the land-based plants.

Or maybe the fish on the planet don't have the same type of mind her Power knows how to scan.

Blackwing got purpleeyed too when he watched and he came out ok.

Blackwing was essentially viewing the planet from orbit. Details would be sparse and individual life forms invisible. Even cities could exist without being seen.

"We live on a sentient, evil planet" Sounds like a sci-fi horror plot.

Reminds me of Ego the Living Planet.

It has been. One of those teenager-oriented Star Wars novels. Probably other books as well.

For "deadly planet" plots, I think my favorite concept yet was the one used for The Midas Flesh.

Basically, what if literally everything King Midas touched, including the earth he stood on and the air that touched him, turned to gold? And what would space travelers think when they discovered this golden planet?

A sentient, evil planet could be straight-up Cosmic Horror Story. Thomas Ligotti wrote a story like that.

Does the gold conversion work on volume or mass? Which is to say, if you took a cube of water a decimeter wide (weighting roughly one kilogram), and turned it into gold, would you get a golden cube with the significant increase in mass, or would you get one kilogram of gold? Because both would have very significant effects on the Earth at a planetary physics level.

Whichever is required to have the plot of the planet looking just like it was except frozen in gold.

Volume, then. Which would make Earth more than triple in mass, which would make its gravity increase to probably-lethal levels, which would at least wreak havoc on the moon and tectonic shift, not to mention the core passing from molten iron to gold would probably have some interesting effects on the magnetic field whose name I forget and its protecting us from cosmic radiation. There may be an xkcd What If about this, I don't recall.

Point is, it probably wouldn't look like Earth sprayed with golden paint.

Or you know the gold could condense into a porous form. It is highly malleable and can be forced into microscopically thin sheets.

Gold croissants...

Also a possibility, if you want to conserve mass and volume, though it's slightly cheating. It'd collapse into a much smaller planetoid under its own gravity, anyway.

Maybe it's magic gold that has the density and other properties of the material it replaced.

He said the air turned gold. If the air turned gold, you definitely wouldn't have a gold-plated still image of the planet.

If the entire atmosphere and everything under it is gold, then what you have is a golden sphere.

Air isn't very dense. Even if he turned the entire atmosphere to gold it would presumably just fall to the ground and make a tiny fuzzy gold coating over everything. But presumably only the air he directly touched would turn to gold.

Mind you, Midas would die pretty quickly if his ability actually worked like that. And he might never touch the Earth directly before dying.

edited 4th Aug '15 6:52:43 PM by Arha

I always read the myth as he had to intentionally touch something to turn it to gold. In other words it's his mind doing it, not his skin.

The setup I read definitely had the change do big damage to the planet itself. Stuff like "The soft gold of the planetary crust is unable to withstand the weight on it, and begins to buckle and distort."

And yeah, Midas dies pretty fast. Asphyxiation.

It was a Ryan North idea. Check it, if you like. And don't forget the alt text.

He later turned that into a sci-fi comic miniseries.

edited 4th Aug '15 7:53:00 PM by Enlong

Please, it's magical bullshit. The point of the story is a planet perfectly preserved in gold. Everything else is wankering about not what the story is about.

Surface gravity is influenced by density directly, so this Gold Earth would have 34 N/kg surface gravity.