Am I over-thinking things/being too critical?

Right, so I've got a bunch of interesting (well, to me, anyway, so hopefully others may find them so), and an idea for a world in which they can have their adventure and an idea of its history, where they're at now and what direction they're heading in.

Then I start finding/picking holes in things until it winds up unravelling. I start asking what I think are reasonable questions and when I can't come up with answers - or when my research comes up with answers that render my ideas implausible or impossible - it wrecks the work and I end up giving up on it.

Most recent case in point:

It's a "Portal Fantasy" in which people from Earth suddenly and mysteriously find themselves in a strange place where they must do what they can to survive.

So, we've got another planet. Since the it's very unlikely that another life-bearing planet would have life that's compatible with our biology (which would make for a very short dark story of people starving to death while trying to eat alien plants/animals), I decide that the life on that planet all comes from Earth - presumably the same way the people mysteriously got there: by vanishing from Earth.

So I start looking into it in depth and it's pretty damned unlikely that life from Earth would successfully "take" on an alien planet, no matter how benign the climate, without extensive deliberate attempts to make it take.

So, the world I envision is completely implausible.

I don't want any variation of A Wizard Did It involved, as that'd then beg the question, "why?"

I'm already using up my "breaking reality" quota by having humans etc vanishing from Earth and appearing there - and that's pretty big as it is - without "and magically the place just happens to be habitable by humans and they have access to the very plants and animals that they'd have access to on Earth".

So now I feel, once again, that there's no point working on it as quite literally the whole world is fundamentally flawed.

I want it to be, for the most part (ignoring a single collossal departure from reality), plausible and "realistic" - internally consistent. They have x resources, they can do y things, they behave like normal people, the known laws of physics, chemistry etc work as they would here.

But the very world they wind up on is another collossal departure from reality.

In-story, the characters are naturally going to be curious about how they came to be there and how the world happens to be like that.

They may well agree, in-story, to put "how we got here" into the we don't/can't know category, theorise about wormholes, portals etc - but even the characters couldn't help but realise that there's no way the world could have formed naturally and we get into A Wizard Did It (in this case the author, but that's too meta) territory.

I've got no in-universe explanation for the place that is satisfactory to me.

Am I being too critical of my work? Am I over thinking it?

Does it really matter that the world they're on doesn't "make sense" and poses questions for which there are no satisfying logical/realistic/plausible answers?

Can't you just make it an alternate timeline where humans never evolved?

Just toss in some string theory technobabble and most people will accept it.

If you find the text above offensive, don't look at it.

The Antropic Principle would explain it.

You're already using by making the ecosystem Earth-based, so just expand it. Add more portals to other places (habitable or not) then ignore them since they aren't important to the story you are telling.

The reason why "the place just happens to be habitable by humans" is because if it wasn't habitable by humans, they'd die quickly and wouldn't be surprised by the coincidence that its habitable.

I like that.

Especially since that pretty much sums up my answer to those who're surprised that our universe should be "coincidentally" so well balanced that matter can form and life can exist.

On top of that, while I'm far from an expert, it seems to me that the world that you described is highly improbable, not implausible: while it's very unlikely that things would work out that way, they could, and so might; "improbable" does not imply "impossible". (Or put another way, I do think that you're being a little hard on the concept. :P)

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Not necessarily. But you'd have to start with the tough stuff, i.e. microbes that don't depend so much on terrestrial-type environmental chemistry. Cyanobacteria could probably make it just about anywhere that there's a reasonable amount of light and CO2 and nothing incredibly reactive in the environment (strong acids and the like).

Remember, the early Earth was not as hospitable as what we're used to, but life still got started somehow.

edited 15th Aug '14 12:39:00 PM by Meklar

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My main worry is the amount of improbability I've already got in the story - the wormhole/portal/whatever that's bringing people there over the years - and I don't want the readers throwing up their hands halfway through chapter one and exclaiming "Jesus Christ! Did Arthur Dent carelessly fire up the Heart of Gold's main drive while it was parked on the surface?"

Starting with the basics would be possible if whatever mechanism has been around long enough, but if I take it too far back, life would probably start to evolve along its own lines, albeit compatible with Earth-based life.

Wherein I run across the problem that for millions of years dinosaurs reigned here until local conditions forced a large extinction event.

Since it's not likely that all the same extinction events (aside from the self-poisoning event that reduced the cyanobacteria population) would happen on "World B" or whatever we want to call it, later Earth animals and, eventually, humans that wind up crossing over, are going to be arriving in a world where the descendants of dinosaurs may well be running around the forests.

Local plants that evolve there would have the edge over any seeds that come through from Earth, buggering my premise that the land is pretty much "seeded" with Earth plants that arriving animals and humans would be familiar with.

So it'd have to be more "recent" in geological terms, starting at a time when Earth plants and animals are more or less in their current form, which gives the problem of "would there be time for the planet to become habitable for Earth life?"

I can live with the idea that the first arrivals of animals, and possibly humans, probably perished due to a lack of breathable air and/or food at some dark part of the planet's past, until such time as bacteria and plants give a suitable oxygen atmosphere and food supply.

It occurs to me that the arrivals of small-to-large vertebrate animals could possibly stabilise the atmosphere and make it less volatile.

But then there's the problem that the "arrival point" for incoming Earth life is somewhere on a single landmass - not always in exactly the same spot, but somewhere within a radius of about 100 miles.

Which would mean that it's likely to take a while for life to spread unless that land mass is some Pangaea-like supercontinent.

So what it boils down to is "how long has crap been 'falling through' from Earth before we 'realistically' get a world that human protagonists can survive in?"

The Earth "end" of the portal is centred over the British Isles, hence the flora and fauna having a "British Isles" aspect to it.

Which is why it's got to be all natural/random rather than a concerted "persons/entities unknown decided to seed this planet with Earth life and dump humans on it" - it avoids "Why?", "Fucking why?", "Why did they decide on British life in particular?" and so forth.

Ah, fair enough.

Hmm... Could the portals be somewhat temporally variable? What I have in mind is that the portals always open within a small temporal range (modern times), but exit over a longer range, causing modern life-forms to spill out over a long period, allowing for modern life to take hold, perhaps.

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Actually, I was wanting the temporal variation to go the other way - that centuries passing here relate to mere decades there, which I suspect makes it all the worse.

12,000 years there would equate to 100,000 years here.

... Yeah, that probably does make it worse. ^^;

Of course, if you don't mind dropping the modernity if the life that takes hold on this planet, it shouldn't be a major problem: it may well develop in directions different to Earth's fauna, but it should still be edible to human travellers. The flora and fauna might even be sufficiently recognisable that at least some knowledge from Earth would still be useful (just look at cycads and sharks for examples of little-changed life-forms).

edited 16th Aug '14 7:52:56 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

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Then my two "problems" become:

"How long would it realistically take for plant life to take hold on the previously barren planet (starting with fairly advanced plant life)?" then divide that figure by 12 to get the number of centuries of Earth time that equates to, giving me:

"What life was growing/roaming around Earth that long ago?" to give me an idea of what would have first gone through.

Plants and animals aren't going to magically stop transfering (statistically likely that more seeds, spores, bacteria, insects and wild animals happen to fall through a wormhole than humans, and quite a few humans fall through over the years) so more modern plants and animals, including naturalised introduced species, will wind up there - how well they do compared with the "local" species could vary, but they'd get there.

It occurs to me that you could wipe out a bit of the improbability problem by making events deliberate on the part of some party- say, an alien civilization wants to study Earth life and terraforms this planet to act as a greenhouse/simulation thing.

Of course, that might require changes to your plot which you might not want to make.

I couldn't conceive a dream so wet; your bongos make me congo.

Which is the "A Wizard Did It" scenario (the aliens being "the wizard") and either introduces a lot of things that immensely complicate matters or raises questions about why they made particular choices - could even have Unfortunate Implications, given the culturally unbalanced nature of the location (implications that don't exist if the cause of the imbalance is due to a portal that "just happens to be" in a particular location)

Not necessarily. The ecosystem we have here is more diverse, which might lead to more competition and faster evolution. Plants on the other side that have time 'get lazy' and don't evolve for tough competition might get caught out when the new stuff crosses over from here (and to some extent this could apply to animals too).

Unfortunately, though, many advanced animals tend to require a certain breeding population in order to sustain themselves, and inbreeding can cause genetic problems. So while a single pregnant rat or wolf (animals that have several babies at once) arriving in a territory with no competition to speak of might be able to create a large population on their own, animals coming through later would be way outcompeted by whatever was already established. And animals that only have a single baby at a time would find it quite hard to get started, unless the portal happened to bring through many individuals at once.

As I recall, the Great Oxygenation Event here on Earth took hundreds of millions of years to complete. There were so many reactive chemicals on the early Earth that they were able to absorb a massive amount of molecular oxygen before becoming saturated and allowing the oxygen to persist in the air, and it took the cyanobacteria a very long time to bring about this change. So, even if your portal opened up hundreds of millions of years ago, it might only be much more recently that cyanobacteria from here managed to stabilize the environment to the point where animals and other advanced organisms could survive. This would particularly be the case if the other planet only formed quite recently, giving the cyanobacteria a hot, hostile environment that would only change more gradually. Timed right, this could have the result that the planet is habitable but has animals and advanced plants only from, say, the past few tens of millions of years.

Like I say, though, with the problem of breeding populations for animals, you'd still be likely to find the dominant large animals on the other side to be the earliest ones that got through and survived, and if those are from as much as 20 or 30 million years ago, they'll be noticeably unlike modern creatures. One solution would be to have a recent extinction event taking place on the other side, wiping out most of the animal populations without damaging the long-term habitability of the planet, so that more recent types of large animals could get established.

I don't think vertebrates have much responsibility in that regard. Insects, for instance, are already perfectly capable of munching down excess plants of most varieties, and would be much more likely to get through and establish sustainable populations on the other side.

Life spreads easily, even across oceans. Given a favorable environment generated by the cyanobacteria, plants will find their way pretty much everywhere.

That said, one alternative would be to make the planet naturally colder than the Earth, so that the only region that is habitable at all is around the equator and has a similar climate to northern Europe, while the rest is mostly lifeless due to being covered in ice. This would also increase the time required to oxygenate the atmosphere.

Yeah, that would just make things worse.

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Thanks for that very comprehensive answer.

I was thinking in terms of the planet being habitable only in the last 2-5 thousand years so that all of the life is pretty much in its modern form.

So, presuming it takes quite some time for a stable atmosphere and ecosystem to develop to the point that human life can be supported, what then, is the likelihood that there would be fossil fuels?

Would enough time have passed, given the life is not actually evolving on the planet but being dumped through from Earth, for fossil fuels to form from the stuff that first originated life on that world?

What, too, of the oceans? Would such a timespan mean that the oceans would have a sufficient ecology to support marine life that's come through?

If there is land life, there is ocean life, assuming a similar evolutionary course to earth. It's easier to survive in the water for simplistic organisms.

And frankly, you need to take a bit of Clauswitz to heart: The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.

Nous restons ici.

I love the quote.

The problem is, I'm not remotely presuming a similar evolutionary path to that of Earth, I'm presuming youngish, as-yet lifeless, world in the Goldilocks Zone of some unknown G-type star receiving frequent and long-term "injections" of life via portal/interdimensional gate/wormhole from one part of Earth to the point that it becomes a self-sustaining environment suitable for Earth life (whereupon it continues to get injections of Earth life, including humans from time to time).

"Actually, I was wanting the temporal variation to go the other way - that centuries passing here relate to mere decades there, which I suspect makes it all the worse."

There's another problem here: Eventually the portal in the past will catch up and pass the portal that started in the future, which could create causality problems.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

I don't get what you mean by that.

The ends of the portal are moving at different speed on their respective worlds, but they're still moving forward.

From the point of view on some one on the other world, events happen one after another on Earth, but at a rather accelerated rate.

If it were possible to see what was happening back through the portal from Earth, things would be following one after the other there, too, but at a slower rate.

I forgot that the portal only works one way, so never mind.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

I've run into a similar problem on designing an AU, if the line of thought continues then you will eventually have to reconstruct everything from scratch which tends to be impossible, it has to break somewhere. As long as the world is consistent with itself than you typically don't have to worry about breaking suspension of disbelief.

If humans come to your alternate planet and don't immediately die I do not expect an enormous explanation as to why, if I am immersed I just assume that the planet is similar to earth, similar ozone protection, similar oxygen concentrations. We take it in stride. And if you were to reveal aspects of what makes the planet like it is than it would probably be best to introduce it in isolated fragments, after all there's no "Absolute proof of all existence and phenomena ever." on Earth, it would be millions of pages long!

So for the purposes of telling a story I would think yes, you are being a bit over-critical. It's a good trait to have but it will absolutely cripple writing the story if you let it so the question is, Priority: The story, or the setting?

My two cents.

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