Designing Earth-like Atmospheres

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Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Thanks for watching everyone. It means a lot. :)

[Xx_BoogieBomber_xX]

Maybe in a world with a low pressure sea level, the people there would believe the afterlife was on the peaks of mountains, and you can't go there and survive. Maybe monks would do mountain climbing and prepare for their final climb as they get old.

[eruyommo]

So, if pressure is too high, highlands become islands and you'll need zeppelins to travel between them or a diver's suit? And fires will be infernal? Nice.

[AtlasReburdened]

In other words take earth, screw with it just a little, incite wholesale catastrophe. That's nice and calming.

[iammegan]

On the note of human powered flight, AFAIK Titan has a dense enough atmosphere and low enough gravity to achieve that.

[landonkryger]

It'd be cool if you could add a calculation for the Karman Line on the spreadsheet. This is the altitude where an aircraft trying to stay up by lift has to be going at orbital speeds because the atmosphere is so thin. On Earth, it's 100 km and it is how we define where space begins. We don't define space by just picking an arbitrarily low atmospheric pressure.

[zuthalsoraniz]

One thing to note is that these atmospheric habitability boundaries only apply to humans - you can probably go (quite) a bit outside these bounds, especially regarding concentrations of things like CO2 and trace gases to have the atmosphere breathable for the native species (as, obviously, any species will be able to breathe the atmosphere it involved in without issues) but not to any human explorers, á la Avatar.

[smuecke]

Thinking of your video _Do Mountains Alter Speech?_ : An atmosphere with low oxygen concentration might promote languages with ejective sounds as they need less air to articulate. Also dense atmospheres might give rise to languages with more subtle phoneme distinctions (like distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, complex tonal patterns etc.), as spoken language is easier to hear.

[JoakimfromAnka]

You need to talk about possible sky colors on habitable worlds! Can a planet have the seemingly forbidden color green? Also color of sun and moon.

[mateusmundstock]

Combining a whole bunch of things together:

Could you have a high-oxygen world, and in that world have a forest/savanna with green skies?

I was thinking of an habitat with constant, big wildfires, big enough that the atmosphere nearby would have a whole bunch of water vapour. In that place, flying microscopical algae would have evolved to live of that water vapour and CO2 produces by the wildfires, and a big concentration of them would make the sky green.

Imagine how cool it would be for explorers to find an untouched land of green sky!

[micaelo_madeo_anglio]

Is also of note the implications, that that would have on cooking, as in a higher pressure the boiling point of water is going to be higher. In a 1, 7 atm the boiling point would be at around 115°C (for comparison, a pressure cooker cooks at approximately 2 atm at 121°C). So anything cooked or steamed would cook in less time. Saunas would have to be drier or you would risk death, or they would only be possible at high altitudes. In low pressures on the other hand, pressure cookers could have developed earlier, or the cuisine could have been more filled with grilled, broiled and fried foods.

[zodayn]

Tweeking with these numbers just inspires a million cool scifi ideas!

[anthonyeaton]

I appreciate how you flavored the worldbuilding (atmo-building?) approach with a dash of gas dynamics and biology as they exist for our real Earth. (I'm an aerospace engineer, and I'm quite pleased with the due diligence you've shown for the chemistry in this topic.) You've established just enough of a foundation in the hard science without plunging into the deep end. You have really done your homework. It also goes without saying that your spreadsheet is a powerful tool - anyone can create a plausible world without a science PhD. Excellent video!

[unvergebeneid]

Amazing video! The part about the effects of relatively minor changes to earth's atmospheric composition was really exciting! Not only for world building but also when thinking about exoplanets.

[EvilParagon]

What I love about this is one particular thing.

Those lowland areas don't have to be hot, but could still be toxic.
I expect them to be filled with trees.
But all it takes is one tree to evolve like a eucalyptus tree...

It'd be like a volcano. A new natural disaster, planet specific because of that exact weather phenomenon.

[nuadathesilverhand]

Possibly your best quality video yet, and one I have been waiting for for a while. Thank you very much for what you do.

[edibleapeman]

"70cm scorpions" made my entire body shiver. Yeesh!

[petersmythe]

"I'd strongly recommend keeping things the same as Earth"

Instructions unclear, building Xenon atmosphere where microbes perform exotic photosynthesis and move oxygen from Silicon to Xenon forming heat-sensitive explosive Xenon Tetra-Oxide near the poles and powerful oxidizing Xenon trioxide closer to the equator.

[arc]

Yes! Just as I was thinking about you not uploading, I get the notification for this.

[lizerdspherex]

So I guess my oceanic world of large flying wormfish on a low gravity high density atmosphere is reasonable.

[OHYS]

I've been watching your video for ages and it took until now for me to realise that I can download the spreadsheets in the description!!!