What's in the Trappist system?

[Conrad]

This article looks interesting sciencewise, but don't let it stop you running a game in such a setting. http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=37109

[clarence]

Excellent article! Thanks. The discussion below it is also very enlightening. 

[Joerg]

If you avoid single biome planets, there is little reason why there should be only one sentient race per planet.

A couple of questions:

Do you want the system to be a self-sufficient stellar society upon contact (or as you home setting)?

Do you want to have current or former interstellar contact when encountering the system?

Are the inventors of space travel in this system still around? Are they still in control of space travel, or have they encountered other sapients who pushed them out of control?

Imagine a species of engineers solving the problems of space travel, encountering sapients on other planets of the system who then usurp their technology. The engineers may still be around as some sort of technological specialist caste, possibly even drawing strings where their putative masters cannot control them. They might have voluntarily enabled other species in the system to take over their technology as a reaction to losing control to a first usurper species.

If you want, the engineers species could be non-native to the star system. Different rescue ships put down on different planets, co-opt native sapients into returning to space, creating rudimentary space traffic for a number of different species and cultures (within those species). This would mean that there would be salvagable remnants of whatever technology the non-natives may have arrived in, too.

 

Assuming that flares weaken the atmosphere again and again, life would have reacted and gone into controlled or controllable environments where the flares don't take away its basics. The result could be apparently single biome worlds that cover significant portions of the planetary surface with some sort of skin, trapping atmosphere inside.

Inside that skin, or in cave systems isolated by such skin, there could be variant or adopted biomes supported by the surface biome, probably supporting the surface biome, too. Symbionts and parasites. Some of these could be sapient.

Any biome would require autotrophy of some kind as the basis of their energy household, starting with the surface biome. The surface is exposed to the star's radiation, both its ordinary light output and its flares, and would be adapted to deal with both of these. I suggest a canopy of photosynthetic outgrowths that will be fed with the trapped atmosphere and hydrosphere to produce chemical energy as well as a reactive atmosphere both of which are consumed inside of the surface matter. These parts would die off when a flare hits, and would need to be recycled and regrown.

The extra energy of the flares would be collected by a separate system, possibly a mesh of conductive material that gains superconductive or similar properties when exposed to the flare. (Consuming most of the flare energy would simultaneously shield biomes inside of this web.) This extraordinary amount of energy is utilized for the reproductive cycle of the surface biome, powering its seed pods to spread beyond the original position on the planet, possibly onto the other planets of the system. Given different conditions on the other planets, the surface biome would have adapted, possibly leading to variant surface biome strains that get into ecological struggle.

Sapient symbionts/parasites could have manipulated those seed pods into self-sustaining larval stage biomes that survive independent of planetary surfaces. They would need to feed on something - solar wind for basic needs, dust or smaller asteroids for growth and replacement of lost matter, other (unmodified) seed pods for feasts leading to procreation.

 

You would need to handwave a propulsion system for these altered pods. A setting of mine has them using something like warp tunnels to reach subluminal speeds. Alternatively, handwave something about interacting with dark matter (the new Ether).

 

The symbiont species could be aquatic. Without the need for fire or metal to enter space, plenty aquatic life forms could be made masters of their surface/environment biomes - crabs, cephalopods, snails, chordata. They might carry photosynthetic exhaust products like oxygen in storage organs adapted to be filled from exhaust organelles of the environment biome. Other environment biomes might provide different chambers with liquids or gas exhausts.

There might be surface biomes which produce mobile, dependent heterotrophe descendants to provide them with recycling abilities, and there might be such which adopt other species of independent ancestry to perform that service, exclusivel or alongside their own descendants.

 

The flares might be sufficient to send hibernating pods to other star systems. It would take flares in the target star system to end the hibernation.

This assumption gives a plausible explanation why there are no such organisms active in our G-type solar system. They may be present, as the cores of comets, but they never received the necessary activation energy from a flare.

That is, not until space traffic using e.g. some realisation of the Alcubierre drive, or alternatively anthropogenic high energy discharges provide the activation energy to awaken the pods. Which is how humanity could come into contact with such a biome.

Technological civilisations could easily install artificial sources of the kind of energies produced by flares (e.g. implanted or attached fusion reactors) and keep those biomes active and procreating. You could have rather cheap (because self-replicating, if slowly) hybrid organic and technological vessels and space stations of various degrees of technological sophistication, and you could have purely technological space traffic outperforming the cheap stuff.

You can have factions differing on how much to integrate with the biomes (or whether at all).

 

And here I am again, discussing the basis for my organic and technological space faring setting. I have a number of concepts, like a huge exodus of technologically disadvantaged cultures into space on these symbiotic biomes, creating both more sophisticated and also more (technologically) primitive societies able to spread across space. Humanity needn't be the only space faring sapients to exploit this kind of organism and combine it with their planet-developed technology.

You would have your standard, planet-colonizing and terraforming space civilisations flocking to G-type stars with earth-like planets. And you would have rather different types of civilisation colonizing the much more prevalent red dwarf stars exploiting those flares. You can decide to have alliances of different species sharing a positive or negative view about becoming symbionts of this biome.

 

My own ideas run around something recreating a Polynesian/Maori/Inuit contact scenario with advanced technology for the imperialist or mercantyle technophiles and dugout-equivalents for humans (and other planetary species, or original symbionts of the biome) choosing an ancestral or even more savage way of life, possibly with the support of some long lasting technological device like nuclear batteries or self-maintaining fusion reactors flanged on to their dugouts. I want cannibals in space, haughty technophiles excluding such impure and degrading slavery to alien organisms, missionaries spreading the word of god or the words of Newton and Einstein to their savage brethren, mercantylists exploiting the more primitive cultures using superior technology, bleeding hearts idealists (with enough realism to back their ideas) creating protected zones for this style of life, and so on.

It's not quite post-humanism, but verging on it. Cyborgism, technologically created mind collectives, AIs etc. are easy to toss into the mixture, expanding the range of concurrent or assimilating cultures.

 

[Joerg]

Apparently, my idea of life hopping between planets doesn't even need agency by the organisms themselves:

TRAPPIST-1 worlds are close enough for life to hop between them

[Belgath]

A gravitational locked world inspired by this thread and  the Game world Bilharzia created for one of his recent campaigns.  The large landmass on the sides is tide-locked facing  the sun.