Alien Atmospheres: How To Make Plastic Trees

♪ I'm a Clorox tree In a Clorox world I'm made of plastic It's fantastic ♪

Alien: come from Nifelheim during Earth's winter Tour guide: "… and so that's a basic tour of the town. Now if you look to your right you’ll see the amazing ice pans that appear this time of year." Alien: has a panic attack Tour guide: "What's wrong?" Alien: grabs tour guide by the collar of their shirt "Your ENTIRE ocean is freezing solid and you’re CaLm AbOuT tHaT!?"

Is Clorox the home planet of Mr. Clean?

Niflheim is exactly the kind of thing that fascinates me from a functional perspective. As long as the system works chemically, it doesn't matter how likely to exist it is, it's fiction, you can ignore that part. I mean, you should probably avoid anything that doesn't prominently include hydrogen and compounds with it, because it's the most abundant element in the universe by a ludicrous margin, but practically anything else can be handwaved with minimal suspension of disbelief.

To add to the conversation, I would like to remind hard sci-fi worldbuilders: you don't have to go through the trouble of creating an unusual atmosphere for your world in order to make it exotic. At the very most, all you have to do is acknowledge that the majority of the time the species of one planet won't be able to breath on another planet, so for realism's sake you would want to regularly work this in to your setting. Treat it as a default that most characters in an interplanetary setting will wear breathing apparatuses.

"[Fluorine is] super, super chemically active so it probably wouldn't hang around very long." Can this actually be used as an argument? Oxygen is the second most chemically active element after fluorine, yet our ecosystem uses it just fine.

Oh boy the oxygen catastrophe but with Fluorine

It is these kind of videos that make me want to restructure my whole story world.

That animal skeleton looks like a Lapras. Am I guessing right?

but soooo awesome! Beings with Teflon bones?! Plastic trees?! ferking amazing! It makes my brain tingle, thinking that some of this could be possible

who says plastic dosen't grow on trees?

To be fair evidence suggests that for a while earth had little to no free Oxygen until photosynthetic life appeared

"Chlorine makes fires smoulder"—surely you mean the high-chlorine nature of the fuels (PVC wood) rather than the really aggressive Cl2 in the atmosphere? Granted, the latter might make metallurgy a PITA (my guess at avoiding chlorine: make nitric or sulfuric acid, turn ore into sulfate or nitrate, heat to get oxide, heat with the equivalent of charcoal to get metal).

I think this is my favourite video of yours, even surpassing the donut planet (about which I am currently writing a series of short stories).

Artifexian, can you make a video about building "Eccentric Earths"? Their perihelion brings them near the inner boundaries of the habitable zone, and the aphelion near the outer.

I'm sure Radiohead would be very confused.

I wish I knew more about how chemistry works. This reminds me of an idea a friend and I had decades ago; a terrestrial M-Class super-Earth with high concentrations of various noble gasses (mostly neon with high traces of the full spectrum of the rest) in the atmosphere. How would that even work? What would that look like? ( honestly do not remember what type of star we said. We did choose though.)

Could make a video detailing what different gases would do if we added it to an Earth-like via the tweaking-method? Im tryna build a planet that would have an atmosphere that blocks out a lot of the sunlight that in turn makes the locals on the planet evolve a slower heartbeat, colder body temperature, and monochromatic infrared vision to help search out prey. I cant find a gas that would hang around the planet long enough for the locals to evolve and also block out much of the sunlight

What about inert worlds? Could you make anything interesting with purely anaerobic life?

Only an Artifexian update has me clicking to watch it without delay, every time.