Acid Planet

It's been a wile since I've submitted a spacescape, it feels good to be back in class and back working with computers, so I did a simple piece. I think it turned out pretty cool.

This planet is called Thunderwell. The name comes from an old idea about a theoretical machine called a "thunder well", which could launch something at escape velocity and into orbit by basically making a giant cannon in the surface of the planet. You dig a giant reinforced hole, put your payload in it, and fire it into space by detonating a nuclear warhead at the bottom of the well. Well on this planet a similar idea was used for strip mining. They dug under the planets crust and detonated several bombs up pillars to launch chunks of the surface into space. This artificial verneshot condensed into a ring, which was eventually also mined via robotic probe.

The surface was covered in many automated factories and mines that used fully self-sufficient rover-like craft for retrieving the exposed ore. Mining on such a massive scale produces a lot of acid as older mines flood and are abandoned. This acid too is safely drained and after processing it is utilized in the production of batteries in the planets auto-factories for making new mining rover-drones. After some time there was a media crusade that caused this method to become a public controversy. Thunderwell was abandoned, eventually losing all their investors as protests and eco-terrorism forced them to take their funding elsewhere.

A century later, the planet is a very different place. Pretty much all the surface mines have failed and flooded, and the acid drainage systems have long since broken beyond repair. Rivers, lakes, and ponds of acid and very acidic water flow across the surface, the colorful damaged rock around the acid's shores visible even from this distant orbit. A massive scar has been ripped across the surface by the thundermines, and much of what was once a large portion of the planets crust in that scar is still in a now decaying orbit. One by one the pieces of verneshot are now slowly beginning to fall back to the surface of Thunderwell, not quite burning up in the thin atmosphere of noxious gases and oxygen. A biosphere of extremophiles feeding on the rock in the water and producing the acid is beginning to stabilize, where once the interference of the factories kept their numbers low. In orbit the mining continues, the auto-factories producing the orbital mining drones being located on asteroids anchored to surface elevators. The drones maintain the mines, factories, and the upper portion of the elevator, but with no drones maintaining the surface portion of the elevator eventually the delicate cable will fail and send the auto-factory and orbital mining operation flying off out of orbit.

Strangely the operation of the auto-factories and mines has changed. Old, abandoned mines have been converted into new factories that are producing the surface rover-drones. The AI network maintaining the orbital operation has adapted and is taking advantage of the decaying orbit of the asteroids to send squadrons of rover-drones of its own to maintain the surface. Currently it seems focused merely on the elevators and its own self-preservation. The limits of its neural network inspired bio-computer design the potential for it to learn and grow is unknown. It may do no more than follow its programming and maintain the orbital operation, eventually shutting down for good when the verneshot all falls back to the surface. There is also the possibility, however, that it may become intelligent enough to think in the long term and attempt to reestablish the surface operation as well in order to ensure the survival of all the auto-factories, rather than just the orbital operation as this AI was originally designed for (naturally the surface had several AI programs of its own for different factories and regions, but they have all more or less failed).