[TML] Plants, animals and characters

[Knapp]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 1:14 AM, Jerry W Barrington
<jerry.barrington at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/4/08 2:35 PM, "Bruce Johnson" <johnson at pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
>  > On Apr 3, 2008, at 10:01 PM, shadow at shadowgard.com wrote:
>  >
>  >> On 3 Apr 2008 at 19:42, Jerry W Barrington wrote:
>  >>
>  >>> On 4/3/08 5:17 PM, "Knapp" <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >>>
>  >>>> Eating, I need some help here but the roots of the energy system
>  >>>> are:
>  >>>> the sun, geothermal and ???? After that it is all about eating
>  >>>> others
>  >>>> and how fast, big and or resistant to eating the others are and you
>  >>>> are.
>  >>>
>  >>> Solar is by for the primary.  Geothermal is only available in very
>  >>> limited
>  >>> areas, and those areas can die out over time.  I really don't know
>  >>> over any
>  >>> other *known* sources.
>  >>
>  >> I just recalled that a *lot* of bacteria get energy from processing
>  >> things like sulfide ores into sulfates.
>  >
>  > I'm thinking he's asking about primary sources of energy, of which
>  > there are only two: fusion, powering the sun, and fissile decay, which
>  > powers geothermal sources.
>
>  Yeah, that's why I didn't distinguish Douglas's "geothermal" from
>  chemosynthesis.  Whether chemicals emitted from magma or minerals which once
>  *were* magma or rocks metamorphosed by tectonics, it's driven by the core.
>  As opposed to most of the biosphere, which is driven by sunlight.
>
>  Even though we generally consider the rocks to be static, if bacteria are
>  "eating" them, they must be replenished by one of those 2 sources.

I don't think parasites are a subclass of grazer. Makes no sense to
me. I think a class is missing. How is a tick a grazer or a flee or
leach or Alien from the movie of the same name. The attack and defense
stuff does not work nor the groupings or anything.

What  I meant by, "primary sources of energy", is any place that
energy enters the biosphere. I would say on the Earth that it mostly
comes in from Sun into plants using photosynthesis. It would be
interesting to know what percent of the total energy input comes from
each source. I would exclude it as primary, if it comes from a life
form, IE meat or plant eating etc. Also you should be able to put it
in  a jar by itself and the system should work. With a plant all you
need is soil, sun, heat and air and the biomass will start
increasing.It seems to me that some planets might not have much sun
but might have Geothermal vents with the inorganic chemicals needed to
make more biomass. What other forms of input are there? I would think
the more I could list the better alien life form I could invent. Also,
if this only works for one cell then it is of little use in a game. It
works for plants and they are game sized. Anything really small would,
in a game, most likely come up as a sickness or disease. Modeling all
the bacteria on a planet would overload my game, so I will not even
attempt it. :-)
Thanks all for the feedback!
-- 
Douglas E Knapp
http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Front_Page