Should we host questions about hypothetical or fictional planets?

Question

There are three recent questions that are asking about how things would be different on a fictional "alternate earth" with different parameters:

• Altering the Milankovitch Cycles
• Great Lakes Earth: The Americas
• If the Oceans Were Deeper

It's previously been established that geoscience questions related to other (real) planets are on topic, but that's a little different to "if earth were different in parameters A and B, how would things X and Y be different".

We've previously discussed "movie science" questions, although I'm not sure whether consensus was reached, but these questions are different - they're reasonable geoscience questions (albeit mostly too broad at the moment) that happen to relate to a fictitious, hypothetical scenario. They would certainly be on topic at Worldbuilding, but that doesn't mean that they don't also belong here.

Should these questions be on-topic at Earth Science? If so, how should they be signposted to make it clear that they do not refer to reality? (a tag? A prefix to the title?)

Answer 1

Yes, as long as such planets are physically feasible or otherwise give insight into real physical processes.

Serious earth and planetary scientists are involved in this kind of work, in particular in the context of modelling the climate on extrasolar planets. For example:

• R. T. Pierrehumbert 2011 ApJ 726 L8: A PALETTE OF CLIMATES FOR GLIESE 581g

And in any kind of models, including climate models, it is common practice to run the model with some toy simplified world. For example, one might run two climate models with a planetary configuration consisting of a world with the surface covered entirely by an ocean. Much simpler to keep out those pesky continents.

Of course, within those toy worlds, questions should still be focussed. A question like what would the climate look like? might take 5 TB of data to answer. Not good.

Answer 2

Personally, I think these mental exercises are useful but really complex. Unless I feel it helps me understand a specific Earth Science process or problem, I am going to likely request for a migration to Worldbuilding and see what the community decides.

Answer 3

I am against allowing questions with hypothetical situations here with the exception of (reasonably scoped) questions referring to situations that could easily happen on Earth in the foreseeable future.

Here are my reasons why I disagree:

1. It would create a rather big overlap with World Building SE. Overlap between sites is inevitable, but I feel that we should try to limit this if possible. At the very least we should not actively widen the scope of an existing SE site if there already is another SE site for exactly those types of questions.

2. Several of the 'world-building' questions that were posted here were rejected from the world-building site because they were too broad. If we allow such questions we run the risk of becoming the default 'dump' site of rejected WB questions.

Answer 4

Through science or God, man will prevail. To question whether to host "fictional or hypothetical theories" is equal to censorship. Promoting freedom of thought should be paramount.

It took but one question to start this journey, no matter your education you still ask the same question.

Plz allow the mouth of babes to do the same.

C