Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
However, if there are gaseous products, you can assume they're ones that require energy to split off, and there aren't terribly many candidates for that; splitting off light hydrocarbons won't be all that useful, nitrogen tends to be pretty inert once it gets split off so you can't have a long term, fluorine and chlorine aren't common enough.
|
Conceivably you might split hydrogen cyanide into hydrogen and cyanogen. Cyanogen has quite a low boiling point.
I don't insist on dumping the waste product into the air. If you split hydrogen sulfide and get sulfur, you might have "respiring" organisms seeking out deposits of sulfur to consume, I suppose. Or maybe the sulfur could combine with something other than hydrogen.
I realize that the answer might be "there are no respiratory cycles other than water/oxygen that could sustain a planetary ecology." But I'd like to see the list of planetary types in GURPS Space worked through.