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Q&A

Will my worlds not be salty enough to support animal life?

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I read on the cooking.stackexchange site that all natural salt on Earth was created by seas and oceans, starting with primordial oceans four billion years ago. This got me thinking about my fictional terraformed far-future worlds, where people brought organic materials to lifeless planets and engineered new Earth-like planets, starting by seeding the planet with small Earth species chosen to start developing a more and more Earth-like environment, and then working up with later arrivals of larger organisms, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years later.

My concern is that there may be a need for a lot of salt all over to support an Earth-evolved animal (or even insect?) bio-mass. I understand that animals tend to have a lot of salt in them, and that they need it to do many of their life functions, notably to control the movement of all sorts of things across cell walls via osmosis.

So I'm wondering what would need to be done to get the world salty enough to support abundant animal populations and related ecologies consisting of introduced Earth-evolved animals (perhaps with a little bio-engineering).

The tech level is very far future, but preferably does not include complex nano-machines (i.e. no saying there can be microscopic intelligent self-replicating machines that cooperate and do it), the ability to just zap up anything from anything (i.e. no saying there are machines that can build anything by arranging atoms however wanted), nor genetic modification that isn't something that clearly very possible by today's understanding (i.e. no saying "use GMO" to make animals not need salt or be salt factories, unless that's a real known thing agreed to be eventually possible by today's scientists). Construction of industrial/chemical facilities is an option.

If thousands of years are needed, that's acceptable, but hopefully not many thousands of years.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/31653. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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