Pottery Without Using Heat
I'm currently writing a sci-fi trilogy on an alien world with a CO2 and methane atmosphere. The natives have pottery but since fires cannot work on the planet, how would they harden the clay without heat of any kind?
Would say using an element like mercury be a possibility to leech the water from the clay to harden it?
The aliens are methane breathers and they eat hydrogen peroxide (in addition to carbon from plants and animals) for their metabolism- there's perchlorates in the water as well.They have a primitive technology- living in tribal areas.
Any ideas welcome!
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1 answer
If you have mercury; you have a lens: Put it in a dish and provide a low spin, it will form into a parabolic lens that focuses sunlight. Large lens = hot hot focal point. The dish can actually be just dried non-porous clay. The focal point can be a built up rock, brick or dried clay oven, up on some platform above the lens, and the bottom of this oven can have a small hole in it so the focal point of the lens heats a rock that won't melt, but can get to many hundreds of degrees.
Other ways to focus the sun will work too, if you can polish anything to a reflective surface. I know you don't have glass for lenses (because you don't have the heat to make glass!) but as a note IRL arrays of glass lenses can focus the Sun to a point with enough heat to melt iron. It is just a matter of size.
The same will be true for parabolic reflective lenses; check out these Real-Life Solar Power Towers. A spinning dish of mercury cannot be oriented to track the sun. But given a reflective surface (which does not have to be image perfect smooth; just reflect most light), made of polished silver or other reflective metals, this same idea can work on a very small scale: Reflect a lot of light to an oven on a tall stand (made of some wood equivalent or if need be a stone tower with clay mortar), and it will heat up. Put enough light on it, and it can get as hot as a forge, help refine metals, create crucible steel, etc.
Trial and error will tell (or have told) your aliens which rocks, materials, and clay recipes can tolerate the heat.
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