wild theorising for Iron Lung
obligatory pedantic questions: What counts as a star? What counts as a planet? What makes a planet habitable? What happened to things that are neither - black holes, nebulae? What natural resources remain on these?
If you want to listen to someone go into the semantics of this, watch the first half of this video.
Looking at what explicitly happened in the Quiet Rapture, we know that the Sun, the stars, the Earth, and Mars have vanished. We know that space stations, starships, and 'barren moons' remain. From this pattern I propose that mass is the criteria for being Raptured: anything above a certain mass and density disappeared, ranging from medium sized planets to supergiant stars.
What is left are the 'moons' and a few other miscellaneous objects. Possibly the term 'moons' refers to any spherical body small enough to remain, as 'moon' is a very vague category and could have been repurposed with a new definition in the wake of the Quiet Rapture. Moon doesn't really mean anything if there are no planets or sun to orbit; a moon is a satellite, but what happens if that moon has nothing to be a satellite of?
So, this is a rough list of celestial bodies in the Solar System remaining after the Quiet Rapture, possibly redefined as moons:
large spherical asteroids
planetary rings (which are quite sparse and light)
the asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, and Oort cloud
All of which provide a lot of potential for worldbuilding and headcanonising.
So, first part of RESOURCES: ENERGY
(I think I'll make another post going into food and link it at the end)
Energy is matter, and if the Quiet Rapture blinked most of the universe's matter out of existence (most matter is in stars) then the total amount of energy in the universe is now a fraction of what it was, speeding up the heat death of the universe significantly.
For humans, this is bad! Almost all of our energy comes from the Sun. (sidenote: the other stars disappearing is not actually that much of a problem. We can't harness such distant starlight for energy, and most stars would not disappear within a lifetime following the Quiet Rapture. Emotionally, though....)
So that means solar energy and fossil fuels/biofuels are no longer available. This is immediately catastrophic, since a space-colonising civilisation would depend heavily on solar energy. And even if fossil fuels/biofuels work as a back up energy source, they require organisms, and in a food-scarce world nobody would be producing biomass/hydrocarbons just for fuel.
Geothermal energy would be promising if it was only the Sun disappearing, but Earth is gone too, though there are some geologically active moons in our solar system.
Any process involving gravitational energy is also probably unviable, especially as hydropower requires water and a lot of infrastructure, not to mention anything with a usably significant gravitational pull would have been Raptured.
Given that humanity survived the period directly following the Quiet Rapture, they must have had significant amounts of power stored in long-life batteries, giving them some time to get organised concerning energy sources. They must have figured out something at some point, because though the Father states that 'supplies dwindle', presumably shortly after the Quiet Rapture, any stored fuel would run out long before the events of Iron Lung. The only exception is if fuel was being mass-manufactured somewhere in space for entire planets-worth of people, and enough remained in storage to support a small population for a couple of decades.
If the survivors managed to produce their own fuel, there are a few potential energy sources:
Nuclear - requires uranium or plutonium as well as infrastructure and safety procedures, but there is precedent on a small scale.
Magnetism - I’m shit at physics but: electric generators produce electricity by having a conductive coil rotate through a permanent magnetic field. When this happens, the amount of magnetic flux passing through the coil changes as area increases, then decreases. Through electromagnetic induction, an electric current is induced in the coil, ie, electricity. However, there needs to be a kinetic energy input to rotate the coil in the first place. These generators would probably be used to recycle kinetic energy as they aren’t primary resources, they just convert motion into electricity.
Elementary particles - this one is weird but hear me out, it involves particle physics and the mass-energy equivalence, and requires a particle accelerator. Essentially, colliding matter and antimatter (usually in the form of electron and positron pairs) causes them to annihilate one another and produce high-energy photons. Thus, the matter has been converted into energy (light). Currently, this is completely unfeasable as an energy source (see CERN, 4th FAQ) but considering Iron Lung takes place 300 years in the future on an accelerated technology timeline, who knows what could have been cooked up!
The oceans on the anomalous moons are... almost... human blood. We can assume they contain plasma and red blood cells. In terms of resources:
Plasma contains 90% water, with the rest consisting of proteins, amino acids, gases, glucose, and ions/electrolytes.
Red blood cells contain mostly hemoglobin, which in turn contains iron. Also present are proteins and lipids from the cell membrane.
All of these substances are useful resources.
Tangent. Platelets are possibly not present in the moon blood, as their purpose is to cause clotting, and the ocean is mysteriously liquid. But then, maybe they are present, just not at the surface. Ava says the bottom of the ocean is just congealed blood, so maybe the platelets are present in the ocean at depth. No idea. End tangent.
So, the blood: useful, but for what? Food seems to be what the characters of Iron Lung are thinking, but I propose what they're actually looking for is fuel.
The SM-8 data, via dessathealien:
Organic chemistry is not my strength but blood, as an organic substance, surely contains organic compounds. From the molecular structure above I can see hydrocarbons and alcohols, which can be converted into glucose, then ethanol, as fuel.
So the blood oceans are in fact a massive resource for fuel (and water). I still wouldn’t make it into food, considering all that stuff about "unknown nucleobase that promotes rapid lysing followed by uncontrollable stem cell growth." And I definitely wouldn’t drink it directly, from what we hear in the SM-8.
But it would be very 'indomitable human spirit' to find a creepy unnatural ocean of blood possibly containing the eye of God, poke around it a bit, and start harvesting it for fuel. Picture John COI working on a treatment/processing plant shunting the blood through various reactors, hearing it whisper “join us… jump in the blood…” and going “get fermented, molecule.”
I have a whole other thing on food sources in Iron Lung, but this is long enough.
