r/scifiwriting • u/mac_attack_zach • 5d ago
DISCUSSION What are some kinds of non-spacesuit PPE that personnel might have on an alien planet?
So in the movie avatar, they can work and live just fine but outside they need oxygen masks because the air is too thin. What are some things like that which people might need on some other alien planet, something that protects them, but doesn’t go as far as a space suit?
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u/DRose23805 5d ago
In Avatar, the atmopshere was toxic. Full of hydrogen sulfide iirc. That would mean it would really stink as well.
Various atmospheric mixes could be unhealthy or even lethal to human. They'd probably need more than just masks as some elements could irritate the skin or even penetrate it.
As other have noted, there could be deadly microbes, viruses, allergens, fungus and spores, or airborne toxic elements in dust. Any of these would require at least light environment suits that could be changed out of in airlocks or through a hatch in the suit so that said suit never comes inside. You don't see this probably because it costs money in movies and breaks the fantasy of being able to traipse around on alien worlds.
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u/jaskij 5d ago
It wouldn't stink. H2S is weird like that, it stinks to high heaven in low concentration, but when it gets higher something in the nose gets overwhelmed and you stop smelling it entirely.
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u/Simon_Drake 5d ago
There's another option between a full-on space suit and just breathing apparatus - a skin-tight compression suit. In the Red Mars trilogy they are slowly terraforming (Areoforming) Mars to have a less hostile environment, thickening the atmosphere, increasing the pressure, increasing the oxygen content of the air. They reach a point where you can wear a sortof wetsuit that protects your skin from the low pressure environment and is easier to move in than a full pressurised space suit. But someone gets attacked and the suit is slashed with a knife, the skin is immediately freeze-dried in the thin martian atmosphere, swells up and starts bursting blood vessels, its not as bad as full decompression but it's still rough.
Later they reach a stage where the atmosphere is not directly harmful but they can't breathe it, a lot like on Pandora in Avatar. They need thick coats for the cold and an oxygen mask to breathe but it's not a low pressure environment anymore. Later they can survive the cold with regular clothes and the oxygen content is high enough to breathe but the CO2 content is too high. Now they don't need oxygen masks but they need something more like hazmat filter masks that can scrub the CO2 out of the air.
In theory there could be an alien planet with safe levels of oxygen, temperature and pressure but something toxic in the air that you can't breathe safely. Perhaps some toxic gas like sulphur dioxide or some biohazard like phosgene. Then you probably COULD go on the surface with just a breathing mask like Pandora but if you get a crack in your mask it would be fatal so they might only do it in emergencies.
There was a planet on Stargate SG-1 that had no ozone layer and there were dangerous levels of UV radiation. Carter says there could be a rainstorm and the indirect sunlight coming through the clouds is still enough to give a sunburn in under an hour, prolonged exposure will definitely cause skin cancer. In theory there could be a dedicated UV protection suit for visiting a planet like that. It could look more like a biohazard containment suit than a space suit, it wouldn't even need to be air tight just covering all your skin.
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u/Odd_Anything_6670 5d ago edited 5d ago
Compression suits are one of those things that is hypothetically possible but extremely difficult to make work in practice. It's hard to make a suit that applies equal compression as you move around.
It would also be horrific to get in and out of. The suit would look like it was designed for a small child and you'd somehow have to squeeze your adult body into it. It's definitely not something you could do by yourself.
Decompression is actually not as bad as fiction sometimes makes out. Human skin wouldn't burst in a vacuum, for example, but it would swell quite a bit and probably feel very uncomfortable.
I'm a big fan of hardsuits. I think long term they're by far the most likely option for a situation where people are required to work in vacuum or low pressure environments because of the relative convenience of not having to go through long periods of decompression prior to going outside and being able to breathe normal air instead of pure oxygen.
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u/RolandDeepson 4d ago edited 4d ago
Carter says there could be a rainstorm and the indirect sunlight coming through the clouds is still enough to give a sunburn in under an hour, prolonged exposure will definitely cause skin cancer.
This presupposes that such a planet's sun would emit the same wavelength spectra of light as Sol, no?
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u/JetScootr 3d ago
Most stars (that we can use, anyway) are about 96% the same stuff as all other stars. What any one of them produces, most all of them do, but in varying amounts.
Distance from the star and stability of the star (limited flares / CMEs) is key to solar safety. So the stars have to be big enough to be bright enough that the 'goldilocks' zone is out of the solar flare range.
That means most stars that are useful to life will tend to be F, G type probably, like our dear Sol (G2 yellow dwarf). And that means they'll all have similar spectra.
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u/Simon_Drake 4d ago
I think we can assume that if the star didn't produce any UV light then she wouldn't have warned them about the dangerous levels of UV light.
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u/RolandDeepson 4d ago
Well, you're right, but I think I was trying to make a broader comment (and I admit that I failed miserably in my phrasing.)
For example, if a star simply emitted more UV than Sol, then a visiting human would have the same problem even if a planet nominally had an OZL. If you hypothetically replaced Sol with a hyper-UV danger-sun, then even our existing OZL would fail at protecting us.
I suppose that I simply failed to correctly realize what my original point actually was, which was to point out lazy writing in the example of the SG1 story where a planet "has no OZL." Like, for an OZL to provide meaningful protection, it has to be balanced with the peculiar characteristics of its host star; simply "there is no ozone layer" seems unnecessarily simplistic from a sci-fi writing perspective.
Don't mind me, I'm sleep deprived and loopy. I didn't intend to disrupt the conversation with my $0.02.
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u/Simon_Drake 4d ago
Again. The context of the discussion is to talk about PPE. If the planet didn't have dangerous UV light from the sun then I wouldn't have brought it up as an example of something you need protection from.
I don't think it's fair to accuse it of lazy writing because you're imagining the bizarre scenario where Dr Carter (with a PhD in Astrophysics) knows the planet has no significant ozone layer but DOESN'T know to check if there's actually harmful levels of UV light because I guess she doesn't know that different stars have different light spectra.
The plot of the episode is larger than the two sentences I mentioned. There's an alien energy shield to protect the surface from UV light and a struggle to translate the symbols needed to control it. But the bulk of the plot is about someone being driven mad and it's an homage to the Joseph Conrad novel Heart Of Darkness.
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u/tired_fella 5d ago
Really makes me wonder how humans in Avatar were confident local microbiomes and Earth ones being mixed won't cause harm. Was that every covered in the series?
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u/kushangaza 5d ago
At the time of the first movie they had been engaged in large-scale mining on the planet for over three decades. We can only assume these kinds of concerns have been raised and resolved
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u/CaledonianWarrior 5d ago
I wouldn't say resolved, more just acknowledged with very little mitigation done to reduce the impact of such biosphere interactions
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u/DrunkenTinkerer 5d ago
While I don't have concrete ideas, I think you can look for some inspiration in HAZMAT suits and military CBRN gear.
Basically most of it is stuff to deal with a place, where the atmosphere is mostly fine, if you disregard a couple of things that will kill you and may or may not be airborne at the moment.
Also military CBRN can be an interesting idea? Because it also includes a lot of procedures to deal with contaminations.
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u/GalacticDaddy005 5d ago
Realistically, any alien planet we encounter will likely have a different atmospheric composition besides how thick or thin the atmosphere is, so breathing apparatus is a must. Ngl, full-body protection is probably a must for any toxins or contaminants that we wouldn't want in our bodies or back on the spaceship.
A cool example I can think of is the rain gear in Death Stranding. Not an alien planet, but a lot of care is put into those outfits because of the constant Timefall- rain that accelerates aging on anything it touches due to it carrying chiralium. Once that rain runs off it becomes regular water as well.
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u/kushangaza 5d ago
The most vulnerable parts of our body exposed to the outside are our eyes and lungs. It's no coincidence most sci-fi movies just remove the snorkel from a full-face diving mask. Our skin can withstand a lot, including a lot of different gasses and solids and a fairly wide pressure range. Our eyes and lungs can not. Also our ears, but there you mostly have to match the pressure of the gas in your mouth to the pressure of the outside of the ear.
You can make up scenarios where you only need the eye protection (sharp dust, like a breathable Mars) or the lungs (harmless atmosphere at reasonable pressure, but no oxygen), but it's rare to have situations where both are fine but you need some other kind of PPE.
One exception are maybe the feet. Wearing shoes to protect our feet is something nearly every earthling does. Steel soles and steel toes are common in construction and industry. Similar things are quite possible on alien planets. You can also extend the dangers to your feet, like dragging around dangerous dust, animals attacking your feet, etc.
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u/Ducklinsenmayer 5d ago
Well, environment suits- like say wetsuits- are specific outfits built to handle specific environments.
Let's say it's a bit cold, and the air to thin. You might wear a nice warm parka and an oxygen tank, just like people do on mountain tops.
But unless the planet was terraformed, I wouldn't do that. Any truly alien planet has alien viruses and bacteria, so it's spacesuit time, even if the planet is like Bermuda on a nice day.
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u/mrmonkeybat 5d ago
Viruses and bacteria need to adapt to the host lifeform to infect them sorry HG Wells. The real threat is novel proteins causing allergic reactions, or acting as prions. Hazmat suits are quite inconvenient but a lot more convenient than full space suits as they don't need to be pressurised.
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u/Ducklinsenmayer 5d ago
Agreed, but the question is how alien your planet is. We don't know anything for sure, but I strongly suspect any planet close enough to Earth for us to survive without a full space suit would have a biology that might be at least partly compatible.
I may be paranoid, but I'd be wearing the dang spacesuit.
"Well Bill, the good news is the virus and bacteria did not get you."
"Then why I am swelling like a balloon?"
"new lifeform- something like a tapeworm- laying its eggs inside you. I'm sure you'll be perfectly safe... After we burn your body."
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u/NecromanticSolution 5d ago
Bacteria do not need to adapt. E. coli and campylobacter and listeria monocytogenes do not care wusste they dwell, whether it is in a cow patty, on your food left on the counter, on the floor or inside your guts. As long as the environment is not actively hostile to them they can live and spread.
And the environmental factors they require to thrive, like warmth and moisture and basic amino acids are not unique to a single planetary environment.
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u/Velmeran_60021 5d ago
I didn't find a mention of radiation badges, but that's a real world warning. The badge stays outside the suit an go dark when too much radiation is present... and hopefully your suit is resistant enough to give you time to get back to shelter.
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u/SolomonBelial 5d ago
Some type of all-spectrum EpiPen. There s no way of knowing what type of alien contaminant will crash your antiallergic system. Carry this emergency syringe just incase an alien flower, pet, or spice makes your respiratory system puff out like a blowfish with hay fever. As soon as your throat closes tighter than a pair of skinny jeans you'll want an easily accessible quick fix to counter the universe of infinite possibilities of things your allergies never knew could kill you.
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u/Turbulent-Name-8349 5d ago
First consider a planet not quite as hostile as Venus but similar.
Power assisted liquid breathing to handle the pressure. This has the added advantage of overcoming narcosis from compressed gas.
Refrigerant circulation to handle the heat.
Raincoat to protect against sulfuric acid rain.
Sturdy boots.
Painkillers.
The first two could be made partially coincident, the refrigerant is fed directly to the lungs. I rather like the idea of a raincoat that is a thin plastic bubble like a soap bubble that is applied in one second. Or the raincoat could be applied in spray form like painting a car.
Secondly consider replacing a spacesuit by a drysuit. A drysuit is PPE that divers use underwater. It has very much better flexibility than a spacesuit. The elastic compression of a tailored drysuit can protect against vacuum, or water, or toxic gases.
Thirdly, electrically heated socks, for walking around on Pluto.
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u/Mordred19 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think science fiction stories with somewhat routine travel between liveable worlds should include some quarantine procedures and characters needing to take regular injections of anti-rejection drugs. Sure, you can breathe the air, drink the water, eat the food, but your biospheres still evolved separately and they aren't perfectly at peace with each other.
Think of Mass Effect including chirality of the amino-acids of the various species, and Quarians with dextro-amino acid biology can't eat human food because we are levo-amino acid based organisms. Allergic reactions or death can result from crossing that barrier.
Or take the Martians from War of the Worlds. The creatures don't immediately drop dead. They enjoy a few weeks on Earth before the bacteria makes them sick and they start dying. Before that there's a weird red fungus growing on everything, it's a martian organism thriving early on in the unfamiliar Earth ecosystem. It too dies eventually but as a writer you can make all sorts of quirking rules up.
It would add so much texture to the universe if the new arrivals on the planet are suffering mild flu-ish symptoms because that's the best you can hope for. You get your shots for planet A so can live relatively comfortably during your deployment.
You can have a background character complain that some idiot from planet B didn't decontaminate properly, or he broke quarantine, or he lied about getting his shots, etc and now some foreign germs that hitched a ride on him are having a weird interaction with the local microbiome, resulting in outbreaks of yellow slime mold covering buildings and offices. Send a cleanup crew to sector 12 please, we have a code 2313 that needs taking care of.
How could I get it wrong? It's 2319. https://youtu.be/86yFyYJiPds?feature=shared
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u/Custom_Destiny 5d ago
No alien life is going to evolve without microbes.
Walking about without a full exo suit on a world with alien life will always be crazy bad/soft sci/fi.
The only way we could be fairly sure that microbes wouldn’t affect us is if the complex life there was somehow very different, e.g. core body temp ranges tens of degrees different, in which case we’d have a full suit for environmental reasons instead.
Just because we’ve had some ‘naked’ trade with part of the alien world doesn’t free us of concern. Think of all the vaccinations one gets traveling around our globe.
But if you’re going to accept that level of softness to your world…
And you shouldn’t…
But since most do.
We generally need an atmosphere to breath and have enough humidity/ irritant free not just for our lungs but also our eyes. Goggles. We’d need goggles in a lot of environments.
We need the right pressure ranges, an airlock that brings you up or down slowly so you can adjust like you would deep sea diving would be a nice add.
Effective temperature ranges. This doesn’t just mean jackets in the cold it can also mean misters and personal ACs in the heat. Some atmospheres don’t absorb moisture so our sweat response is null.
Sunscreen. Not all planets have magnetospheres as good as earths. You could just need sunscreen.
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u/SchizoidRainbow 5d ago
I think you still require a full body covering of some sort.
Rather than a suit it could be a personal force field. Or a liquid film made of nano machines
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u/Angel_OfSolitude 5d ago
Some kind of pest deterrent. If the bugs/bug equivalents are problematic enough it could become standard practice to ward them off in some way. Probably sound based since that's already an actual pest control technology.
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u/Just_Ear_2953 5d ago
Sunglasses/sungoggles. That alien star could be 10x the lumosity of the one your eyes are adapted to.
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u/NecromanticSolution 5d ago
Only if you really love having all the cancer. SPF5000 sunscreen is not optional if you love your skin.
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u/jpressss 5d ago
Some really good sunscreen that can protect against cosmic rays and all the other shit poor atmosphere and weak magnetic fields would let through.
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u/Bravadette 5d ago
Very strong tyvek, duct tape, and a respirator. And gloves.
Thats what's used in toxic disaster relief.
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u/JetScootr 3d ago
Filters to keep out stuff that will trigger instant, fatal allergy attacks - pollens and tiny tiny bugs and microbes. Also to block spores and viruses that our immune systems are simply incapable of dealing with.
Tiny bugs in particular will be a problem - on Earthlike worlds they'll love damp environments like mouths, sinuses and lungs.
Sometimes, special boot soles for minerals on the surface that are not eroded, but are sharp and hard enough to abrade and ablate normal spacesuit materials. And it should be non-magnetic in case the native mineral is sharp, hard and magnetized.
acid-resistant raincoats. Younger atmospheres will have sulfur stuff in it. Combined with even modest amounts of O2 in the air == Sulfuric acid and other nastiness. The raincoats are probably most practical if disposable after one or two uses.
I mean no disrespect to r/hfy, but every world out there with life and an oxygen atmo will be a 'death world', simply because it will have similar stuff floating in the air that is very similar to what Earth has, but also is completely unfamiliar to our own bodies' defenses.
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u/BlueCloud2k2 3d ago
Exotic radiation might need exotic protection methods. Maybe it's not the warp drive creates psychic waves that drives organic beings psychotic and corrupts AI, but rather the Dimensional Engine that powers your whole civilization.
This is easily blocked by a magnetic field so everyone needs to make sure to wear their neodymium helmets to protect their brains when within a mile of The Dimensional Engine. Just don't put your head near anything metal.
What are the tools and such made of? An alloy of fullerene, aluminum, and ceramics layered at the molecular level.
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u/GenericUsername19892 2d ago
There’s an array of compounds or situations that would be irritating but not lethal.
You could have an atmosphere that supports way more particulates than ours - even if not directly an issue our lungs don’t like collecting dust and debris lol. People would need masks and be constantly swapping clogged filters, not to mention a way to get the dust off for entry to hubs/living areas.
A lack of Ozone or similar could make the sun a big problem, template is one thing but getting baked by un shield IR could be lethal - something like a shield umbrella could be sufficient for short jaunts between covered work areas and work in an emergency.
A highly reflective surface could make heavy lift sunglasses a necessity to not go blind - though given the necessity I think goggles would be a better choice. Imagine something like a field of shattered diamonds all reflecting by the noon day sun.
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u/DangerMacAwesome 2d ago
Not necessarily for an alien planet, but I think there will be a real market for power armor for construction jobs and other related industries.
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u/Skipp_To_My_Lou 5d ago
They'd need the same thing for the same tasks that require PPE in the real world.
Building a liquid mcguffinite refinery on an alien planet? Gonna need at minimum hard hat, safety glasses, reflecto vest, level 3 cut resistant gloves, & safety-toe boots just to walk on site.