I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Let there be light

So our world is ice, with heat and safe living areas forged from volcanic tubes and tunnels. Our people live mostly underground, venturing out only during the night when the sun's gamma rays are hidden.

Outside, they'll be able to see a little by the moonlight, most of the time. And they may even borrow a few tricks from the Egyptians, using mirrors to reflect moonlight down into the tunnels. That's not much light to see by, however.

We could have them not use the visible spectrum at all - maybe they see via echo location, or some other sensory system. It's entirely feasible, but not great for a novel-length piece - the inability to describe what anything looks like in a way the reader will understand makes a story extremely difficult to sustain for any length of time. Unless we're writing a short story, or a novel where the entire point is the sensory difference, we really need our people to be able to see.

So we need a way for our people to at least be able to see the nose in front of their face. We have a few options open to us:

Fire

The boring, mundane version - they have fires burning all the time.  Unlikely in this world - combustable materials would be difficult to come by - forests would grow very slowly in this temperature, and you'd always have to dry the wood out first. It's doubtful that a civilisation could survive with this as its only light source.

Lava

Slightly more sane, but also more localised - areas of constantly-molten lava dot the tunnels, and the people organise their meeting and living areas around them, surviving the darkness of the tunnels in between.

Also difficult, as the fumes and gases from these places can't be healthy, nor would areas like this be common or large enough to house a decent civilisation. Still, it's worth thinking about as a possibility for some areas.

Bioluminescence

Bioluminesence is light created by an organism, as in the case of glow worms or fireflies. The organism uses a particular chemical reaction to generate photons for various reasons - to attract prey, or a mate, or just as a by-product of another process.

We could have all kinds of bioluminescent organisms within our volcanic systems - plants, animals, bacteria and microorganisms. While they don't emit that much light, a whole cave full of them would certainly give enough light to move by, if not to read.

Phosphorescence

A more 'passive' form of emission, where a substance absorbs radiation, stores it, and slowly releases it over time, rather like the various toys and stickers that you 'charge' in light and let them glow. It's feasible (in theory) that the walls of our tunnels could be covered in a substance that absorbs energy and re-emits it slowly.

However, phsophrescence generally needs direct contact with the energy it's absorbing - we can't really have 'tendrils' on the surface delivering light down below. What is possible, however, is that the people create lanterns of this stuff - leave it to charge in the sunlight during the day, and collect them to take down below at night. After all, if they're up and about during night-time, it's quite probable they'd sleep during the day, therefore not needing light all that much.

There's no reason we can't have both, either - some levels of 'natural' lighting provided by bioluminescence in areas, augmented by the "lanterns" created from phosphorescent materials that people collect each dusk and position back outside at dawn.

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