Design Script's ambiguous and versatile Replication Guides <2>

When it was raining cats and dogs earlier, I didn't bother clarifying that drops of water were pouring down from the skies and that canines or felines weren't involved. However, if I were to be addressing a universal audience, I might need to be sensitive to alternate possibilities (beyond amphibious rain, literally) and ensure further clarity.

I'm actually alluding to an audience that includes inter galactic travelers familiar with Diamond rain on Saturn where crystallized carbon falls like tiny diamonds, Sulfuric Acid raining on Venus, Dry Ice snow on Mars and Liquid Helium rain on Jupiter.

Diamonds? Lets get them.

But they need cleaning

Boiling diamonds in acid is one way of cleaning them. We will need sulfuric acid.

So we get rid of unwelcome dry ice from Mars and helium from Jupiter to be left with Diamonds from Saturn, Sulfuric Acid from Venus and Water from Earth.

Sounds like a plan.

We could go about this in two ways : Get rain from a list of planets and select the desired ones or Short list the eligible planets and get only their rain.

Do note the use of Replication Guides (< >) to access elements at sub list level.

But it isn't just the planets, it rains on some moons too. There are icy methane rainstorms on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Titan has a methane cycle similar to our water cycle.

Lets compile a list of the planets in our solar system along with their moons . Planets like Jupiter (79) , Saturn (82), Uranus (27) and Neptune (14) have numerous discovered (so far) moons. For the sake of brevity we will only limit our consideration to a few of their moons.

Many planets have multiple moons and they would need to be contained within sub-lists that are accessed using replication guides.

Planets that have no moons are not ignored, empty lists indicating their absence ensures consistency in sub-list structure. The content is extracted irrespective of quantity.

Beyond the first four rocky planets, the gaseous Jupiter & Saturn and the icy Uranus & Neptune there are the dwarf planets which, besides Pluto (which was classified as such on August 24, 2006), so far includes Ceres, Makemake, Haumea and Eris. The planet list structure gets another level on including the dwarf planets and accessing the moons of all planets will require a chain of replication guides <1><2>.

The chain of replication guides could get even longer as the level that needs to be accessed gets deeper. Like if other planetary systems, are to be considered or if precipitation on other moons is of interest. By the way, snow on Io (Jupiter) is yellow and snow on Triton (Neptune) is pink.

Now that we can use replication guides to access targeted levels, we are better equipped to take on the universe than the inter galactic visitors, camping on Mars, who are still struggling to figure out the correct combination of replication guides that would enable adding us, the shining bright star in the Martian night sky, to their shopping list of planets.

Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems/Texas A&M University. Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Sources

Alison Cooper, "Does it rain on other planets?" 3 September 2014. HowStuffWorks.com. <https://science.howstuffworks.com/rain-other-planets.htm> 24 January 2021

NASA Science, Solar System Exploration <https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/> 24 January 2021

"Boiling Diamonds" <https://en.israelidiamond.co.il/wikidiamond/terms-attributes-the-diamond/boiling-diamonds/> 24 January 2021