Lich, Draugr, Poltergeist, and Phobetor: a neutron star system

[iancampbell]

Neutron star planets' composition would be even weirder than carbonaceous (adamanean?) planets. All those rare heavy elements mixed with oddball transition elements, but starved of the light ones like oxygen and carbon.

So far, I've only heard of this "Island of Stability" in terms of prospects for creating heavy elements whose half lives are measured in microseconds rather than nanoseconds.  As such, I wouldn't expect to find them anywhere in sufficient quantities to be a "substance" as opposed to an isolated scattering of short-lived atoms.

Unless people are Just  Plain Wrong about what the island of stability means, it would seem to me that anyone experiencing time at the same rate we do would find them too ephemeral to be valuable.

Not microseconds. Potentially up to tens(hundreds?) of million years.

There's also the point that with current technology, it's really hard to make the most stable isotopes of the heaviest transuranics. The reason is that the heavier the nucleus is, the higher the optimum proportion of neutrons is. Given that we currently make the really heavy stuff by bombarding heavy actinides with fairly big nuclei, we still come up quite a few neutrons short. As an example, one of the syntheses recently was done with calcium ions, using californium as a target.