Planetocopia is a group of model worlds supporting intelligent life. They fall into four series: Tilt! (Earth with different poles), Futures (set 1000 years from now), the Biosphere Variations (diverse experiments in planetology), and Caprices (whimsically altered Earths). Behind-the-scenes pages include the new Planetocopia interview, Carpentry Tips for World-Builders (how I make 'em), The Heart Hath Its Reasons (why I make 'em), Tech Corner (a chart comparing 'em), World-Builders (influences: others who make 'em). Here's a group snapshot of the Planetocopia family, all to scale. Click for tours!



Set 1: TILT! Alternate Earths that evolved with our geography, only tilted. Shift the axis, and you shift climates, sea levels... and evolution. SEAPOLE

a warm, flooded world

SHIVERIA

a steady-state ice age

TURNOVIA

the world on its head

JAREDIA

a world testing the theories in Jared

Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel Set 2: Futures Three worlds on the same day 1000 years from now--all of them profoundly transformed: DUBIA

Earth has doubled CO2,

thawed poles, flooded coasts MARS REBORN

Terraformed, but

emphatically not Terra VENUS UNVEILED

the ugly duckling

becomes a swan Set 3: The Biosphere Variations Inhabited worlds so unEarthlike that most exobiologists would write them off--prematurely. Not all are even planets--the second row are moons. SERRANA

Cross Earth with Mars--

How low can you go? LYR

Not a hot Jupiter, but...

a tepid Neptune? KAKALEA

Earthlike by the numbers

but Australian bad luck! PEGASIA

a huge Earthlike moon

of a hot gas giant

THARN

a living Marslike moon

with just 0.2% of Earth's water

OISIN

a giant Europa

walking on thin ice



CAPSICA is a hot world, averaging 50°C (122°F)--that's 35°C (63°F) hotter than Earth, and daytime temperatures in the Capsican lowlands will run 10-20° hotter still. Our deepsea vent communities prove that complex life can adapt to extreme heat; but exobiologists still focus on cool worlds like Earth. Would life differ on a hot world? Just as some of Earth's iced over, some of Capsica is Earthlike; would these biological "coolspots" be oases... or backwaters? Is Capsica a steambath or oven, wet or dry? Wet seemed too easy: our Carboniferous squared! So I went with hot but drier, with shallow seas and patchy rain patterns like Earth. Or are they like Earth? Evaporation's fast; small seas generate rain, but rivers shrink as they run...

(40% complete--planet built and some tours written, but life-forms unsketched and half the regions still untourable.)



XANADU: Most of Titan's "seas" seem to be just tarry dirt/mud, not the extensive hydrocarbon seas exobiologists hoped for. Only the north pole looks "wet". What if Titan were just a bit wetter? Some say extreme cold would slow biochemistry so much that life still wouldn't have evolved--at least not far. What if that's Terracentrism? Xanadu will scale up Titan slightly, warm it a little, fill all its seabeds and lakebeds, and see what happens.

(15% complete, on hold till I firm up the global map and read up on cryochemistry.)



LIBRATIA a world that faces its tiny sun, but since it's in an eccentric orbit, it swings . The sun doesn't hover OR circle, it... wobbles. The result? Nearly a third of Libratia never sees night, nearly a third never sees the sun... and over a third has diurnal cycles! But strange ones.

(5% complete, on hold--geography solid, but orbital/tidal issues demand recalculation from scratch. Ah, but the concept is too tempting...)

. The sun doesn't hover OR circle, it... wobbles. The result? Nearly a third of Libratia never sees night, nearly a third never sees the sun... and over a third has diurnal cycles! But strange ones. (LATERIA): Don't click yet! A planet tilted 90 degrees like Uranus. Can a world spinning on its side, with extreme seasons, develop life? If so, what kind?

(0% complete. "Late last night, upon the stair, I met a world that wasn't there...")

Set 4: Caprices This new set of worlds in progress is a ragbag of whims: poor old Earth with just a few tiny changes... Siphonia

Earth with most of the ocean siphoned

off, leaving just shallow seas on the

abyssal plains 4-5 km below our coasts.

It's a wild, steamy topography down there,

while the old continents turn alpine...

85% complete--short on portraits & scenery Inversia

Up is down and down is up!

Land is sea, sea land;

trenches are peaks, peaks trenches,

islands and reefs are lakes,

lakes are reefs and islands...

25% complete--first tour!: Arctica Abyssia

start with Inversia's inside-out geology--

now pour on as much water as Earth has.

Miles-deep seas, with tiny continents

where our abysses and trenches lay.

Unrecognizable, yet weirdly familiar...

Completed 2017

NEXT!

In 2016 I finished Kakalea, in 2017 Abyssia. Thanks to GEBCO (the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) Inversia's on the front burner again! It'll be slow--even at a million square km a day, it'll take many months, for Inversia has more land to map than my other worlds. But you can test the first tour, of Arctica--an easy region! I'm going slow partly because my dreams have warned me to take my time on this one.

Inversia's companion-world, Siphonia, is much farther along. Its premise is simpler but equally drastic: drop a hose 5 km down (16,000') in the northern Pacific, and suck the oceans up til the hose runs dry. Nine-tenths of our water, gone. Now wait 100,000 years and see how life's adjusted! The new sea level varies around the world--the Sea of Japan, being nearly landlocked, dropped very little, while the Mediterranean and Caribbean dropped 1-2 km (3-7000'), the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are now a chain of seas 4 km (13,000') down, and the North and South Pacific (now two separate seas) are 5 km down (16,000'). The old continents are generally alpine or Tibetan; most of the livable land is now in the abyss. And those lands are rugged, spectacular, and bizarre--the secret face of Earth. Siphonia's regions all have maps now, but ground-level sketches and descriptions of scenes, critters and cultures are still thin.

I'm slowly, spottily adding regional tours to Capsica. Maddening to have half a world tourable and the other half not. It's just difficult to design tours for some regions that don't bake or steam you to death. Things will speed up once I decide how the natives look.

I need to rethink Libratia in light of the last few years of fuss about its fundamentals. Probably I should enlarge the whole system, move the planet farther out, halve the tidal effects. Still, that won't satisy some readers sure it'll be a volcanic hellhole (I dunno; people overestimate the effect, very strong on Earth because it spins relative to its primary, maximizing tidal warming; tidelocked, merely nodding worlds are massaged much less). Other readers swear by the new atmospheric studies suggesting not all close-in worlds will be tidelocked at all--hot dayside air is less dense, and it works out that the atmosphere actually protects a planet's spin. So would Libratia slowly spin like Venus or Mercury, not nod? Other readers complain Libratia's orbital eccentricity would decay to circularity--killing libration. That'd take the fun out of it! But the moon has equally big tidal stresses on it, yet it nods every which way (and isn't erupting this week). We'll see.

Maybe all those helpful critics will be distracted by the discovery of our (hold your breath) NINTH PLANET! I think the odds look decent by 2025. Can we name it Planet Ix? What a great retro sound! Not just for the Roman numeral, plus the pun on X... it's already a place name! L. Frank Baum wrote "Queen Zixi of Ix" a century ago. If we can use Shakespearean names on Uranian moons and Tolkien placenames on Pluto, why not Oz out in the Kuiper Belt?

World Dream Bank homepage - Art Gallery - Favorites: Shorts, Great Dreams, Art - On dreamwork - Bibliography

Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles

Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sh - Si-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ

Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites