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...)

• (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...")

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?

• A 3D portrait of Io I sculpted for fun. Not really Planetocopian, no what-if premise, just portraiture plus a bit of speculation. But oh those crazy cliffs and colors!
• A recently rediscovered 1990 dream prompting the Planetocopia series: Tilt the Globe to Maximize Biomass
• A Venerian prehistory for Earth?: What the Pteros Tell
• Would we notice a Dino Singularity?
• What killed the dinosaurs isn't as sure as you think--and ignorance can kill us: Volcanism, Impacts and Mass Extinctions
• A dream pointing out how to build domeless colonies inside certain dense planetoids: Witch at the Iron Core
• Shout in a Crowd, or, How to Survey Galactic Civilization, a dream claiming some dreamers wander the galaxy sampling the frequency of intelligent life! Curiously, it implied the same range I heard months later at a planetology lecture: on the order of a million civilizations and billions of biospheres.
• More dreams on terraforming, climatology and other planets. I find these dreams both entertaining and (surprisingly) more astute than many people's conscious thoughts on these topics.
  • terraforming
  • global warming and climatology
  • dreams of Mars, Luna and other worlds
  • Dreams of time: past, future, parallel worlds and reverse time
  • ecology
  • evolution
  • populations and eco-crashes
  • dreams on uplift (the genetic engineering of intelligent species)