Cerberus: the ultimate desert coast under a white-dwarf sun. I’ve worldbuilt for it once or twice on this website, but although alien, I haven’t explored just how alien Sirius B’s planet in my fictional universe would be until recently. There are also new aspects to … Continue readingCerberus: A World Out of Classic Sci-Fi?
Garbage. You just can’t get away from it. Not even in Challenger Deep, it seems, the darkest and most distant of all seabeds. Over the course of exploration of this mysterious reach, which started in 1960 but only truly picked up pace in the 2010s … Continue readingA World Without Garbage
I ask: “what if: a bromofluorocarbon world?” “A what?” you might reply. It’s perhaps one of the most underrated of all alternate history what-ifs: it’s well known that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), while inert and non-toxic on the surface, destroy ozone when they waft up to the … Continue readingBeautiful and Terrible as the Dawn
Ah…the white nights, the glow that scatters the midnight sun’s illumination beyond the polar circles. But it only extends down to about 60 degrees latitude, below which the sun is too far below the horizon to light up the sky, and that will never change…or … Continue readingA Noctilucent World…
Go through the list of the nearest stars, and binaries abound…but few are the close binaries needed for the iconic twin sunset scenes from classic sci-fi. Gliese 866, better known by its variable-star designation EZ Aquarii, is the nearest possibility: located 11.1 light-years from Earth, … Continue readingBlack Seas, Red Sky, Three Suns: Worldbuilding EZ Aquarii
Astrobiology, worldbuilding…you see so many red dwarf, orange dwarf, sun-like systems you feel like your eyes are going to roll after a while. Well…I’m going to flip the script: what about a paradise of a planet, orbiting a giant star that’s well off the main … Continue readingWinter Sports Under Twin Suns: Worldbuilding Capella
Where is the nearest Earth twin? It’s a crucial question for my sci-fi fictional universe, that I try to base on real scientific information about exoplanets but also keep interesting. Habitable planets abound in the closest star systems, but none are quite Earth-like. Proxima Centauri’s … Continue readingThe Pale Blue Dot, Filtered Through a Dream
Well, my brainstorming for planets kick continues, now with a little tool for calculating planetary equilibrium temperature (we need better worldbuilding software, after all…), and also with some ideas for a planetary system that was discovered early on but is now often overlooked: Upsilon Andromedae. … Continue readingThe Pale Green Dot, Filtered through a Dream
As you might know, I’ve been on a worldbuilding kick recently, brainstorming out planets…and I find there’s a real shortage of good, easy-to-use calculators for equilibrium temperature, surface gravity, greenhouse effect, planetary density (and plausible radius), which substances that might be found are solid, liquid, … Continue readingWe Need Better Worldbuilding Software…
Thalassa this, Thalassa that…yes, my version of Proxima Centauri’s potentially habitable planet (speculative, but based on real science!) is a fascinating place, but what about the rest of the system? Proxima is just one part of a triple-star system…two of which are some of the … Continue readingWorldbuilding Alpha Centauri