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 book "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 and flooded coasts	Mars Reborn Terraformed, but emphatically not Terra	Venus Unveiled the ugly duckling becomes a swan

Set 3: The Biosphere Variations

Worlds so unEarthlike that most exobiologists would write them off... prematurely. An ongoing series, currently two planets (top row) and three moons (lower), all with life, most with intelligent life.

SERRANA Cross Earth with Mars-- How low can you go?	LYR Not a hot Jupiter, but... a tepid Neptune?

PEGASIA a huge Earthlike moon of a hot gas giant	THARN a living Marslike moon with just 0.1% 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. How would life differ in a steambath world? (25% complete)

• (started but on hold) Xanadu: Titan's "seas" seem to be just tarry dirt/mud, not the hydrocarbon seas exobiologists hoped for. What if Titan were "wetter"? Some say extreme cold would slow biochemistry so much that life still wouldn't have evolved--at least not far. What it they're wrong? (15% complete)
  

• 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)

  Kakalea is a world so Earthlike by the numbers that it should be ideal. But through sheer geographical bad luck, its continents are mostly dry and barren--wrong latitude, wrong shape, mountains blocking storm tracks...

• (don't click yet!) Lateria: 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)

• a Venerian prehistory for Earth?: What the Pteros Tell
• a dream pointing out how to build domeless colonies inside certain dense planetoids: Witch at the Iron Core
• A collection of dreams about terraforming, climatology and other planets. I include these links because I find these dreams entertaining and (surprisingly) more astute than many people's conscious thoughts on these topics.
  • terraforming
  • global warming and climatology
  • dreams of Mars
  • dreams of Luna
  • a dream of Io
  • dreams of other worlds in general
  • Dreams of time: futurology, the deep past, time travel, reverse time, and parallel worlds
  • ecology
  • evolution
  • dreams on uplift (the genetic engineering of intelligent species)
  • populations and eco-crashes

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