by Samantha Cavet

fernlichtsicht

Turtle and colorful friends 🐢🐠🐟🐡 !.

💙🔹 ~ Sapphire Sandwich ~ 🔹💙 (d0peslimes)

(Credit this post if you use!) (ko-fi)

💙Deep Blue Stars💙

Yarragardee Basin, Mangala, 7995 A.D.

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Accompanying music: You’re On Fire by They Might Be Giants. Summer road trip music of all time, in my opinion.

Here’s a little expository write-up on the history and geography of the worlds shown here. Someday I’ll have more to show of the personal story of these two critters and their travels; until then, a more macro-level description.

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Mangala and its sister world Kahira (visible in the background) are binary planets, orbiting one another in a manner not entirely unlike that of Pluto and Charon in the Solar System. Mangala is a relatively small world - just about twenty percent the mass of the Earth, something like if you took two copies of Mars and smushed them together; it was a frozen, dusty, and arid place when transhumanity first established a permanent presence in the Tahoka system some four hundred years ago. Since those early days, terraforming using a Birchian soletta system (a huge but foil-thin Fresnel lens of mirrors, with a secondary focal lens for burning atmospheric gasses out of the regolith) has rendered it shirtsleeve habitable to baseline humans across much of the surface, although the global water inventory remains low* and the air in the “continental” uplands is stratospheric, with only the hardiest lichens establishing a foothold. Most of Mangala’s major metropolitan areas are located in the deep rift valleys and basins, where air pressure is highest.

Kahira, on the other hand, is arguably** too small for effective terraforming, having only a third the mass of its sister world (a little over the mass of Mercury). Some of its larger rift valleys and craters have been tented over, aerated, and planted with tall low-gravity forest and grassland, a style of habitat construction dating back to the first Mars colonists almost six thousand years ago. Industrial complexes and underground cities sprawl out across the bare surface of the moon, with huge low-gravity lava tubes seeing extensive urban development.

The Yarragardee Basin, pictured above, is a graben basin in Mangala’s northern hemisphere, notable for the historic industrial city of Tirupati - here we see two road-trippers between cities on the basin’s great plain, taking a break in the long late afternoon of a sunset-day***. Having stopped for a night at a motel near Tirupati’s aerospace complex, they’re now continuing their journey to the city of Redmond-Tonasket, located in the Woronora Valles trench system about two thousand kilometers to the southwest.

* While plenty of water could have been imported from Tiandonias’s cometary halo, it was decided not to do so in order to avoid inundating pre-existing cities in the valleys and deep basins. The extremely humid hothouse conditions that come after slamming dismantled ice moons through the stratosphere at over six kilometers a second were also broadly considered unacceptable.

** Smaller worlds have been terraformed in transhuman space, both by worldhouse and more open-air methods, but it’s largely the kind of thing that much more energy-rich systems do as a vanity project. Kahira may someday see blue skies, but likely not for a thousand years at least. (edit, one year later: I actually changed up some of this while simulating this system for stability. I’ll be posting more about this soon.)

*** Mangala and Kahira, being tidally locked to each other such that they always show one another the same face as they orbit their common center of mass, both have days exactly as long as their orbital periods - 403 kiloseconds, or roughly 112 hours. This is for convenience divided into month-weeks comprising four “circadian days” of 100 kiloseconds (~26 hours), with the remaining three kiloseconds added on to the last day of a month-week to keep synchronization.

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The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

I see your "you don't sound...russian?" and "can he read?" and I raise you "why are you wearing shades in the middle of the night?"

Progress on a couple of other prints i'm making on the side for a school convention!

im considering making the gt print something that can be physically shipped to folks as well...though i'll have to figure out the logistics before going through with it

Fade away 🌊💙 !.