Plants and Architecture: January 2017

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The first moon to develop life was the third one from the Planet Gasfapples, eighth around Procyon A, the raccoon star.

This life, obviously, started in the oceans.

It would not be the last.

Coming up next: Episode two.

As luck would have it, due to complex geoastronomical abnormalities, seven of the moons of Gasfapples were located in habitable zones.

Only five hundred million years later, life wiggled in another.

By a billion years in, five moons had life on them. By then, land plants had begun to carpet moon four.

Ordovician sea fauna flourished on the fourth moon first. But by the second billion years in, the sixth moon had seaweed. But nothing like the seaweed we're used to.

Transmission Three.

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These symbols are the sun with the planets and all the moons, in case that isn't clear.

Moon four had dinosaurs first, too. And they were the first to develop mushrooms, after quite a humid carboniferous period. They were first to crack angiosperms out of land plants, nearly three billion years along.

Vertebrates developed on moons six, three, and seven roughly at the same time, a full billion years after moon four. Moon four's vertebrates crawled out of their oceans during a pangeaial desert period. In fact, crabs on that world became quite the significant land animals. They grew giant and juicy, traversing deserts as camels do. They kicked pieces of sand into the sun

As they ran. They gathered at rivers and water holes. They dug.

Nothing of the sort happened in moon six, for example. Moon six's fauna was tame to the point of boring. Though they did get quite the snapping salamander, in only the second amphibian group to show up in the solar system after moon four's. Formidable snapping salamander this guy was. Angry alien creatures who could easily ward off the enormous carnivorous fish from the depths of earlier on. So big you could ride them, those snapping salamanders. They traversed the oceans of moon six. "We're going go to go fuck shit up in this boring-fauna-ass world," they said. They fought megalodons in canyons in the deepest oceans, deeper than Earth's, but on a rock only six seventeenths her size.

Meanwhile, back on moon four, the breakup of the continental shell gave rise to lush coastal mountains, from their tropical zones all the way to their polar regions. In moon three, a non-vertebrate fish developed tetrapods. They slid along volcanic cliffs, eating the squickly purslane from the sea. Like octopi, they sluck in and out of tiny pores.

But moon four was the first to get reptiles, as you know. It just took a few vertebrate amphibians to wander into those deserts, where they were baked into reptiles. They grew and swelled into the aforementioned dinosaurs, but they were not blasted into extinction. They were hunted.

And so it went that moon four was the first to develop primates, just a few tens of millions of years after the first mammals. Humans had developed.

And in no time they were all over the planet, which by then was a bunch of small broken-up continental masses and islands, some hot, some cold - due to the presence of a continent at one pole and a semi-closed sea at the other, lucky them - and they developed quite a complex marine culture based on hunting and kayaking massive animals and distances, as well as a rich diet of seaweeds. They were also endowed with the understanding that long-distance swimming made their bodies more sexually desirable. If dolphins are chimpanzees, the first peoples of moon four were bonobos. Moon four developed religion, but it would be considered bizarre and heretical by the religions of Earth. Their religion was about boats. Boats and hoes, you might say. Moon four developed a complex boat-making culture as a result, and habitually planted a rich biodiversity of trees from the shores inward, which they needed to build their boats. Moon four's people ran through the forests. Naked. They scaled towering snowy mountains. Drunk. They urinated on each other. Sober. No. They did not do that last thing. Anyway, they learned to bathe in live jellyfish tentacles, learning to enjoy it the way Earth children love to eat atomic Warheads, and it carried quite the disinfectant effect, from the skin to the blood. In return, they attracted biting asshole fish, which the jellyfish loved. Now nice and clean, the people of moon four ran back into the forests.

Veritable coastal cultures developed next to the sparkling oceans of moon four. Adapted to both marine and terrestrial environmentalists, the monkey men and women of moon four were still hundreds of thousands of years ahead of agriculture, if it would ever happen at all. Also, they were occasionally gobbled up by dinosaurs.

Three unknown moons had developed life around the same time as moon four. Moons one, eight, and nine, far off in the darker recesses of not-that close, had also developed fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and, bizarrely, primates. These remarkably similar conditions drove crazy the agricultural primates of moon eight.

"He has left evidence of His work," said some groups of them, while other groups claimed that you must wear the parachute trousers twenty-four hours a day forever, or you will be acting against the rules. One day, shortly after a set of middle ages, somebody with tight pants set a telescope to moon nine - remember we're on moon eight - only to discover farmers only 5,000 years behind! Naturally, it created a great political and spiritual upheaval among the peoples of moon eight, still centuries ahead of space travel. The peoples of moon nine, of course, had no idea. They simply traded livestock for their daughters, just like here on Earth. Just like in the hinterlands of moon eight, as it was still going on when the first moon eightling pointed a telescope at moon nine and saw activity, clear as day, sharp as the shadows of men and camels treversing the steppes. For the first time in moon eight's turbulent history, there was proof of human-like life on the brown-green continents afloat in the bright blue oceans of moon nine. You could see their farmland. You could see the places they had not yet traversed; five of their eight continents were still covered in deep green forest or white ice. Neither of these two worlds would develop space travel before the people of moon one, who had reached a technological level just a few decades beyond that of early twenty-first century Earth, all while absolutely none of you were paying attention. They had launched a satellite in orbit around moon nine in their year 6968, just in time for local (and controversial) celebrations ringing in the one time in history in which the year would match everybody's passwords. People stood around in formal groups, but instead of drinking champagne, they drank fermented juice of an extraterrestrial pumpkin squash. They high-fived one another, even as people protested in the streets: leaving the peoples of moon nine alone, they demanded. Hot Claudiora Bananerson burned her bra, and all the boys gathered in a university square to watch. Bacteria, guys, come on. What are we doing?

But the satellite arrived around moon nine and hooked into orbit nonetheless. There it was. What a disaster.

A world away, the peoples of moon eight had mapped out the surface of moon nine on paper, and they published and distributed it with a Gutenberg press machine. It sparked controversy and imagination. "What if there were continents still undiscovered on our own world?" they wondered. In fact, there were three continents, plus dozens of large islands, at least two-thirds of which had anatomically-modern moon eightlings on them.

The moon eightlings were deeply affected by their observation of the satellite from moon one, orbiting moon nine. "What the fuck is that thing?" they contemplated. They came up with theories.

"It's natural!" said Karl Turnhopper of southern Whackhammer Village. "It was formed by collisions and smackages."

"It's clearly manmade," said Septembifer Chockman. "There's no way the primitive clowns of Willayner World could produce their own space machine."

"It was placed there by the Great Giggers Himself," said the Mayor, His Most Important Jackals Sandberdoo. "He watches over us all."

There were those on moon eight who were not impressed by the announcement of mysterious unreachable people on moon nine. "It's a happy accident," they said. "The presence of life on our two moons is the result of unique conditions in our lunar system, not nearly enough to imply that life may have formed anywhere elsewhere except these two places in particular."

And, of course, just as on Earth where this happens regularly even before mass announcement of direct observation of extraterrestrial life, people on moon eight would come out of the bushes with stories of probing, yonking, and no-nutter-grabbing. People on moon nine sometimes did this as well.

As far as the people back on moon one were concerned, they were <i>were</i> the only intelligent life in the universe. As far as they could tell, there was nothing out there but the wet yuckly salamanders of moon six, and the athletic smug assholes of moon four who were even behind the dumb barbarians of the eighth and ninth moons, having not produced agriculture. "Screw those guys," people liked to say, over there on moon one. Well, them and the sniveling jerks they had observed on a moon of the next planet closer to Procyon. Are you following all of this? Do you care?

Show me some signs of giving a shit, and I will continue to elaborate on this concept.

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In 7682, the people of Moon Eight experienced a hot war followed by a cold war followed by a space race.

It was quite bizarre, however you roll the dice, that such a specific arrangement of pool balls could occur twice in the same universe, but indeed, it happened. In fact, such a situation occurs on about 40% of the worlds on which intelligent primates sprout. Other common scenarios include a space race followed by a hot war followed by chaos and destruction followed by the taking over of a delicious species of potato across new continents followed by long periods without war, and a cold war followed by a lukewarm war followed by a severe shoe shortage caused by nothing other than incompetence followed by a space race. There's no limit to the possibilities here.

In 7706, the first manned space vehicle was sent into space by one of the powers. In 7712, a crew landed on a particularly large round comet which had been in orbit around Moon Eight the entire time, which is why Moon Eight had tides in its oceans. One by one, individuals and crews were sent out into space to marvel at how stupid everybody back at home was. "Wars and environmental destruction? Really?" they said. "That is what you are going to do when you're sitting atop a rock that beautiful?"

These developments were not lost to the people of Moon One. They watched Moon Eight's space race with both amusement and trepidation. "The fools," they thought, in accordance with their local stereotypes about the people from Moon Eight. "Who do they think they are? They'll never pilot a propeller-plane, let alone a space ship. Oh? They did it? Weird. Let's keep an eye on them."

Moon Eight's big dream was Moon Nine. Imagine, they thought. Landing there. Playing pranks on the primitive locals. Breathing the air of another world.

And on Moon Nine, a Black Plague raged, but caused by a completely different category of organism and with completely different symptoms. Still, the death toll was high on Moon Nine, during their 300s and Moon Eight's 7700s. Moon Oneians, aware of the ridiculousness of the story they were being written into and unwilling to interfere, let it happen, although they did send in occasional covert biohazard guys to help clean up the bodies.

One evening in space, a contingency of biohazard guys from Moon One had a collision with a contingency of explorers from Moon Eight which had been en route to Moon Nine on a momentous and historic journey. The political aftermath of this unlikely blunder was therefore very intense.

Moon Eight's spacecraft was totaled. It was bunched up at the hood, and a spiderweb of cracks ran through the windshield and a total of seven of the side windows on both sides. Terrified and embarrassed, the biohazard crew began to discuss who was at fault.

"Definitely their fault," said the driver. "Those idiots have no idea how to navigate space. They have no business out here. Look at all these safety violations. Sending a manned crew to an inhabited planet without even properly sterilizing their equipment. Mouth breathing."

"No, this is our fault," said Leon, the ship's cook. "We're the adults here. We're the ones with navigation skills and advanced equipment. We knew they were going to be taking this route."

"Don't be daft," said the driver to Leon, the cook. "When a sixteen-year-old and a forty-year-old crash into each other on a country road, is it ever not the sixteen-year-old's fault? So they're kids. They should have been watching out. They can steer. They should be watching for objects."

"That wouldn't fly in court, they're no way this is ever going to fly in the political disaster that will surely follow. People at home are going to crucify us in the media. They'll hate us."

"Hey, look, the crew is freaking out," said Jim, the co-pilot, who had been silent until now.

The biohazard guys quickly and easily rescued the astronauts, using available technology that's routinely built onto ships in that world; namely, a vaccuum cleaner.

Plants and Architecture

Saturday, January 14, 2017

yet another hand-drawn world map

[.:.:.•..:.:.::.] moons story

Political outlook 2017; 2016 quick review; 2016 - 2020 second-half-of-the-decade general five-year plan

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