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...")

• 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?
• 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, reverse time, and parallel worlds
  • ecology
  • evolution
  • populations and eco-crashes
  • dreams on uplift (the genetic engineering of intelligent species)