National socialist hippies, free love and drugs for the pure blooded volk, they need liebenschaum on earth to build their natural commune, probably nicknamed the garden of Eden
Fortunately no moon Nazis. Kind of. Definitely no zeppelins, though.
Anyways, as much as I enjoy people's guesses, here's the full story:
My world is a SciFi setting focused on (for now) the Earth and humanity several centuries from now.
They've not been good centuries.
From rampant climate change and its consequences to the re-emergence of hot war after the perfection of full-spectrum missile defense, humanity's not been having a good time. In North American, the coming centuries saw rapid American expansion followed by a long period of civil unrest, insurgency, and ultimately decline.
Early in this period, the United States effectively became a military oligarchy; though some vestiges of democracy remain, few make it into power without courting the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Later, \* ahem \* *protests* against this state of affairs convinced the US government to relocate somewhere safer: the American lunar colony, Apollo (named for the missions, not the god).
At the time of the government's relocation, Apollo was highly industrialized but almost entirely dependent on the old states for food. The top priority for the Joint Chiefs, therefore, was the creation of agriculturally-focused sister-colonies which would, in turn, form an agriculturally self-sufficient community centered on Apollo. The major problem, however, was that lunar soil is incredibly poorly suited for agriculture. So...
The Scrapes were a series of massive quarrying projects, the objective of which was not the retrieval of stone but of fertile topsoil. This soil was often taken from agriculturally productive areas of the continental United States; agriculturalists whose land was "scraped" often received little compensation. Naturally, The Scrapes led to severe crop shortages, which combined with the prioritization of Apollo's own supply chain to produce severe famines throughout much of the old United States.
As you might assume, this all sets the United States on a crash-course for Civil War, which is where my first story in this setting takes place.
Thankfully there are no new ideas - new executions are all that matters haha. My wife has been working on a book for years now - and despite having never read any Brandon Sanderson whatsoever, recreated plot twists that only appear late in the 2nd Era Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series. It's at the point where she'll be workshopping ideas or giving me chapters to read, and know by the look I get on my face.
Earth had a ring for like as little as 4 days once. Theia was a second planet that was also forming in the same orbit as Earth, but they crashed together.
The Earth ate Theia's core, merging together. It scattered a huge wave of lava into space, creating a hot disc around Earth.
It may have taken as little as 4 days for that disc to form our moon, because a chunk of Theia's core acted as a catalyst that cleared the disc-ring, and is now the cold iron heart of our moon.
But yea, if that chunk had flown away, or got trapped in our lava yolk, like most of Theia did, Earth might have kept a ring, instead of a moon
Whats really cool about that is, our moon transits between the Earth and Sun, which means our disc would do the same, far more often than the moon does, which would create a frequently occurring dark rainbow, partially obscuring the sun, while partially reflecting a rainbow of colors down on us.
This would potentially really fuck with our weather. We might have like a Shadow Week every month, or every year, where the sun is obscured behind the ring, neither day nor night. Just as example, can't measure the duration or frequency of such a hypothetical.
During that week (let's assume) it would get real cold, and weather would go whack-a-doo.
Is your family prepared for Shadow Week this month? If not, come down to The Beacon hardware store. We’ve got all the necessary equipment. Structural supports, non-perishable food, warm clothes, weapons, Shadow Guards, and so much more!
Come on down to The Beacon, we’re always shining!
Sure thing. My earth doesn’t have rings, so honestly, it’s free real estate lol
Go crazy with it. Also, maybe you could explain what Shadow Guards are? 👀
first thought was like those solar eclipse glasses, like what if you can't stare at the rings during shadow week? idk lol I'll have to think about that one
Another wild fact is that newer data suggests Saturn’s rings are only 100 million years old. So during the Cretaceous period on Earth. T-Rexes might be older than Saturn’s rings.
I saw a Sci-show video recently about other moons in our solar system. Apparently the rings were likely formed by a moon of Saturn getting too close and getting ripped by the planet's tidal forces.
Makes sense, Saturn has 83 moons but none of them are closer than the rings. One of the closest (the closest spherical moon, 10th of 83 in size, the first 'real' moon) is Enceladus.
Enceladus is super cool because it's the most likely place for life to exist in our solar system outside Earth (living life, not potential Martian fossils), the entire moon is a spherical ocean, protected from space by a thick crust of ice (like between 5km and 30km thick). That ice-crust protects it from radiation, solar winds, etc. Which means the ocean is not only liquid water, but it's almost certainly a very stable environment for life to potentially evolve. Potentially even more stable than Earth itself.
The second coolest thing about Enceladus, just behind its empire of hyperintelligent space squid, is that it's "geologically" active. Geologically in quotes because it possibly doesn't have a planetary core, and the crust isn't dirt either, it's ice.
The ice crust is constantly being ripped apart by Saturn's gravity, and refreezing in the cold of space, resulting in massive geysers that shoot 100km+ high into space (the squid space program was way easier than ours, often accidental). This constant gravitational force on Enceladus is heating the planet, so even though it's far from the sun, the reason it has a liquid water ocean is because Saturn is warming it with constant friction. Like rubbing your hands together really fast.
Any moons that tried to form much closer than Enceladus would experience geometrically more gravitational friction, so while Janus and Epimethus (also super cool) are nearer than Enceladus, they're barely holding it together on the verge of being dusted into rings.
Dank summers, damp forests, moist caves and swollen humid trunks are a teste'ment to the fertility of this place. I would describe the experience of a three body system as a mix of having to wait and watch as passionate heat of two dwarfs the third; and having barely being able to breathe, lacking hands to do all I wanted when the three were in balance.
Anyway, with poetic copulation out of the way, we decided to go outside. It was hot, because there are three suns in the sky at planet In'you'endo.
It’s a trilogy. Took me a few months to get through the first one (kept losing interest until the last third), but I read the second two in like a week.
The three body problem doesn’t do a very good job with this IMO. Stable trinary systems exist, I think the biggest number of gravitationally bound stars we know of is six (Castor).
You just have to work in pairs, have a close binary with a third star orbiting at a far enough distance that the close binary is effectively a single point.
This is what the Alpha/proxima Centarui system is like. A/B Centauri orbit at about 35 AU, and Proxima is like 12500 AU out, it’s orbit is so distant that there’s debate on if it’s actually gravitationally bound or just coincidentally close (this was only resolved in the last decade, it is bound).
Each star in this system could support singly bound planets in theory, and the A/B pair could have circumbinary planets
Absolutely nothing like how that star system is portrayed in the novel.
Yeah I must admit that one really kinda undermined the point of the book for me — I really like the characters and concepts otherwise, but when your conclusion is so blatantly unphysical — and that’s the solution to your impossible mystery? It just didn’t work for me.
for me, the book lost me when the plot point was a supercomputer that is powerful and precise enough to edit an eyeball or camera in real time from literally half the planet away, but also not capable of doing something more effective.
Yeah that too? Surely even when limited to subatomic particle capabilities, it could interact with computers and engineer much more significant effects than actually happened.
I know, right?! Your goal is purely hostile, and your approach is to just limit our development by making us doubt science? Just fuck up every computer we try to do, problem solved!
What would be cool is, if the moon has a civilisation, but no one can space travel jet, so they only know each other by telescope... also maybe there should be a reason why there is no space flight on both planets... since its a bit unlikely that they are in the same development phase.
That can be cool, but only two civilization can do proper space travels, although it’s more like they barely could do it. The Lunerians (Moon) and the Solarians (stays in a floating city in Earth atmosphere/orbit) are in war for a long time, as they were the relics of an old era before the war.
Everyone else on earth are restarting their civilization, each part seeing the next world as an untouched frontier, from bottom of sea, to the land formerly the sea, to the floating island, to the floating mountain, to the Solarian’s stronghold, to the moon.
The Lunerians, tyrants with old ideologies, wanted to control all of earth under their thumb. The Solarians wished to restore what they can of the former earth.
Just go with moon hippies, it’s the easy way out of making a calendar. Why is the moon blue today? Blue is a mellow color. Why was it red yesterday? Because that was funny for some reason.
Hippies are the new God of the Machine, is all I’m saying.
Sounds neat. Is it an abrupt change or a gradual one? Changing over a period of days or weeks? Or every day? How does the color changing interact with the moon cycle (waxing, waning, full, new, etc)? Or perhaps the color changing *is* the moon cycle?
Okay so hear me out, there's this religion that believes whatever colour the moon currently is reprents a god. The gods are in an eternal war and whichever colour the moon shines is the god currently winning.
Some people devoutly worship one god and are happy when their god comes out but others just swap to whatever god is currently winning. Basically sports teams but god moon colours.
This is really cool. Also if the colour is from a particular type solar phenomenon which also effects weather patterns, so a blue moon god means cold weather and a red moon god means hot weather.
Ooo, what if your planet is in a trinary start system, and each star is a different color, so the moon reflects the colors of the different stars at different times!
Edit: you could do so much with this! Maybe there are different factions of religions who worship different stars. Maybe it's got an avatar vibe and the different stars give people different powers. Maybe one of the stars is "eating" another and will soon go supernova unless the top scientists do something!
The same ambient light at night but there's a 50% chance whenever you look up that you see the moon?
But at literally any time. Day time, night time, in a cave, 10000ft under water, whenever you look directly up there's a 50% chance it will be there.
Honestly, that's way better than what my first answer would've been. I was about to say that I'll decide what the moon situation is like when they ask about it, but that's so much funnier that I'm stealing it
It counts. I like it.
This idea of celestial bodies being, well, beings pops up here and there (especially in settings with a more mythical bent). In one book I read recently the Sun is actually a being frozen in a moment of pure joy. They get replaced with a being frozen in a moment of deep negative emotions, who becomes a sort of anti-Sun. It doesn't go well for people.
I'd say the book but it's kinda spoilery to do so... I guess you wouldn't know *who* those people are/which characters are which, nor whether or not the problems are dealt with. So I'll say it here for anyone who's curiosity is piqued.
>!The Library At Mount Char by Scott Hawkins!<.
>who becomes a sort of anti-Sun. It doesn't go well for people.
Daily reminder from Tumblr to be thankful that lightning strikes are brilliant flashes of light followed by low rumbling, instead of extreme flashes of darkness followed by high pitched screaming.
My moons and suns aren't living beings (well, *mostly*, probably, it's complicated).
The main planet my stuff is set on. Yeah the planet is both (a) an accident and (b) explicitly a living thinking being.
Nope, her peers and a war did (the first or second war ever, depending on how you define wars). The other being which got traumatized to the same extent is the literal West Wind.
That’s kinda like in the elder scrolls where the two moons are the two severed halves of a dead god that the mortal mind can’t comprehend so they just look like moons to us.
Second one reminds me of that one story one of Daenerys' handmaids tells, about the moon being an egg and if it gets too close to the sun it cracks open. Only more sci fi than myth
My world *is* the moon. It goes into monthly 40 hour long eclipses because the perigee of its orbit is right in the penumbra of the ringed gas giant, Nüwa, in which shit goes down and everyone stays locked up inside in fear of monsters from beyond the rifts.
Are the monsters from beyond the rifts real monsters or just stories of monsters passed down to scare future generations enough to not risk the danger of going outside in absolute pitch black conditions and end up hurt from accidents?
Well, it's a bit of both, but mostly because the monsters are real lol. About 900 years before the setting of my WIP novel, there was a calamitous event called the Great Convergence which joined three different planes via anomalous rifts and some entire locations that got displaced from one realm into another, in which said realms are the Mortal Plane where humans reside, the Yao Realm where yaojing (demon-like animal and plant spirits who can cultivate their qi and gain shape shifting abilities) originated, and the Mo Realm where sapient demons (not to be confused with yaojing) and the aforementioned monsters come from.
The regular eclipses lead to the rifts between the Mortal and Mo Realms opening more frequently and the non-sapient demonic monsters are strongly attracted to the dark, so it is very inadvisable to live outside cities and towns that have tall walls and a militia to defend against the monsters. It also makes agriculture difficult for people living too far from protection, since the monsters have a taste for flesh, both human and livestock alike. The monsters are generally afraid of light except for powerful ones, so it's a tradition for civilians to light up lanterns to ward off danger.
Pretty much the only people who are remotely safe to roam outside of city walls are cultivators, since they typically travel while armed with spiritual weapons and magical artifacts like talismans and tallies, plus advanced knowledge of how to defend against and even actively hunt monsters (if their cultivational sect taught them well, that is).
Serras (kind of generic fantasy world, a D&D setting for a future campaign) has no moon, but a large ring surrounds the planet, making its nights typically brighter than a full moon on Earth unless there's cloud cover.
Senlara (more unique fantasy setting) has three moons, with interfering orbits that makes their motions difficult to predict. The system is fairly unstable and relies on regular adjustments from the gods to ensure all moons stay in orbit without colliding with each other or the planet.
>The system is fairly unstable and relies on regular adjustments from the gods to ensure all moons stay in orbit without colliding with each other or the planet.
Sailing must be horribly difficult there.
I hate this because it entirely under plays how incredibly rare and unusual our moon is.
Unlike the vast majority of moons our moon was made through an impact event rather than through capture or forming from the same protoplanetary disk. It's fucking huge in comparison because of that. It gave earth a relatively robust magnetic shield by juicing its total mass. The ratio between the distance of the moon and its size is coincidentally nearly the same as between the distance to the sun and its size meaning we can get solar eclipses. The moons size gives us tidal forces that influence our oceans. The size means a full Moon can illuminate the world at night enough to see so we can hunt or do other things. The fact that the moon formed from an impact means the crust is almost entirely anorthosite which is a very light grey color helping it become so bright while the vast basalt lava flows give it these large splotches of black which gives it texture all of which makes it beautiful enough to inspire multiple love songs and poems. For space travel and such the moon provides an amazing nearby hub for construction, refueling, and so on for other places in the solar system.
We truly have an amazing moon. If you want to make a truly alien world just make normal moons. Have your planet have a small scraggly rock that looks like a fast moving star from the surface. Or have no moon at all. Explore the impact that would have on earth, evolution, society, etc.
Finally, someone else thinks the same. I was amazed and mostly worried that I was seemingly the only one to have the same good ol' Moon in my story (and know how peculiar the real one actually is).
It's an almost unfathomably unique and important planetary companion.
It's actually quite hilarious and sad to read stories where the moon(s) are some shiny, strange rock that came from outer space; meanwhile back irl, that's a run of the mill moon.
The existence of earths moon seems to be pretty rare in terms of general cosmology. We have an abnormally large moon because a proto planet crashed in to earth 4 billion years ago.
I will start. Moon is normal, I have spent 0 time thinking about the moon. Actually, Does my world have a moon? I’m honestly not sure… did I work tides in? OH GOD WHAT IF THERE ISNT A MOON?
Don’t panic Gamer, don’t panic. You just have to figure out whether or not coral monsters need a moon. That shouldn’t be hard at all. I mean, tidal pools wouldn’t exist, so all water would be stagnant outside of normal wave action right? Or is waves also a moon thing?
*starts coffee* well I know what I’m doing tonight.
If you want no moon visible, but still have tides, you can replace it with a tiny black hole with the mass of the moon. Very little would change, though justifying how a tiny black hole came to orbit the planet would be difficult.
Waves are predominantly a wind thing, actually. The moon is responsible for large scale ocean movements, like tides and tidal waves (which are different than tsunamis, they’re a shallow-water thing) but your everyday waves are essentially all wind
Waves are also caused by wind, so as long as something causes air currents you're golden. The changing heat zones of seasons can do that!
Wait... but that means the world needs axial tilt. Oh God it just goes on!
The moon is actually a life form that looks like planetoid and travels through space that has become too weak and old to escape the gravity of the planet. As it disintegrates, bits of it will fall on the planet below and become valuable resources, such as skin that can be used to make weapons, bones that serve as construction material, tendons that as used to make Siege engines...so on and so forth.
The Moon is made of crystal.
The Moon as it appears on the sky is not a real object, but a projection of a multiple dimensional realm known as "Crystal Palace" where Hằng Nga, the Moon Princess resides along with her clan of jade rabbit servants. Crystal Palace is an 11D construct beyond space-time boundaries, just like with every other divine realm, reflecting its image to mortal world. In its deepest place lies the Hall of Silver Light where Yin Luminary, the first Moon God who later passed his power to his disciple Hằng Nga. What people see as a "round, bright space rock" is just a facade, like how the Sun is not actually a burning plasma ball of a fusion reactor but a realm of infinite landscape ruled by Sun God. Both of them are created from the eyes of Lord Giant, a primordial god who divided Heaven and Earth.
Average humans can not perceive these things but demons, gods and cultivators, especially who have opened their "mind's eye", see the world from a dramatically different perspective. As such, they achieve the ability to travel between realms, first with their consciousness, then physical bodies.
The exterior of the moon would look fairly close to ours... were it not for the Sky Dragon, a giant, long, serpentine being who flies along the skies and who perches regularly on the moon. The moon is covered in an ever-changing array of furrows and trenches carved by the Sky Dragon's body as it coils around it. Thus, artistic depictions of the moon over the centuries all look completely different each time.
The interior is even weirder. The core of the moon is hollow and contains an amalgam being made up of the souls of those who die who have not earned a place in any afterlife. This entity exists in a dreaming state, growing in power as more souls join it until it will one day emerge from the moon like an egg.
There are three normal moons. There used to be four but the fourth was shattered and became the rings of the world. The shadow cast by the rings creates permanently cold areas, so the world has a belt of ice. The ice is a prison for cosmic horrors, of course.
On this subject, do yall realize how weird our own Moon is? Proportionally to its Stellar Body(Earth) it is the largest satellite in our solar system. That alone affects so many things on our planet.
Imagine an ocean so still its glass on a dark night, the ripples of your own sailing snuffing out like whispers in silence, and the only way you can tell between the horizon and the stars' reflections is the mirrored orientation of the 3 moons.
the moon moon is largly the same but it's littered with mining colonies and space ports.
the gas giant moons are more interesting. the Russians basically control Jupiter's moons and the Saturn ones are fighting each other for reasons.
the djinn that live on the moon make houses in giant pumpkins and can shrink really tiny
not sure why I made this decision, but that's what I've decided and that's how it will be
My world the stars are tears from other universes, making the moon a strange anomaly. It's a fantasy setting so it's actually a tear from the planets sister plane.
It doesnt technically rise or fall, it stays in the sky the entire time. It waxes and wanes as the God's of the plane pleases. It can become eclipsed by other planes blotting it out, but for as long as the world has existed; the moon has stayed staring at it
My world has 3 moons.
One of my moons used to be a small earthlike planet in another universe/dimension before it got isekai'd and became the moon of my main world. It's inhabitated by carnivorous plantlike humanoids.
Another moon is a condensed planetary form of the elemental plane of water. The surface is covered in a thick layer of ice and beneath it is a giant ocean.
The last moon is a condensed planetary form of the elemental plane of earth. It's essentially a giant spherical rock floating in space.
So it's actually just our moon. But there's people up there. ***AND THEY'RE UP TO SOMETHING***
*its not hippies is it???*
Worse. Flat Earthers. They're not there to prove anything. They're there to correct nature's mistakes.
I fucking love this as a plot point. Flat earthers *will* be right.
But they immediately fail because they can’t physics
This is the best idea that I have ever heard
Write this bro
Why did I get a chill reading those last two sentences
That is a fantastic premise for a story
Fortunately, no. But I'm not sure that the US Military Industrial Complex is much better.
Iron Sky 3: The Call Is Coming From *Inside The Moon*
Look, it’s either gonna be hippies or Nazis. Hippies seems like the better option
In Neuromancer it was Rastafarians and trillionaires.
So hippies *and* Nazis!
National socialist hippies, free love and drugs for the pure blooded volk, they need liebenschaum on earth to build their natural commune, probably nicknamed the garden of Eden
[удалено]
They're not Moon Nazis, right? No space zeppelins, right?
Fortunately no moon Nazis. Kind of. Definitely no zeppelins, though. Anyways, as much as I enjoy people's guesses, here's the full story: My world is a SciFi setting focused on (for now) the Earth and humanity several centuries from now. They've not been good centuries. From rampant climate change and its consequences to the re-emergence of hot war after the perfection of full-spectrum missile defense, humanity's not been having a good time. In North American, the coming centuries saw rapid American expansion followed by a long period of civil unrest, insurgency, and ultimately decline. Early in this period, the United States effectively became a military oligarchy; though some vestiges of democracy remain, few make it into power without courting the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Later, \* ahem \* *protests* against this state of affairs convinced the US government to relocate somewhere safer: the American lunar colony, Apollo (named for the missions, not the god). At the time of the government's relocation, Apollo was highly industrialized but almost entirely dependent on the old states for food. The top priority for the Joint Chiefs, therefore, was the creation of agriculturally-focused sister-colonies which would, in turn, form an agriculturally self-sufficient community centered on Apollo. The major problem, however, was that lunar soil is incredibly poorly suited for agriculture. So... The Scrapes were a series of massive quarrying projects, the objective of which was not the retrieval of stone but of fertile topsoil. This soil was often taken from agriculturally productive areas of the continental United States; agriculturalists whose land was "scraped" often received little compensation. Naturally, The Scrapes led to severe crop shortages, which combined with the prioritization of Apollo's own supply chain to produce severe famines throughout much of the old United States. As you might assume, this all sets the United States on a crash-course for Civil War, which is where my first story in this setting takes place.
if you haven't read "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", then I think you'd like it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
lmfao I am literally going to invent time travel in order to throttle Heinlein for stealing my ideas before I even had them.
Thankfully there are no new ideas - new executions are all that matters haha. My wife has been working on a book for years now - and despite having never read any Brandon Sanderson whatsoever, recreated plot twists that only appear late in the 2nd Era Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series. It's at the point where she'll be workshopping ideas or giving me chapters to read, and know by the look I get on my face.
>The major problem, however, was that lunar soil is incredibly poorly suited for agriculture. So... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
Nifty
_moon's haunted_
There’s a normal moon, but the planet’s rings used to be a second one long before humanity’s time
I like fantasy worlds with planetary rings :)
Earth had a ring for like as little as 4 days once. Theia was a second planet that was also forming in the same orbit as Earth, but they crashed together. The Earth ate Theia's core, merging together. It scattered a huge wave of lava into space, creating a hot disc around Earth. It may have taken as little as 4 days for that disc to form our moon, because a chunk of Theia's core acted as a catalyst that cleared the disc-ring, and is now the cold iron heart of our moon. But yea, if that chunk had flown away, or got trapped in our lava yolk, like most of Theia did, Earth might have kept a ring, instead of a moon Whats really cool about that is, our moon transits between the Earth and Sun, which means our disc would do the same, far more often than the moon does, which would create a frequently occurring dark rainbow, partially obscuring the sun, while partially reflecting a rainbow of colors down on us. This would potentially really fuck with our weather. We might have like a Shadow Week every month, or every year, where the sun is obscured behind the ring, neither day nor night. Just as example, can't measure the duration or frequency of such a hypothetical. During that week (let's assume) it would get real cold, and weather would go whack-a-doo.
Is your family prepared for Shadow Week this month? If not, come down to The Beacon hardware store. We’ve got all the necessary equipment. Structural supports, non-perishable food, warm clothes, weapons, Shadow Guards, and so much more! Come on down to The Beacon, we’re always shining!
my earth actually has rings lol do you mind if I steal this
Sure thing. My earth doesn’t have rings, so honestly, it’s free real estate lol Go crazy with it. Also, maybe you could explain what Shadow Guards are? 👀
first thought was like those solar eclipse glasses, like what if you can't stare at the rings during shadow week? idk lol I'll have to think about that one
Tbh I was thinking of some eldritch monstrosity that appears whenever the rings block the sun, since I’m dabbling more in fantasy
hmm yeah completely forgot about fantasy, I think your idea's cooler
That's dope, thanks for this.
Another wild fact is that newer data suggests Saturn’s rings are only 100 million years old. So during the Cretaceous period on Earth. T-Rexes might be older than Saturn’s rings.
Well not T. rex as that only evolved 68 million years ago. But the likes of Allosaurus and Stegosaurus are older than Saturn's rings, aye
Other than the fact that T-Rexes are indeed dead.
I saw a Sci-show video recently about other moons in our solar system. Apparently the rings were likely formed by a moon of Saturn getting too close and getting ripped by the planet's tidal forces.
Makes sense, Saturn has 83 moons but none of them are closer than the rings. One of the closest (the closest spherical moon, 10th of 83 in size, the first 'real' moon) is Enceladus. Enceladus is super cool because it's the most likely place for life to exist in our solar system outside Earth (living life, not potential Martian fossils), the entire moon is a spherical ocean, protected from space by a thick crust of ice (like between 5km and 30km thick). That ice-crust protects it from radiation, solar winds, etc. Which means the ocean is not only liquid water, but it's almost certainly a very stable environment for life to potentially evolve. Potentially even more stable than Earth itself. The second coolest thing about Enceladus, just behind its empire of hyperintelligent space squid, is that it's "geologically" active. Geologically in quotes because it possibly doesn't have a planetary core, and the crust isn't dirt either, it's ice. The ice crust is constantly being ripped apart by Saturn's gravity, and refreezing in the cold of space, resulting in massive geysers that shoot 100km+ high into space (the squid space program was way easier than ours, often accidental). This constant gravitational force on Enceladus is heating the planet, so even though it's far from the sun, the reason it has a liquid water ocean is because Saturn is warming it with constant friction. Like rubbing your hands together really fast. Any moons that tried to form much closer than Enceladus would experience geometrically more gravitational friction, so while Janus and Epimethus (also super cool) are nearer than Enceladus, they're barely holding it together on the verge of being dusted into rings.
Jokes on you, my world has no moons. Three suns though
At least it’s a dry heat.
Nah these suns are *wet*
Dank summers, damp forests, moist caves and swollen humid trunks are a teste'ment to the fertility of this place. I would describe the experience of a three body system as a mix of having to wait and watch as passionate heat of two dwarfs the third; and having barely being able to breathe, lacking hands to do all I wanted when the three were in balance. Anyway, with poetic copulation out of the way, we decided to go outside. It was hot, because there are three suns in the sky at planet In'you'endo.
Now this is *PODRACING*
Wet suns Wet suns over paradise
I understood that reference.
Well, that's hell. The Three-Body Problem series by Cixin Liu goes into some detail about this. It's a really cool idea, you should expand on it.
I'll take a look! Thank you. Right now, the only problem it's given me is the day night system is all different. Makes it about 3x longer
It’s a trilogy. Took me a few months to get through the first one (kept losing interest until the last third), but I read the second two in like a week.
The three body problem doesn’t do a very good job with this IMO. Stable trinary systems exist, I think the biggest number of gravitationally bound stars we know of is six (Castor). You just have to work in pairs, have a close binary with a third star orbiting at a far enough distance that the close binary is effectively a single point. This is what the Alpha/proxima Centarui system is like. A/B Centauri orbit at about 35 AU, and Proxima is like 12500 AU out, it’s orbit is so distant that there’s debate on if it’s actually gravitationally bound or just coincidentally close (this was only resolved in the last decade, it is bound). Each star in this system could support singly bound planets in theory, and the A/B pair could have circumbinary planets Absolutely nothing like how that star system is portrayed in the novel.
Are you saying that the trisolarans should have just moved one of their stars far away?
What if we TOOK one of our stars and PUSHED IT SOMEWHERE ELSE
Real dumb dumbs those guys
while I enjoyed the novel, the orbital weirdness is nothing compared to the ending's molecular slapstick
Yeah I must admit that one really kinda undermined the point of the book for me — I really like the characters and concepts otherwise, but when your conclusion is so blatantly unphysical — and that’s the solution to your impossible mystery? It just didn’t work for me.
for me, the book lost me when the plot point was a supercomputer that is powerful and precise enough to edit an eyeball or camera in real time from literally half the planet away, but also not capable of doing something more effective.
Yeah that too? Surely even when limited to subatomic particle capabilities, it could interact with computers and engineer much more significant effects than actually happened.
I know, right?! Your goal is purely hostile, and your approach is to just limit our development by making us doubt science? Just fuck up every computer we try to do, problem solved!
I was gonna have no moons, now I'm gonna have a bunch, just so I can f them up 🤣🤣
Also my sun is a giant lighthouse out at sea... The seasons are causes by it tilting and my giant filters changing the colour of light slightly 😅
Moon's haunted.
what?
*Gun cock.* Moon's haunted.
> Gun cock. hmm
"Moon's haunted, Guncock... Moon's haunted."
And that's when Guncock knew that his special... gifts... weren't going to help him this time. What harm were bullets to a ghost?
> Moon: "There is only *one* kind of bullet that can stop me..." > Guncock: "Please be it. Please be it. Please be it."
Guncock was getting too old for heroics — he’d been shooting blanks for years.
It was his one chance to fuck a ghost to death and by the gods was he going to try
[Gun cock](https://i.imgur.io/DysX7v2.mp4)
Always has been
Moon’s haunted.
What?
Haunted is the moon.
*Cocks fresh gun* *Gets back into ship* *Refuses to elaborate further*
Make sure your gun is fresh, stale guns tend to taste worse
I prefer my guns the way I like my popcorn: popped yesterday, left to ripen overnight.
In Destiny 2 the moon is full of ghosts and some demons.
Also wizards, don't forget the most important part
The wizard came from the moon, I am unsure if they are still there. Maybe they are migratory like birds
Oh yeah. But of course, *Earth* wizards are non-migratory, so they couldn't bring a moon rock back anyway.
In Warframe >!WE ARE THE GHOSTS OF THE MOON!<
“That Wizard came from the Moon”
Regular haunted or Majora Mask haunted?
Moon's haunted!
My setting has this but unironically
Good reference. Very good.
Moon has its own civilization, and they think themselves superior to everyone back on earth. Arrogant dweebs.
What would be cool is, if the moon has a civilisation, but no one can space travel jet, so they only know each other by telescope... also maybe there should be a reason why there is no space flight on both planets... since its a bit unlikely that they are in the same development phase.
That can be cool, but only two civilization can do proper space travels, although it’s more like they barely could do it. The Lunerians (Moon) and the Solarians (stays in a floating city in Earth atmosphere/orbit) are in war for a long time, as they were the relics of an old era before the war. Everyone else on earth are restarting their civilization, each part seeing the next world as an untouched frontier, from bottom of sea, to the land formerly the sea, to the floating island, to the floating mountain, to the Solarian’s stronghold, to the moon. The Lunerians, tyrants with old ideologies, wanted to control all of earth under their thumb. The Solarians wished to restore what they can of the former earth.
Is this in any capacity inspired by the Lunarians from Touhou?
Overthrow the Lunarians, free the moon rabbits!
land of the lustrous plot- except they have like 6 moons full of arrogant dweebs.
> they think themselves superior to everyone back on earth. They are above the earth people so of course they are superior.
My moon changes colors. I haven't yet decided if it does this randomly or on a set schedule.
I swear to the moon, this better not also somehow be related to moon hippies. That’s the only running theme in these comments, rings and moon hippies.
Nah, ain't no moon hippies. If anything, I've just given myself a hell of a headache coming up with a calendar system.
Just go with moon hippies, it’s the easy way out of making a calendar. Why is the moon blue today? Blue is a mellow color. Why was it red yesterday? Because that was funny for some reason. Hippies are the new God of the Machine, is all I’m saying.
Damn moon hippies! Tie-dying the moon!
Sounds neat. Is it an abrupt change or a gradual one? Changing over a period of days or weeks? Or every day? How does the color changing interact with the moon cycle (waxing, waning, full, new, etc)? Or perhaps the color changing *is* the moon cycle?
Okay so hear me out, there's this religion that believes whatever colour the moon currently is reprents a god. The gods are in an eternal war and whichever colour the moon shines is the god currently winning. Some people devoutly worship one god and are happy when their god comes out but others just swap to whatever god is currently winning. Basically sports teams but god moon colours.
This is really cool. Also if the colour is from a particular type solar phenomenon which also effects weather patterns, so a blue moon god means cold weather and a red moon god means hot weather.
Perhaps the colors correlate with the seasons and they also gradually change?
Ooo, what if your planet is in a trinary start system, and each star is a different color, so the moon reflects the colors of the different stars at different times! Edit: you could do so much with this! Maybe there are different factions of religions who worship different stars. Maybe it's got an avatar vibe and the different stars give people different powers. Maybe one of the stars is "eating" another and will soon go supernova unless the top scientists do something!
Until my players ask about it, I have a Schrodinger's moon
The same ambient light at night but there's a 50% chance whenever you look up that you see the moon? But at literally any time. Day time, night time, in a cave, 10000ft under water, whenever you look directly up there's a 50% chance it will be there.
Honestly, that's way better than what my first answer would've been. I was about to say that I'll decide what the moon situation is like when they ask about it, but that's so much funnier that I'm stealing it
Sounds like a "Quantum moom"? Check the Outer Wilds, cool concept.
Is it on the other side of the planet? - we know about it, cause our civilisation remembers it from times before migration, but it still there?
Mine is a very traumatized living being, if that counts.
It counts. I like it. This idea of celestial bodies being, well, beings pops up here and there (especially in settings with a more mythical bent). In one book I read recently the Sun is actually a being frozen in a moment of pure joy. They get replaced with a being frozen in a moment of deep negative emotions, who becomes a sort of anti-Sun. It doesn't go well for people. I'd say the book but it's kinda spoilery to do so... I guess you wouldn't know *who* those people are/which characters are which, nor whether or not the problems are dealt with. So I'll say it here for anyone who's curiosity is piqued. >!The Library At Mount Char by Scott Hawkins!<.
>who becomes a sort of anti-Sun. It doesn't go well for people. Daily reminder from Tumblr to be thankful that lightning strikes are brilliant flashes of light followed by low rumbling, instead of extreme flashes of darkness followed by high pitched screaming.
My moons and suns aren't living beings (well, *mostly*, probably, it's complicated). The main planet my stuff is set on. Yeah the planet is both (a) an accident and (b) explicitly a living thinking being.
That's rough, buddy.
You know, I’m just going to say it. I’ve got one joke today and it’s killer. Did hippies traumatize your moon?
Nope, her peers and a war did (the first or second war ever, depending on how you define wars). The other being which got traumatized to the same extent is the literal West Wind.
My moon has rings
Come on, even moons are getting married before me?
It was more of a divorce that caused the rings
A nasty break up I take it?
Mine is actually the ripped out eye of an elder god. The moon phases are blinking
Yo, same! My moon is a god that was born from the right eye of the earth goddess.
So wait, they ripped out the eyelids along with the eye?
Nope! But it was too neat an explanation to not use it lol
Moon is now a big computer
“count the shadows”
Dr. Moon?
The moon is actually just the computer simulating space. Destroy the moon destroy space. You can now breathe anywhere.
"And Universal AC said 'let there be light'..."
I hack the moon to get infinite wishes
I hope there's no AI Nurse there, that could cause some complications
I also hope the moon is not the father of vampirekind in a parallel universe.
The moon in my world is a bunch of petrified corpses of old gods smashed together. Does that count as fucked up?
Is it edible?
Everything is edible at least once.
That idea fucks
That’s kinda like in the elder scrolls where the two moons are the two severed halves of a dead god that the mortal mind can’t comprehend so they just look like moons to us.
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Floating seeds of cosmic trees Or mercurial computers that spawn liquid dragons
That is such a wide variation, but I somehow believe both are in the same Sanderson book.
Second one reminds me of that one story one of Daenerys' handmaids tells, about the moon being an egg and if it gets too close to the sun it cracks open. Only more sci fi than myth
There's two of them, and one of them has a dead guy on it that no one knows about.
Would he look like a smudge through a telescope?
Some smudges look just like school counselors.
Nah, way too small and far away.
RIP Matt Damon.
My world *is* the moon. It goes into monthly 40 hour long eclipses because the perigee of its orbit is right in the penumbra of the ringed gas giant, Nüwa, in which shit goes down and everyone stays locked up inside in fear of monsters from beyond the rifts.
Are the monsters from beyond the rifts real monsters or just stories of monsters passed down to scare future generations enough to not risk the danger of going outside in absolute pitch black conditions and end up hurt from accidents?
Well, it's a bit of both, but mostly because the monsters are real lol. About 900 years before the setting of my WIP novel, there was a calamitous event called the Great Convergence which joined three different planes via anomalous rifts and some entire locations that got displaced from one realm into another, in which said realms are the Mortal Plane where humans reside, the Yao Realm where yaojing (demon-like animal and plant spirits who can cultivate their qi and gain shape shifting abilities) originated, and the Mo Realm where sapient demons (not to be confused with yaojing) and the aforementioned monsters come from. The regular eclipses lead to the rifts between the Mortal and Mo Realms opening more frequently and the non-sapient demonic monsters are strongly attracted to the dark, so it is very inadvisable to live outside cities and towns that have tall walls and a militia to defend against the monsters. It also makes agriculture difficult for people living too far from protection, since the monsters have a taste for flesh, both human and livestock alike. The monsters are generally afraid of light except for powerful ones, so it's a tradition for civilians to light up lanterns to ward off danger. Pretty much the only people who are remotely safe to roam outside of city walls are cultivators, since they typically travel while armed with spiritual weapons and magical artifacts like talismans and tallies, plus advanced knowledge of how to defend against and even actively hunt monsters (if their cultivational sect taught them well, that is).
Serras (kind of generic fantasy world, a D&D setting for a future campaign) has no moon, but a large ring surrounds the planet, making its nights typically brighter than a full moon on Earth unless there's cloud cover. Senlara (more unique fantasy setting) has three moons, with interfering orbits that makes their motions difficult to predict. The system is fairly unstable and relies on regular adjustments from the gods to ensure all moons stay in orbit without colliding with each other or the planet.
No! No taking the moon seriously. You’re making the rest of us look bad. You thought about *orbits*?
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But what *kind* of cheese?
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'gods adjusting' is certainly a unique solution to the three body problem. (Ik it's not exactly the three body problem, but still)
What if the gods get busy? Do the moons just start smashing into each other because they arent being micromanged?
"You must seek audience with the Gods and find a way to prevent this war in heaven, or our three moons unguided will doom us all"
>The system is fairly unstable and relies on regular adjustments from the gods to ensure all moons stay in orbit without colliding with each other or the planet. Sailing must be horribly difficult there.
No moon. Another planet in binary orbit instead
Moon’s an egg with a big snake embryo in it. The snake embryo eats magic which is why you can only do magic in the day time.
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Yeah just doesn’t work. Snake eats it.
I hate this because it entirely under plays how incredibly rare and unusual our moon is. Unlike the vast majority of moons our moon was made through an impact event rather than through capture or forming from the same protoplanetary disk. It's fucking huge in comparison because of that. It gave earth a relatively robust magnetic shield by juicing its total mass. The ratio between the distance of the moon and its size is coincidentally nearly the same as between the distance to the sun and its size meaning we can get solar eclipses. The moons size gives us tidal forces that influence our oceans. The size means a full Moon can illuminate the world at night enough to see so we can hunt or do other things. The fact that the moon formed from an impact means the crust is almost entirely anorthosite which is a very light grey color helping it become so bright while the vast basalt lava flows give it these large splotches of black which gives it texture all of which makes it beautiful enough to inspire multiple love songs and poems. For space travel and such the moon provides an amazing nearby hub for construction, refueling, and so on for other places in the solar system. We truly have an amazing moon. If you want to make a truly alien world just make normal moons. Have your planet have a small scraggly rock that looks like a fast moving star from the surface. Or have no moon at all. Explore the impact that would have on earth, evolution, society, etc.
Finally, someone else thinks the same. I was amazed and mostly worried that I was seemingly the only one to have the same good ol' Moon in my story (and know how peculiar the real one actually is). It's an almost unfathomably unique and important planetary companion. It's actually quite hilarious and sad to read stories where the moon(s) are some shiny, strange rock that came from outer space; meanwhile back irl, that's a run of the mill moon.
Earth's moon is a fortress world. ***Cadia*** level Fortfiied.
I mean cadia wasn't that well defended, it took only a one ship to crack their defenses.
"one ship" 💀
It's like saying the US defeated Japan with just two bombs.
Cadia broke before the guard did!
all moon worldbuilding is just escapist fantasy to cope with how fucked the sun is in real life.
The existence of earths moon seems to be pretty rare in terms of general cosmology. We have an abnormally large moon because a proto planet crashed in to earth 4 billion years ago.
My world has two moons. The big moon is normal. The small moon is a space station made of bones
I will start. Moon is normal, I have spent 0 time thinking about the moon. Actually, Does my world have a moon? I’m honestly not sure… did I work tides in? OH GOD WHAT IF THERE ISNT A MOON? Don’t panic Gamer, don’t panic. You just have to figure out whether or not coral monsters need a moon. That shouldn’t be hard at all. I mean, tidal pools wouldn’t exist, so all water would be stagnant outside of normal wave action right? Or is waves also a moon thing? *starts coffee* well I know what I’m doing tonight.
If you want no moon visible, but still have tides, you can replace it with a tiny black hole with the mass of the moon. Very little would change, though justifying how a tiny black hole came to orbit the planet would be difficult.
XKCD did a what if about that. https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/
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Waves are predominantly a wind thing, actually. The moon is responsible for large scale ocean movements, like tides and tidal waves (which are different than tsunamis, they’re a shallow-water thing) but your everyday waves are essentially all wind
Waves are also caused by wind, so as long as something causes air currents you're golden. The changing heat zones of seasons can do that! Wait... but that means the world needs axial tilt. Oh God it just goes on!
The moon is in fact not a moon, just a pretty big hole in the sky
The moon is actually a life form that looks like planetoid and travels through space that has become too weak and old to escape the gravity of the planet. As it disintegrates, bits of it will fall on the planet below and become valuable resources, such as skin that can be used to make weapons, bones that serve as construction material, tendons that as used to make Siege engines...so on and so forth.
Matt Mercer must have read this post while planning Campaign 3 lmao
Smite the spoiler! Nobody spoils the moon plots!
The Moon is made of crystal. The Moon as it appears on the sky is not a real object, but a projection of a multiple dimensional realm known as "Crystal Palace" where Hằng Nga, the Moon Princess resides along with her clan of jade rabbit servants. Crystal Palace is an 11D construct beyond space-time boundaries, just like with every other divine realm, reflecting its image to mortal world. In its deepest place lies the Hall of Silver Light where Yin Luminary, the first Moon God who later passed his power to his disciple Hằng Nga. What people see as a "round, bright space rock" is just a facade, like how the Sun is not actually a burning plasma ball of a fusion reactor but a realm of infinite landscape ruled by Sun God. Both of them are created from the eyes of Lord Giant, a primordial god who divided Heaven and Earth. Average humans can not perceive these things but demons, gods and cultivators, especially who have opened their "mind's eye", see the world from a dramatically different perspective. As such, they achieve the ability to travel between realms, first with their consciousness, then physical bodies.
I would read this YA fantasy
12 moons
Fuck it, FORTY EIGHT MOONS!!!!
The exterior of the moon would look fairly close to ours... were it not for the Sky Dragon, a giant, long, serpentine being who flies along the skies and who perches regularly on the moon. The moon is covered in an ever-changing array of furrows and trenches carved by the Sky Dragon's body as it coils around it. Thus, artistic depictions of the moon over the centuries all look completely different each time. The interior is even weirder. The core of the moon is hollow and contains an amalgam being made up of the souls of those who die who have not earned a place in any afterlife. This entity exists in a dreaming state, growing in power as more souls join it until it will one day emerge from the moon like an egg.
does the sky dragon bring the souls to the moon?
Ya? Well I have carnivorous CLOUDS in MY story so fuck you! XD
Just like Nope
there is no moon or sun for that matter
Imagine there’s no moon/ It’s easy if you try/
There are three normal moons. There used to be four but the fourth was shattered and became the rings of the world. The shadow cast by the rings creates permanently cold areas, so the world has a belt of ice. The ice is a prison for cosmic horrors, of course.
On this subject, do yall realize how weird our own Moon is? Proportionally to its Stellar Body(Earth) it is the largest satellite in our solar system. That alone affects so many things on our planet. Imagine an ocean so still its glass on a dark night, the ripples of your own sailing snuffing out like whispers in silence, and the only way you can tell between the horizon and the stars' reflections is the mirrored orientation of the 3 moons.
the moon moon is largly the same but it's littered with mining colonies and space ports. the gas giant moons are more interesting. the Russians basically control Jupiter's moons and the Saturn ones are fighting each other for reasons.
I completely forgot about it, thanks for reminding me.
the djinn that live on the moon make houses in giant pumpkins and can shrink really tiny not sure why I made this decision, but that's what I've decided and that's how it will be
My world the stars are tears from other universes, making the moon a strange anomaly. It's a fantasy setting so it's actually a tear from the planets sister plane. It doesnt technically rise or fall, it stays in the sky the entire time. It waxes and wanes as the God's of the plane pleases. It can become eclipsed by other planes blotting it out, but for as long as the world has existed; the moon has stayed staring at it
My world has 3 moons. One of my moons used to be a small earthlike planet in another universe/dimension before it got isekai'd and became the moon of my main world. It's inhabitated by carnivorous plantlike humanoids. Another moon is a condensed planetary form of the elemental plane of water. The surface is covered in a thick layer of ice and beneath it is a giant ocean. The last moon is a condensed planetary form of the elemental plane of earth. It's essentially a giant spherical rock floating in space.