Worlds! Worlds, everywhere!
What would the Earth look like if it spun backwards. Or if all of the land were replaced by water? How could the Earth be placed into a permanent ice age, and what would the climate be like?
Planetcopia
answers all of these questions. It really defies definition, but...
In essence, it's a series of tours of hypothetical worlds, with special focus placed on climate and geography, filled with lush descriptions of alien landscapes, all very lovingly hand-crafted on globes, with numerous drawings of landscapes, flora and features. All of this is created by Chris Wayan, and is regularly updated with new content.
The worlds are grouped in several categories, which include:
Tilt
Tilted, alternate earths- Seapole: An Earth where both poles are on sea (off the coasts of Brazil and Japan, respectively).
- Shiveria: Both poles on land (in South America and Asia), which locks Earth in a permanent Ice Age.
- Turnovia: Earth simply turned 180°.
- Jaredia: Inspired by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, an Earth with the largest possible east-west continent extensionnote .
Futures
Earth, Mars and Venus as they may be 1000 years in the future- Dubya: Earth if the atmospheric CO2 concentration doubled.
- Mars Reborn: A Terraformed Mars, although not fully Earth-like.
- Venus Unveiled: A terraformed Venus.
Biosphere Variations
More alien worlds than alternate Earths- Serrana: Midway between Earth and Mars.
- Lyr & Oisin: Lyr is a planet designed to be utterly un-Earthlike (7 times more massive, near-completely oceanic, fainter sun, eccentric orbit), Oisin is its Europa-like moon.
- Capsica: A hot world, averaging 50° C (122° F).
- Pegasia: Earth-like moon of a Jovian world, with many intelligent species (there was a contest for user-submitted species).
- Tharn: An extremely dry (1/500th Earth's water) but still inhabitable moon.
Caprices
Earths with more...esoteric changes- Siphonia: Earth with most of its oceans siphoned away.
- Inversia: Earth with an inverted height scale — turning the continents into oceans and vice versa.
- Abyssia: Starts from Inversia, but has the same amount of water as normal Earth (Inversia has much less). The result has very little exposed land.
Tropes in 'Planetocopia':
- Alien Sky: Lovingly described around every world, every time it's different from earth.
- Special points go to Lyr, for how the light of the sun curves around the planet, and for the iceball Oisin in the sky.
- Alternate World Map: The original point, really.
- Artistic License – Biology: Wayan has freely admitted that he puts more thought into the geology and planetary conditions than the biology, and it shows:
- Many of the aliens simply look like anthropomorphic animals. While convergent evolution can explain this to some degree, it's still not likely.
- All of Wayan's planets have multiple sapient species, sometimes over a dozen. This isn't impossible in theory, and some other speculative biology projects have shown plausible scenarios where this could happen, but he insists that multiple sapient species are probably the norm for Earth-like planets. There is no reason to believe this is the case.
- Many of Wayan's flying animals do not have wings that look like they could support their weight in flight. Likewise, the ones on higher-gravity planets, like Lyr, should be short and squat to cope with the higher gravity, and the evolution of flight is unlikely on such worlds.
- As far as Earth biology goes, Wayan refers to flying foxes as marsupials. They're placental mammals.
- Author Appeal: The whole reason the aliens look like attractive humanoids.
- Death World: Averted; all of the inhabited hypothetical worlds are more pleasant than this one. At least, if you subscribe to liberal-leaning anarcho-primitivism.
- Eternal Sexual Freedom: Most of his cultures.
- Intelligent Gerbil: Quite a few of the aliens are essentially humanoid versions of Earth animals.
- Jungle Japes: Lyr...mostly. Except for the rare grassland. And desert.
- Lady Land: No obviously male pictures are included.
- No Nudity Taboo: Somehow, every female creature Wayan populates his worlds with. Makes far too many pages NSFW.
- Shifting Sand Land: Tharn, Mars and Serrana. Largely downplayed and original, because italics: water spreads out.
- Single-Biome Planet: Averted. Every world has multiple climate zones; Lyr has more than Earth!
- Speculative Biology: Not as much as you might think. The geology is very rigorous, but the creature designs have more to do with Author Appeal than with any serious speculative biology.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Oisin, a moon with life in its oceans.
- Under the Sea: Lyr and Abyssia consist predominantly of water. Downplayed, because both have substantial land masses. Subverted with Seapole and Dubya; they're only the Earth with all of ice caps melted.
