Humans are the weirdest aliens?

Ahhhh they look so cool is that the recent film with Matt Damon?

 

they'd probably either be like "eh no biggie" or be boggled that we've created a couch with anxiety

 

yeah sure those are probably your cousins

(but for real the language was So Cool)

 

I meant more in the sense of centaurlike aliens, im just imagining them landing on a foggy day and exiting the ship, then seeing a figure approaching in the distance and theyre like "oh hey theyre like us" and getting more and more freaked out the closer they get. Once they get there the human gets off the horse and the aliens briefly freak out like "WTF THAT SHOULD NOT BE DETACHEABLE"

 

i wish we learned more about the aliens though, cause they're fascinating and i have Questions

 

flashback to the Animorphs books- what if all other aliens are just, like, permanently worried that humans will fall over?
if you look at us objectively, our vertical stance looks tippy and ridiculous, like every single one of us is spitting in the face of physics (never mind that a large portion of our brain power is devoted to just... keeping us balanced day in and day out) there would be SO MANY HUMAN PRANKS.

imagine humans being the only ones able to constantly keep their feet no matter what kind of turbulence/swaying is happening (Like, the ship lurches and the aliens all get knocked into a pile on the floor, but the human rode it out like a lurching subway)

 

On the topic of "how does the human stay balanced", imagine trying to explain ballet.

 

...and it's supposed to look like you're not affected by gravity.

- The dancers are very light then?

No, they're surprisingly heavy because of all the muscle.

- And they balance on the fragile tips of the jointed flappy end of the limb with all the tiny bones.

Yeah. Well, usually just the women.

- Are the men unable?

Nah, they're able.

- Then why?

Aesthetics, my dude.

 

What if earth is the only planet with an axis tilt, or we have like a super extreme axis tilt, so other planets either don't have seasons or only have very mild seasons. So you get species that can handle, like a very narrow range of temperatures comfortably, varying depending on what subrace of that species they are and what latitude they've evolved to inhabit. Humans being like "damn it's cold out" and aliens being like "oh, that's outside of your temperature range? We'll get someone else to go out and gather specimens." and humans are like "Nah, I'll just put on a coat. No big." and aliens are like "...Coat? ?? A what???"

 

Climate is also affected by things like air pressure and water!

A thicker-aired planet has a much more even temperature gradient, and a planet with more broken-up continents will have less severe seasons because of the moderating effect of water.

Geography actually affects climate a lot-an Earth with modern CO2 levels but both poles on land would be in a steady-state ice age, and likely would've been in such a state for long enough that the Mediterranean Sea turned into the Mediterranean Deep Salt Flats (like it did in our ice age) and then just into the jungly, warm, high-air-pressure Mediterranean Deeps.

Meanwhile an Earth with sea under both poles would have a higher sea level and be generally warmer, with tongues of shallow seas spreading into continents, moderating their seasons and preventing most of the interiors from turning into desert.

Even just an Earth exactly the same as ours but upside-down would have climatic differences, with things like the bottom of South America curving against the current and driving a cold current and icebergs south, rather than curving with the current and leaving the current uninterrupted and a warm Spanish Current keeping Canada and half of Greenland temperate. Meanwhile there'd be no Gulf Stream, so Scandinavia would ice over, and all of Europe would be tundra and cold forest.

That's without changing CO2 levels or anything else at all. Just tilting the planet.


ETA: Finished the post.

 

@raybot I finished the 'things that affect climate other than axial or orbital seasons' post!

ETA: Does anybody want me to talk about orbital seasons?

 

I was actually thinking about making a dedicated space world building thread, That would seem a bit off topic for this thread. Unless people don't think it is.

 

annnnnnd we're back to kintsugi in space, is what i'm getting here

(the preferred evolution for all threads)

 

Okay!

Orbital seasons happen when a planet's orbit around its star or stars isn't perfectly circular. All planets in our solar system have slightly elliptical orbits, and while there's been exoplanets found with orbits more circular than in our solar system, their orbits are not perfect circles-the effect of orbital seasons on them may still be relevant to their climate. (Since we are not there, we don't know if that's true.)

Earth's orbital seasons are aligned with the Southern Hemisphere axial tilt seasons and therefore opposite to the Northern Hemisphere axial seasons. This means that, all other things being equal, the Southern Hemisphere would have harsher seasons. However, the Southern Hemisphere has a lot more surface water moderating the climate.

Orbital seasons moderate Northern climates very slightly and probably are partially responsible for the two-season system many equatorial places have (wet and dry). They also, due to orbital mechanics, mean that the axial seasons that fall in orbital summer are shorter than the ones that fall in orbital winter.

On planets with more orbital eccentricity or less axial tilt, orbital seasons would play a larger part in climate.

In a tidelocked world, orbital eccentricity would mean that some of the planet would have day/night cycles. In some areas, the edge of the sun would peek over the horizon during summer, and stay below the horizon in winter, due to the size of the solar disk. Even a moderate, still-circular-looking amount of eccentricity could cause this. Heck, ours causes it-just only 3.3 degrees of change, which nobody really notices except astronomers who wanted to measure it.
On top of that, the planet would only turn in sync with its orbit in the middle parts. When it is closest to its sun, it moves less distance, is faster, and has its angle to the sun change quicker, but its spin remains the same, so it lags behind-the sun grows in the sky and swings east. When it's farthest from the sun, it moves more distance, is slower, and has the angles to the sun change slower, but its spin remains the same, so it outpaces the orbit a little and the sun shrinks in the sky and swings west.

East-west swing's called libration.

Any axial tilt also causes the sun to 'nod' north and south in the sky-this is the cause of axial seasons. It's called nutation.

The combination of libration, nutation and the size of the sun changing in the sky mean that we can see 60% of the Moon's surface from the ground at different times of the year-20% of it has Earthrises and Earthsets, where the Earth goes up and then, on the same side, goes down.

A tidelocked planet with an atmosphere would also have atmospheric lensing, where the air bends light a little around the horizon. On Earth, that means that at dawn or dusk, you see the sun when it's 'really' a degree or so below the horizon.

Atmospheric lensing is stronger on higher-gravity worlds and worlds with denser air.

The total effect of all that is that a tidelocked world with an atmosphere, even a little axial tilt, and a little eccentricity could be livable, with more dayside than nightside, the heat from the dayside conducted to the nightside, and a large part of the surface having very weird day/night cycles. Like, sun goes up, sun goes down on the same side. The poles would also be seasonal.

Also, a tidelocked world in the Goldilocks zone for a planet of its size would be orbiting a red star, meaning it would have to be very close, meaning its star would be very large in the sky, meaning that sunsets and sunrises would take longer, and even with no libration or nutation, only atmosphere, the dayside would be larger than the nightside and the twilight zone would be large.

 

That post got away from me and turned into a post describing how to give your tidelocked-to-a-red-dwarf planet seasons. Whoops.

 

Should I put the Space Worldbuilding thread in General Chatter or Make it So?

EDIT: Am assuming that nobody else is making the thread. Quotable, don't mean to step on your toes if you're making the thread. I just don't want this to be 2 days of everybody waiting for everybody else to make the thread.

 

This is why space freaks me the fuck out. It's right over the edge of the uncanny valley right into the special pit of no. But it's really cool.