A World Building Process

[Ferret Civilization]

Alright so it seems a lot of people have all their own fancy fact books that either go to the extreme writing in process and ceased to exist or have entire lores written out and just making everything else look like a sad little information dump. Going through all that I was looking at my own procrastination like look at you, you, you and I want to talk about me like an egomaniac drunkenly stumbling in the dark. So here I go being brave enough to open up yet another thread of my own to once I wake up in the morning will probably very much come to regret but let me live in the moment of trying not to break the fact book and information forum rules. Now that I got somewhat of what I think is a fine introduction if you do not me saying let me try to talk about where this is going, something that has been a trouble.

Going over hundreds of pages of threads and searching for anything with either FT (Future Tech), factbook, or worldbuilding in the title it seems most people are forever writing in process. In second place it seems most people focus on the society and people side of worldbuilding, fair enough, those made me pretty jealous and like, I can do that. Well two sentences in trying to do that on my own and that sobering experience said, stay in your lane kid, you can not do this. Bummer, well what should I try to focus on then, I want to be a big kid with cool fact books like the rest of the community that closes itself off for what I know are some pretty good reasons. Looking at what I do have made in private that will never see the light of day because that would require hamfisting beyond which I am not capable of pulling off, however I can present it here and it should be fine, I hope.

What is that, well I better get to it I am probably making the rule enforcers impatient. I will present world building, like the building the worlds kind, not the people side of it. That I did look for quite a bit for a long time, trying keywords and just brute force looking that I found out that is yet another thing I really suck at because I found nothing in this forum about actually building a world from the ground up and including a bunch of worthless information that would never be brought up in a roleplay thread. However the internet as a whole did not let me down here, with places like Reddit and the worldbuilding stack exchange providing some crumbs to chase. Though the Youtuber Artifexian pretty much covers most of what I wanted to go over, well that is a good base to follow if I ever saw one. Next paragraph I promise will have some actual rule following stuff, but the last thing I want to add is that this is going to be an open project that I do welcome feedback on because looking at all the other fact books be closed shows how cool those people are and I am not. Probably should try to call a mentor but that scares me.

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Now starting off the world building process I did say it was hard to think of where to start, what finally got me writing all of this was I figured out I wanted to start of with the star and then go to the planet basics. The star that holds the solar system together seems like the most independent thing that does not require me to throw information that has not yet been mentioned. Kyrusia has already made something of a guide based off of this,

ONSTARSYSTEMS
^{A General Guide on the Creation of Stellar and Planetary Systems}

and why it is not in the helpful links part of the FT advice thread introduction I have no idea, modesty is my best guess but it makes it hard to find by brute force reading. The other guides do not really go much further in depth to the actual details in building a world or star, that makes sense, it does not come up in roleplay so why worry so hard about what in the end is most likely hard artistic license everything.

To get back to me now, I have a grand total of two solar systems to build up, and I will start with my most complete ferret one. Still thinking if the name I gave it is good enough but that is for later. The ferret system has, get this, two white dwarfs orbiting each other. Sad that Kyrusia only stuck with the boring main sequence of a star. First pitching that idea to myself years ago I was like its outrageous but rule of cool am I right, well looking into it on all knowing Google and what do you know, it is possible. Actually looking it up today, apparently more cool news coming in from July ‘19 about a discovered white dwarf duo that spin around each other super fast. Did not know about that years ago, galaxy seems to be quite the show off proving wacky things are possible.

Now thinking back, I really have no idea why I picked white dwarf stars, but it makes for some good history to build. Building the history of some stars, look at how far I am stretching to get some useless fact book information. Though getting on with it, getting to a white dwarf stage of a star is not that hard, just the standard evolutionary cycle of say, something like our sun we enjoy here on Earth. Boom, one white dwarf somewhere and another one somewhere else, no planets yet but that will hopefully be solved when the two stars find each other and fall in love eh. Now something had to happen to get the stars to fall in love, something simple as they got too close to each other in some sort of galactic mishap could do, and bam they are endlessly stalking each other. Or I could say that some overpowered people just made it be, cop outs work here right, only in character probably, religion idea saved for later. Two white dwarfs orbiting each other, some purple prose and that makes for the start of a good fact book, I hope. Before I get to trying to artistically license some planets in I do want to eagerly share something that I learned about the future of this type of system. Apparently according to Wikipedia and the source it links two white dwarfs merging together can possibly form a Subdwarf B star, which then burns back down into a white dwarf itself. The love story ends with the death of two to make a child, amazing. That also spells the death of any planets that originally orbited the two lovebirds, sacrifices had to be made, future roleplay topic I suppose if any of us live long enough to see that happen. So give it a few years.

Since these are just going to be standard white dwarfs that is easily Google searchable, so onto the planets to not bore anyone that has gotten this far with statistics that are not cool. I already gave the ferret system three planets, one to orbit one star and one to orbit around both stars as the stars orbit each other. Easy enough, but let me bring in the outrageous part again, the planet that is habitable does a figure eight around the two stars, within their habitable zones. There is a reason that Kyrusia’s star guide binary part does not include a lemniscate of Bernoulli, it is unstable and completely breaks that suspension of disbelief if the word realism even enters the same realm of worldbuilding. But according to physics stack exchange, there is a small probability of it not instantly falling apart, time to double down on this in the face of being told how stupid this is trying to make it seem like it could happen in real life.

Working with the Roche Lobe both the stars have to be pretty much exactly the same mass so that the planet can just barely skirt over to the other star, repeatedly forever. Well the two white dwarfs can pretty much be the same mass, the planet orbiting closer to one of the stars has to be really small and probably would be called a dwarf planet. Lot of dwarfs. The other star would have to be infeasible bigger mass wise to make up for that, the odds of that being are pretty much zero but damn it I am in too deep full steam ahead. The other planet would have to be small and far away orbiting both stars to not affect the interior workings of this system. How would this come to be, a lot of improbable things happening at just the right moments to capture rogue planets and stellar dust forming rocks I would suppose. Or advanced magic, it is in the back pocket once this goes wrong, trust me. That habitable planet also has to be really close to support life, like, within point zero one astronomical units. (0.01 AU). We should know that Earth is one AU from the sun, setting myself up to look stupid there if that is wrong but oh well. The problems that comes from being that close is that first, the planet will be tidally locked to the star and two, the white dwarfs are so close together it takes some strong counter forces to keep them from suiciding into each other too soon for live to evolve.

However, something saves me with evolution on the habitable planet, that crazy figure eight orbit. Doing the math, a planet at .02 AU would have an orbital period of 12 hours, double that and the year is 24 hours long. Was surprised to learn that when I did it, did it again to make sure that I would be consistent in being wrong and that is the case. One side of the planet would face one white dwarf for 12 hours, then the other side would face the other white dwarf for 12 hours. Not much in the way of seasons and I still have to work out what the climate will be like, since this is not the standard Earth like environment and I imagine the biomes will be really weird. Also have to figure out when each sun is visible in the sky at what time in the center of the orbit between the two stars. Though that part is for later, and maybe it will be fine, this is fine after all. Another thing that has to be considered is how hot the stars are, looking up white dwarf habitable zone, it seems like having a temperature of 5000 K and can last 3 billion years. That would give the planet an average temperature of 260 K to 280 K which is doable. Cool, looking up Earth and oh, well life took over that period of time to get to us sapient creatures. Umm, going to have to speed that process up by a lot, I can see realism hating me so much right now I mind as well move to a fantasy children’s story.

But for now we have other problems to deal with, as they are endless in this scenario system, white dwarfs have the issue of emitting extreme ultraviolet rays when they are young. Which means life, if it water based, has to come in much later when the stars are less angry at the galaxy. The planet being so close to the white dwarf has another issue with being tidally heated, possibly to the point of not even ever getting liquid water, just a bunch of worthless oxygen in the atmosphere. Time to deal with these things, the first one is just let that be, water and life can come later as I pushed that aside at the end of the first paragraph. The second problem is more interesting to me as I looked up tidal heating and realized that the habitable planet would have to be really small to begin with in order to try and have something of a stable orbit that I gave it. Now let's say I gave this planet point one mass of Earth, that is pretty small for a planet. Looking at the solar system we live in like Earth and Mars, some theories state that because Mars was smaller it lost its magnetic field because the core could not keep up and cooled down faster than Earths. If this is what I go with and put that on my habitable planet I am making, well it loses the only thing protecting it from the wrath of space. This is where tidal heating from the white dwarf might come in to save the day, where on a bigger planet it would superheat things, on this small planet, it might be the only thing keeping it chugging along. Wow, amazing how some things in this insanity might just click together.

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With that I suppose this is a good place to finish off for the starting post, if you actually read that thanks for humoring me, there will be more to come. Feel free to ask any questions about something that I missed or tell me where I am wrong, or perhaps right if you are feeling really kind of this internet stranger. I will be trying to move onto more specifics about the stars and planets and then move onto my second solar system, which is more of a work in process and will be more open to last minute public mess ups.

[Ferret Civilization]

No one to reply to, that kind of sucks, now I have to keep talking to myself to try and get this mess to go in some sort of direction. Going back over my previous ramble seeing that I set up some building blocks, alright, suppose I can continue to scare everyone away by bringing in numbers and equations into this to see if the math would really work out. Thinking about backpedaling a bit for a second here to talk needlessly for a paragraph. Probably should have started by saying my place in the galaxy, that was something that should have really been the foundation, since that matters in hard science. Though going over where the community has placed themselves in the galaxy and saw that the galactic habitable zone thing has really been thrown out the window. Guess it was just a probability idea and the galaxy is crowded enough with giant map filling empires. But space is big, like really big, that is the saying is it not, can come back to that later after figuring out all the little unimportant details of the solar system that will never be brought up again.

Starting off with the white dwarf stars that I had mentioned before, guess now would be a good time to give them some of those wikipedia page facts that something like our sun or the many other stars that we know about have. Could just rip off the stats of one of the many well known white dwarf stars, would make things really easy to just skip ahead to the consequences of what those stars would do to planets in orbit. But that does not really seem like fun to me, and would probably be a slap in the face of some people, well maybe just my face. So now where to start, probably would be smart to start off with the limitations a white dwarf star has in order to be such a thing in existence without quickly ceasing to exist, as that would be bad for any aspiring lifeforms stuck in the solar system. Going by Wikipedia on this for real life basis; temperature can range from a high of 250,000 K to a low of 3,000 K, mass can range from 1.35 M☉ to 0.17 M☉, radius range is 0.265 R☉ to 0.005 R☉. Well those numbers should be something of a base to find all the other numbers through equations hopefully, does not really have to be hard since like faster than light exists, just enough to be reasonable on first glance and then never look back to see the dumpster fire it really is.

In the last post I had said from some searching, someone on the internet said that at 5,000 K that would be the best time frame area to last the longest for a stable habitable zone. So that is one goal, and then there is the Chandrasekhar limit to worry about, so the mass can not go above 1.4 M☉ otherwise bad stuff happens and everyone dies before they even had a chance to live. According to some site that has nasa in the title and national geographic the average mass is 1 M☉ and the average radius is 0.01 R☉, pretty much just a shrunken sun with all the original mass still there. Since I am not trying to get too much more crazy this is probably a good baseline, more probable that two average stars meet each other than two not average stars of this kind. Watch the two averages not work together for some obvious reason, though looking at the real life stars there is not really a strong link between the two. Onto the equations that will be needed to make this move forward.

First up, the mass-radius relationship, and I was proven wrong so very quickly already. Let us see, trying to keep this somewhat simple and not so full of variables that are unknown right now. The idea is that the more mass a white dwarf has, the smaller the radius of it will be. That is until it hits that Chandrasekhar limit and then it is no longer going to be a white dwarf. Luckily for me, other people have already worked all of this stuff out on a basic level to show on places like Wikipedia with the graph and such. This is going by the relativistic scale since that non-relativistic one pretty much ends up defying reality and even the relative one has its own problems down the line. Started hitting paywalls for finding out just what was supposedly wrong in dept and that is probably a rabbit hole I should avoid for my own lack of understanding. So to the math part, having an average 1 M☉ would get me .008 R☉ and to get an average .01 R☉ would give me around .8 M☉. Well that matches the graph pretty closely, and is not was I was hoping for, suppose I will have to see how the other things will turn out depending on those two factors.

I would try to find out the temperature next but Google has pushed me instead to find the luminosity, which will probably lead to what I was originally looking for. Suppose that makes sense, the less luminous the star the older it is and therefore the cooler it will be, the goal is 5000 K which will most likely require me to not have the average mass or radius of the star that I am using. And then going into some older resources about this topic I find out that apparently the white dwarf will cool down to an invisible black dwarf with an approximately constant radius. That is nice I should go with that, kind of falls in line from what I have been seeing around the internet on this topic as well. Willfully ignoring that I am most likely wrong time to go on to how temperature and luminosity are related. Going by calculator now, if I say that I want my white dwarf to be .01 R☉ and 5000 K the outcome is .00005608 L⊙ along with an absolute magnitude of 15.37. That falls in line with the graphs I have seen about this as well, with 5000 K aligning close to 10^-4, I could probably get away with rounding up to .0001 L⊙ if I have to later on. But so far this part looks great, I hope. Age is a factor in all of this as well so I will be putting this here, seems like the white dwarfs would be around over three but possibly under four billion years old. And as I said in the last post it is suspected to be able to host a stable habitable zone for another three billion years before getting too cold unless the planet was inside the area where it would get ripped apart.

You know going over this I saw that this is kind of getting close to what the Van Maanen 2 stats are, just a little different since they actually account for all the real life variables that affect the perfect equations. I have been spending too much time on just this part alone, and it is probably not even the hardest part. If any further equations require it I think I will choose the 1 M☉ with the accompanying .008 R☉ and have it been an old fart putting out 5000 K with .0001 L⊙. Will leave it as that right now as finding out the special equations that white dwarfs require over main sequence stars has been taking quite the drag for very little payoff. Tomorrow is a new day to focus on that along with actually doing all this over again for the planets, seeing if they get along, and then hating myself when seeing that they do not thus being forced to start all over.

[Ferret Civilization]

Hello past me, let us keep up this little sad talking to oneself show going, alright. Picking up where I left off, I have two stars that both are around 1 M☉, 0.008 R☉, 5000 K, 0.00003589 L⊙, Apparent Magnitude of 15.85. I saw that I made the mistake of using the 0.01 R☉ which had less mass than the one I said I would go with, giving me the need to redo the L⊙. I also am deciding that it is probably best to not try and round the answer as of right now until everything is found out, as rounded answers might mess things up later on. That leaves me with finding out the age of the stars and then probably the density from what I can think of right now. Luckily once again I have managed to find the answers to those equations rather easily today than I had yesterday, woo present me. Though that requires changing the units of measurement, so that brings the white dwarf stats to 1.989 × 10^30 kg and 5821 km, thus going through the equations given that is 5.09 × 10^6 kg / m^3 or 5.09 x 10^17 kg / km^3 if I keep the same units even though it is a bigger number.

Now to finish up on the real age of the white dwarf stars I have made here and not just some poor estimate. Looking up that equation gave me a chart, lovely, and seeing how my estimate used the wrong mass giving the wrong luminosity that I am now going for, oh. I was given an answer of -4.44 for the L⊙ and for a carbon-oxygen common star, that is just under 6.919 billion years old coming from the -4.5 L⊙. If the idea that the galaxy is 13.8 billion years old sticks here, that gives me 6.881 billions years to have two main sequence stars die. It is said that stars under 8 M☉ will become a white dwarf, however I can not use G-type main sequence stars since their lifespan is over 10 billion years. That leaves me with pretty much using the A and F-type main sequence stars that only live millions of years versus billions. Those two would give plenty of time for the white dwarf to cool down and have the age it does have without it being older than the galaxy itself. Well now that I know that works I suppose I should move onto building the planets now, that way I can finish up what the stars look like from them and wrap up the stats.

Though before I start with some numbers to build the planet, suppose I should say that from my first post building blocks the two white dwarfs would be 0.04 AU away from each other, leaving the barycenter 0.02 AU between each other as they constantly chase each other down. Looking up to make sure that they would not rip each other apart fighting for mass found out about ZTF J1530+5027, quite the name. Apparently they are only 0.0005 AU and kicking even though they are having a cannibalizing relationship, not what I was wanting to see. So doing the Roche Limit equation, assuming the same density and that both the stars would count as rigid, that is an answer of 7334 km or about 0.00005 AU. Huh, well at least I now know that they can orbit at that distance and the planets can too, just have to watch out for them eating each other, hopefully at about the same rate since they are about the same in every way. That would at least keep them balanced out and not exploding for getting too big for themselves to handle.

Starting with the main star of this system, the planet that orbits around both the stars that hold the solar system together. I already know that in order for the planet to be habitable it has be so close to the stars it will be tidally locked in a 1:1 orbital resonance with one of them. That might have been a mistake I made in the first post, as given the orbit, it might only get stuck facing one star, and then be forced to rotate going around the other one. That is unless the planet is not rotating at all, which is, well I think not possible. Even if it was going in between the two stars would force it to rotate some I would think. Another thing I know is that I set the distance the planet orbits at 0.02 AU, and it would cross over at the barycenter of the two stars, though I found that in order to have this orbit it would probably need a net angular momentum of 0. That would be interesting to find if this was reality. But for now that type of puzzling to make work can come later, let me try and stick with the easier stuff like picking out a mass and radius and hoping that it can support itself.

Quickly throwing something out there like a planet with 0.1 the mass of Earth and 0.5 the radius of Earth, 5.972 x 10^23 kg and 3185.5 km respectively that can give me a lot of things to find. Going by a mass-radius relationship for planets this should be able to be made like a terrestrial world with an iron core, silicate mantle, and stuff like that. To get the density first have to find the volume of the sphere, which is 135,400,864,605 km^3 thus giving a density of 4.41 g/cm^3 or about 0.8 of the density of Earth. Taking that to find the gravity ends up giving me 3.9228 m/s^2 which is 0.4 of Earths, not exactly the best place for humans but so far it should be doable for life I would hope, least it fits in the Habitable Planets for Man book. Because the Roche Limit eluded me for so long I will put it here as well for the planet, which given whatever the other object is made out of it can be anywhere between 2,102.43 - 3,567.76 km which might be good to know, if there was anything in orbit with gravity which I am not planning. The other important thing that needs to be known is both the escape velocity and then jeans escape, which will determine what this planet in process can hold onto. Going over that math, escape velocity would be 5 km/s, only 0.45 of Earths, be pretty easy to go to space for those on this planet compared to what we have to go through. Jeans escape on the other hand ends up being 0.83 km/s, that ends up looking a little scary. Though I think I just jumped a point and did not put what the surface temperature of the planet would be to get that last answer, I used a program and used Earth as a stand in for the other variables to an average surface temperature of 260 K to 280 K depending on where the planet is located. Not very hot, thus it might help hold onto some of the lighter elements, sad to think that water is considered light here.

Looking at the escape velocity of water, well my planet can not hold onto it for long, but at cold temperatures my planet would end up being like Mars in this regard and hold onto all water as ice. When the planet starts to warm up to where the ice would melt, a probably noticeable percent of it would be lost in the air as sublimation, and then when it cools back down whatever was held onto would slowly go back to being a solid. Though optimistically there would still be liquid water around to support life, which is cool, make for some interesting stories to tell to other people in roleplaying. Funny, using another online program it says that this hypothetical planet is 1.1 AU away from the sun if it was set in our solar system. Now that I know what this planet can hold onto I can go onto the atmosphere, coming up with an atmospheric pressure I would say 0.5 atm of Earth would be good. This is one thing that I found that I could make up since real life in our own solar system has given quite a variety so if there is an equation out there well rest in peace me on this front. 7.35 psi is not exactly survivable for humans, as that on Earth would put the elevation above Mount Everest, from what I put together it would be akin to about 11000 meters above sea level whereas Everst is 8850 meters, yikes. Having already tinkered with the biology building blocks I do know that life can find a way here from what we know currently about hypothetical life biochemistries.

Though what would this atmosphere be made of, as stated in the first post life would never get a chance to grow when the white dwarfs are young, they would blast whatever the planet held onto away. That is kind of why I picked a low atm, since the planet really would not have a chance to hold onto it for as long as Earth could. Little bit of artistic license there but oh well, no one has bothered to correct me except myself so far. I figured that I would do something a little exotic when coming to the atmosphere, assume that the planet has a rather large percent of itself made out of phosphorus, not something extreme but noticeable. One form of phosphorus decays into Argon, and instead of having a Nitrogen-Oxygen world this could lead to a more Argon-Oxygen world. Was thinking I could just throw the nitrogen right on out, and I will talk about that problem later on, but for now let us just say this world is like 87% Argon, 12% Oxygen, then 1% a bunch of other stuff like Carbon Dioxide and Monoxide along with other greenhouse gases and the ever shifting water vapor. Good enough I suppose, this would bring the molecular mass of dry air to around 39.02 kg/kmol and Earth has one of 28.96 kg/kmol which is due to argon being more than nitrogen. Though I suppose that atmospheric pressure should change that, possibly. Let me see what else can one find, oh the boiling point, that would be 80 C here, which is not a good thing for this planet since it is trying to hold onto water as ice but it is not apocalyptic just an annoyance. At least fire would not be that big of a deal here since it does not have the oxygen or gravity to really mess things up. With an atmosphere I should probably calculate the atmospheric density at sea level, that ended up coming out to be 0.37 kg/m^3 compared to Earth’s 1.2 kg/m^3. That really should show off how poor of an environment this would be for us humans. Other random things I found while looking for stats was that the specific gas content here would be 220 Joule/Kilogram-Kelvin and the speed of sound here would be 320 m/s. Not sure if I did those equations right as they were harder to find but I think it is close enough, if not, well then I will never bring it up again and it can stay buried forever to hide my shame to bringing it up in the first place.

From here I should probably step back and get on the solar system, since I know that this planet orbits at 0.02 AU from one star and then gets a little further to orbit 0.02 AU around the other I should probably try to find out the orbital velocity and such. Already said that the year should be about twenty four hours so from there hopefully it is not too difficult. Though running out of time this is something to do later.

[Ferret Civilization]

This must be a blog cause all I managed to do was talk to myself and get views for doing so, imagine most of them are my own views and the bots. Anything else is just too good to imagine, so picking up where past me left off again instead of having some sort of naturally flowing dialogue, putting the three celestial bodies together in a moving system. So doing a simple circular velocity equation that comes to a crazy 210 km/s, comes from having the mass of the sun and being so close to it I suppose. Wondered if that kind of speed alone would just cause the planet to flatten under its own gravity, but no, looking it up there are planets out there doing a lot worse and barely surviving. If this planet I was making got much closer to the white dwarf stars then it would slowly cease to be a planet and become metal spectral lines for other astronomers to look at. Using a Lemniscate of Bernoulli calculator to get the more correct distance than just multiplying two circumferences together I find that the perimeter that would be traveled is equal to about 0.15 AU. Using two circles with a radius of 0.02 AU would have got me a perimeter of 0.24 AU and that shape would have really been an astronomical mess up to use. So now with the distance and the speed I can find the time and hopefully find out that what I was going for and already looked up to be right. Then I get an answer of about 30 hours, divide that by two since this planet is orbiting around two equal stars and get a time of 15 hours. Well it was not 12, must have messed up something fierce in the building block stage, oh well it is fixed now right. With no planet rotation, since this has to have zero angular momentum to have a chance in Hell of being stable, that is one side of the planet baking in the sun for 15 hours, then the other side gets baked. Then there would be a little bit of time in the center there were some places would get to see two suns which is nice. With that kind of time at least I do not have to worry about this place becoming an eyeball planet so life does not have to struggle to find a way.

Before I go making another planet I guess I can put in a circular velocity that the two stars would be going around each other, and at a distance of 0.04 AU that would mean they are going about 149 km/s. Of course not the fastest pair of white dwarfs but I can just say that they have some kind of will to live a long life together. This would mean that the stars take about 70 hours to fully come around in a circle like orbit, about 3 days. Considering that it only takes like a day for my planet to fully orbit the two stars that takes them 3 days to do for each other is a neat fact. Actually continuing with this star planet relationship for a paragraph, time to finish up that luminosity part, the white dwarf at their closest would have an apparent magnitude of -24.376 and at their furthest even though it would be blocked by the other white dwarf that would come out to be -22.64. Compared to our real sun that is at -26.74 that is something, despite being so small the two stars will sure be able to dim everything else out when they are visible. Though just how big would this two main stars be to the observers on the planet, going through the angular diameter equation I get 0.21°, the sun for comparison to us is 0.53°, so at the closest the white dwarf would be about half as big in the sky as our sun is in our sky. Still as dangerous to look directly at with the naked eye though which is no fun. Now all I really need to do is pick a spot in the galaxy to start finding the rest of the general information out and I would be golden but I am still going to hold off on that for no reason.

So now I can go onto putting some other less detailed planets in this solar system, well probably not less detailed but will have less to worry about since they will not be having to worry about hosting life. Getting on with it I decided to put a planet that orbits only one of the white dwarfs, so it has to be closer than 0.02 AU and can not be so close that it gets ripped apart. Clever me decided to just put it halfway at 0.01 AU, good enough to call it a day there right. Now getting on with it I suppose I will go about it the same way I did for the first planet that I made and pick a mass and a radius to work from there. Now I can not make this object too big or it messes up the three body orbit I got going on and then everything falls apart, so going with a mass that is 0.0001 of Earth and a radius that is 0.05 of Earth. 5.972 x 10^20 kg and 318.55 km respectively, it would be big enough to be rounded in shape so I will call it a planet based off of that alone. With the mass and the radius I find that the density of this place would be around 4.42 g/cm^3 which is about the same as my first planet. Well that could give some ideas for later. Then quickly finding out the gravity of this place would be 0.39 m/s^2.

With that all the other basic geography parts could be found, though moving onto other potential facts about this planet, it would be tidally locked and have no hope of having a thing like an atmosphere. One side is pretty much getting vaporized away and the other side is solid below freezing giving a definite eyeball planet outcome. Much like Mercury there would not be an atmosphere but most likely an exosphere made up of all the stuff getting sanded off the surface and into space. Just for fun, the average temperature of this planet is 324 K, though it is tidally locked, so of course one side is hotter than the other with the cold side getting pretty much in the -100s C. Not really going to find the exact numbers here but knowing that, let us just say that the cold side is -200 C, knowing that the average is 50 C that just means I have to find the high number, a simple 300 C should be it right. Hate myself if I fail at something that should be that simple. If that is correct however, this would not be a nice place to try and live. Last thing I guess I could find right now would be how big this planet would appear in the sky of the first planet I made when it crosses the sun. Oh the speed and year length, 298 km/s giving a year of just 8.7 hours and probably getting messed up at that point. Now on to the angular diameter, got 0.02°, huh, looking it up and it would appear that the sun would be the same size as Mercury in the sky of my first planet so this would be one little tiny dot to find in front of a ball of light.

Making another planet to finish things off this one can orbit further away around both stars in a P-type orbit whereas that previous one had an S-type. Give this planet an orbit that places it 0.07 AU away from the barycenter of the system, thus the closest it would get to a star is 0.05 AU and be 0.09 AU the furthest away from the other star. Going with the same process as I just went through I would start with a mass of let us just say 0.4 of Earth and a radius that would be 0.75 of the Earth. Finding the density I get a higher 5.22 g/cm^3 which is really a lot closer to Earth than I was expecting but hey, possible heavy element mining eh. Then the gravity here would be 6.96 m/s^2 making the escape velocity here be 8.18 km/s. Missed that part above, the escape velocity of my smallest planet would be a measly 0.5 km/s making it really easy for spacecraft to get off of it. Now back to this work in process number 3. It really would not matter if this planet was tidally locked or not since it is so far out there it would not really be getting hot at all, funny thing to say since this is all happening within a 0.1 AU sphere from the barycenter of two white dwarfs. Even at its closest it would only get up to an average of 96 K, brr. Then lastly suppose I could get the speed now for a year length next. Speed is only 112 km/s, faster than pretty much anything in our solar system but like the slowest thing here. That then wraps things up given a year length of 163 hours, or 6.8 days, super long time as well considering what I just went through working out. With that the basic premise of this solar system has come together rather nicely, next time for future me, will try to further work on the first planet I made on less grand a scale like getting the continents and water to set up moving onto the biology side of world building.

[Ferret Civilization]

Well past me dropped the ball on future me now did they not, guess it is up to present me to fix this week long silence of shame. Least I was not making someone else wait on me, while that still hurts deep down I can live with it when it is just myself I procrastinate with. Now onto the first planet that I made, since the overall goal here is to get to the climate setup first thing I realized I missed upon reflection was that I did not select an orbital axis, and thinking about it I am given a unique situation where whatever degree I pick will not change anything regarding the time one side faces the sun, seasons, or anything else. The reason why is that the planet is tidally locked with no rotation on the axis, and by going around two stars each side of the planet will get an equal amount of sunshine. Does not matter if the planet has an axis of 0° to 90° the overall temperature is going to be the same, the only thing that changes is where the ice caps would be forming since this place is still very cold. Going with an idea of what could be going with something extreme like 0 would make the poles the most stable, the higher the degree gets the more minor the poles would shift as far as they could in the short periods of night and then shift back in the daytime since the ice would slowly turn into gas. Probably going to say something like having a 20° tilt for right now and if things work out put it in as a fact for the book eh.

Now moving onto the rough surface of the planet itself, for this I will consider this planet to be like Mercury when talking about the crust and core. I was trying to think of what the tectonic plates would be like here in this place that I am making, and the reason I picked Mercury is that I am going off of what our solar system has provided the current science on this topic. Figure I should work some history here because plates to not just pop into existence and talk about the planets in our solar system as well. Let us say that this planet was captured by the two white dwarf stars when they had just formed and thus are cranking the heat out at around 10,000 K each and that the planet had to orbit both of them at around 0.02 AU that it is currently at. The planet would be baking at around 522 K, not supporting life but not that bad since not every element is melting to that. Factoring in the tidal heating I figure this would be something like Venus when it comes to tectonics, this planet would not really have any though that would not mean there is no activity going on. For this period of time while the stars and the planet is cooling down every once and a while the interior will get hot enough to spill lava out all over the surface before cooling back down and leaving the stuff on the surface to harden up. This would allow anything that hit the planet at this stage to not really leave a mark since it would be covered up. But what happens once the planet is cooled down with the stars no longer trying to melt it away, could go with what Earth did and start cracking and forming the plates that we know today. Thought about that for some time while not writing any of it down like an idiot but looking it up I have to consider that I have a really small planet that would not behave like Earth. That is where Mercury comes in, since it is made up of one tectonic plate which is something I can use here.

Sounds like something that would be too easy for the stuff that I have been working for but surprisingly to myself I found that even Mercury with a single plate has a lot going for it to give similar geographic features as Earth. Saw that Mercury does it by shrinking as it gets colder, seeing the setup that I had going where the planet I made is only really as hot as it is due to how close it is to the star with some tidal heating as the star cooled the planet would as well. Thankfully I do not have to say that the shrinking of the planet that I made would be noticeable to the radius while still getting all the neat kind of mountain ranges and valleys. This probably should be something that I draw but not going into that effort just yet for no results with the crowd that I am trying to engage with. So going with that idea I can put my mountains and valleys anywhere along with volcanoes and other surface features that can change over time without trying to map a bunch of fault lines and think about how they would change over billions of years, so that is nice for me here. However the limit of how high and low points are would be more restricted, so nothing like Everest would be able to form here. This would also bring up an interesting point from the view of what the ocean would be like, since it really would not be able to get as deep either.

Getting to the water part of things, since there are no ocean plates and continental plates I suppose that gives me more freedom to decide just what the ratio of water to land is. Have to consider how important water is on Earth since I have nothing else to go with, for us it is a great heat and carbon sink along with making some of the biomes possible to exist. I will probably work towards having my planet be 80% water and 20% land, that way I would not have to worry about losing it all due to jeans escape and what not over a billion years in the window the planet has to horde the stuff from comets or something. Now going onto the biomes that would be able to exist going by an Earth analogue, half to draw a line at anything over pretty much 10 C which is kind of limiting. The biomes I have to work with are tundra, cold desert, woodland, shrubland, boreal forests, temperate grassland, temperate seasonal forest, and temperate rainforest. Nothing close to tropical, even right on the equator, pretty much as alien as I can get without breaking realism. This is all going off of that the hadley cells and ocean currents work the same way as they work on Earth despite not working at all the same way solar system wise that I had made. Kind of getting tough for me since I am probably missing something before moving onto how life would come to be and describing that stuff so I will end this day here and try to get my future self more motivated.

[Holdac]

Well past me dropped the ball on future me now did they not, guess it is up to present me to fix this week long silence of shame. Least I was not making someone else wait on me, while that still hurts deep down I can live with it when it is just myself I procrastinate with. Now onto the first planet that I made, since the overall goal here is to get to the climate setup first thing I realized I missed upon reflection was that I did not select an orbital axis, and thinking about it I am given a unique situation where whatever degree I pick will not change anything regarding the time one side faces the sun, seasons, or anything else. The reason why is that the planet is tidally locked with no rotation on the axis, and by going around two stars each side of the planet will get an equal amount of sunshine. Does not matter if the planet has an axis of 0° to 90° the overall temperature is going to be the same, the only thing that changes is where the ice caps would be forming since this place is still very cold. Going with an idea of what could be going with something extreme like 0 would make the poles the most stable, the higher the degree gets the more minor the poles would shift as far as they could in the short periods of night and then shift back in the daytime since the ice would slowly turn into gas. Probably going to say something like having a 20° tilt for right now and if things work out put it in as a fact for the book eh.

Now moving onto the rough surface of the planet itself, for this I will consider this planet to be like Mercury when talking about the crust and core. I was trying to think of what the tectonic plates would be like here in this place that I am making, and the reason I picked Mercury is that I am going off of what our solar system has provided the current science on this topic. Figure I should work some history here because plates to not just pop into existence and talk about the planets in our solar system as well. Let us say that this planet was captured by the two white dwarf stars when they had just formed and thus are cranking the heat out at around 10,000 K each and that the planet had to orbit both of them at around 0.02 AU that it is currently at. The planet would be baking at around 522 K, not supporting life but not that bad since not every element is melting to that. Factoring in the tidal heating I figure this would be something like Venus when it comes to tectonics, this planet would not really have any though that would not mean there is no activity going on. For this period of time while the stars and the planet is cooling down every once and a while the interior will get hot enough to spill lava out all over the surface before cooling back down and leaving the stuff on the surface to harden up. This would allow anything that hit the planet at this stage to not really leave a mark since it would be covered up. But what happens once the planet is cooled down with the stars no longer trying to melt it away, could go with what Earth did and start cracking and forming the plates that we know today. Thought about that for some time while not writing any of it down like an idiot but looking it up I have to consider that I have a really small planet that would not behave like Earth. That is where Mercury comes in, since it is made up of one tectonic plate which is something I can use here.

Sounds like something that would be too easy for the stuff that I have been working for but surprisingly to myself I found that even Mercury with a single plate has a lot going for it to give similar geographic features as Earth. Saw that Mercury does it by shrinking as it gets colder, seeing the setup that I had going where the planet I made is only really as hot as it is due to how close it is to the star with some tidal heating as the star cooled the planet would as well. Thankfully I do not have to say that the shrinking of the planet that I made would be noticeable to the radius while still getting all the neat kind of mountain ranges and valleys. This probably should be something that I draw but not going into that effort just yet for no results with the crowd that I am trying to engage with. So going with that idea I can put my mountains and valleys anywhere along with volcanoes and other surface features that can change over time without trying to map a bunch of fault lines and think about how they would change over billions of years, so that is nice for me here. However the limit of how high and low points are would be more restricted, so nothing like Everest would be able to form here. This would also bring up an interesting point from the view of what the ocean would be like, since it really would not be able to get as deep either.

Getting to the water part of things, since there are no ocean plates and continental plates I suppose that gives me more freedom to decide just what the ratio of water to land is. Have to consider how important water is on Earth since I have nothing else to go with, for us it is a great heat and carbon sink along with making some of the biomes possible to exist. I will probably work towards having my planet be 80% water and 20% land, that way I would not have to worry about losing it all due to jeans escape and what not over a billion years in the window the planet has to horde the stuff from comets or something. Now going onto the biomes that would be able to exist going by an Earth analogue, half to draw a line at anything over pretty much 10 C which is kind of limiting. The biomes I have to work with are tundra, cold desert, woodland, shrubland, boreal forests, temperate grassland, temperate seasonal forest, and temperate rainforest. Nothing close to tropical, even right on the equator, pretty much as alien as I can get without breaking realism. This is all going off of that the hadley cells and ocean currents work the same way as they work on Earth despite not working at all the same way solar system wise that I had made. Kind of getting tough for me since I am probably missing something before moving onto how life would come to be and describing that stuff so I will end this day here and try to get my future self more motivated.

i see you

[Ferret Civilization]

I got really excited to see a reply and then I saw the reply, well at least my wish got answered in like a really monkey’s paw kind of way. It did motivate me more than I could ever do trying to get myself to do something though so after seeing what I wrote pasted again for spam I realized I should probably calculate the tidal forces the stars are doing to this planet that I am working on. Going off of an online calculator to make things general and easy enough Earth gets mostly affected by the moon that puts out at most 7.79^18 N, meanwhile the sun puts the Earth through about 3.17^18 N. Putting in the system that I made when the planet gets closest to one of the suns there will be 1.88^22 N being dealt with, kind of knew it was going to be a big number since tidally heating came out pretty high but whew it is something to look at. Can tell that the high tide and low tides will be a lot more severe here, and since trying to find something to calculate the range is being tough to find I will just look at the extremes that we see here on Earth. So heading closer to the North Pole we see that the tidal range can be the most extreme, with examples like the Bay of Fundy giving a range of 38 feet to 23 feet depending on where in the bay one is to many other places. Though as the NOAA source I am using for this points out, the higher the latitude does not mean higher tides, this is more because the landmass does not give the water as much wiggle room as it has out in the middle of the big oceans. So it really depends on how I want my map to look, something that I should probably really be getting on to make this proceed better as I pretty much have all these building blocks in place.

However all I have to use at the moment is MS paint and that makes things look sad when I try to use it for what I want to use it for so I am stuck with words. Going with what I had already made I know that this planet is going to be more smooth due to its younger years of melting over and hiding a lot of craters. Volcanoes would probably end up looking like the broad craters that form on Venus, these areas would most likely be the areas that end up not just being underwater but most likely the deepest parts of the ocean. Now Mercury has a radius of 2,439.7 km and it has lost some number of km, seems like the news put out different numbers and the official NASA page that they got it from does not list it. But going anywhere between 10 to 20 km I will pick the biggest number cause why not for a ratio, getting 0.008. Using that for my planet of 3,185.5 km at the present that means this place lost about 17.5 km. This would allow for a good amount of scarps to form mountain like geography to be above the average elevation. Again using Mercury things could get almost as high as 4.5 km, no Everest but it would be pretty high here, especially with the low atmospheric pressure already at what will be sea level. The lowest point can be around 5 km below the average in the form of basins made by volcanic activity and mantle plums. This can be sprinkled in with hot spots that form the more recognizable style of volcanoes that are in the shape of cone looking mountains or such.

Though this is before considering how water would affect the landscape, first big thing is that it would put the pressure on the ground that was underneath it which would probably be looking like how that is on Earth. Then there is the erosion factor, that would smooth out any scarps that barely break the surface and dig away at the bigger ones just like what can happen here, only be more noticeable with this time span that I am working with. But it really will not be that big of a problem, just something that I should be considering. Moving on since I really can not draw these ideas out and it is time to get onto the way heat will be moving around, early history on this rock would completely rely on the Hadley cells and thus the wind to transfer heat within the atmosphere as it slowly radiates away into space. Eventually things would cool down enough that whatever brought in the water to a planet can get there and dump water. Around this time things would be the most interesting since jeans escape would probably be the biggest problem, as what little water could get through would be turned into gas and then pack its bags to leave the planet again. Sometime later the tipping point would happen and there would be more water on the planet than could be lost through that escape method as it would no longer be hot enough to just boil everything away. From then on water would do what it does as an ocean and move heat around through the Coriolis forces and currents. Like I pointed out in the double pasted talk above things around this point things will be so cold that there will be a different layout of biomes around.

Getting onto the biomes, while I can not map it out I should still be able to figure out how far the tropics would extend from the equator and then the arctic from the poles. Going by the 20° tilt that I had picked out that means 20° north and south from the equator would be this planets tropics, even though here it is so cold even on the equator line that the best I can hope for is temperate rainforests to take place instead. This would mean that then 70 to 90° would be where the arctic would be all the time, however like I just said I have to work out how much further down the permafrost goes. That has been giving me some trouble to actually find some kind of equation to use for this that involves temperature, kind of a bummer but maybe I can find that later.

Without mapping I suppose this is a good time to completely switch online academic skills and start down the abiogenesis line of building blocks. Now somewhere I pointed out that I only have a window of 3 billions years for life to evolve and thus it really only has one shot to rush something out. Going by temperature and the jeans escape problem I have another roadblock, I can not really use water as the starting point of life here. Luckily that does not mean forever and then having me try to shoehorn in why life evolving without water would look just like some lifeform that did, just need to get the starting life building material to click together. Surprisingly looking into this beforehand, I found out that it is possible, most people are aware of a thing called chirality when making some alien species. While that is neat and all it is not the only thing that can be switched up when coming to amino acids, there is alpha and beta forms of acids as well. What I found cool about this is instead of being kind of up to chance whether life goes Dextro or Levo is that alpha or beta is possibly determined by when water enters the stage. Start off with water like how it was on Earth and get alpha, perhaps like in my case that luxury is not there, beta comes in to save the day and push life forward.

After this I had to come up with some crazy idea to see if life could evolve without Nitrogen of all things and I have really come to regret that. Turns out if one wants to not use things like Carbon, Oxygen, Water, or a few other things there are a lot of speculative papers that will gladly give a world builder all the resources they need to fight chauvinism on those fronts, Nitrogen not so much. Problem is that life already uses Phosphorus, so unlike Carbon one can not just go down one row on the periodic table to point at Silicon and say that will work. Other elements just do not really work in the place of the N, which means that in order to get something to work one would need a compound to take its place, one that might be too complex for life to just make out of chance. However I should have some artistic license here, like I said before, let us just assume this planet has large quantities of Phosphorus being made over the lighter Nitrogen which would give it some better favor at being used. Looking at the compounds the P can do it can make its own group of acids that are analogues to the ones made by the N, something that I can run with. Biggest problem I face there is what I would call the replacement of nucleic acid in this life building block.

Going with that then the atmosphere will definitely have a large portion of Argon in it and as noted before the atmosphere will be super thin, meaning that once I get to advanced life the only blood type I really have to use for respiratory needs would be coboglobin. Bonus is that it does better the colder the climate is as well according to research so I have that to look forward to. Right now this is kind of a split post in ideas so I will leave it here for now in hopes of getting a discussion of some sorts. Motivated though now, looking forward to any future free time to look up how evolution will be turning out and hopefully it fits the building blocks that I have set up.

[Kyrusia]

and why it is not in the helpful links part of the FT advice thread introduction I have no idea, modesty is my best guess but it makes it hard to find by brute force reading.

It is linked, for the record. ;P

Edit: While I can't honestly say I've read this thread in it's entirety yet, it is an interesting project from what I have; I wouldn't call in a "guide" in the traditional sense, so much as it is a glimpse into how another person develops their own creations, in their own style, and with their own sort of foci. We have a couple, shorter versions of these linked in the Advice thread. I hope you don't mind, but I've added a link to this thread in the Helpful Links section as well.

[Ferret Civilization]

Okay seeing another reply I started wheezing a lot, and I found out that the star guide is linked, that is some personal Mandela Effect right there. Now this is linked in with all those other guides as well, guess this is where I peak on the forums. Alright totally motivated now, going back over once again things that I could have missed here in this paragraph before moving on to trying to design life. Found the tide calculator, turns out there are a lot more interesting factors in play there like tidal bores and stuff but that depends on the landscape. Going over the equation and using the calculator to continue getting general information it turns out that if my life bearing planet here was strong enough to stay round the ocean would have a tidal range of 15 km. I would have thought that would have been wrong, but it turns out being 0.02 AU away from a star that is 1 M☉ will have some very strong results, let alone the other star that would act like the moon in the equation provided. Looking at Earth we know by precise measuring tools that the continents are affected by the tidal pull of the moon and sun, here on this planet one would not need precise tools. It would be something that changes the landscape to the visible eye in some thin crust places making for more jagged features to break out of the surface of the ocean. Though the ocean would still cover it up in high tide, when the tide is out there would be whole new landscapes to explore. Beachfront property here would not sell that well thinking about it, the intertidal zone is huge, which could possibly help with life moving from the sea to the land.

Alright moving onto the life part bit, I have my building blocks in place so let us start with the lowest level possible and work our way up. Going by the biological organization Wikipedia the lowest level is of course the atom, so what elements do I have to work with. Using the human body for an example most of that is made up of Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium, and Phosphorus. Of course then there is more required to make up life and then some those can be the big six that I stop at since I have my first roadblock. I am going to try and remove all the N and replace it with the P and just with some basic chemistry knowledge this should be theoretically possible since they are part of the same Pnictogen group. Of course I know things will not be as simple as just switching N for P and calling it a day as P is kind of special when it comes to forming bonds. Also have to consider that Iron will not be as needed in this place as it would be for us since Cobalt would find itself being better suited when the time comes for Oxygen transport in the blood. So with that out of the way, let me try and move up a level to the molecules, not much more I can add with that unless I was trying to screw realism or something so up another level.

Coming to macromolecules and biomolecules this is where the proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids, and all that fun stuff start to come into play to get some base single cell organisms out there. Think that is how it went, starts off small and then after a long time it got bigger and more complex. Now I could go down the very long list of every little thing but I am not creative enough to come up with a whole new set of building blocks that would also make sense to any chemists, biologist, or biochemist that could possibly be reading this in the future. The human stuff that we know about will do absolutely fine, all I have to do is just put in the tweaks to the things that feature Nitrogen or involve using water first. The water part is pretty simple because that has already been worked out as I mentioned with beta-peptides and such, all it changes is which Carbon atom the rest of the molecule connects to and I will leave it as that. Getting to the N part is going to be more of a chore, since N is pretty much found all the way down in the lowest level here of practically everything. Starting off by looking at equivalent analogues that each element can make are promising, however most of those require more Hydrogen or Oxygen or in some cases double the P for what something should only take one N to accomplish. Life prefers to take the easy way, which is why the only reasonable way to be able to go down this path is to limit the N available and increase the amount of P around for easy use. Another problem is that in humans a lot of these analogues would not be healthy to put that lightly. Here I would assume that once everything was configured correctly it would not be deadly for life here and maybe humorously the Nitrogen bonds that life here on Earth uses could be fatal to the life I am making. Be quite the biological barrier if that was the case, on top of the different peptide bonding.

So getting through that using some artistic license at the moment unless someone wants to discuss that above part with me in which case I will be happy to go full detail, we have functioning if not a little unwieldy biomolecules ready to go on and do what they do. Names like Nitrogenous base would have to be renamed to account for that it is a Phosphorus base but I have yet to prove myself capable of naming anything original yet so pushing that off. Things go up a level and we see that we are at the organelles, getting pretty close to seeing early life like Prokaryotes and other single cell organisms if I follow the evolution of life on Earth. Things here on the planet I am working on would probably be a lot like Earth, more CO2 in the atmosphere and such requiring early life go anaerobic and the sun while not a deadly laser is still nearly boiling things away and ending this experiment into life before it gets very far. Eventually the breakthrough happens and cells are just floating around doing their own thing. Millions of years go by and still following Earth for an example some cells get all capitalistic and take start to take advantage of the sun doing photosynthesis. Other things like bacteria are appearing and doing their thing and now a billion years go by, the planet is less hot and starting to be able to host more advanced lifeforms though at the same time life messed itself up here by putting Oxygen into the atmosphere to the point where other once prolific single cell organisms are dying off. Since Nitrogen is not around to be heavily present in the atmosphere I did pick Argon to replace it, which should not be that big of a deal since I replace the Nitrogen cycle with a P one instead. So this would mean that the planet could have large deposits of Potassium-40 which like Earth would give the atmosphere Argon-40. Having a large abundance of both P and K would help with keeping the density of the planet that I calculated before low to help me be able to say that I have a larger than normal Iron core.

Then on the life front another breakthrough occurs and all of a sudden there are Eukaryotes, still in the cell level on the biological organization chart but it is getting closer to leveling up again. Thing is here something has to rush things to be faster than how it happened on Earth, as I have already pretty much wasted my 3 billion year window on getting those early building blocks in place. In another billion years I would have to say that things got far enough into seeing multicellular life that things like sexual reproduction starts to occur and plants start to make headway onto the land. Animal life will only have one shot and it is not going to be easy, things like insects and other Hemolymphs with open circulatory systems will not come to exist in this low atmospheric environment. Plants on the other hand will have an easier time, however instead of using other things as pollinators they would both have to evolve to the extreme cold and use the wind and water to pollinate and get seeds around. Wind would be the lifeblood here on the surface of the planet, if it ever stops Argon will do what it does best and pool up in low areas thus choking out the Oxygen and everything dies. Religious idea to hold onto later with that. But for now with this early life it is a battle to try to adapt to harsh conditions that early life on Earth did not have to deal with. Branching out with things like insects and reptiles would not look at all like they would be on Earth if even existing at all, going through a Dinosaur phase and then having an extinction event really is not in the cards either as that would take too much time for the rebound to happen before things freeze over. Life in the water however could pretty much be alright for things like what we have now I think since they are not dealing with the extremes.

Actually thinking about it warm blooded reptiles would have a chance to thrive, and amphibians might have a chance as well if they could be warm blooded. With such huge intertidal zones I would assume that those places would give rise to interesting creatures that could breathe on land and underwater, if those species had to be cold blooded they would have to get their warmth from the ocean water when it rises and then work hard in the open air to do something. Be a good jumping point at the very least, plants in those areas would also be interesting, as they would have to thrive in under full salt water and then be out in the open air possibly getting fresh water through whatever weather is going on. Somehow things would have to jump right into the mammal favor, getting all those special organs we know and love today. Then it would go down the normal path of all the herbivores doing what they do until carnivores come along and jump start the evolutionary arms race. Thinking about how low gravity would affect things playing out, TV tropes would say that life would be able to grow larger but then I also have to think that the low atmospheric pressure would be the thing to put a hamper on that. Can not get large if one requires respiration and there is not enough Oxygen to get pumped throughout the body in a timely manner. Though mentioning that got me thinking of another group of species, birds, with the low gravity and low atmospheric pressure birds of Earth would not thrive at all here. Looking it up it would appear that things that adapt to gliding would be the ones to take up that flying roll, being able to stay in the air longer without trying to expend energy maintaining lift. Getting really crazy some creatures might learn to take lighter than air elements and use them to float, but that might be pushing things I do not know yet.

Going back to plants I should probably go into some details, types of things I have to pick from are of course already mentioned with the biomes. Would probably see pretty much everything will be some form of evergreen like pines and such, was thinking if there was going to be trees or bushes that would lose their leaves. Though realizing that the year is only like 30 hours with a 15 hour day and night there are no seasons, thus there would not be a real pressure to shed leaves to conserve energy in winter time like plants do here in some climates. Animals in detail really continue to elude me since things while could possibly be done with the excuse convergent evolution there still would be some differences to try and describe. However for now I just have the one sapient species that I just call ferret to talk about in detail, so for them I suppose I can work backwards to this general point while thinking of how to branch out the biology tree.

[Ferret Civilization]

So I was thinking more about just how extreme the tides are on this planet and how life would possibly adapt to this kind of situation. Kind of hit me just how radical this would be in reality, in some areas life would have to adapt to be like the tide is coming in and then probably like a few hours later everything is underwater. Other areas would be opened up to allow forms of life on land to travel around without needing plate tectonics to relocate life over millions of years. Also kind of hit me thinking about the ice caps, they would never really be a solid form that creeps down from the poles as tidal forces would continuously break them apart while the extreme cold would continue to fuse the ice back together in an ever shifting around environment. Probably making it out to be more extreme than it really is but compared to any planet in our solar system this would be an extreme place to look at, life really would only have a few truly stable areas to cling onto and flourish around. Weak areas over the globe would be places that experience a lot of volcanic activity allowing forms of life to use other energy sources like chemotrophic bacteria to thrive.

Well moving on to the main attraction for today building the sapient species that this world put out. Already kind of bound by the roleplaying I already have done and the name that I picked out to use on NationStates so I will definitely be going out on a limb in places instead of going back to the drawing board if something does not work out. Already worked out the lowest levels of life so now I am dealing with organs and organ systems which really is not a bottom up approachable so for right now I will do some basics going outside in. Ferret was pretty much picked out for the reason that it is my favorite animal that I had and do own so there is my bias showing. Given that other people have picked out other animals to turn into an alien species least I am not alone there and whether or not they actually like those animals in real life is a different thing. Made things easy starting out with anthropomorphize the animal, take some cultures from real life, and work around not falling into the furry community stereotypes. Makes things easy as long as you do not have to deal with a human supremacy kill all furries thing that has happened quite a few times on the forums in the past. Getting back on track it is time to flesh this furry stuff out, should not be too hard to say anthro ferret and everyone has an image in their head. Something that looks like a humanoid, arms and legs along with a tail and the head of the animal for some flavor. Make the legs digitigrade with a less human like foot anatomy trope to go for some more, well more flavor I am not going to kid myself with trying to be biological realism path. Put a canine like snout in place of the ferret one to allow the eyes to be more forward facing for the same reason and hopefully that gives a more defined image in someones head.

Now getting onto the organs it can be really easy to just say take all the human ones and put them in this species to call it a day. I am going to do that do not get me wrong but there are quite a few drawbacks to this idea and that is what I am going to have to go over. If you read any of the ramblings in the above posts I made then you are probably somewhat aware that there is no way a human like autonomy is going to stand a chance here. While I have seen other people do it I kind of feel like it would be a cop out to just say human but better to deal with these problems, nothing is wrong with that since this is FT and there are a plethora of realistic reasons why human but better would work perfectly but I kind of want this to feel more fleshed out with drawbacks and such. So since there is no real order to the way biology books list out organ systems I will go with Wikipedia and just go down the list they give. Starting of with the musculoskeletal thing, already going to be a couple of interesting little tweaks to be made. Going with the things that are not changed at all would be the rib cage area, shoulders, and arms. Minor change in the hands I figured can be just one less finger to have a three finger one thumb human like hand and call it a day there. The spine would of course have to be extended down longer to make the tail and digitigrade legs require a different setup than the human plantigrade legs have. Now digitigrade legs on a biped already has some major problems, this mostly comes from gravity. The worldbuilding stack exchange has already covered this for me, it basically boils down to you can not have digitigrade legs like how furry artist draw them because those are not rigid enough to withstand gravity’s downward pull. The planet I have made has lower gravity so this is not much of an issue but the problem is still there so I can not get all cartoony about it, the more straight the legs the better and that is what I am going to go with. That leaves the foot, probably try to keep it to the paw like roots since this species will be walking on their toes, which probably going to keep the same number as there are digits on the hand just like humans have 5 and 5. Though to keep the symmetry one toe would probably come out on the upper ankle part of the leg giving a 3 and 3 with 1 to 1 extra. Going up to the head the snout changes up the skull and jaws by a lot, pretty much putting a canine skeleton on the front half while keeping the more rounded human part in the rear. The ears will also be changed since this is somewhat of a ferret base still, so instead of some pointy cat ears near the top of the head they are going to be the more rounded and less protruding ferret ears there. With that out of the way, getting onto the makeup of the muscles all the appropriate changes would have to be made to make the skeleton work. Then I was wondering about how I replaced Nitrogen with Phosphorus what that would do, one thing is that it would make the meat a little bit more dense molecular wise if I assumed that correctly and that since P analogues of N require more Hydrogen to work things overall for life would be more acidic. Just more biological barriers to think about I suppose.

Next up on the Wikipedia list is the circulatory system, this is going to be interesting since I did not do the lung part yet and this does not cover that. The idea that the heart pumps blood through arteries, veins, and lymphatic vessels still applies here and all I have to do is consider what the environment will do to either strengthen or weaken this compared to a human. First thing is that with low gravity the heart does not have to push as hard to fight against gravity, thus the heart is going to be weaker than a human heart. This will also affect blood pressure, going by what I have learned from that I picked a low number like 60/40 mm Hg which is half of a healthy human normal. On this planet though that should not be a problem and allow the cardiovascular system to perform the same functions that happen here for us. Going one over to the lymphatic system not much would change there either at the end of the day, only big one coming to mind right now is that the bone marrow will not be producing hemoglobin but instead coboglobin. Reason I picked coboglobin is not actually a flavor thing to just throw in, having read some research into that kind of blood it turns out it is best suited for a low atmospheric and cold environment. Now going by what I have said about the atmosphere only 12% of it is Oxygen, it is also only half of Earth’s atmospheric pressure so it is pretty much 6% at Earth’s standard. Going by how much the human needs to function and one can pretty easily find that 6% is the threshold for a quick death since hemoglobin can not really function that well with that little percent in the air. Using a little graph on the different blood types what does peak at most optimal at 0.06 O2 partial pressure is coboglobin, allowing that one to be the one to thrive in this environment just like hemoglobin is the most optimal on Earth and thrives here. Another plus is that research put the temperature when testing coboglobin down to 15 C which also helps on a planet with the most extreme highs being 7 C. This would help offset problems like quickly going into hypothermia since the two temperatures are closer to equilibrium than say having a human body temperature of 37 C. Things like fur that I will add later will further help keep the warm body temperature stay there, though for now this means the advantage this species has to being able to thrive in low Oxygen and low temperature worlds. Also kind of a big deal is that according to the papers this blood is immune to the effects of Carbon Monoxide so that is a huge boon. However the downside to this will be that on normal worlds with average Oxygen pressure and average temperatures this species will begin to feel the effects of Oxygen toxicity and hyperthermia. One neutral thing to probably bring up about the blood that I will take from ferrets in real life is that they will only have one universal blood type as opposed to human blood types.

That was the most I could think of at this time so onto the nervous system which not much will change here as compared to the two I just went over. Brain will be just like a human one with rather the same nerves, probably more to account for a tail and snout but not to much more to add to that. Though the sensory system is part of this oh there is going to be a lot to talk about actually. There is going to be a lot more drawbacks here due to the environment, no super senses like I have seen some others pull when having anthropomorphic species. Starting with the eyes cause why not, will have the standard two eyes with three color cones to see like a human to start off with. Could put in here has well since they are like human eyes those iris colors can be green, blue, brown, and such. Was thinking that I could have kept it closer to the animal side so that this species only sees shades of grey and red but nah. One thing that will change is how well the eyes can see, on this planet with low atmospheric pressure there is not as much air in the way to obscure something that is far away, the only real hamper is the horizon. This would mean that the eyes would not have to be as strong to see as far, thus compared to humans this species would have a really weaker vision, something like 20 / 50. Though through simple modern technology something as simple as glasses should be able to level that playing field when dealing with other species. Getting onto the nose and smells, with a snout the obvious advantages are that this kind of species would basically be able to smell better which is nice enough I suppose. But wait there's more, with that same low pressure smells do not disappear as quickly and stay pretty localized meaning the sensory organs would have to adapt to be able to filter out old smells from the new. Quite a boon right, kind of, the problem is once one of these species is dealing with a normal world where smells quickly come in go compared to what they were used to things could get rather overwhelming. Not something that would be super overpowered in trying to track someone down. Taste would also be affected by this, but in the end it really would not change much since it is not like this species is going to be eating other foods or drinks because that would just kill them. Onto the auditory senses, you probably guessed it, the low pressure forces this to become better adapted on picking up sounds since they do not travel as far here either. Trying not to be overpowered I promise I can tell someone is probably like that is total BS. Kind of have to realize that these improvements do not actually amount to much in this environment since nothing much travels far enough for senses to pick up on to give an advantage. Like once you smell something you are practically standing on top of it and once you hear something it is practically on top of you in this world. And once this sapient species goes onto another world all that this does is reward them with sensory overload making it all even more worthless. Only the eyes are really safe, that and the sense of touch I suppose. The sense of touch would be kind of hampered by a layer of fur though, only getting things that cause pain would get through with the same intensity that we have to deal with.

Integumentary system comes up next, well that should not be too hard just the skin. Pretty much say that everything except the nose, eyes, and around the mouth will be covered in fur. Was thinking would this species have paw pads like most animals here on Earth have or would they be like rabbits. I supposed that in this kind of cold environment shedding heat is not that much of an evolutionary concern to push for paw pads and instead just have everything covered to try and conserve all heat loss. Seeing that mammary glands are apart of this system, well I have been thinking of ways to remove that part since I am going for the least sexual dimorphism possible along with other ways animals can raise their young. Other than that there is not a lot to touch on, maybe just say that the fur can come be brown or white depending on which one provided the best outcome in the surrounding environment. Skin color since not really exposed to the sun can be mostly standard pinkish and the skin around the nose being typical rhinarium stuff. Going to lump the haematopoietic and immune system in this paragraph to make it look longer than it should be, since I already went over coboglobin not much changes here either. Does all the standard stuff that it does in the human body, no advantages or disadvantages compared to the average human so there is that.

Skipping down to the respiratory system going to start off the same and say that nothing much will change and hopefully end up writing a lot of minor fluff differences. Here might be the one big advantage that this species would have, while the breathing mechanisms would be the same the lungs would have to be stronger to deal with the low pressure and high amounts of Argon. Since Argon is heavy and makes up most of the atmosphere the problem standard human lungs face is that Oxygen would not be able to get through at all and then the person passes out all in one breath. The lungs on this species would have to be able to not just take that on but be able to remove the Argon before it can pool up in the lower lungs where typical human breathing does not really touch that part. This in part would have to be helped by the air constantly having an air flow to it, part of that religion idea mentioned earlier springs to mind, to help bring in more Oxygen than one could get if it was standing and pooling. Downside of this actually comes in from the Oxygen toxicity I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, if the lungs were this effective then it only speeds up that harmful process on more Oxygen rich worlds. Without treatment the lungs would inflame themselves, scar up, and then not be able to go back to their home planet as they would then deal with Oxygen deprivation. Not as much of an advantage thinking about it now.

Really starting to fizzle out I guess, digestive system coming up though. The snout is going to give the biggest changes to the mouth like with the tongue and teeth, also there would be a lack of lips which will come into play later when it comes to language. Actually will take this moment to mention some things about the sounds that can be made, starting with the human sounds that this species would not be able to pull off. Going by the IPA without lips the bilabial and labiodental sounds are not possible and dental along with alveolar consonants will not sound at all like how humans do them due to not having the same teeth setup. This of course means that there are going to be sounds this species can make that humans can not, however since that would require making new letter symbols and the words to describe it like how we have with bilabial to glottal I am just going to leave that there for now. Back to the actual digestive system the second big change comes in with the stomach, using the animal ferret base cause why not they are obligate carnivores. What is interesting is that they are more so than cats, to the point where ferrets lack a cecum at all compared to humans where it is there but just a dead end. Now the stomach would simply have a really acidic ph level from 1-2 to help deal with possible food poisoning from eating other animals like carnivores do and that would be really the biggest change. No plants in the diet leave it to be a typical one chamber and getting onto the intestines they would be shorter than a herbivore or an omnivore of the same size. Other than that all the typical organs are there doing what they do to help with the digestion process.

Well things are probably going to get more squick coming up but I will try and get through it like an adult. Do not have much to say on the urinary system, does the same thing as it would in humans getting rid of waste and maintaining a healthy body and that is fine. The reproductive system follows this and things get hard to keep in PG vocabulary so lets get through this as fast as possible. Did mention that I wanted the least sexual dimorphism as possible, this can be helped by the extreme cold temperatures for the males. Probably should have mentioned I will keep the male female thing for reproduction without anything getting wonky like having a third sex or doing something insane like asexual splitting into two or simply being both. Anyway back to the cold temperature, this would help force keeping all the parts of the process stay internal rather than being external like they are for most mammals. So pretty much on the outside both males and females of this species look exactly the same with no size differences or anything. Would probably have a different way of determining each other through, well smell would be difficult but it is possible since it would not stray far from the individual here. For females I would suppose there would be a gestation period of about 50 to 60 days with about 2 to 3 offspring being the normal. Lifespan would be around 30 years for both males and females which if going by talks about long lived species disadvantages should give my species time to technologically advance faster somehow. Other than that everything is normal and does not need to be explained any further as that is what school or parents should be for.

Finishing things off with the endocrine system to say that not much would change here and for once I am saying that literally and not let me open the door to talk about stuff. Kind of a weird place to end it but I have been writing for a while and it is messing up my ability to see if I am missing something to add. For now this should be good enough I would say, a lot to read and take in. Will probably try to think of a single evolutionary tree to describe why some of the things I could not explain with the environment came to be and probably get onto the building blocks of early society and eventually be playing in the big boys park of modern society stuff like military that brings forth longer lore dumps than I have written here.

[Ferret Civilization]

Alright things that I missed from above that I could mention, the first thing that sprung to mind was all the useless measurements of the body that I do have on hand. In past writings for roleplays I have stated that ferrets are about 3 feet or 1 meter at their absolute tallest which is not that common. Will use cm so let us say a ferret is 91.44 cm tall and use that to get all the other body parts. The head would be 11.5 cm with about a 4 cm neck, the torso would be about 30.2 cm, arms would be measured around 40 cm with the upper part of the arm being 19 cm and the forearm and hand being 21 cm, the legs would be 45.8 cm with the upper part being 22.9 cm along with the lower part. The widest point of the shoulders would measure 22.9 cm across and the snout would stick out about 11.2 cm and the tail would be about 45.5 cm. That should make the proportions similar to a small human for reference which is good enough for me. Other things to measure would probably be the average length of the claws which I would say be 1 cm and the length the fur grows out to be 2.5 to 3.8 cm, that would be the longest it gets anywhere and thin out or grow shorter around areas that should not be covered in fur. Using a simple BMI calculator that means the healthy weight should be between 38 to 46 pounds or 16 to 21 kilograms on an Earth like gravity, using the lower gravity on this planet they would weigh between 13 to 18 pounds or 6 to 8 kilograms. Not that heavy like dwarfs in fantasy are said to be eh. That does not take very many calories to have a weight like that but assuming a very active lifestyle and bumping the number up a bit more to account for anything it could take around 1,300 calories per day to keep on going.

Did mention something about 15 C in the above post, humans are about 37 C but as anyone who has ever been out in those temperatures can probably say they did not like it for long. There is also the other end of the scale where people get uncomfortable getting to cold without protection. Kind of hard to determine the hard limits but using the human ratio for soft comfort limits the room temperature for this species would be about 9 C and can survive lower which is good on this planet. Never really be a worry about overheating until they get into a different environment like one meant for humans at which the hyperthermia would set in if they were sitting in anything hotter than 25 C temperature and that is with no humidity. Yikes, our room temperature is their practical death point. Oh and I also mentioned a life span of 30 years at the latest, of course there is no real good science to that as creatures on Earth already have a crazy range of lifespans but going by a rule of thumb pointed in the worldbuilding stack exchange an animal gets about 1 billion heart beats in which humans and chickens already break that but it is a start. So take 1 billion and divide it by the years, days, hours, and minutes to get about 63 heartbeats a minute. About the low end on the resting rate for humans, humans get about 2 billion heartbeats and last well over 70 years so we are kind of an except to a lot of observations but hey at least it works out for useless information to talk about here.

Not much more to add as that is what I could think of that I missed unless someone thought of something I could add and tells me. Moving on, I do have the choice of going forward with this species history or try and work out the rest of the biosphere, since I have a general sense of that I will probably go on with the society and just refer to things as generic predator or prey along with the fact that most plants are evergreen growing nice and tall in low gravity to get that sunlight and fight against being submerged. Ferrets are not going to be the apex predator in any sense, be one of the middle tier animals that just develops intelligence to dominate and that will be cool enough. So starting off with somewhere in the evolutionary chain this pre-ferret creature gets spit out and has to deal with a world that it was slowly adapted for. Probably should have determined the amount of land on average there is to be spreading out, 127,516,117.98 km^2 total surface area and I did say 20% land and 80% water so that is 25,503,223.6 km^2 or slightly larger than the area of North America. Of course it is not all going to be one big landmass but hopefully that puts things into perspective. So on one of probably many of the island outcroppings this species just goes about its life reproducing and trying to survive things meant to kill it. Perhaps when the tides go out there is enough land bridges to get the species to spread out where it can while not having any technological advancements but for now they are kind of stuck in a small geographic area.

Time goes on and members of this species probably go from being solitary carnivores to being more social with each other beyond just wanting some one night stand for mating. Being a pack hunter would be more beneficial for the species and thus those that do it will end up thriving more than those that do not, this can stem from them having digitigrade legs which are not meant to be endurance hunters like humans were. This species would probably be more ambush hunters or scavengers when needed using their design to have quick short bursts of agile speed giving up if the chase ends up going on for too long to be worth it. Suppose as time goes on little band societies of hunters, no gathers as they can not digest plant matter, come to be as these creatures slowly start to get smarter than their ancestors. Time continues to speed by and most that comes of it is seeing the use of tools for hunting and probably killing each other as well along with minor changes to the species starting to build up to look more and more like a modern ferret. As the species start to collectively get smarter on average the beginning of a protolanguage would start to take root rather than just going by body language and animal noises or something. All of this would account for a basic cultural revolution that would ramp up to see more abstract thinking come into being, probably be around this general time period that little bits of history get painted down.

Around then the species would probably be the modern ferret having spread and intermingled with whatever genetic cousins they had being limited to a small area at best. It would probably take the breakthrough of managing to domesticate whatever prey species they were hunting for the species to advance technologically as a whole. Still be traveling around into whatever bands they had formed but a few of them would slowly learn the art of herding animals and animal husbandry, well getting the very loose grip on the subject at least. It would take a long time to understand agriculture since that would not be a byproduct of gathering plants but have to come from some individual noting what their livestock eat and how that stuff just grows. Most likely putting together the more of those plants the more meat they can get out of their animals that they keep. Finding a suitable spot would be where setbacks occur, since the planet is constantly being shifted around fertile land can find itself underwater at certain times of the day which would not be good for solely ground based creatures and some other spots could break apart either sinking or rising causing earthquakes to mess everything up. So this would probably be a technology that is learned and lost a few times before some group finds a sweet spot that is stable.

Once that happens the big societal change of turning into settled farmers and shepherds from nomads occurs allowing for the population to expand faster than it could before over time. More specialized tools would come to be turning from weapons to hunt and kill with into things meant to help life flourish. Grasses and cereal like crops would be the sole staple of the day to only go towards feeding their livestock which is their only source of food. Luckily with no seasons things can be grown ‘year’ round so things like inventing storage containers out of clay and pottery starts to become a thing. Art continues to grow and with the increasing amount of food coming from less and less individuals free time and specialization seed themselves into this society. Language evolves to where numbers and writing slowly become a thing, allowing records to be kept better and the start of more advanced subjects that are not based off of survival alone come to be. Around this time a simple plant kind of analogous to flax can be cultivated not to feed livestock but actually produce goods like cloth and eventually paper would be a big advancement in agriculture. While this is all going on it would be the mining of metals that would really push society forward at a faster pace.

This is of course where things really start to speed up being pretty much the equivalent to Greek and Roman civilization, everything just starts to come together and learning happens at a faster pace allowing for better tools to come to be. Pretty solid positive feedback loop that goes on. One thing that I do have to note is that the population would never get as big as the human population did, this is due to a really small amount of stable land available for settling. Try to go above it and spread out nothing will really last for long, I do remember putting that I had a population of a billion before in some role plays and sign up sheet, however after building this world I have found that to be a ridiculously high number and it would probably be magnitudes less at around a million at the highest. And I do probably have to explain why I only have one city if anyone has read what I have written outside of these ramblings. Was figuring that with how hostile the environment was one place would probably be the place that expands the easiest and fastest, taking in all the surrounding populations. Disease can be another big issue that cripples the small settlements eking it out to be forced to come together in one place for better protection since predators while not be a big problem would be hampering down the population. The area that I had picked out was on both sides of a large river and on top of a large coal deposit that was mixed with other elements like iron in ironstone along with other impurities to allow for an industrial revolution to take place on a small scale. Left it off kind of there getting into World War 1 equivalent technology-culture compared to humans. Though that is just the building blocks I can and will get into more detail later on coming up.

But since I have one city being the ultimate accomplishment of this species I will go into some detail with that here. Going with a rounded up by a lot most likely million individuals I can find out all that I need this city to have and the details of it. Starting with density if I take something like Manila with 42,857 per km then this city would be 23.3 km^2 which is good enough for me. Sprawl would be highly discouraged here on this planet and since ferrets are smaller than humans that is a lot more space for them compared to Manila itself. Now there has to be farmland, which is meant to feed the livestock which also take up space so I will be using 0.2 km^2 per individual which means there is 200,000 km^2 needed. That is about the size of Kyrgyzstan which boasts a higher population than I have here. Though I can chalk that up to globalization and better modern technology than I am giving this civilization here. So only 0.7% of this world is controlled by the intelligent species which is an interesting fact to me. Now being in the modern age this city is going to be powered by the resource in which they should have plenty of because reasons, coal. Cities in real life around the same population all require different amounts of MW/h so I will pick something like Austin to go off of and say this place needs 2,500 MW, I could use less if I go by Oahu but I will keep it on the higher side without going overboard. Let us suppose a single coal fired generator can put up 500 MW and needs about 1.4 million tons of coal a year. Multiply by five and this city needs to dig up 7 million tons of coal a year to keep all the lights on peak load 24/7. Sounds like a lot but looking up biggest coal mines and number one on the list is in North Antelope Rochelle, US and has 2.3 billion tonnes of coal which if this city was located on top of that would be more than enough to go for a long time. The other thing that is needed for an industrialized city is water, taking into account all the agricultural and industrial needs on top of civilian needs I find that 64 cubic meters a second of water is needed to be flowing through the river. Using something like river Severn as an example that would provide enough water to meet everyone's needs since a lot of the water would just be returned to the environment.

That is good enough for now I suppose and I can continue to elaborate on smaller and more unimportant details as time goes on, probably will not go all out as I can switch over to the other system I have not built yet and exchange new ideas I find for that over to this one that I have built up some.

[Ferret Civilization]

Motivation, motivation, alright have to start writing something since this is starting to depress past me and make future me anxious. Kind of stumped myself if I really was going to bail out and build up the base of the other system I have but that seems like a really messed up thing to do. Guess getting to the branches of the tree really scare me since that is getting into the playground of the big kids and all I have going for me is superficial knowledge about this society building part of world building that will probably not give any real insight for what I am trying to do. But I will try and get myself to write generic stuff down for now and hope things just get better later on. So starting off now that I am motivated again with more things I possibly missed from the above posts from past me. Already talked about the useless numbers about height and length of some body parts and body temperature but I missed Oxygen levels and pressure. I know I said 6% is the prime Oxygen atmospheric partial pressure and then mentioned that for humans that is kind of a death zone, but I did not mention what the death zone would be for this species. Human safe range goes from 23.5% to 19.5% at 1 Earth atm and can go as low as 6% where a human enters a coma in less than a minute and dies a couple of minutes later. Now for the species that I have made 6% is the prime spot, since I am not going all hard science I will stick with a ratio for this as well, giving me a safe range of 6.7% to 5.6% which is not a lot. However having some fun the lowest limit would be 1.7% where similar going into a coma and dying quickly would occur. Moving onto pressure where I picked out the 60 / 40 mm Hg with the atmosphere being 0.5 Earth atm or 380 mm Hg so that would total to 440 / 420 mm Hg. Something like Earth where the pressure is 760 mm Hg that means the pressure would be pushing this species body to be more compact. By how much I guess I will find out by using what happens to a human body underwater, for now I suspect that this number is not that big a difference to cause problems. Using the NOAA again every about 10 meters below water the pressure goes up by 14.5 psi or about 750 mm Hg. I have a 320 mm Hg difference which is 2.3 times lower than 14.5 psi, so if I did this right my species on an Earth like planet would be like us being around 4 meters underwater. That really is not that much to be dealing with as people go deeper than that with increased pressure with no gear so pretty much like I thought. Over a long period of time things would probably be different health effect wise as it is not a healthy thing for one to constantly deal with but hey, baby steps I probably already messed up and no need to dive deeper into a wreck.

Getting onto what I fear to do now, which branch, all of them seem like really bad picks since I can not think of much more to add besides all the generic building blocks that I have already went over. Tried to start off with agriculture but I would really have to describe species I am not even sure of yet so, probably try getting onto describing the government. This is going to be pretty bad. Starting off I have already mentioned that early society existed mostly in the non-state form of band societies that came to be due to the species starting to try and work together to thrive rather than suffer alone without much success. This would most likely start out being based around kinship and the efforts being put in to keep a family lineage alive seeing groups shrink or grow based off of who has to leave to mate with other lineages or joins to become apart of a lineage. Guess it would be around this time that gender roles would start to develop to be a line of separation in duties, however I tried to make the sexual dimorphism as nonexistent as possible so whatever the male could do the female could do. The female would have the advantage here of being the one to bring more family into the rather cruel world that is going on around this time. After that though the two sides of reproduction are equal and would probably have equal share of seeing the offspring become adults that could help the band further thrive. That could mean that both males and females would be able to go off either independently or not to another band depending on the needs of two groups rather than it be based off of one gender gets the benefits. Though I am probably thinking too human middle ages for this, hmm, well something to keep in mind starting off that the roles were not there right off the bat that one side was more fit for some things than the other. Going by leadership things would still be rather fuzzy since no one is really bond to each other which would mean the majority rule and if a minority had a big enough problem with that they could leave to try and do better on their own or with another more agreeable lineage. Something would have to happen along the way to start seeing bands come together to make segmentary lineage become a thing, perhaps families take what they have going on and apply the same logic that the more members the better success they will have overall as a whole. Still be the same things going on as with the band societies but just with more individuals and no real leadership roles.

Suppose things go like this for some time before some groups start to get too big and require some kind of authority to handle things outside of just love it or leave it. Most likely some would go with might makes right or eldership makes right and those that can do it the best will succeed to take charge. However the leadership would not be able to ignore those that have the knowledge needed to help the whole do better but are not the ones in power so this is probably where stratification within groups begins with members specializing on what they know to do well. Nomadic hunter lifestyle goes on for the species so more advanced type polity governments will still take some time before they come into being, even with the domestication of some animals I have to get to making so I can get to that history of agriculture the nomadic life would go on for even more time. It would take the most likely repeated discovering of the growing plants part of agriculture would groups settle down, probably face disaster and have to move, to resettle somewhere else. Once some tribes become more in place the idea of holding onto land rather than just moving around comes to be however just like in real life the borders at the time will not be defined for an even longer time to come. Specialization would allow a certain group of members of the new towns to have a rather secure spot at the top of the political latter, though other specialized groups coming to be would want their say in the leadership area. This would probably see things shift in some of the permanent communities back to a more open style of rule with everyone getting some kind of input again. Trade starting between settled areas would see the more steady exchange of ideas instead of it being an off chance of meeting another nomadic group.

As the population rises in towns things would hit something akin to a Dunbar number and the power would find itself resting back with a few rather than the many since now the many can not effectively work as well together as before with small numbers. This time around instead of one specialization cranking out the leaders there would probably be something more like a group of people in charge with each one having a speciality to input into the decision making process. Around this time pillarization would start seeing some inroads being constructed, with individuals going into a certain group and then being stuck there. One thing that everyone would have to have in common however is their willingness to defend the community from predators or other settlements. The idea of being alone would slowly become more and more of a death sentence rather than to find other groups to become apart of further increasing the idea that everyone has to defend the community from any outside forces. Around this time things would probably be as big as early city states at the best since there is not a lot of free land to use and share which would also keep things like linguistic drift and separating nationalist ideas to a minimum. Being in better contact though would probably see disease be a real concern as it goes through towns and then swings back around to the starting point a little stronger to start a cycle all over again. This I guess would be the most equivalent to the middle ages, the only thing that is really missing that would allow me to pretty much call it a rip right of human history is the lack of space for different nations to come to be and gender roles are not there. There really would be no such existence of monarchs since oligarchy would come into favor first. When getting into a modern era kind of existence something will have to happen around this time to finally force the few stable city states into merging as one unified nation. With that more democracy would see its way into the oligarchy systems finally putting the finishing cement on pillarization, allowing everyone some kind of voice but only within the profession that they work with instead of just the most charismatic or familial ties being able to see anyone get into a high governmental position. That part would still be too early for those effects to be seen since better off families would see their family better trained and thus better able to rise through the ranks. And with that that is kind of the modern age, totally not fleshed out as of right now I know but I am just trying to write anything at this time. Will be coming back to it a lot hopefully in the future as other branches get better than just generic information.

[Ferret Civilization]

Try to keep the quality up here but no promises, started with the government so suppose this time I should catch up and write about the admistrivative things going on within it. Already have the limitations in place so that is what I have to expand on, will try to use real life services to compare to while trying to make something unique. Here the legislative and executive branches within the separation of powers idea would be merged into one council made up of the leaders of powerful interest groups. Was thinking what I should actually call those groups, would they be like departments or ministries and could I actually come up with something better sounding that would make more sense. Tried calling them pillars since pillarisation is a thing, though that would come from a modern interpretation and thinking of what they would have been called and it seems that as of right now using concern as struck my fancy having a definition that has a synonym with one of the department definitions so it can be close enough. So listing out the top concerns that make up the council at this time would be the military / law enforcement, commerce / environment, healthcare, education, infrastructure, and foreign affairs. Pretty much six spots on the legislative branch and together they get the power to decide who will get to be the executive head of this little group in power making the seventh spot at the very top.

Well hopefully that was not too scrambled, but it is not going to get much better as I am going to switch and go to the lowest point in political power which are the civilians and citizens. Everybody that is born in this society starts out as a civilian before they are drafted into military service to get granted the right of citizenship kind of ripped right out of Starship Troopers the movie. Being a civilian is not suppose to be a bad thing as one at that level politically is pretty much a child under the legal protections of their parents and thus they are for all practical purposes restricted as much as kids here in real life are in first world states. They get basic education to make them good individuals in society and then they get drafted to do their duty to the society that raised them. In the past that I made there would have been more of a choice on the one growing up and reaching that age if they wanted to leave they could try and join another group but since that is no longer an option that freedom is no longer there. Of course when I say military service that is a lot different than military service here in real life since there is no longer a threat of being invaded by a foreign state actor. Thus service here is pretty much a continued basic education on how to be a good little conditioned individual in society, learning how to take orders from whatever pillar one finds themselves in and how not to be too radical for one's own good. Back in the past it would have included a lot more real life military stuff like going to war and learning combat training stuff but those would not be held onto as the nation came together in one place, thus the only thing that did get held out was their once powerful role in the start of society being one of the first concerns putting a leader in charge of some nomadic hunter groups. After going through that one gets a bunch of choices in life opened up to them, by picking a career they are selecting a pillar that they will most likely be stuck in for the rest of their life.

But now they are a citizen and they have the right to vote on things since they are willing to ‘risk’ their life for the society that they live in, starting off at the bottom in no pillar there is not much that gets voted on but the most basic things that affect everyone and everything. Sticking with the military cause why not one finds themselves in the military and police concern and thus get to vote on things that affect personnel within those fields like deciding the criminal laws. Actually, that sounds pretty bad to have the judicial branch of government be stuck there but I could try to work that out. Since the other concerns would have to agree to be subject to the rules put in place by the rule enforcers, can not get crazy when the rest of society can collectively shut them down and also know and have the same weapons those that enforce the laws have. Figuring how this would come to be in the past it would come to be around the time that groups settled giving things like those in agricultural or teaching the young to stand together and collectively say no. Or in places where groups listened to the wise elders those defending the group and feeding the group would stand together to collectively say no to give them spots of power as well leading to the first councils. The idea that being collective based off of profession would be the start of the stratification that pillars society. Eventually leading to the six I mentioned above, but looking at any modern real life nation there are so many more divisions than what I mentioned and this society is based off of real life so where do those unmentioned things come in.

Starting off with the foreign affairs concern since that is the youngest part to get a spot on the council and as of this point of writing pretty much has one real employee since other concerns are better at trying to work together for now to deal with such things since the idea did not really take off for this state in roleplaying. But it would be planned that they would be the one to deal with employing ambassadors for foriegn agreements and arrangements as their primary mission with a sub agency from the military concern to provide protection if things ever got bad enough to require something akin to the US Bureau of Diplomatic Security. If things get bigger for this concern things like having sub groups overseeing budgeting, protocols, corruption, intelligence, and other state department like duties would pop up. A successful international stage for this nation would probably see this concern take control of immigration and emigration policies. But as of right now it is pretty much defunct as soon as it was born, otherwise I would probably have more of a list based off of things that come up in cooperative storytelling beyond just looking at Wikipedia and things other people have talked about, mostly embassy making, to use as ideas.

Switching to the complete opposite for the oldest and once most powerful concern the military, police, and judicial. The military be headed by one person that then breaks down into categories much like the US Department of Defense with at this moment being split up into Continental (Army), Pelagic (Navy), Atmospheric (Air Force), and Astronautical (Space Navy) and yes I used astronauts instead of marines to account for that in the past there was no navy and so the space program would have nothing to base itself off of like science fiction does for human space military things. For this nation practically everything is based off of ground forces as well giving some unique things to talk about that I can not think of so sorry for that, well besides they would be boned going up against any other state I suppose but that is obvious. Sub agencies would obviously include things like intelligence and research, but wait I said that there are no foreign states here for this planet what the hell does intelligence do then, mostly provide services to then spy on their own nation and would be pretty garbage trying to play against any real intelligence services or communities that other states have going on. There would also be a focus on education outside of the education concern for their young draftees along with things mentioned in the foriegn affairs planned things like accountability / corruption watch groups kind of like those that watch the watchers kind of deal along with budgeting, logistics, management, and stuff like that. Not much in the way of breaking down combat theaters since those have not come to be in a long period of time being dropped in the past, despite this they hold onto the conscription thing to keep some power in their hands. Law enforcement will be interesting as it is provided by the military as well, leading to another branch of agencies to deal with that concern. Considering that this nation would be pretty liberal things like special drug enforcement or arms enforcement would not be big enough to warrant their own special groups to get those individuals. It would pretty much just be one big general division coming to think about it because the watchers for the watchmen here would come in when discussing the judicial side of things. The judicial thing would be kind of like the, continuing the theme, US Department of Justice with all kinds of special agencies to see that certain categories of laws are fairly enforced along with maintaining the prisons and rehabilitation facilities. There really is not a giant population and foreign nations to shoehorn in a bunch of special sub groups so I will leave it as this for now until ideas can come in later.

The next big concern would be that of commerce and environment, now I have already mentioned Ferret Productions in other threads but that is where this is. Unlike most real life states that have a separation in place for private industry and the state to some degrees of success depending on where one looks but here things would be more mixed together. Coming in from the past it would arise due to certain business people getting some leverage and wanting in on the decision making allowing for private business to speak for itself in government with governmental powers. Hopefully I am making some sense with that, probably an economic nightmare but artistic license that away and I will still claim realism if no one fights this idea like no one has asked about the other things I have brought up. And getting back into things this would allow big business to set up their own regulation committees without having to worry about outside independent scrutiny. That would be along with their own research initiatives, analysis or statistical groups, and other things that would help plan for more progress and success. It would kind of be like the Department of Commerce and Labor being one thing but run by the businesses they are supposed to be watching and controlling to help the average person. Does not mean that things would turn out to be all that bad even if every other concern finds itself kind of in the pocket of this one at some time or another, they are apart of the government only because they have to do a good job at pleasing everybody else to keep on top of the power game. So there would still be agencies funded by business for unemployment, wage, or time working issues within their pillar during the bad times along with other insurance policies to make those within the pillar content with themselves to keep on providing the manpower to push the economy forward. They would probably be like a mafia in the fact that those trying to start something up to compete against the status quo going on would find their lives being pretty miserable just before the point that the military concern could step in to stop that kind of bad activity. Other than that the long list of different types of careers and employment opportunities would be found under this pillar if they did not land a gig in one of the other concerns specifically mentioned. Oh and almost forgot that something like the Department of the Interior also falls into this concern since they are the ones in power of the watchdog interests, instead of protecting land from exploitation they would be trying to figure out how to use it to get the best out of whatever it is that is there to take. Since the nation does not control a lot of land things like environmental damage or global warming would be next to none, the only thing that keeps things from being something out of a dystopia is that the business has to keep things nice enough to not negatively affect itself. Like an example being they can not pollute the river to the point that it would make everyone sick and be unusable for agricultural cause that cuts back on how much they could economically advance as a whole. That on top of a cultural that one puts society ahead of oneself would hopefully help cut back on trying to destroy everything in a short term kind of thinking, but I could be wrong with that in someone else’s opinion that I would love to hear still if anyone got this far through my rambling.

Getting on through this ramble to the education concern, now this might be pretty standard with sub groups focusing on how to better the main goal of this focus. This concern would be the very first one everybody encounters through schooling with the first objective to be to teach civilians basic skills in math, reading, writing, and that kind of stuff. Then after that it would be up to the military concern to teach them further in those skills. But while it is their job to teach things as the young get older there would be more programs getting involved to help kids succeed in society along with helping those with disabilities. Other things in the budgeting would probably include some funding to independent artists and such in a mission to foster the arts along with funding what independent research could be going on to help science or something like that. This would probably be the only outlet available for those that decide to strike it off on their own instead of getting into a pillar allowing for some homeless to be successful doing what they want to do. Actually an idea that would go under foriegn affairs if it was successful would be to have cultural outreach programs to become a thing which is I hope what turns out to be something I am already trying to do now. And further thinking about this right here and now some independent journalism might get away with being a pain to the commerce concern doing it under some legal loopholes for protection by this concern. More stuff might come later on as this society building process continues to flesh itself out as I write other things down.

The spiritual sister to education is the health concern, well, it probably is not but they will be alike in the fact that I really can not think of a strong bureaucracy for these things. Actually this one would probably be really small since it is a city of less than a million people with most services being provided by one hospital with many smaller clinics and family doctors covering the rest. There would be the standard budgeting group along with the watchdog groups making sure that if a doctor or something messes up that the patient has some leverage to bring up complaints along with appeal boards and all that jazz. They would be the ones in control of drugs when it comes to research, regulation, and standards control just like how business watches itself along with playing a CDC like entity for studying disease along with containing any serious outbreaks with the assistance of the military. Other things that this pillar would oversee is making sure that everyone has equal access to medical coverage since with a collective kind of focus I would imagine medicare for all with everyone paying in would not be that big of a deal here. They would also have to pick up where the education concern leaves of with helping those with disabilities giving them a place to be along with the care that they would need depending on if it was mental or physical instead of forcing them to be alone out on the streets. While it would not be a perfect thing it would still be there for other individuals in need as well. That would maybe cover all that this concern has to offer.

Finishing this long ramble up with the infrastructure concern solving the but who would build the roads meme. Though why would this concern exist let alone have a spot on the council, well this would probably be a compromise that the business concern would have to give the others since infrastructure is something that everybody would rely on thus giving them too much power to have things their way through natural monopolies. First thing that they would be covering is transportation issues like building and maintaining road and rail lines throughout the state along with making sure that the river would be under control enough to allow for some transport to take place along water. The next thing they would have to do is build and maintain the pipe infrastructure along with keeping the water treatment process and sewage waste treatment going so everyone can not have to worry about where the water comes from or what happens to it after they are done using it. Once electricity comes along, you guessed it, they would be responsible for building and maintaining the electrical wiring along with the power plant itself while the business concern supplies that with mining which it has under its own pillar not to be given away here. Sub groups would of course focus on research and development on the transportation, service delivery, and resource management things along with any safety improvements to anything that they have to do. Since it would not be a big issue since no foreign state threats to this kind of stuff security would be provided by the military concern until it blows up in their face requiring special security agencies to be made.

And that kind of makes up the basics for administrative things to start off with, be a closed system when it comes to money flow so just a normal tax chart should cover that stuff. Seems like enough writing for now, still hoping you know so got to keep things short.

[Ferret Civilization]

Hmm, guess this is a good of a spot as any to start trying to be a big boy and talk about the military setup going on. Going to be opening many fact books here on NationStates and Wikipedia articles to see what I can base anything off of here because just using me and this kind of topic would be torn apart by anybody. So starting off with the generic setup I made above and going top down I kind of have to think whether this would equal civilian control of the armed forces or a military dictatorship, which neither sound right, on the one hand everyone has to go through military service to be apart of society but looking at other countries that do that in real life and they still can have civilian control and on the other hand the military is a separate power within political setup I have going on but they have to work together with the other pillars so it is not exactly a dictatorship. Funny enough that might qualify to meet the definition of a deep state, probably the most open deep state ever made though. But for now I can probably just rest easy calling it some bureaucratic blurry mess that reality often gives in replacement for perfect textbook standards.

So getting to the structuring part of things, can not go too crazy here as I have limited myself to one city with one million inhabitants at best so there will not be so many units and formations to warrant numbers going into probably even past 10th something formation. However being into the FT scene now there will always be big plans to get something more and better so all the planning into becoming something past 10th can be there with no one in them. So starting things off we of course have to have someone to be the head of all the armed services, who would also be a politician with a seat in the council for the military and police concern. Going from there, probably imagine things would be more unified in one command style structure since the only real force that this nation has is with ground troops and a token air force, with the navy and space navy being completely new and that is along with the police force being thrown in here as well. So back to the top with the command, the top individual would have to oversee a logistics, intelligence, academic, and court system divisions. Logistics would then have to be split into groups making sure that needs like food, medicine, and equipment are provided to everyone along with keeping up with other needs like construction and repair of said equipment. There would also be the issue of dealing with the transport of individuals but given that this state has stuck in one city state for quite a while this group within the logistics field is probably in a poor state of disuse compared to other states. It would probably be up to the individuals to get where they need to be, using their own homes as a base rather than having some fancy military bunks set up since no one is traveling far enough to have a need for that. Thinking about just what military intelligence does that most people focus on this division would also be kind of really lack luster without the innovation that being around rival states tends to give. Though they would have their role here watching over the population to the best of their capabilities, all the fun dystopian thoughts that come with that but made to look good with collective ideals. I kind of realized that this group would take on the roles of a national weather service along with mapping services of things outside of the state that would be a very public arm of operations. Pretty much have things like radar, one satellite, and a television station under their control. Was wondering whether or not to put the research divisions under this one or the academy one but it is probably best to put that stuff here to invoke some secrecy stuff and that is what real life states tend to do. The academy division is pretty simple here pretty much being made up of schooling for those that have been drafted and those that want to further their career within this pillar. Then there are the special courts which would pretty much be the watchdog for military illegal or immoral activities being made up of the judicial judges, prosecutors, and defense along with the special law enforcement arm for the military forces. The court and academy would probably share some group involving training of those individuals who want to keep the military accountable which should finish off the upper command of this military organization.

Below them would be all the speciality branches that individuals can sign up for that I already mentioned five of being the Continental, Pelagic, Atmospheric, Astronautical, and Military Police though I realized looking through my last post I forgot to include a Fire Department. First thought that I could group it under the health concern but maybe it would be better here with the police emergency service instead of the EMT service. Then I tried to think of any kind of special forces that could stand out on their own like Marines but those really do not work here with a nation that has not dealt with real modern warfare for most of its history. So let us start with this poor armchair general setup going with the ground forces, they would probably be split up with an engineering and training groups. Getting to the main bulk of the forces they would probably be separated into a mechanized and infantry groups. Those would probably get lucky enough to have enough members to be split into a first and second formation at best, will have to work out the total numbers sometime later as this is just putting some blocks together right now. And that would probably be it, getting onto the navy things would be even smaller pretty much being a glorified merchants marine protecting cargo along a small part of a river that is never attacked by anything ever. They would pretty much be split into those that watch over the few real ports and those that are on the barges that move mostly agricultural goods into the city proper itself that can make due being one large division. The air force would not be better off either, really just being a glorified FAA and ATC watching over blimps, yes outdated cargo blimps for fancy traveling. They would probably be split the same way as the navy, with some watching over the ports and some on the vessels themselves. Both are probably small enough that they would require the upper academy command for training. From there is the last what would be called real armed service in FT and that is the space navy that gets all the action, well not here but in general. Just like the two branches last mentioned they do not have much in the way of anything except a few vessels that would be lumped into a single unified division that gets most of its support from higher up command. As these may or may not expand obvious things like getting artillery and reconnaissance groups would have to become a thing along with more special forces groups cause who does things without misunderstood spec ops. One idea that I had that will probably never see the light of day except here is probably a force in between ground and sea that is not a beach storming marine would probably involve speleology and using that kind of environment in a dangerous and cool warfare kind of way.

Moving onto the more civilian side of the military branches we come to the police that deals with civilian crime not crimes taking place within the military itself. Kind of like the gendarmerie I suppose. Now I think that there would not be many divisions here since being in one city does not really require there to be things like a federal and local policing effort and it would all just be a unified entity. However, the judicial branch of the government takes place here meaning there would have to be some more internal divisions than based off of a chain of command. There of course would also have to be a special academy for those going into this field and like the courts that I mentioned before these things would probably be heavily based off the military style ones. So the schools and courts are in place, leaving it up to law enforcement to separate themselves into those that deal with the paperwork, internal affairs, and bureaucracy and those that deal with the detective and patrol stuff. Pretty simple standard stuff hopefully, at least it is supposed to be if I am not presenting it right. The other side of things sees the military fire department branch with their own schools and some ability to investigate fire related crimes, they would have to have their own internal affairs groups set up as well to keep an eye on themselves. This division would be the most likely to be broken down into special groups with the biggest of them being for general fires that need water to be put out and that is it. There would then be smaller more focused groups for things like chemical and electrical fires, oh and wildfires in the farming community I can not forget about that after asking about it in the FT advice thread, with the last but probably most important being search and rescue that does not always deal just fires but individuals. Sounds good enough of a start for me there to leave off on.

Now how big of a force would this end up being, with a million individuals and conscription of the younger population. Using a global age pyramid and making it so that those in their 30s would make up less than one percent of the population and having the younger populations slowly make up a larger and larger portion of the whole. And this kind of got a little hard for me to do actually so this is not going to be a hard number right now, let us suppose that half the population is split male and female with a third being below conscripted age and about the rest above that age. Given a thirty year lifespan, I will divide the human time in half so suppose this species becomes roughly an adult at nine instead of eighteen. The third ends up kind of matching the world population pyramid which is what I am going for, with the other two thirds being an adult. Let us say that conscription is for one year, the equivalent of an eighteen year old serving until they are twenty, so what percent of the population is that, I had trouble finding. But using the world pyramid chart the age gap is four years, so assuming that there is an equal percentage of each age within the four year mark it should be easier to find. So then I get about 4% of the population having to go through conscription at any given time on average. Sounds like a nice big number but that is pretty much made up of kids, not battle hardened volunteer badasses, hell getting the volunteer leftovers will not be badass either. Goal would be Israel but probably end up looking like the South Sudan military in the FT setting. So percent of those that volunteer to stay, probably be like 0.2% for the military command itself with another 0.2% for the police force and 0.3% for the fire department for a total pushing that 5% mark that would end the societal ability to support such a giant entity. Though that does give an average of 0.2 soldiers per km^2 that the state controls though if law enforcement stuck itself within the city proper that is nearly 86 officers per km^2, of course not all of them are patrolling around and they would have to cover the rural agriculture areas and that would spread them out more. Suppose this is a good place to leave off as I can cover equipment itself in another post about general engineering advancements, also really have to get on that biosphere building for agriculture explaining.

[Ferret Civilization]

Alright forcing myself back a couple of steps to work out the biosphere things and focus a little bit more on the world building that I started off with. So past me I hope you are proud because I am now trying to get into what I have feared the most, dealing with making a bunch of different species that I am going to avoid giving special names for now. Already named the biomes that I will be dealing with which should give some basic ideas with the plants and animals along with calling out the cold temperature and how even with no map I know that I am going for 80% water coverage with many outcroppings of land from the planet contracting in on itself. One problem I did not get myself to answer was just how big the polar ice caps would turn out to be and looking that up it would pretty much be wherever the temperature is constantly below freezing. Easy enough but now I need to know where it would be below zero, so I looked up how temperature changes with latitude and that got some seemingly unsound answers but since temperature is more complex than just simple variables like latitude that is understandable. So using Earth as a base taking the average temperature of the equator and the poles and going from there should be a simple enough base. Using a 30 C at the equator and a -5 C being generous that is a difference of 35 C dividing by 9 for every 10 latitude degrees that gives me a change of about 4 C rounded up. Now I said the average temperature was between 260 to 280 K but that would be different starting temperatures to get that, also realized that my planet is smaller than Earth so the distance between the latitude degrees is different than those on Earth. Since my planet is half the size of Earth I will say there is a 4 C change in latitude every 20 latitude degrees to make things simple enough for a general rule of thumb at sea level.

If I take the average temperature of 260 K that means things would be below 0 C at the equator, which means the whole planet is an ice cap and not exactly growing many diverse biomes. Using 280 K means the equator is around 16 C with it being an ice cap at around 80° North and South. However that does not really match the axial tilt of around 20° which places the polar circle at 70° North and South. Though I have to consider this planet does not have the long dark periods Earth has due to seasons and a long year. The 280 K works out pretty well for me though that requires my planet to be in between the two stars it orbits for the entire year rather than the orbit I have given it so I will just be doing all averages and try for something colder like 270 K. That would give me an equatorial temperature of 6 C and the ice caps would go all the way down to 30° North and South with the poles being at around -12 C which I can go more for I suppose. That would allow the ice to grow further when the planet has only one sun warming it and then the ice caps would retreat a little when the planet is between both suns. That is on top of the ice being broken apart nearly every day by the tidal forces in play which is pretty cool to my mind as well. There is also elevation when it comes in to how the temperature is, which I said the highest point would be around 4.5 km above the average, which for this purpose I will just call sea level. This time around I will just use the first website in the Google search and say things cool down about 10 C every 1 km higher in attitude, so if the tallest mountain was on the equator that would be a mountaintop temperature of -39 C and if on the poles the temperature would get down to -57 C which is pretty much the Earth south pole for an extreme. There could be Death valley kind of places that are land below sea level which could see a little rise in temperatures up to like 8 C or something just winging things but that should wrap up temperature talks and now I know that ice caps extend all the way down the the 30° latitude lines, if extrapolated to Earth all of the US, Russia, China and Europe would be under snow while on the south side of things are less buried except for like New Zealand.

So now that I know how restricted the biomes will be with most the planet being a one biome planet at the moment under snow and ice. Another thing I have mentioned that could be factored in is the low gravity that favored gliding animals, think I forgot to mention that it would probably favor animals that bounce as well to move over longer distances without expending as much energy. Focusing on that agriculture first the animal that would be tamed first would probably be closest to something like a mammalian chicken mixed with something like a kangaroo rat. Be kind of easy to take care of, would have to be somewhat of an explosive breeding creature with short lifespans that after some time, kind of like what we did to chickens be made larger than their wide cousins. Now in order to avoid being a monoculture animal that has a multipurpose service there would be other animals tamed as well, but trying to think of something like sheep or cows. Going into something like wool I would figure that such a cold environment would give rise to animals that have analogous type warmth protection. On Earth that is all provided by the Caprinae subfamily that are hooved, for some reason that bothers me when it really should not, suppose it has to due with how big on average the group is when I am trying to stick to having smaller creatures as I already pointed out the low atmospheric pressure would probably be a limiter there. Though I suppose that since this is an entirely different place a species could arise that is a miniature version of something in this family From there I looked into other animals and surprising to me we use a lot of different animal furs for making clothes or brushes for painting so that kind of opened some doors to have a different kind of animal as livestock for making better cloth material. Other materials that I have to think of that animals would provide for an expanding society besides food and clothing material would be things like casein to eventually get an early form of plastic with galalith or using the fat to make early forms of soap. Which in the end should give me like four or five species of livestock to be using to meet the needs of the sapient species.

The plants would be rather easy at the start, just focusing on different kinds of hardy grasses that could be cultivated to become better suited to the needs they are being used for in feeding larger and larger livestock animals. Eventually someone would notice that some plants can provide materials that can be used in the same manner the materials they are getting from animals provide. The very first thing that popped into my mind was using flax to make linen for cloth and paper since something like cotton would not be here since it is too cold for that kind of analogous plant. That is before getting to the obvious things like trees providing wood for building and eventually paper as well, using something like pines as a base tree that grows everywhere on this planet vegetable flannel could also start to be a thing to diversify the fashion. Another thing that is provided by plants that could be found here is something that produces the things needed for rubber, which would not come from the place where we get most of our natural rubber but from things closer to dandelions or lettuce plants. This would start to see a wide range of plants taking up space being grown beyond just grasses for feeding a wide range of livestock species hopefully, at least that is what I am trying to go for. In the end it should end up giving the state most the materials needed to become somewhat of a technologically advanced polity to further get more things out of the stuff it grows and raises. Also have to consider that there would be some plants that are grown for no real useful purpose other than to look aesthetically pleasing. Though even after giving this a couple of days I am kind of pushing my limit of knowledge and what I can look up so once again I am going to have to shelve this and move on to come back to it.

[Ferret Civilization]

Well still talking to myself, still looking just as sad, not really able to get into further details about what I wrote in the above post though I wish that creativity would just punch me by now. Got the basics of getting meat, milk, fur, skin, and other refined materials like soap and plastic coming from animals along with food for livestock, clothing, paper, lumber, and rubber coming from plants. There probably should be a whole lot more but that is just kind of a base right now, and that is something that I can expand since I forgot the useful role that a thing like fungus can play into making different foods, and as society advances it can get into that field of cellular agriculture to get something like yeast to produce milk or more popularly alcoholic beverages because who does not love just getting drunk in life. Something of a basic base to start civilization off with if I do say so myself, but that is just one part of an economic foundation of things extracted from nature, the other part that will hopefully bring some better quality writing for the poor souls reading this is getting into that mining game.

Now one thing that I have to have be absolute is that the one city state is located above a very large coal deposit which does not leave a lot of room for a small location to be rather minerally diverse. However the way I made the planet can come to help with that allowing for some highly unrealistic conditions to be a little bit more plausible in this hypothetical environment. For one having a thin crust covering the mantle allows for more magmatic and volcanic related deposits to form due to the way that I set up the tectonic plate to fold in on itself. This would hopefully allow for polymetallic deposits of Iron, Copper, Nickel, Platinum group, Titanium, Zinc, and / or Lead to be found together in large enough quantities to be worth something. One nice thing is that since pretty much all the ground above sea level will be formed by pushing the crust out and making the mantle a little bit more exposed all land areas should have some kind of these deposits mixed in with other stuff that I will get to. But right now, let us suppose that the large coal deposit got disturbed and mixed up with the minerals that I am seeking here, that should be simple enough for now.

Though thinking about it there would be a whole lot more to it than just that, going by a history the first thing that would happen would be the ground going through tectonic activity to bring it above the sea level, bringing a more diverse mineral composition to the surrounding area. Once life comes along and takes over that sets the stage for a future coal site, for that to happen that would mean the area was not done settling and after some time of dead biomass building up eventually everything shifts again covering it all up. Once the biomass known as peat is buried it slowly goes through the process of ranking up with life coming back burying the first layer under another level of stuff, suppose the cycle repeats over and over again changing the landscape along with how life tries to adapt to such a drastic change. Though eventually things would settle down landscape change wise, making for a large landmass with a mountain range through the center of it rising above the sea. Life would cover up the last of the exposed minerals made in the mantle and things like rivers would come to be to shake things up. Leaving a cyclothem of alternating coal and mineral deposits to be found later for a certain sapient species to enjoy and use for technological process.

That would not be the end of the story as I found out looking around Wikipedia for every possible sort of mineral compositions to be had in a small area. Taking the same swamp like area that turns biomass into peat, and the tectonic activity going on, something like volcanic ash getting into the mix of things would see the creation of Tonstein around the coal that would allow for things like clay to come into existence for this society if they decided to dig. Oh that is a side topic that I should probably bring up here, due to the world being mostly water the sea would not be as salty as it is here on Earth, in fact it would probably be more brackish at its worst, so that is something on top of all the frozen freshwater covering over two thirds of this planet. Nice little transition into whether or not something like limestone could come to be in this small area that I am working with as well, and looking up limestone that does not come from previous lifeforms I was surprised to see both Travertine and Tufa fit the bill. Suppose the river comes across carbonate minerals, if it is not super heated then it will slowly build up into Tufa which as a limestone would be the most valuable thing to start making concrete with in early settled society. Could be a possible interest in having a slightly more base of a water compared to the slightly more acidic life that it would be sustaining.

So, that is the building blocks that I have set up for this allowing for the society here to go through layers of increasingly ranked coal to also get things like Iron and all the other metals that I mentioned plus a few other mixed minerals to get most of the stuff needed for a modern society. That is on top of the river providing limestone, probably even sand for glass if I can try and push it that far, the one thing that probably everyone noticed is where is the oil and that is something that I could not push hard enough to be fit into this system. At least from what I have found, though that does not mean there is something that can not replace it, and for that I turn to the air itself while still thinking of the religious implications of that part of nature here. Without being able to turn to hydraulics I instead turn to pneumatics to be the thing that forges the industrial revolution to the modern age here. Something that I will get more into later, as for this part of things I guess I will keep it on the short end for today, hopefully the quality is there since the usual quantity is not. Though anything you want to say I will be more than glad to hear if you have continued to read this far.

[Ferret Civilization]

So I have the basic building blocks needed to go more into trying to describe the city itself, that will be what I go into I guess. This will require a little bit of historical insight, so starting off with what I have so far it seems pretty simple that there would not be a lot of stuff being built permanently while the species is in the early stages of a nomadic hunter type groups. Best thing that I could think of are things like tents and the like made out of animal skins and furs to give temporary shelter when it is needed. Time goes on and then groups start to settle down and even large tent like structures are just not going to cut it as time continues to go by. The first resource that will be widely available for use would be the abundance of wood based products, the biggest one being the lumber itself to be used to build single-pen log buildings scattered over some distance. Bigger families might take it a step further coming closer together to have double-pen cabins. As these basic communities get bigger eventually centralization of a town surrounded by farmland will overdo the decentralized every home being the center of a plot of farmland. More people also eventually leads to the whole being able to specialize start to happen, and since I have one city that is what I will focus on from here.

The city that I have made right now is placed within a thick forest with a river running through it and all the future resources below it. When it would first be settled things would be stuck to one side of the river in kind of a radical setup, the main building that it all stems from would most likely be a place to turn the cut down trees into building materials with everything from that point being spread out farmland for herding livestock. Things would slowly start to congregate around that point once the distance becomes not worth it further allowing for a growing population to specialize, with the first individuals shifting from majority agriculture work to majority woodcutting and working work. That should be good enough to have a wide range of tools for both farming and cutting things down with, eventually getting water to crops would have to start becoming a problem that would need to be dealt with leading to digging tools and such to make canals. So once that starts happening a few new resources come into play like clay and stone along with a bunch of other generic dirt, allowing for the centralized little town to get better building materials that come from clay like bricks and shaping stones for surfaces rather than just having dirt floors or poor wood ones. The canals as they get better and larger would also leave their mark on the future sprawling of the settlement, eventually bridges would have to be made to cross over them once they fully cut off areas of farm from the town itself. A new specialized group would come to be working with making bricks and fire, I imagine around this time other early governmental roles would start to take on a more defined role as well.

Mining would start to become the new industry to focus on bringing in better metallic resources to make tools out of further increasing the tools efficiency. Roads made out of either brick or sett would start being made instead of relying on dirt footpaths, buildings would start to see metal parts being included with the wood, stone, and brick. This would allow for the buildings themselves to become bigger and have fully functioning two story homes and such. Eventually other resources would be discovered like flax or using the wood to make paper like products and sheets to give interior design something else to work with instead of everything being based off of what the animals themselves provide. Another thing advancing society within this settlement would be the mines eventually getting to the first layer of coal, even though it would most likely be brown coal it would still allow for some kind of breakthrough. First obvious thing would be the switch from using wood or charcoal for fire and using coal, allowing for a better material to heat both the homes and the tools needed to work with metals leading to better tools. Though going back to the paper and using charcoal for writing would see the rise of formalized laws along with record keeping and the start of a written language being more widespread. More specialized groups would come into being within this society due to the increasing variety of both work and the efficiency of the tools themselves. The city at this time would probably be an organic flow with not too many straight lines of public roads, with the river being the limiter on one side with things spreading radically the other direction. Canals that once served to water crops would be gaps in the growing settlement, actually thinking of it the side of the river that the town is on would also start to be tamed with a solid wall structure holding the water back rather than a natural shore. Buildings themselves would grow in height as well as mines continue to go deeper, eventually a problem would arise due to Argon pooling in those holes making it so no life could ever go into them. This would be where more complex machinery would come into being, using air and water to pump out the air in the tunnels to create a circulation that simply using fire could not do at a certain level and around large coal deposits. As that system improved the town would have a new direction to spread and that would be downwards, making more room to put new inventions like plumbing and heating lines.

Mixed-use development would be the staple of all development from this point forward, and things like public spaces would start to come into being as a purposefully built thing rather than just using empty space areas. Use of fire would eventually lead to an industrial revolution kind of event with the industry most likely taking the free space of below ground and using pipes to get rid of their waste and pollution to above the surface with smoke stacks. At around this time this city would get a surge in population as other settlements have to be abandoned, leading to the colonization of the other side of the river and the taming of the river itself. This would be a huge project in the history books since the absolute control over the river level through irrigation and plumbing diversions for industry and eventually residential life. Another thing that it would be the ability to build under the river without needing to worry as much of it leaking through their construction as well as bridging over it. Other forms of transportation such as using the river to move agricultural goods would start to become more promising with a tamed river and railroads would start to come into play to ease the stress of congregating into a small area. The city would see a boom in surface trams, elevated, and subway rail lines to move people around as well as standard lines to connect the outer farmlands with the inner city. As time goes on the city would reach further into the sky and deeper into the ground, using coal for power would see the expansion of power production through a single coal fired power plant that would be located under the river itself to use gravity brought in water to keep things cooled down. With the taller buildings skyways would be another thing made to decrease pedestrian congestion on the surface streets which still have yet to see automobiles. Thinking about that with the advancement of pneumatic engines, the rise of personal automobiles would be practically hampered by the setup that is in place and has been for a long time, meaning only the military and agricultural groups would be able to make use of mobile vehicles. With that roads would not be rebuilt for the separation of vehicles and pedestrians, leading to a shared road with trams, military vehicles, and pedestrian traffic relying mostly on each other to determine who has the right of way instead of there being laws in place to determine such things. Boats would face less issues with civilians being able to freely boat along the urbanized canals but more restricted getting closer to the agricultural ones as well as the main river itself since that area would be more commercial and industrial traffic and needs only.

Pretty much sums up the modern state of the city, mostly would look pretty modern with concrete, steel, and glass making up the big buildings with decorative wood, brick, stone, and clay all over. Houses and buildings out in the farmlands would be more open to architectural design themes using mostly wood and stone or the like. Getting to the space age would need a place for launching stuff up there like satellites, was thinking that instead of using a wide open space that we use in real life I would try to focus more on building a tube into the ground to help force things go upwards. Other than that there is no real space port on the ground to define a part of the city, which sums everything up nicely I hope. Need a plan for the future so I will probably go into demographics and more cultural ideas before just switching over to starting over again.

[Ferret Civilization]

Time to get back on this since past me is kind of getting overwhelmed researching all the topics that I missed, well the ones that I realized I missed when getting on what physical demographics would be like. Kind of mentioned that the white dwarfs would emit extreme ultraviolet radiation which would not be a good thing, though looking that up I found out that since my stars temperatures are around 5,000 K they would apparently emit 1.65 times less radiation on the planet in the habitable zone if it was an Earth like planet. Well the planet that I have is not Earth like so what does that end up meaning, magnetic field is fine but looking up the atmosphere and what it does to protect against ultraviolet radiation. With half an atmosphere of what Earth has my planet will get an increase in radiation by a factor of 10, that is not good at all, and looking up what that meant really turned out to be pretty hard since everything is referenced by an index without much defining the numbers. After some searching I found 1 UV index is equal to 25 milliWatts per square meter which is good enough for me, so times by 10 the weakest amount of ultraviolet radiation in some areas would be 250 milliWatts per square meters. That is a 10 on the UV index, and the highest would be 500 which would be a 20 on the index, something that does not happen on Earth since the highest possible right now is 12. Life would really need to find a way to adapt to that issue like having darker or thicker skin, or as I have it dense fur works as well from what I found though there are still exposed areas that can be fried. Also tried to look up how close to the surface UVC radiation would get to this planet, since extreme UV rays are stopped instantly by any kind of atmosphere which is nice but UVC can get somewhat in before getting stopped by the Ozone layer. So calculating how far up my atmosphere goes and it effectively ends at around 10 km, which means unlike Earth harmful UVC would get very close and could maybe reach the surface it some unlucky places that have thinner Ozone and Oxygen layers. Though another thing to consider is with my large snow caps on the poles to near the equator a lot of radiation all through the spectrum is largely reflected back out into space, however that is not that nice to life since we know that means life gets hit with even more possible harmful radiation. One last thing for this long introduction is that with the magnetic field and the ionizing radiation the light shows that happen at the poles would be pretty awesome for pictures, and looking up what it would look like with an Oxygen-Argon atmosphere the colors being more violet with lesser other colors from carbon dioxide and stuff. Lightening and tasers would possibly give off little light shows as well which is kind of cool to think about even if it is a little ridiculous.

So now getting onto what I said I was going to get onto talking about demographics, sticking with the physical stuff and adding some cultural stuff as I get to it. Two things I can make percentages of would be fur and eye color, taking into account the high ultraviolet radiation going on most exposed flesh like on the nose, around the eyes, inner ears, and since it is so extreme probably the inside of the mouth as well would be very dark brown to black with the rest of the skin probably being dark as well. Though environmental factors would encourage a wider range of fur colors to help the species thrive in both a forest and plains of snow so the colors that I have picked out using real life ferrets as a base because why not, there are brown, white, white and grey mixed, and black. Being on the equator in a forest setting the population would be majority brown so let us say like 78% have a range of browns with 12% having some white and grey mix, then give 9% pure white fur for those that came from hunting in the nearly pure white arctic environments. That leaves 1% for the black color which would be a fuzzy area on whether it is really black fur or just extremely dark brown that would come from a genetic mix up rather than something that was forced through the environment. Getting onto the eye color researching that was pretty funny since I fell down the eye color supremacy thing though getting into more serious topics about eye color, with the high radiation and to avoid instantly giving every one of this species photokeratitis I will have to stick to the darker colored eyes as well. So since the eyes of this species are pretty much based off the same human eyes the melanin and lipochrome will give brown, hazel, blue, green, and grey. Brown eyes would be the most dominant so let us say around 84% have that color being mostly on the darker side, hazel would probably be the second most common being around 9%, green would come up next at around 6% with the rest of the 1% having either blue or grey with that population most at risk for cancer of the eye even if by a small percentage chance. From there it should be simple to find the percentages of who has some specific fur and eye colorization but with the way I am writing it down things might start looking incredibly drab so that will just be an exercise for you and I to do some other time unless you want to see it and say so.

Not much written down with that out of the way, guess I can start getting to work on that culture part of things to have something to present for being absent so long. Did mention religion here and there but I will still hold off getting to that for now, instead opting for something that is more popular in this scene, constructing a language or word building. Looking at the IPA chart for a start and from what I have already mentioned a snouted species with no lips or cheeks will not be able to pronounce bi­labial, labiodental, or linguolabial along with labial–velar, labial–coronal, and sounds which are quite a lot just thrown into the trash right off the bat. Then the harder to produce dental, denti-alveolar, alveolar, and coronal–velar sounds are a limiting thing to realize so no going crazy trying to make those sounds the main focus so that leaves the left side of the chart to look at, though I could probably get away with using them but have to note they would be more whistled mixed than how we are used to hearing them. That leaves me with using interdental, bidental, postalveolar, palato-alveolar, retroflex, and palatal sounds that are placed by the coronal and the alveolo-palatal, velar, uvular, uvular–epiglottal, pharyngeal, epiglotto-pharyngeal, and glottal sounds that are placed by dorsal and laryngeal. That covers the basics, and going into the secondary articulation labialization and labio-palatalization are not going to be possible but palatalization, velarization, uvularization, pharyngealization, and glottalization are possible and when the species finds out about human speech can try to use those methods to get closer to sounds they can not make. Getting to the tongue shape used to make sounds there really should not be any restrictions here allowing for the apical, subapical, laminal, sulcal, and domed should be possible to also try and get some quasi sounds from the places of articulation. Not even going to pretend like I know what half of these lists are but that just means by the end of this part of the project I should be learning something and probably giving the real linguistics a good laugh at this foolishness. Before getting onto manner of articulation I should note that without being able to round out sounds all the rounded vowels on the IPA chart are also out and in the garbage. Moving on all the manners should be possible for this species since they all include sounds not based off of just using the lips so I will save writing out that long list for no real good reason. Though looking deeper at the moment I might have to dig deeper into tenuis sounds to see if those would be possible, and not a couple seconds later I find out they are possible with the palatal clicks and that is it since clicks can not be made with further back places of articulation and the closer up ones are not possible for this species. Probably not going to be including clicks into the language itself but it is something nice to be aware of, and all the airstreams should also be possible for this species to make since it involves closing the mouth completely which is something a snouted species should be able to do and not leak air. If they do leak air then it would be another set of sounds that would have a whistling quality to it compared to how we are used to hearing them. Then I find the glottalized lateral nasal click, well I proved myself wrong yet again and I am going to keep it written for proof.

That pretty much wraps up what I have to work with based off of the IPA, though there are sounds that humans can make that are not on that chart along with other things that I have to consider. Having mentioned whistling already I figure that my species would be able to make that kind of sound and could incorporate it into a language like how we have whistled languages or could just be a small part of a larger vocal language. There is also sign language to consider, given that this species came from a hunter nomadic start having visual elements could be very important to have built into the vocal language to help during hunting and other situations where making noise would be a bad thing to do but the group still needs to communicate. Though I highly doubt it will ever come up again after this sentence there are also color based languages but since my species does not change colors it is not something that would be in early proto-language. Body language would be the more important thing to focus on along with gestures to determine the difference in meaning in some sounds and eventually more complex words.

With that little side note out of the way let me move onto another little side note that will help narrow down the rather broad range of sounds that I still have left to work with and that involves geography. Now it is not really proven yet, this is more based off of correlation and not causation but they are good limiters, but geography should affect linguistic development. Taking a look at my planet and there is a thin atmosphere and it is pretty darn cold so I can look at languages that cluster around high altitudes and in cold places, kind of intermingled thinking about it but anyways using those Earth based languages could give me a good start on this constructed language and I might learn something about foreign cultures so it is a win for me at least. Now in most mountainous areas ejectives are used a lot with the exception of the Tibet so there is the first thing to consider. Then with it being so cold the species would probably have a lower sonority overall, which would be a good thing that I can apply to this planet given the role the species has and the environment that it is in. The cold environment would also really hampers tonal languages that more humid environments would be able to foster, so complex languages like Chinese are pretty much out. Good start for me to leave off on since youtube videos do it in this style so that leaves me with starting up getting more complex systems like words and sentence structures up next. That and this gives me a good pause to hope that someone can interject anything that they want to still.

[Ferret Civilization]

Continuing on with picking up things that I think I left out that are not really important anywhere else but here, figured out that the stars will give a higher ultraviolet punch on this planet but I did not figure out what would be the peak output. Getting to that it turns out that these stars have their peak output in the visible spectrum, more specifically yellow. What does that mean, nothing much I suppose, the sun will still appear white in the sky and the sky will still be a darker shade of blue due to rayleigh scattering with not many visible other stars except at night which they would be flying by at blurring speeds compared to how we are used to seeing them. Though hey plant color, talked about plants for agriculture but never figured out what their chlorophyll would be reflecting back, guessed it would have been green like how it is on Earth but nope. So either I have the plants be yellow to reflect the peak emissions to protect itself or be the complementary color blue or purple to absorb the most radiation. Now given what I had said in the last post these plants would most likely want to reflect as much as possible so say hello to a planet with majority yellow spectrum plants compared to Earth green plants. Also kind of helps give the excuse on why brown fur would be a better camouflage compared to how brown or a crazy bright white would stick out in a blue or purple. Ha, a snowy white plant with yellow plants in an Oxygen-Argon low atmosphere, what a crazy thing this process turned out to be. Also I remember mentioning that this planet has pretty much no angular net momentum, kind of glossed over how big a deal that would be to the coriolis forces and convection cells. Getting the easier one out of the way there would only be on convection cell in each hemisphere compared to how there are three for Earth so the wind flows all the way to the poles from the equator and back down again rather than split at certain latitudes. Then getting to the coriolis force it would change depending on which star the planet was orbiting, and with an orbit of 15 hours around one star and then 15 hours around the other that means the winds change direction every day to account for the coriolis force flipping as well as the day and night side changing. Absolutely crazy and now thinking about ocean currents those will be getting messed up all the time on top of those tides, be quite the thing to be mapped out, and exploration in something like the age of sail would have been a headache to say the least. So yeah when getting to religion the air flow is going to be kind of the biggest deal ever, though I am suppose to be word building right now got to get out of this world building slump.

Alright getting into things, I have already got all the categories set up so just how many sounds do I have to work with. Counting them out I have 15 vowels which are all unrounded monophthongs, which can become 225 diphthong and 3,375 triphthong sounds which of course no language ever gets that crazy but it is a possibility. Then I have 120 consonants that I can work with, which most languages do not get that high and now I have to select some sounds to start making something that is not a complete laughing stock. What should my goal be then, focusing on the consonants first I figure this language should be more glottal heavy with dorsal consonants as well given that using the whole front part of the mouth is kind of out of the equation. Though if needed I can throw in the interdental sounds to make up for some letters but as of right now using laryngeal and dorsal that gives me 12 solid consonants and, actually using the dorsal puts me right back at 120 so that is no good. So let me cut that back to the velar and uvular which is 27 consonants on top of 12 for a total of 39, that seems like a good enough amount to use to make words with. Though I could add the non-pulmonic and co-articulated consonants to add 14 more sounds for a real total of 43 consonants. Also saw that no clicks are possible with this format so that is something, not like most the languages in real life use them anyways. With vowels I figure I should stick with the same idea that this species sticks to using the back of their mouth area to make language sounds so that is pretty much stuck to the back vowels for 4. Not that many, but there are 5 more vowels that I can add that are not on the IPA chart since they are either mid-back rather than full back or compressed which is some nice little variation to throw in there. That is 9 monophthongs with 81 possible diphthongs which goes into the unwieldy area, given that I have stuck myself with one side of the chart I can only have rising and falling diphthongs and I will avoid putting compressed with uncompressed vowels. Sticking with the vowels on the IPA chart that gives me 16 diphthongs so plus 9 that is 25 vowels. This leaves me with 43 consonants and 25 vowels, a ratio of 1.72 which according to the World Atlas of Language Structures is considered low which works for me.

Now that I have all these sounds it is time to get into the next level of phonotactics and figuring that I am working with a cold environment words would be pretty short. So this would mean that to start things off my syllables will also have to be short, probably be best to keep things as small as possible with the internal segment structure being just the optional onset and the nucleus. Then I will add that on top of having vowel only syllables the vowel can be in the onset allowing for null onsets to happen. Though to limit things I will make it so that there are no syllabic consonants finishing up the syllable rules this language would have. Suppose now I have to figure out how the stress system would work, with such small parts to a word I think having it so that depending on what part of the word is stressed the meaning of the word changes. But at the same time I am drawn to the fixed stress and just having it be the first syllable of every word but that would mean I would have to have a wider range of unique words or things would depend really heavy on context. Thinking it over I will go with the fixed stress on the first syllable and try to have some fun with that later on down the line. With all of that I can theoretical have, let me see with 68 sounds for the onset plus 1 for none and then 25 sounds for the nucleus, that is 1,725 possible combinations. While unlikely I could just have to stick to have 1,725 one syllable words each with their own definition or maybe even more than one definition. Seems like something to fall back on if everything after this ends up falling flat since I have a good thing going to follow the sonority hierarchy, plateaus, and reversals using the two sounds to make a syllable thing going.

With that basic idea down I guess this is kind of a safe place to move onto deciding what the syntax would be like for these possible words. Starting off with word order I have a simple 6 choices to pick from, though as an English speaker I am of course drawn to the Subject Verb Object order and if I was to get out of my comfort zone I would go for Object Verb Subject since I can grasp the reversal better than mixing it up any further. That and the examples Wikipedia make me crack up, but I will stick with SVO just so I do not get too wild with this construction project. Actually no I should get out of my comfort zone more with this, already trying to pronounce sounds I can not even attempt to get right, let me see what OVS gets me. Moving on with things I am following Biblaridion with Artifexian on the side here so adjectives, I will have them be derived from nouns and only nouns and with adpositions I will follow the same thinking and have them be prepositions that also are derived from nouns and only nouns. Finishing up with the possessor being treated as the adjective and that ends the video I was basing this part of the process on. The next video nicely continues to cover this part of the process so I will continue on with it to piece together my process here. Starting up with the plurality of words, figure with the small syllables words that mean more than one will do reduplication instead of having a special suffix. The reduplication of the word would simply just mean more than one all the time rather than it meaning two, more than two, or collective depending on context. When dealing with tense, I will continue using the same using a separate word to denote whether something is past, present, or future meaning that this language would end up being tenseless relying on context words for different meanings. This could end meaning that the aspect is also separate from the base word which is what I am going to go with, more unique words instead of having a system of additional markings to a word. Guess I will run with that fully, using words to define all the context in every case leading to this being a genderless language, words do not have to be modified to agree which I kind of fine to be nice. I will take this a step further and make this a gender neutral language as well, using one word to mean either male, female, or neutral all in one with further words required for context. Word position ends up being very important here thinking about it. I should touch on morphosyntactic alignment as well, given that what I have going so far I will strike out something more unique and use either the direct or tripartite alignment and since direct is the one that requires context to be made I will go with that one. No passive or antipassive voice to be used. Quite the system that I have going on here I think so far. The modality would be the one thing that would be able to have a lot of distinctions since there are now many different words at play to help narrow down the context from what I have gathered. Overall I hope that I am getting across that instead of narrowing down concepts based off ideas almost everything will have its own unique word assigned to it, kind of not what I was going for at the start. Words are small, sentences ended up being long in some cases, though with some words meaning more than one thing context will still kind of matter like how I mentioned no distinction between male and female words. For an example on that instead of there being a word for mother and father it would simply be parent with context telling if they are referring to someone specific.

That is a good enough for me, would need someone to tell me anything I am missing otherwise I will have to get to it way later down the line if I realize the issue. Figure I can add the small note here to talk about number system, now on Earth there are many different systems in play with decimal being the most popular. Now I know that it is pretty much a myth but I will be base 8, octal, since this species has eight digits on their fingers so they will go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 0. I could try and go crazy with the number words though I think I will go with the more than one meaning for something like with the cardinal and ordinal with the word for one meaning both the singular one and first along with any other possible distinctions that languages use here in real life. That is a lot easier to get to and wrap up, and this might be a good place to leave off, will try to think of more to talk about coming up along with getting to any forgotten loose ends like I have been doing.

[Ferret Civilization]

Got real busy it seems and left poor old past me in the dark, what a shame since present me is not really sure where to go from here anymore. Going back over everything suppose I missed another thing when building the main planet of this show. Looking at albedo I know that about two thirds of this planet is pretty much under snow and ice and if each third had for some reason the same amount of water to land ratio that would mean the last third would be 80% open water and 20% land mostly covered in either snow topped mountain regions or forests. Ice and snow is about 0.9, water is 0.05, and the land would be around 0.15 on average. Doing the math and that gives my planet an albedo rating of if I did this right 0.6 which is double that of Earth though less than Venus just based off the sheer amount of white stuff involved reflecting most that harmful radiation back into space. Thinking about that along with the amount of harmful ultraviolet rays hitting this planet and well looks like that means life in the arctic would be pretty brutal in that aspect.

Though once again moving away from the world building and getting back into dabbling with the language construction there is not much more for me to add because I did not really think of much that I was missing. I figured that when looking at grammar and agreement that I would do my best to remove as much of that as possible like I did with gender by being completely neutral there and with plurals by making them reduplication and thus treated like a singular when it comes to making a sentence. Though I would have to go further with that idea since there are other ways numbers are used like with distinguishing order or degree, figured I would stick with what I said last time and make it so that one word has multiple meanings here depending on how it is used. You probably get where I am trying to go with this, there would be no separation of tense when it comes to forming a proper sentence and there would be no cases, cutting it all away for this language. This would place heavy focus on the word order that I made to be object-verb-subject and other parts of speech to help bring in the context, lots of small words to make longer sentences rather than big words than encode a lot of information in them to make short sentences. The negative aspect, that is what I forgot, suppose I could do what Spanish does and tack on the negative at the start of the sentence or at the end of the sentence in other languages. With what I have going on here, I am not really sure how I want the negative to work, it could function as a standalone thing but that is kind of hard to deal with. Guess I will go with the negative at the start of the sentence if that is required to make sense with context and have the word for no be able to stand by itself as well.

Pretty much what I have going on here, I have a solid 1,725 words that I can work with plus how many more for reduplication plurals, not a large dictionary of words but that is not a solid number as of right now. I did mention involving body language or probably better defined sign language to incorporate non-manual and manual aspects in which can add a lot of variability into the little amount of spoken words I have at the moment. Suppose for example, I have only one word for the different kinds of emotions and it order to change the meaning rather than relying on other spoken words to get context a physical aspect is involved for each particular emotion given. That would really help expand the number of words that I have to work with but would not be counted in the same way as purely individual words I think. While I will not be writing out every single word and giving them a meaning I will talk about where the base ones would come from and shape the meaning of all the other words. In this world the air is the most important thing around, without wind life will suffocate and die which is something I figure early lifeforms of all intelligence will pick up on right away. I also figure that sapient life that I have made would put all the importance of that fact as well making their words based around what the wind does in weather while derivative all their other words from this basic concept. This will come to play in early religious ideas since without wind there is death and what not, something to completely go all in on for later. Guess this is beating a dead horse at this point but just to mention this language will have no suffixes or prefixes.

Have not touched at all on what the written language would be like, mostly because I kind of trapped myself there with the past me making something up for the Global Economics and Trade forum that fizzled out with not much in the way of results. Though I will give the excuse that that could be a creole written language for the sole purpose of adapting to another language and I still have yet to reveal the real thing which is what I am now going to go with now that I have all this new information to work with. Using Wikipedia for research it seems that I can either go with an alphabetical, logographic, or syllabary system which while it seems like three choices to me it is actually two. If I follow that all my words are one syllable that means that if I use one of the last two choices I am using both the last choices which apparently can be called logosyllabary. Now I did weigh the pros and cons of either making an alphabet or just making each word its own distinct thing and I think I will go for the syllabary system and make every word kind of unique. Maybe make it easier by having interchangeable parts that would be more easily recognizable once learned, so instead of an alphabet it is a sound part with two sound parts making a written syllable. This is probably more alphabet thinking about it now, either or would work for what I am going for it looks like. Of course this would allow for the proto-language to be based off of ideograms or pictograms, either one of I am fine with which can evolve into what I want it to. The advantage that I am trying to go for here is since without other languages to borrow from in this world the written stuff will remain readable to anybody even if language managed to drift so far that the same group would not be able to understand each other in speech or body language. Just to make this a little more tighty with all the information being included I will add that this writing system will probably end up being like English being written right to left and top to bottom.

Not much of an update of things to add but I would like to think that I have many readers that I should not let down, at least past me would appreciate it. Because I almost lost relative past me I will state right here and now that unless someone points something out I shall focus on religion next time I have the time to write a bunch of stuff out.

[Ferret Civilization]

Alright religion is going to be an interesting topic to go over, I have already kind of established the importance of the wind in this environment. I had also figured to put it into the basis of my language I got going to further show just how important it would end up being in this society. Starting off I have a basic concept that moving air means life and that still air most likely means death, especially if it is in a depression where Argon would slowly pool displacing Oxygen and killing life. So in the absence of any kind of wind the secondary goal for life would be to be at a higher altitude which hosts its own set of dangers, mostly with the thinner atmosphere putting the pressure on making it hard for life to thrive. Also I pointed out that it gets colder way faster on this planet with a rise in altitude which once things get below freezing being high up for wind does not really pay off at all. So plains with wind from the ocean I figure would probably be the best place to be which I can make work with the river setup that I have going on. Since there are no seasons of any kind here things like fertility would not matter as much, and really looking through the list of all the kinds of deities that people have worshipped it seems like my focus would be on things relating to the weather, of which would be driven by the wind circulation. Going through as many religious topics that I could with general information on Wikipedia and I am really left thinking do I want a monotheistic, polytheistic, or some mix of worship deities in this religion and I am left thinking no.

Which I guess leaves me starting with focusing on the deity side of things which as can probably easily be pointed out does not make a religion in any sense it is where I begin this journey. Suppose that I go with a nontheism focus where this religion does not have a deity of any sort, no higher being or any of that stuff. But the wind would be important enough to have something put into it with an early rational mind and with that I find myself looking at animism or hylozoism, really kind of hard to find the word for just putting spirit into one specific thing rather than all inanimate objects and forms of life. For a basic idea what I will try to go for is that since the movement of air brings life and moves things it, thus giving it the strongest properties to be considered a kind of living force. Though there would be no deity behind making that happen or move the air, it is the air itself willing itself to do what it does and that is how it would be recognized by early sapient life. With that I have something to deal with the life side of things so I guess I should also be thinking about the antithesis and would that be death or nothing. With death there is the allure of an afterlife and that would be something interesting to get more in depth on since it is a place after death without some greater being having made it. Suppose I could go with the reincarnation thing since I do have a hard time trying to figure out just how to describe an afterlife in the situation that I am trying to make. The best thing that I can think of is maybe the belief is that once the individual dies their soul or spirit joins the wind itself and that it is not some kind of perfect land or something similar that promises good stuff for worshippers. There would also be no duality with this, all individuals would join the wind no matter if they believed or did not, and if they were good or bad they all go to the same place. Then on the there is no afterlife side of things where once you are dead that is it, well that is it, pretty simple concept. Not sure if a species with some form of individualism and self actualization would come to accept that line of reasoning, and the collective form that I am pushing also seems like a tough angle to go with. So I guess I will go with that once someone dies they join the forces of the wind to keep life going for those that are still alive. No Gods, the wind is its own probably sapient thing, and those that die join it, good enough for now I do hope.

This kind of makes moving onto a moral code rather difficult since there is no supreme or greater being telling someone the rules to spread around to everyone else about what they can and can not do if they want in on the good afterlife doing whatever it is that is promised. However there would have to be some kind of understanding that in some way everyone is connected and bound to each other, and through that I will have to focus on more secular ethics to make this part of the religion. Thinking about it can I really even call this a religion, well maybe I can after I finish up all the not finished parts. I could say that the wind gave the individual life and from there it is up to the living individual to make whatever it is that they want out of the blessing or curse, new experience is I guess what I can call it, that they have been given. This would start to gear this religion to have a focus on existentialism, kind of a paradox to the idea that in the end no matter what one did they all end up in the same place. I will try to make that work however, one starts off as an individual in the world and it is up to them to make the most out of it and the world that everyone lives in is practically meaningless. All that jazz, however at the end of their life they become part of something bigger than themselves to help future generations make the most out of the live that they were put into. That subtle bigger picture would hopefully push for more of a collectivist stance that would see groups stick together to make things better overall for themselves and their children rather than just trying to do whatever it is they have to do alone to get that pass into an afterlife. With this there really would not be a church like organization around telling the masses what they have to do and what they should not be doing, rather society just functions with self imposed morals and laws that can vary by group before eventually they all merge into one. Pretty much solely secular ethics going on, with the individuals coming up with what is right and wrong without a higher being telling them. Though the population would not ignore the significance of the wind, it just probably would end up being expressed in different ways like through the language. Thinking about other ways to avoid a church while still showing the religious things like architecture would incorporate more open and airy spaces, clothes would focus on being airy and comfortable over formality and excessive displays of wealth. Things like that they hopefully help flesh out the rest of the culture that I am trying to make.

So far not the most traditional way of going about things on the block but as I continue explaining this the more that it grows on me. But religion evolves and what happens as this society gets more scientifically advanced, well the nice thing is that a lot of it does not change, maybe just the idea of the afterlife gets dropped in parts of the population. Though with the idea that everyone ends up in the same place after they die the original group would not be trying to force them to go back to the old way of thinking or they will burn in some kind of Hell. Thinking about it science would be coming in to explain things that the religion ideas have left out, such as where did life start. Looking at the religious guide here at the FT advice thread and the creation myth would be interesting here since if the wind is its own force that keeps life alive and when someone dies they join that force, what started life itself without the wind. Figure that this religion would be silent on that, focusing more on the now and how to affect the future rather than what happened in the past. This would give science free reign on explaining that without offending the original idea that would be around and would not have much to fight about. With that science would most likely come to two conclusions depending on the field, I do have to remember just how crazy the solar system that I have going is and science would pick up on that. Biology would probably turn out the simple idea of evolution and abiogenesis whereas astronomy might look at the setup of their local neighborhood and go, yeah, this definitely is not natural and thus aliens. That would be the first idea of their being some kind of deity, in the form of another civilization made this one, and another group could probably run with that idea and say that there is then really a deity behind the wind that also made their solar system come into being leading to three groups in the scientific community all without affecting the main religion itself from what I am understanding of what I have made. With that I am not all to sure of what else to tack on here to expand on what I am going for since most other things religions have require things that I do not include here, which probably means that in reality this would not count as a religion but I will just call it that for here.

Will try and find some other culturally topics that I can talk about to continue to flesh out this nation as well as look for things that I have missed. The more I flesh out this main thing the better time I will be having when I have to start the process over again and I still would love to hear from anyone that is following along about what they would do or do do.

[Grand Indochina]

What a nice thread, I never know it even exist until now !

Dear Ferret Civilization, can you recommend me a factbook that you deemed as excellent by your standard ?

[TURTLESHROOM II]

HOLY CRAWFISH. Forget a link. This needs to be PINNED.

[Ferret Civilization]

It really was a wonderful yesterday and to see someone else take notice in this project of mine, thank you Indochina. Though out of any question that I could have gotten I guess my nonexistent expectations have yet again somehow been subverted and I had to go through a bunch of other people’s fact books to get something that was not a cop out answer. Because really any work that goes beyond just the dreaded writing in process acronym and they have done all that I think makes a great work. Kind of hard to say what would be excellent since I have limited myself to looking at the FT player stuff and the gameside fact books do not really have a search function so there is probably a lot that I have not seen. But for the forum side stuff, even though it is not a fact book Sunset has a really great national maintenance thing and while they end up going a little on the military heavy side Xiscapia and Alversia did some pretty great world building stuff with writing that I look up to. I look up to everyone’s writing style though, hope that when I finish up this process I can turn them into something a little bit more professional looking and readable. Huerdae did a fact book as well here on this forum and practically went all in on the military, have yet to find something that can match it in just the sheer content that it has and it is still being worked on from the edits that are happening. Thrashia also has one that is more Star Wars but is not at all bad, I could keep on listing but I think you probably get the point and I will go with my cop out answer on top of this. Turtleshroom that means a lot to me, especially since you have been around longer than I have and have probably seen better out of other people.

Well back to things that I have missed and one thing that popped out to me about the writing system that I have going. Have to say that it will probably be a linear writing system over the non-linear but with the body language being included to change the meaning of words there would be a strong transient non-linear part of the language from what I understand. Not much but I am trying to include as many useless facts here that will never pop up in a roleplay cooperative work. Another thing that I realized is that with my religion focused on the wind and trying to be all about freedom to make use of the life one is given there would be no taboos. But then I thought would things like fans or ventilation that moves air in what could be considered unnatural ways be considered a big no here for these people. However I think that if one is going to join the air after they die, are considered a part of it, and it has the power to do what it wants moving through unnatural means would not really be taboo since they could view it as if the wind did not want to be moved it would not move no matter what efforts were taken. Thus the wind could be pushed down into lets say the mines to keep the miners alive. With that out of the way that pretty much covers what I realized I have missed and I should now move onto what I need to correct.

Right now I have it so that the governmental system in place restricts individuals to politically thrive in whatever career pillar that they end up in, once they make that choice they are effectively stuck with that life. However the religious set up has it so that individual freedom to explore any part of life is wide open and that kind of conflicts with the government. Could work with it as culture is really how society restricts the individual, and while religion is the optimistic thing here saying that anyone can do whatever they want and the anarchy will work out the government on the other hand is the pessimist that goes anarchy will be chaos and there needs to be some order in place through laws. I have not really said what the average laws would be though, and thinking about now that I have these two conflicting points of view the government is made up of individuals with the belief system that I have made so the laws would probably not be all that extreme. It would probably be simple stuff that relates to one is as free as they want to be but they can not restrict others ability to be free, that on top of if one wants to be into politics and making more restrictive laws they can only do it within their own field so they have more incentive to not go crazy trying to police the state. Suppose I can say that freedom is valued so much is because due to probably many different groups having to merge together ethnocentrism would not really be given as strong of a chance of surviving to see the splits become more divisive.

With that in mind I guess the next part of the culture building will be to look more at social organizations. At the lowest level would be the individual that is mostly free to try and find out who they are, though if they want that freedom they have to be willing to offer some of their life up to defend the nation to order to ensure that others can continue to enjoy that freedom for the most part. The next level would be the family, I imagine that the old roots of kinship tribes would be carried through all the technological advance so being able to rely on family members for a lot of things would not be looked down upon by society as a whole. Kind of trying to work with the idea that even though this place is going to be strongly on the collective side of the spectrum individualism is still prized. From there the next level would be the colleagues that share a pillar politically and career wise, being almost like a second family from how I am trying to think of it, of course there would probably be some kind of class divide with some families being more well off and staying well off while others have to work harder to stay in the same place. However I would hope that there would be more of a chance to succeed, the realist in me says that no this society would have a pretty clear who is on top and who is not and I have already written it that way before talking about this. Though I imagine it probably would not be as in the face about that issue. Not being part of a pillar as an adult should not be looked down upon at least, choosing to be freelance while not usual would be an option to get into even though it would not have the safety nets in place that the pillarized groups have. From there the next level would be society as a whole making up the state itself, not much but there is a lot to hopefully work with with that little bit right there.

All of that in mind hopefully it is more clear that this culture would value sticking together in order to help the individual thrive with a lot of the arts and entertainment that is more visible to outsiders being focused on helping one find out where they belong. If looking at it from a darker perspective there would probably be hints of if not for the collective one would not be able to be an individual, if that makes sense. And like I said with the focus on the air and wind architecture and fashion would work to be more open and inspire comfort, it could be functional or artistic as well. Suppose the only thing that would be celebrated as that is another vein of culture would be lifetime milestones like birthdays, graduations, promotions, and retirements or death. Death actually would be celebrated here, not as something to mourn unless the group is not religious since the soul or spirit would be going to join a force bigger than both the individual and collective. Really running out of things to think of at this point again so this will be another short thing, kind of a bummer that as of right now this place is largely a planet of hats but that is the consequence of being a small city state I guess. Will move onto restarting this process over again for the second system that I made not that long ago to explore a different solar system set up and a planet that hosts more diverse nations to fully explore all the crazy setups that are possible.

[Ferret Civilization]

Hold up there past me, you kind of forgot one of the three things that are used in role plays and how am I going to live with myself if you forgot to at least half arsed discuss the economics to go along with that weak looking military and political setup. So given what I have with the history I know that early society here would be mostly hunters in which mostly everyone has to take part in to sustain themselves and eventually turn into pastoralist that start to use animals for more than just food. Once that point comes in things move from a reciprocity where maybe not everyone can get a kill for food but someone else can, and when they can not hopefully the other individual can find something to return that favor within the group to a redistribution. With that system there would be those that bring in different kinds of food from animals and those that work with the inedible parts of the animal to get things like fabric or cloth and they exchange what each other needs within the group. That works well early on with all the small nomadic groups though things would probably change once agriculture comes into the fold to have groups settle down and become more specialized. Once there are more than one specialized group those that are making the food might not need what all the diversifying groups have to offer, and with the food producers getting more efficient with the yields they are getting the market system would slowly become a thing. Around this time there would probably be different settlements that can produce different things better or worst seeing trade pop up, and while communities can sustain some kind of informal economy amongst themselves for those in trade they would need to have something to exchange on hand because their word could end up being worthless or not redeemable. There would need to be something that does not expire and has some value, kind of like how we find with past currencies in western society being based off of silver and gold. Here I thought of the setup that I have going on with a real lack of precious metals, like to the point that being a currency would be a joke, so what do I have to work with and that would be iron and steel. Iron would be a cheap thing that is around and easy enough to shape, getting it closer to steel would make it more valuable and worth something to groups. As the communities all merge into one big nation they would keep this as their commodity money. With this in mind, I do have to consider how in the FT setting this currency is going to be worthless and that my markets could easily be flooded with outside investment, though for now roleplaying wise this has yet to happen and I have really enjoyed the isolation corner that I have worked myself into. Really want to and do not want to chance that at the same time, guess that is why I decided to do this process here because I could not get myself to try and join Discord to get in those ingroups. Alright keeping with this I now have a currency that is made out of iron, so farmers and miners have really important roles in this society and give the business pillar of my government quite a lot of weight in whatever they want to happen. Can see why they do not have control over the infrastructure, that would make them even more overpowered in the political setup. Going to be changing a lot of this when I introduce the other species that I have made to shake up my own isolation with more isolation but like, fun, so government and currency change is what I have to look forward to. Probably why I was not in some mind induced craze to write down as much as I could about this topic.

You know, I probably should hold off on that making the next process and try to talk more about the family structure of this species. History I made started off talking about how the whole family sticks together in their own little tribe with some going off to join other families. That would make the whole family a village from the saying it takes a village. The roles would be less the parents are the role models for the children and more all the elders are the role models taking care of the children so that way those that birthed the kids are still able to go and do their share of bringing in the goods to keep the family thriving. Kind of fit in with that stage that for some tribes the most elderly lead the group and I will try to keep this going for all of the history of this species. So something like the concept of the nuclear family would be really weird here, one has the ability to rely on their whole extended family as their own much like how in a nuclear family the child can rely on their parents. Then I was also thinking about how merit would be addressed here in this society and the idea that I am working with is that one is addressed by their first name to specifically refer to them even in a formal setting, addressing an individual by their last or family name would be referring to their family and the accomplishments that the family line had achieved or is achieving. With that in mind that means that this species has a naming structure of a personal and then family. Personal names would probably be derived from the religious ideas of the wind and the air, something that I totally am not doing at the moment but really should be and will get to now that I have mentioned it. Though personal names might also be based off of appearances as well which I kind of do, barely. With surnames things would be kind of interesting since I can not go with a line based off of patrilineal or matrilineal and I do only want there to be a single surname so where would they come from, and with that I think that surnames would derive from the locations that they come from. But that does not answer who adopts the surname, even if I drop the concept of marriage which I will say that that idea is not going to be here either, the children have to get a surname from one of their parents if things are not all full of incest. With that I will go with the idea that whoever joins a family or in the past the tribe they lose their original surname and adopt the new family surname which both males and females would have to do, thus their children get that family surname until they join another family to lose it. Hopefully that helps flesh out the culture a little bit more than where I had just dropped it in the last post without much effort.

Going to have to cut things here for today, unless my mind ends up going haywire with all the information that I missed kind of like it did right now I shall try to once again move on and come back to other things that I have missed as I go along.