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Architect of Worlds – Some Initial Results

Architect of Worlds – Some Initial Results

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been applying the star-system and planetary-system design sequences from the Architect of Worlds draft to generate planetary systems for nearby stars. In a number of cases, this has involved tweaking the parameters of the model to fit strong exoplanet candidates that we already know are there. In other cases, it also involved tweaking the parameters to avoid creating exoplanets that we would reasonably have detected by now, if they were there.

So far, the model has held up surprisingly well. I’ve had to make a few adjustments to make the results more plausible, and to allow for some of the real-world cases. That’s to be expected, but by and large I haven’t had to do any major redesign.

Let me summarize some of the results thus far.

Alpha Centauri

We know of two strong exoplanet candidates for this trinary star system – one close-in planet for each of Alpha Centauri B and Proxima Centauri. I had no difficulty at all fitting either of these candidates to the model. The result was five planets for Alpha Centauri A, nine for Alpha Centauri B, and twelve planets for Proxima. The tight or loose packing of planetary orbits makes a big difference, and of course Proxima has no close companion to block off the outer system for planetary formation. Thus the little red-dwarf companion gets the most extensive family of planets.

The mass of the known candidate for the B-component suggested a lighter protoplanetary disk than usual, but this still yielded two Earth-likes in the habitable zone, generously defined. One of these is the best candidate I’ve generated so far for a habitable world. The mass of Proxima’s known companion suggests a denser than usual protoplanetary disk, so Proxima ended up with a few gas giants up to Saturn size, at fairly wide orbital radii.

Barnard’s Star

Low-mass star, very low metallicity, not much material with which to build massive planets. The system ends up with nine planets, all packed well within one astronomical unit of the star, all but the last of them little Mars-likes. This turns out to be fairly typical of red-dwarf stars, given the assumptions of the model.

Wolf 359

Very small and dim red dwarf, although the metallicity is high and that might help form planets. We end up with ten planets this time, several of them cold super-Earths. The innermost planet is in the habitable zone, but is too small to retain much atmosphere.

Lalande 21185

Another small red dwarf. Interesting in that we have a strong exoplanet candidate here, a super-Earth very close in. The problem is that we don’t seem to see any more heavy planets or super-Jovians further out.

This star caused me to make the first adjustment to the model: I added a rule that permitted a massive, volatiles-heavy “failed core” to appear close to the star in rare cases. This makes sense, given that some of our known exoplanets are both massive and not very dense, suggesting that they’re not rocky “terrestrial” planets, but something rich in water and other light compounds instead. If a gas giant can migrate inward, perhaps a smaller planet can form out past the snow line and barrel in close to the star as well.

Placing the exoplanet candidate as a “failed core” rather than a “terrestrial planet” permitted me to keep the assumed density of the protoplanetary disk to a reasonable value. The rest of the planets turned out to be quite small close in, leading to a few modest-sized gas giants on the outskirts, safely under our current detection level. Ten planets in all, two of them within the generous habitable zone, both of those probably too low-mass to be truly Earth-like.

Luyten 726-8

Two very low-mass red dwarf stars, co-orbiting at a close distance that probably forbids either from having many planets. The model gave me two planets for the A component, one for the B component, all cold “failed cores.”

Sirius

A very hostile star system. The bright A component ended up with nine planets, all packed close in, a mix of gas giants up to sub-Jovian size and a few rocky super-Earths. All of the planets are far too hot for human comfort, the coolest of them running a blackbody temperature over 400 K.

I didn’t bother to generate planets for the white dwarf B component – I need to work out rules for applying the model to white dwarf stars, and in any case there’s no possibility of an Earth-like world in such a planetary system anyway.

Ross 154 and Ross 248

These two red dwarf systems each turned out to be barren, with four and five planets respectively. I’m not going to report on any more red-dwarf systems, as they’re all going to be similarly uninteresting.

In fact, my research tells me that the probability of any red dwarf giving rise to an Earth-like world is going to be very low. Any world that’s warm enough will almost certainly be tide-locked, with all the problems that implies. Not to mention that red dwarf stars put out most of their radiation in the infrared range. That means a world that’s warm enough to live on is likely to get so little visible-light insolation that photosynthesis is going to be problematic.

Epsilon Eridani

This was an interesting case – we have at least one strong exoplanet candidate here, a super-Jovian, with a strong indication of a dense asteroid belt just inside that candidate’s orbit. None of this was a problem for my model. The mass of the known gas giant, together with the known density of the current debris disks, suggested a high-density protoplanetary nebula. I was able to generate the rest of the planetary system to match.

I ended up with nine planets, one of them a super-Earth squarely in the middle of the habitable zone. The star system is quite young, well under a billion years old, so that planet is almost certainly a heavily oceanic “pre-garden” world, lacking complex life or a human-breathable atmosphere. Still, maybe a terraforming candidate? Meanwhile, the asteroid belt is in place and I would be comfortable marking that as a rich resource zone. This looks like a star system that people would come to visit, even if there isn’t an Earth-analogue there.

61 Cygni

No surprises here. I got thirteen planets for the A-component, due to tight packing of planetary orbits, and only seven for the B-component. Nothing so massive as to be detectable from Earth, so there’s no sign of Mesklin, alas. Each star ended up with a planet in the habitable zone, but both were too low-mass to be good Earth-like candidates.

Procyon

As expected, this system ended up like Sirius A, but not quite so extreme. Eight planets, all of them rocky worlds, no “failed cores” or gas giants in the mix. The outermost might almost be cool enough for habitability, but it’s far too small, so it’s more like a baked-dry Mars than anything else.

Epsilon Indi

This star gave me a little trouble, and caused me to tweak the model again slightly. The problem is that we have an exoplanet candidate here, but it’s simultaneously very massive (about 2.5 Jupiter masses) and very distant from the primary.

As written when I got to this point, my model permitted massive gas giants to form, but that would tend to require a dense protoplanetary disk, which would in turn force the gas giant to form close in and migrate closer. A gas giant forming much further out would suggest a lighter disk, which would render the planet less massive. A paradox. I solved the problem by adding another size category for gas giants – in rare cases, even a fairly light disk can now give rise to a super-Jupiter. Which makes sense, as this isn’t the only massive gas giant we’ve detected in the cold outer reaches of a star system.

Final result was nine planets, the innermost of which wouldn’t be a bad Earth-like candidate, except that the system is fairly young. Probably another “pre-garden” world here.

Tau Ceti

We have several strong exoplanet candidates here, all of them super-Earths fairly close in to the star. I computed the most likely disk density and proceeded, adding Mars-sized mini-worlds to fill in two gaps left by the known exoplanets. Final result was nine planets, none of them further out than about 6 AU, which gives us room for this star system’s apparently very wide and rich Kuiper belt.

Two of the known super-Earths are close to the habitable zone, but one of them is probably too hot, and the other one is probably only habitable if it’s running a very aggressive greenhouse effect. Probably interesting places to visit, but not somewhere anyone would want to live.

Summing Up

Twenty-seven stars so far, in twenty star systems, and so far I’ve only generated one strong candidate for Earth-like conditions (Alpha Centauri B-V). I’ve also concluded (or, rather, verified for myself) that red dwarf stars are very unlikely to give us Earth-likes. Depending on one’s assumptions, this may mean that such stars are best ignored when building a star map for fictional purposes.

I’m going to continue with this, probably saving myself a bunch of time by skipping over most or all of the M-class stars. Meanwhile, this is enough for me to start building a new version of my solar-neighborhood map. Stay tuned.

Status Report (3 June 2018)

Status Report (3 June 2018)

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Some more work on the world map over the weekend, rather painstaking. I’m flipping back and forth between continuing to paint in elevation contours at lower and lower levels, and adding ocean currents. Neither of these is finished, but another day or two of effort should have me there. Then the fun part begins – actually mapping out climate zones.

Here’s the current map:

Status Report (31 May 2018)

Status Report (31 May 2018)

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Not a lot of time over the past couple of days to work on this, but I’ve managed to tweak some of the landforms a little. The planet resembles a mirrored Earth a bit less now. I’ve also started painting altitude contours on the map. So far, just the very highest peaks, the Andes- or Himalayas-equivalents, but the next few layers should cover all of the land areas with colored zones to indicate altitude.

Status Report (28 May 2018)

Status Report (28 May 2018)

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A few hours of work this evening, while I had Wonder Woman playing in the background, and I ended up with a decent set of land-masses for my world map.

I seem to have reinvented an Earth, although flipped east-to-west. That not-North-America stands out in particular, and all those island arcs in the far western not-Asia are kind of reminiscent too. It makes sense, I suppose, since plausible plate tectonics aren’t going to generate completely arbitrary shapes.

There are differences too, of course. The pseudo-Atlantic ocean is a bit wider, and the continents are in general separated by stretches of sea. There’s a narrow gap between the not-Americas, and instead of a Mediterranean Sea there’s an open ocean between the not-Africa and the not-Asia. That’s going to do some interesting things to ocean currents, I think.

No matter. The actual stories I intend to write are going to be on a much smaller scale, so if the layout of the continents looks a little derivative, that won’t be obvious to my eventual audience. What’s important right now is that I’m reasonably satisfied with this layout, so I can move on to the next steps again.

Status Report (27 May 2018)

Status Report (27 May 2018)

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One of the major stumbling blocks with world-building, at least for me, is that even when I’m momentarily satisfied with the outcome of a task, it doesn’t take much to rob me of that satisfaction. In this case, while staring at my world map draft in progress, I began to compare it to both the real world and to other world-builders’ efforts, and found it lacking. Too crude.

So I’ve gone back to first principles and started over, this time rebuilding a map of tectonic plates without pre-designing any of the continental land masses. This time I strove to come up with something to resemble the general pattern of tectonic plates on the real Earth, at least as far as the number of major and minor plates was concerned. I also paid attention to the way plate boundaries are arranged – whether they tend to be convex or concave, and how they form seams and three-way intersections.

One thing I found useful was to simply mark off the polar regions and ignore those. One of the things that was giving me fits was the transformation from a flat projection to the globe and back, and that switch always introduces the most distortion close to the poles. By assuming there will be no major polar land masses, I can gloss over how any plate boundaries might be laid out in the arctic or antarctic regions.

The result (equirectangular projection only) is as follows. So far, so good. I haven’t marked continental plates yet, but there will be five major continents and a few minor land-masses and island arcs.

Next step will be mark out the relative movement of plates at each boundary, and then sketch land-forms to match.

 

 

Status Report (25 May 2018)

Status Report (25 May 2018)

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Just a quick report today: progress on my world maps for the Curse of Steel project. After tinkering a bit and learning how to build and use layer masks in Photoshop, I managed to paint mountain belts in their own layer on my map, with the following results:

Here, the deep-red belts are “young” mountains, the result of recent orogeny at the site of plate collisions or subduction. Think the Andes, Rockies, or Himalayas. The narrow, golden-brown belts are “old” mountains, the eroded remains of ranges that formed many millions of years ago in previous orogenic periods. Think the Appalachians or Atlas range.

One thing strikes me: the big continents to the east are going to have really big rain-shadow deserts, since those young, high mountains are going to block any kind of monsoon climate from moving too far inland. I’ll have to figure out the air circulation patterns next to know for sure. It makes sense, though, since large continents tend to have big arid zones anyway.

Next, it will be time to work out those climate patterns. I’ve been reading up on techniques for that all week, and the long weekend coming up should be a good time to work out the details.

Status Report (22 May 2018)

Status Report (22 May 2018)

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Had the day off sick today, so in between bouts of ick I got a bit more work done on the world map for The Curse of Steel. Mostly this involved refining the landforms, using a much finer pencil stroke to create crinkly coastlines and islands. I’m fairly happy with the results. Here’s the equirectangular base map:

Much better continental shapes, not so cartoonish now, and clear island arcs. Another view, in the Mollweide projection for variety:

Next step will be to lay out mountain ranges, in accordance with the underlying map of tectonic plates. Once that’s done, I’ll need to work out air and ocean circulation patterns, and then lay out climate zones. Then it will be time to drill down to the regional scale and build the maps I’ll need to support the story.

(Very) Rough Draft World Maps

(Very) Rough Draft World Maps

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Okay, given my level of frustration over the weekend, I’m rather happy with today’s developments. I’ve managed to produce a very rough draft of my world map, using Photoshop, the GPlates software, and GProjector. By no means is this as detailed as a good map of Earth yet, but I’m reasonably satisfied with the realism of the planetary geology involved.

Here’s a flat map in equirectangular projection:

This planet is in the middle stages of the breakup of a supercontinent. An Atlantic-like ocean has opened up, breaking off the equatorial continent and sending it south and west, creating a nice long chain of island arcs along the edges of two subduction zones as well.

The big continent that covers the north polar region is actually made up of three major continental plates. The piece covering the polar region itself is one plate, then a second is in the process of breaking away and heading southward, with a rift valley and a newly opening ocean basin dividing them. The third piece, down in the southern hemisphere, is actually a separate plate that started out attached to “Equatoria” but found itself divided from it by the new mid-ocean ridge. It’s currently being driven east and north, and is probably forming a blocked-off sea basin or an impressive range of mountains (or both) along the point of contact with the larger land mass.

The blot of land in the middle of the pseudo-Atlantic is my equivalent of Atlantis (or Númenor), the home of the most advanced human culture on the planet, one which is just starting a period of sea-borne exploration. The land-form is basically a super-Iceland, an exposed piece of the mid-ocean ridge that has a magma plume under it. Lots of volcanism and hot springs, and the inhabitants are feeling crowded enough that they’re ready to sail away and find primitive lands to colonize.

For variety, here’s a two-hemisphere orthographic map, produced using GProjector:

I did mention that this is a very rough draft map, right? I think I may produce a somewhat more detailed version of this map with Photoshop first, so I can add mountains and other major land-forms, then work out ocean currents and climate zones. Then it will be time to drill down to the specific region(s) that will appear in the story, and use Photoshop or Campaign Cartographer to put together finely detailed maps for those.

How did I get through this in just a few hours, after struggling all weekend? As often happens in world-building, the secret is finding the right workflow.

For a couple of days, I was using the GPlates software to try to draw features on the sphere. Problem is, although GPlates is perfectly good for that, that’s not what the software is actually designed for: it’s a very sophisticated plate-tectonics simulator. So by using it just to sketch features, I’m ignoring 99% of the thing’s functionality – and some of that functionality very much gets in the way. I was spending most of my time juggling multiple raster files, and fighting the very elaborate system GPlates uses to save projects, and getting frustrated with the results.

So today I switched my workflow around. Rather than do any drawing in GPlates, I did all of it in a Photoshop document with three layers (one each for ocean, tectonic boundaries, and land-masses). I would draw a few features, then save the result as a PNG image and import that into GPlates, purely to see how it looked on the sphere. More often than not, I would spot absurdities on the sphere that weren’t obvious on the flat map – so I would go back to Photoshop, fiddle with a few lines, and then re-import the result back into GPlates. I never tried to save anything in GPlates, so I never had to deal with its weird file-management system. Fifteen or twenty iterations later, I finally had the planet divided into a reasonable set of major tectonic plates, I knew where the major mid-ocean ridges and subduction zones were, and I was ready to finish the sketch map here.

I’ll take my progress where I find it.

First Light for a Constructed Language

First Light for a Constructed Language

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One of the occasional pitfalls I see in genre writing is the awkward use of constructed vocabulary, usually in the production of names, sometimes in the development of bits of exotic dialogue. This is usually to suggest the living language of a fantastic culture. Unfortunately, many authors are careless about this and seem to come up with their constructed vocabulary at random, so we end up with “Qadgop the Mercotan” or something equally silly. (Five kudos to anyone who recognizes the source of that name, which did in fact appear in a piece of genre fiction. At least in that case the author was trying to be silly.)

The world-building challenge is to produce an actual constructed language from which names and bits of vocabulary can emerge organically. There’s something aesthetically pleasing about this when it’s well done. The human brain seems to recognize the internal logic of a well-constructed language, even if we’re not fluent in it. J. R. R. Tolkien, of course, was the past master at this, but a lot of other authors (and hobbyists) have had a crack at it over the years.

For The Curse of Steel, I’ve decided to build at least one constructed language, mostly for naming purposes. Since I tend to insist on doing things the hard way, I’m actually building an “ur-language” and producing my primary language by applying a consistent set of sound-changes. In the back of my mind, I have half a thought that I may need a second constructed language, one that feels related to the first, rather as (e.g.) Greek and Latin are both members of the Indo-European language family. If and when I go that far, I can generate words in the second language by applying a different set of sound-changes to the ur-language roots I’ve developed.

The past few days have been fairly productive in this area. I seem to have finally developed a work-flow that actually functions, without getting me snarled up in unnecessary details of semantics, grammar, or phonology. In particular, I decided to write some text in English and “translate” that, developing new vocabulary and bits of grammar as needed. At the moment, I have about sixty words of vocabulary, several rules of inflection and word morphology, and about a page of notes on semantic structure. Enough to produce an actual paragraph of text:

Esi degra tremárakai múr kresdan. Esi kráva degraka bendír. Augrinír tan esa nekám velka devam. Enkorír skátoi taino. Antekrír skátoi tainmuro, dún begrír tan múr bákha. Vóki degra velka kresdani, dún tarthámi da skátoi. Verti kráva ked saka kó márai. Asgáni skátokai kestan, dún verti dó an atrethen degra. Rethi kráva arekhton saka padír, dún verti sa múr skáto. Dághi kráva aspera rethen skátoka klávo; esi dó kresdághen, dún esi dó degraka danpreta.

A rough back-translation into English would read something like this:

Lion was a great warrior of the Mighty People. Raven was Lion’s daughter. One night they visited the Wolf-clan. Orcs attacked the hill-fort. The orcs broke into the stockade and threatened to do great harm. Lion summoned the Wolf warriors, and opposed the orcs. Raven slew many with her bow. A chieftain of the orcs came forth, and slew Lion in single combat. Raven fought to avenge her father, and slew the great orc. After the battle, Raven took the orc’s sword, as a spoil of war and as Lion’s weregild.

You’ll recognize that as a one-paragraph summary, in pseudo-epic style, of the first chapter of The Curse of Steel, posted a few days ago here.

A few notes:

The convention in this language is to tell stories in the present tense, which is how the untranslated passage is written. In English, of course, narrative is normally framed in past tense.

The language has a very strict verb-subject-object (VSO) sentence structure. VSO languages are uncommon, although not unheard of; notably, many of the Celtic languages use that structure. It seemed appropriate, since I have a sense that Kráva’s people resemble the ancient Celts in many respects. Using a very strict word order helps with the design, since strongly positional languages don’t need quite as elaborate a system of noun or verb inflections.

I’m using a system of word roots very similar to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, although in most cases I’m deliberately selecting different roots. The result should be a language that sounds as if it would be at home in the Indo-European family, without actually bearing more than a superficial resemblance to any one IE language.

A few pieces of vocabulary I’m rather pleased with:

skáto “orc” is from a word root that means “to hate,” with a noun suffix that implies a “thing” rather than a living creature or human being. Essentially, a skáto is a “thing that hates,” and notably not a person that hates. Yes, Kráva’s people really don’t like orcs.

There’s a whole vocabulary around the word kresa “war,” including kresdan “warrior” (or literally “war-man”) and kresdághen (“plunder, spoils,” literally “war-taking”). Some cultures have a hundred words for snow, but I suspect Kráva’s people may have dozens of words for armed conflict.

arekht- literally means “to set straight,” but it also carries the meanings of “to make right,” “to carry out justice,” and “to avenge.” Which probably is another clue about this culture. Related to that is the word danpreta “man-price,” or more appropriately “weregild.”

Now that I’ve been able to produce one paragraph, I can probably develop more as needed, hanging more bits of vocabulary and syntax onto the partial framework I have. I think the next piece of this project will be to start assembling a map for the story, and coming up with names for terrain features and settlements. Not sure whether I’ll do that immediately, or get back to working on Architect of Worlds again . . .