The Fact That We Know So Little About The Ice Giants And The Outer Solar System In General Is Pissing

the fact that we know so little about the ice giants and the outer solar system in general is pissing me off something awful today.

the only times anything made by humans was even close to Uranus or Neptune were the Voyager probes, and those were flybys that lasted a few days, tops. we know next to nothing about either planet’s moons, and in fact Voyager 2 discovered about 6 new Neptunian moons on its APPROACH. we have no complete maps of any ice giant moons; the best we’ve got are some blurry hemispheres from the larger ones, and the rest are tiny dots jpg’d to hell from being superzoomed. we only found out what Pluto actually looks like five years ago, and we have no fucking CLUE what Eris (or any other Kuiper Belt dwarf planet) looks like. but this is all exciting and enticing!

the part that’s making me angry is that we COULD know more, but politicians and their poisonous, twisted priorities are in the way. we have technology now that was only discussed in the pages of science fiction in the 60s and 70s! we have ion drives and miniaturized nuclear reactors and ultra-high-definition cameras and remarkably advanced AI! we can do amazing things remotely, even with the light delay, and it’s not even that fucking expensive!! I mean, LOOK AT THIS.

this is the proposed flight path of the Uranus Pathfinder mission concept. wouldn’t this be a fucking awesome mission? for only half a billion dollars you get passing data from Venus and Saturn and a fresh, in-depth look at Uranus! sure it takes 16 years but whatever, that’s how spaceflight works!

the quote of “born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe” is BULLSHIT. this is the opening of a golden age of solar system exploration; or it could be, if we let it!! defund the military, start fixing the ecosphere, help the working class, and then LET’S EXPLORE THE GODDAMN UNIVERSE ALREADY!!!

a map of the brightest stars in the Pleiades open cluster, adapted from a SpaceEngine screenshot. please be aware that space is 3-dimensional and thus APPARENT relative distances and positions on this map do NOT correspond to ACTUAL relative distances or positions. you can figure those out on your own with SIMBAD data and this calculator here. this image is public domain by my explicit authorization, because I did all that work so why should anyone else have to?

stellar charting is soothing for me, idk why? manual data entry and cross-referencing is just pretty zen in my book, and there’s nothing better than the sky to hold my interest.

I also have a handy local stars chart here, with a Sol-centric radius of 10 parsecs.

i will defend improvised storytelling till the day i fucking die i think stories told by people under pressure to do it fast, stories told in collaboration…. that shits gorgeous and ALIVE. have you ever gone to a writing workshop and someone writes the rawest shit in the entire world during a ten minute free write? playing dnd and some dialogue is so moving it makes you wonder how it came from your dumbass friends? got really into one of those ‘one sentence at a time’ campfire story games and ended up making something— totally unrecorded, lost except to the people who were there— that should have been in the fucking moma?

people are full to the BRIM with stories and honing that storytelling into a specific practice (ex. writing) is for sure a learned skill that takes tons of practice to do effectively but…… it’s there. it’s there and anyone can tap into it if they’re given opportunity and an audience to say it to.

look, the point of telling stories is to connect with other people. and all we’ve ever done throughout human history is connect connect connect so is it any wonder when you put a human being in front of an outlet and you say ‘tell me a story’, no one stays silent? 

[Audio Transcription:

(Humming) Oh! Hello, I didn’t see you there. Why are you here - Oh? A story? (sigh) That’s what they all ask me for, these days. Let’s see…what about this one. A tale of disgraced heroes, and jaded sorceresses, of those who have been kept silent for so long. A tale of drifting amidst the endless void of space, searching desperately for some kind of anchor in the weave of fate’s celestial tapestry. And a tale of…hope, I suppose. That funny little thing that rests all aflutter at the bottom of your ribcage, waiting to be let out.

(chuckle) Well, here it is. The Khora Podcast comes out on the 28th of December. Muses great, grant me the ability to sing you this tale. Let me sing you a song of adventure, of love, loss…and maybe, just maybe, hope.

End Transcription]

The countdown is on– 7 days until Khora’s premier! The Talespinner invites you to listen to a new story.

astute of you to pick up of the hurdle that firestarting presents! but I promise you, fire is not a universal keystone for tool-using sapience. let’s look at it this way: what did early hominids use fire for?

cooking food - octopi don’t necessarily need to do that. if they really felt like it, they could strategically sun-dry and store fish onshore (octopi can survive out of water for significant periods of time!)

providing light and warmth - octopi have much better low-light vision than we do, so again, they don’t need fire for that.

fending off predators - octopi have the most advanced biological camouflage in the world and lack bones. they can hide extremely effectively, and if worst comes to worst they have ink to provide cover during an escape.

metallurgy - this one is more of an issue, as fire is necessary to produce the vast temperatures that smelting and forging common metals (iron, nickel, copper, etc) require. however, there’s more than one way around this! of course they could just come onto land to do their metallurgy, but there are a few metals/metalloids that are malleable at relatively low temperatures (i.e. underwater); notably, aluminum, zinc, and lead. but who says metals are the only way to make advanced tools...?

two words for you: artificial selection. due to the fact that metallurgy (and, later on, electricity) is a technology that isn’t feasible underwater, it would make much more sense to selectively breed other organisms to be living tools. they might start by carefully cultivating a few generations of clams to produce hatchet-shaped shells, but given time, resources, and the right base stock, the possibilities are virtually endless, especially once they unlock the secrets of direct genetic engineering. as far as we can tell, the psychology of octopi is extremely alien to that of humans, and from what I’ve read they show a remarkable amount of patience, which is needed to achieve significant progress in this toolmaking method. can you imagine it? vast biopunk metropoli sprawling across the ocean floor...!

Octopus filmed changing colours while sleeping.

Member States of the United Sol System

(c. 30th century CE)

The United Sol System (top flag) is an entity that fills the same essential function as the United Nations of Earth: it is a pan-governmental organization conceived to deal with issues that affect internal interplanetary relations and/or the system at large. The USS is a member of, and serves as the primary seat of, the interstellar United Nations of Humanity, which is in turn a member of the United Spacefaring Sophonts Coalition (multilayered decentralized government is the most practical form of organized government in space).

Left column, top to bottom:

Inner System Territories, with the flags of Mercury (left) and Venus (right) Territories below

Free Democracy of Ma'at, a multi-body nation composed of several large inner-system asteroids (Apophis, Eros, Icarus, and Phaethon)

Earth-Moon Union, in turn composed of the United Nations of Earth and the Lunar Territory

People's Republic of Mars, which includes Phobos and Deimos Territories

United States of the Solar Belt, which is composed of hundreds of main-belt asteroids including Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea

Right column, top to bottom:

Jovian System Federation, including the lunar-planetary states of Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io

Saturn Alliance, including the Ringshadow Federation of aerocities on Saturn and the lunar-planetary states of Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, and the Joint Authority of Titan

Uranus Coalition, including the Tilted Sky Confederacy of aerocities on Uranus and the lunar-planetary states of Titania, Oberon, Ariel, Umbriel, and Miranda

Moons of Neptune Alliance, including the lunar-planetary states of Proteus, Nereid, Larissa, Galatea, Despina, and the Republic of Triton

Outer System Territories, with the flags of Pluto-Charon (left) and Terminus (right) Territories below (also including Eris, Haumea, and Makemake Territories, not shown)

Bonus: flag of the United Nations of Humanity itself, composed of hundreds of member star systems across a sphere of influence nearly twenty parsecs in diameter.