The creation of another planet!

It all started with a language. To make a long story short: I began making a language a long time ago, and in my efforts to be thorough and plausible, but I am also now making an entire fictional planet for this language to develop on. SO! I am going to start blathering on about my ideas for this world on here, because it seems a suitable location.

Today, I shall be discussing the global characteristics of the planet itself, beginning with decisions that I am currently settled on.

It's going to be a fairly small planet - Mars or Mercury sized - and dry relative to Earth, with two major continents on a north-south division. Essentially, there will be primarily land with an equatorial ocean that reaches all the way around the circumference. The overall climate will be fairly cold - cold enough for parts to have ice and snow. However, since the water is collected primarily around the equator, with land at the poles, the planet is ideally (and serendipitously!) designed with the best buffer configuration against snowballing. So it shall not turn into an ice planet! Joy!

The atmosphere is relatively high oxygen content to modern-day earth. Greenhouse gases are apparently fairly low, resulting in the relative coldness of the climate. And aiding in the prevention of runaway fires. The high oxygen atmosphere means fires burn very hot and very fast - which plays a major part in the evolution of flora. More on that in a future post.

Due to the small size of the planet, it has a high potential of being, rather than a proper planet, the moon of a gas giant. This would cause very, very interesting relative astronomical phenomena, which would most likely highly impact the developments of cultures. Such as the giant looming object in the sky, and regular eclipses of the sun, and lengthy days due to tidal locking. I haven't yet decided if I want to go with that idea, interesting as it would be. I'm definitely leaning towards it, however.

Another interesting side-effect of being a moon instead of a planet is that it would not have any moons of its own. Instead, it would have the far more complex relative motions of the gas giant's other moons. Which means even more fascinating potential cultural influence from astronomical phenomena.

Let's talk about plants!

One of the interesting aspects of a high-oxygen atmosphere is the tendency for things to burn. Lots. Earth actually went through this before, a couple of times, but that's besides the point.

The point is that easily-flammable plants are extremely unfavored due to the BURN BURN BURN BURN BURN AHAHAHAHA nature of the environment. So the majority of plants will develop resistance to fire - a thick woody bark, for example, possibly reinforced with metals and/or minerals like a shell or animal armor. In order for a less flame-resistant plant to survive, it would need to have developed a flame-resistant reproductive system - nuts, for example.

An interesting note on that point is that the majority of plants that produce nuts on Earth are in fact woody plants with coarser bark.

In contrast to the flammability of above-ground elements, however, one has plants which are based on a root system - something like grasses. The flames could completely raze an entire grassland, but the grasses could have developed storage node things so they have the energy to re-sprout. They would need to be very fast growing, as the fires would be a fairly frequent occasion in this scenario.

Additionally, the higher flammability levels from the oxygen-rich air means that lower elevation locations - such as valleys - are at greater risk of destructive conflagrations than higher elevations - such as mountain sides or plateaus. I'd imagine that the vegetation of such lower-altitude areas would thusly be very tough and woody, in contrast to the lush valleys we envision on earth. I imagine they would grow primarily upwards (as opposed to branching), reaching for a) the sunlight, and b) less flammable environments for the relatively tender and unprotected leaves (a.k.a. photosynthesizing elements).