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Gardens of Vaw

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"On a boiling, toxic moon orbiting a planet, navigating a trinary star-system, microbial super forests act as bio-spheres from which higher lifeforms evolve."

Lately Ive been thinking about life on other worlds, and how they would look according to their unique "extreme" environmental pressures.

For example, this piece... the moon Vaw orbits a gas giant similar in structure as Uranus, which navigates around three stars. Vaw has a thick atmosphere made up of various gases such as carbon-dioxide, sulfuric acid, argon, and methane, but also compounds like hydrogen fluoride, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen-sulfate produced by the geological stresses caused deep in the core by the host planet in the same way Jupiter manipulates Io. These gasses are vented out from volcanoes which are only found on one side of the moon. (With the host planet being much larger, its gravity pulls on one side of Vaw with such force it boils the core and pulls it to the surface. Similar to the way the tides and the moon are connected on earth.) Over billions of years, this process has acted as a brake on Vaws orbit. Now it spins once every 351.47 earth years.

Life on Vaw had to adapt to these extremes. For the majority of time life existed on Vaw (2.4 billion), it has been microbial. With the extremes of atmosphere and heat, life found it more efficient to say single-celled, until eventually the vast technicolor microbial forests began to pump out oxygen as a by-product from the chemical reactions with the already existing gas. Millions of years later, oxygen was being produced at such a high rate, it eventually saturated 70% of the atmosphere. With oxygen at such high levels, microbial life began to give rise to more complex life at a rapid rate; Vaws "Cambrian explosion".

The creatures in this piece are one of the millions of new species that evolved during this time. It utilizes the abundance of oxygen the the atmosphere to float above the heavier gasses which settle near the surface. Giving it an advantage to finding and grabbing its food, cone-colony's of bacteria which also grow to extraordinary heights to reach the oxygen rich layer above.
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miha9000's avatar
added to fan art in Sci-fi Archives