Dante

Xenobiology and Xenecology

The world of Dante was colonised in 1380 a.t. by the Company of Venturers from Nova Terra in the relativistic ship Lumiere, one of the first colonisation efforts by the Novans.

Despite the fact this world is tidally locked to the red dwarf star HIP 85647 an earth-like alien biosphere had developed in the zone between the hot day-side and the cold nightside; the slow rotation of Dante as it orbits the sun is enough to maintain a circulation in the atmosphere from west to east. It is apparent from the fossil record that life developed on this world more than two billion years ago, when the world was not yet tidally locked.

The cold air entering the dayside at the west terminator is heated and rises, causing a permanent warm front on that side of the planet; rain occurs whenever the rising air cools below the precipitation point. A considerable amount of water vapour does not precipitate out of the atmosphere in this western habitable zone, but carries on over the hot side as transparent vapour until it cools on the eastern terminator; precipitation here is usually even more frequent than in the west. The warm winds cause the ice near the eastern terminator to melt, adding more water to the eastern habitable zone. A line of volcanoes associated with the planet's unusual tectonic arrangements also breaks through the ice on the eastern half of the dark side. In the west, by contrast, the ice is much higher near the terminator, and only melts occasionally due to the libration effect of Dante's rotation when the sun temporarily creeps above the horizon.

Dante's aboriginal biology has developed quite differently in the two habitable zones, which are separated by dry regions of tundra/savanna at the poles. The West has dark brown and purple coloured rain forests, adapted to catch the infrequent thermal driven rainstorms; the east has low-lying moss-like scrub, adapted to exploit the near-constant drizzle and the glacier melt water. Animal-like sessile land anemones catch the numerous flying insect-like thirps, while larger ground thirps patrol the leaf litter layer.

Due to the distribution of wavelengths in the sunlight from the red dwarf sun, the vegetation seems dark, almost to the point of blackness; however in artificial white light the green tint of many of the plant-like species is apparent. In fact the biochemistry of Dante aboriginal life is quite similar to that of Earth; chlorophyll is assisted by a wide range of accessory pigments including phytocyanin and allophytocyanin to absorb red and infrared light; the genetic material of the biosphere is a mixture of zDNA and twin strand RNA, not far different from Earthly nucleic acids. This has allowed the human population of Dante to exploit the local biosphere for food with relatively little genetic modification to themselves and to their food crops, and giant thirp hunting is a favourite pastime on this world.

History

The two habitable zones are both very limited in size, and population pressure was soon a problem. The single gas giant Beatrice offered limited opportunity for off-world migration, and by 3500 a.t this giant world was encircled by several thousand rotating habitats under the watchful eye of the local power, DaCapo. By contrast the human population on Dante, a self-sustaining Vesperian Gaian world, did not need or desire transapient oversight. The two habitable segments of Dante continued to develop independently of the Beatrice habitat fleet and of each other.

By 4210 the archanarchists of the Western habitable zone were at loggerheads with the Etodist faithful of the soggy east; over and again the hemispheres fought against each other in the hot dry desert of Sunward and the icy black wastes of Nightward.

Long after the Version war, during which Dante was placed under Solarist occupation but Beatrice remained a free independent zone, the hemispheres remained bitter rivals and opponents.

When at last the importation of the Virsurroundings memetic complex in the 7700's provided a partial solution to the problems of crowding on this world, the ancient feuds became largely history and paradoxically a subject for nostalgia.

Virsurroundings

This technology allows nearbaseline humans and other clades to choose the appearance and dimensions of their surroundings, using a combination of direct neural interface and utility fog environment simulation. Even when meeting face to face two people using Virsurrounding tech will perceive their worlds, and each other, in totally different ways. In this way the people of Dante have become more diverse, and less prone to sectarian politics; they are also able to have a rich and varied lifestyle in comparatively little physical space.

Terraforming schemes

There have been many proposals for the terraforming of this crowded world, involving the melting of the ice on the dark side and the cultivation of the dry side; these have ranged from relatively simple sunshade and mirror schemes to plans for an artificial rotation to be imparted to the planet. Most of the artificial rotation schemes were judged to be too disruptive by the world council, while the sunshade and mirror and other illumination schemes have been indefinitely shelved since the introduction of the virtual surrounding technology.