Hello, dreamers. Over the past few nights, I’ve been immersed in research, revising my notes, and actually digging into what I’d written last year. Work on Aquarius 1 has officially begun.

One of the biggest surprises so far was revisiting the actual master file. Turns out, this was actually…good? Really good, in fact. That helps a lot. It means I get to skip a few steps. But it also means I need to get to work researching, because I’ll be taking readers to my fictional water moon sooner than later.

Aquarius 1

Years ago, when I first began taking notes for The Ursa Frontier, I began with an audacious goal: to create a complete, functioning alien biosphere within the realm of accepted science. That pursuit constituted the bulk of my research efforts, eclipsing the week I spent studying geothermal energy and the month I spent researching agriculture. I had to understand how life had evolved on this alien planet. And since evolution is simply life responding to its environment, I first needed to know more about the planet itself.

It began with the history of the planet, Samarkand. The planet had formed around a K-dwarf within the nebula that birthed the Ursa Major Moving Group. That planet had then been snagged by the immense gravity of Megrez as the stars pulled away from one another, with the K-dwarf ultimately being expelled. It was, I dare say, an elegant solution: complex life takes a long time to form, much longer than the entire life expectancy of a big, hot star like Megrez.

Now, I’m once again learning about the history of a fictional world. In this case, it’s an ocean moon orbiting a gas giant. Picture Pandora, the moon from Avatar, but with a much less…well, fanciful take than what James Cameron came up with. So my moon is a water world. Cool. Now what?

The next step is understanding its history. With Samarkand, I had the luxury of working with a planet much younger than our own. But any planet or moon orbiting Rigil Kentaurus would be roughly the same age as Earth; our stars were formed at roughly the same time, with Kent being slightly larger, hotter, and older than our sun. That means I have billions of years of evolutionary and geological history to cover. So, where do I start?

Ultimately, this week I decided to begin with mass extinctions. There have been a number of mass extinctions in our planet’s history (the number varies, based on what one considers a “mass extinction”). But each one of them had a sudden and profound effect on the evolution of life on our planet. When was the last time you saw a dinosaur walking around (birds don’t count)? Or went swimming at the beach and ran across a sea scorpion? Ever gone fishing and caught a placoderm? Or hiked through a forest of lycopods?

Each of the taxa I mentioned above was once a dominant species on our planet. Most ruled their respective ecosystems for millions of years. But one ice age, one major volcanic eruption, one little rock falling from the sky, and it was all over.

For better or worse, mass extinctions shaped our planet. They created the world we know today. And based on our understanding of the universe, such events surely happen on other habitable worlds as well. What effects would, say, a catastrophic impact event have on a tiny moon covered entirely in ocean?

I determined some time ago that, long before the Aquarius 1 crew arrives, the moon Fatima experienced a catastrophic impact event. Now, as I read through the greatest ecological catastrophes of our planet’s history, I’m getting a better feel for how it will affect what these first human visitors will find there.

More than likely, this initial phase of research will last at least through the weekend. As I read, I’m taking notes, learning more about how this impact event will sculpt the moon’s native biosphere. It’s still early, but it’s a start. And the further I get into it, the more I’m remembering how much fun this is. – MK