Hi! Astrobiologist With A Longtime Special Interest In Palaeo-science, Here With A Fun Fact: Shes Not

hi! astrobiologist with a longtime special interest in palaeo-science, here with a fun fact: she’s not far off the mark!

there’s a reasonably plausible hypothesis that describes how chunks of Earth ejected during the Chicxulub impact at the end of the Cretaceous would have more than matched escape velocity for the Earth-Moon system and been flung out into the greater solar system, potentially colliding with other bodies like Mars or the Galilean Moons! If these objects were carrying life on them, likely highly durable bacteria or microbial life (*coughs* TARDIGRADES), they could actually have seeded other worlds in the system with terrestrial life!

so in short, the dino-killer space rock may have actually yeeted water bears to Europa! we won’t know for sure til we explore the icy moons of Jupiter, but the possibility is there!

I went to high school with a girl who said we should check the other planets for the dinasours because when the meteor hit they probably got catapulted away :(

and how can you be sure she’s wrong

I noticed this post is missing a couple smash hits from TES lore so I’m just gonna throw em in here.

let me start by pointing out that the entire premise of TES V: Skyrim is that the player has the ability to change the fabric of reality by yelling.

the human species was liberated from elven dominion pretty much solely by one extremely angry dude who was, and I am not making this up, a gay immortal cyborg demigod from the future.

this is a dubiously canon fact but I should also include that the first empire used giant moths to build a colony on the smaller moon, and then forgot about it.

another dubiously canon fact: the cat people were created by their primary deity to be able to stack on top of each other to reach the moon. yes, literally. which also makes them, collectively, an anchor of reality.

you wanna know how fucked up elder scrolls is? i’ll tell you how fucked up elder scrolls is. heres how fucking fucked up elder scrolls is

yeah so if y’all couldn’t tell I’ve decided to post more, lol. probs gonna do more worldbuilding stuff too while I’m at it. welcome to the Realms, enjoy your stay and please be respectable beings.

What do you mean by "elves are a fungus"? Gnomes as terrestrial cephalopods makes more sense (clever and dexterous), but not seeing your reasoning on the elves.

So a couple days back @mazarinedrake was helpfully infodumping about Pathfinder for me, becuase I’m 2 years into a game and know dick fuck about the Lore, and APPARENTLY the elves in pathfinder??? are literally Aliens???

So that resulted in a late-night insomniac discussion of “If you were gonna design a fantasy RPG where none of the other races are Primates, what would you make them be? and I think we came up with:

Elves are a Fungus, but specifically, Elves are the fruiting bodies of a Vast Underground Superorganism, which is why there’s that bit in LOTR where the elves sometimes find other ‘adult’ elves down by the lake.  They feel a deep connection to thier surrundings, not because of some spiritual thing, but because they’re all small organs of a body that spans continents and thusly reccive cellular signals.  At the end of an Elf’s natural lifespan, they burst into a cloud of glittering spores.  

Dwarves are chemotrophic plants, like the algae that live at the bottom of the ocean at the thermal vents or alkaline lakes.  They never see the sunlight, but don’t need to becuase their metabolic process is based on exothermic chemical reactions that power thier cells.  they mine not as a traditional industry, but as a means of agriculture- they literally crave that mineral.

Gnomes are terrestrial cephlapods that started as something much like a Mimic octopus that took it Way Too Far (out of the ocean).  they’re dextrous, clever, obsessed with color, and have a society whose values are pretty much unfathomable to a bunch of pretentious monkeys.

Halflings are tiny, really ugly Birds. Maybe they originally started like crows, with thier fondness for good foods and shiny objects, but over time, they developed a coukoo-like habit of leaving thier newly-hatched babies in human homes becuase if you can fool a human family? that’s an amazing start in life for a chick.  Over time, they began to look more and more like humans as a means of camoflacge, then retained more and more neotenic features to keep humans feeding them for longer.

Humanity’s closest relative is Orcs, because they’re also mammals!  they’re terrestrial whales! Orcish tusks are simmilar to the tusks of beaked whales, and the roving bands of orcs are very similar to dolphin Pods.

don’t you know that a black cat under a ladder cancels out? it’s PEMDAS or something

SOMEONE laughs in the face of superstition

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

— CARL SAGAN about The Pale Blue Dot, taken 30 years ago on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away from Earth.