Darwin Iv

Darwin IV

Darwin IV is a fictional planet that was the subject of Wayne Barlowe's bookExpedition and the television special,Alien Planet, based on Expedition. Although the details of the discovery and exploration of Darwin IV differ in the two presentations, both are essentially the same in their depiction of the planetary environment and itsnative life-forms, whose abundance and variety prompt the name Darwin.

IntroductionEdit

TelevisionEdit

In Alien Planet, a more basic scenario is presented where a ship called the Von Braun is sent to explore an alien world outside the solar system. The Von Braun is sent to a binary star system about 6.5 light-years from Earth. At 20% of the speed of light (0.2c), it takes about 32.5 years to travel to this system. Upon arrival it goes into orbit around Darwin IV, the Von Braun deployed the Darwin Reconnaissance Orbiter to scan the planet from orbit. The Von Braun also dispatches three identically shaped lighter-than-airprobes to the planet surface. These three probes are:

• Leonardo da Vinci (nicknamed "Leo" and colored blue).
• Sir Isaac Newton (nicknamed "Ike" and colored yellow).
• Balboa (named after Vasco Núñez de Balboa and coloured red). Balboa did not survive entry into the Darwin IV atmosphere, because one wing of its lifting body transport failed to unfold. (Balboa was evidently doomed from the start — the screenwriters of Alien Planet never proposed a nickname for it, and it wasn't named in full name.)

In both stories the low gravity and dense atmosphere allow for aerial organisms that would be impossible onEarth.

The binary star system best fitting the described one above is Luhman 16, a binary system of brown dwarfs 6.59 light-years away, though it is questionable whether a brown dwarf could actually support life.^[1]

Geography and evolutionEdit

It seems likely that Darwin IV was covered with large oceans a few million years ago, just like Earth. But because of important climatic changes, the oceans evaporated and most of the ocean water became part of the atmosphere of the planet. The continents are now mountain chains and plateaus, while the ocean floor has become a large, open plain of deserts and savannah. Thus, most of the creatures who now inhabit Darwin IV are descendants of land-dwelling animals

The dense atmosphere is full of clouds and meteorologic activity and the plains sometimes resemble "weather oceans". Most of the water is found in the atmosphere, but there are also millions of tons of frozen water in the regions of the poles, and big lakes and rivers where the 'pocket-forests' reside.

In the deepest part of the evaporated ocean basins, there is a "lake", the Amoebic Sea, composed of tons of microscopic creatures who have evolved to conserve the last of the remaining sea water inside their bodies in order to survive.

The continental plates are still moving, and the areas where they collide are full of earthquakes and volcanic activity, phenomena that remain mostly unseen on Earth since there they occur under the surface of the oceans.