Worldbuilding in pictures
Surveying a whole new planet safely and efficiently calls for careful planning. After a few hard-earned lessons, the Ecological Survey put little remote satellite sensors in orbit around a new world several years before sending a human to look the world over in detail. It slowed the colonization and extraction timeline, but the satellite was enough to establish intent. Elena pulled up the list of data that the satellite had collected: photographs, of course, but also weather patterns, vegetation maps, surface temperature, ocean profiles: everything she needed to know write the introduction for her report.
If we assume that the Ecological Survey is mostly interested in more-or-less Earthlike worlds, rather than uninhabited planets, the satellites that orbit us provide a guide for what could be recorded for another world. It took less that two years after Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, to begin receiving images from space. Some of the earliest, like the Corona program, took pictures on filmc and the cannisters were parachuted to Earth. The military drove this and other early satellite imagery programs, but the Corona images have now been declassified and are available for other uses.
The United States has had a civilian satellite imagery program for several decades, and more missions are planned. Landsat 1 was launched in 1972. Landsat 5 and 7 are still taking images, and a new platform launch is planned for 2010. These images have a 30-meter resolution, and are very heavily used for everything from mapping different land uses to monitoring agricultural yields.
Most satellite programs now use more sophisticated digital sensors that record individual bands separately. The red, blue and green bands are used to make true-color images like you’d get from a camera, but many platforms record other bands as well. Landsat also returns near-infrared, mid-infrared and thermal data. These other bands can be used to estimate all kinds of things, like the amount of green vegetation present, drought severity, or surface temperature. There’s a lot more available from these satellites than just regular photographs.
Here I have to admit something: I’ve worked professionally with several of these image sources, and very heavily with Landsat data so this is a topic I find interesting and relevant, but the reason I chose satellite imagery for a SiMF topic is so I could share this link with you. The EarthNow! viewer is one of the coolest things on the internet: you can watch Landsat feed live. (Or, if neither satellite is within range of the sensor, a recent recorded feed.)
Wow.
The Earth Observatory site is a great source for more images. One of their recent Image of the Day featured photos was of the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico and has been widely disseminated on the Internet, but their other offerings are worth a look. Having satellites in place and taking regular images makes it possible to monitor and respond to natural and anthropogenic disasters quickly. If you look under “Global Maps”, you’ll see a number of maps that would be useful for Elena while she’s exploring: land surface temperature, plant productivity (Net Primary Production), and ocean chlorophyll, a measure of ocean production. NASA’s Earth from Space site is also worth a look.
The AQUA and TERRA satellites are part of NASA’s current Earth observation program. AQUA was designed to provide information on the hydrologic cycle, including oceans, ice and clouds. TERRA is a general-purpose platform, with several different sensors. ThisNASA site lets you watch how the planet’s plant cover changes over time as spring comes to the northern hemisphere. Those data were for a past year: current maps for plant cover, drought, and more are available for the US.
I’m not as familiar with satellite programs outside of NASA. The European Space Agency has an active program, as do Japan and Russia, and probably other countries as well. Satellite imaging isn’t just a government activity: there are several private companies that offer images for sale from their own satellites: SPOT, owned by Spot Image; QuickBird, owned by Digital Globe; and IKONOS, owned by GeoEye.
Satellites can provide data valuable for ecology, agriculture, weather forecasting, even archaeology. How could this information help or hinder your protagonists? What could they know, or not know? And what if an enemy hijacks the satellite feed? Satellites already seem science-fictional; why not use them? And these images provide a fabulous way to inspire yourself while designing your own worlds.
My previous worldbuilding article was on placing biomes within the landscape. I didn’t pull out any fictional examples for the original article, but last week I read a new fantasy novel that began with a map, as so many do. The hypothetical continent had a mountain range running north-south near the coast, with dense jungle on both sides, and a north-pointing peninsula that was entirely desert. Author, you need some Science in your Fiction.
Especially if the colonists came in some sort of sleeper-ship, it makes sense to wait a few more dozen years and see what the weather cycle is like. It would be unfortunate to build your colony and then discover that you’ve build right in the middle of a seasonal tornado alley. Of course things can still go wrong. Weather has both short and long cycles, and maybe the observation period corresponds with an unusual clement period.
Absolutely, jwbjerk. I postulated that the satellite was put up a few years before the first human survey, but you’d need a lot more data after that before setting up a permanent settlement. All kinds of things could be on long-term cycles, not just weather. What about 17 year cicadas, only nastier?
Did anyone look at the Landsat live link???
Thank you so much for that link.
As a preface to a really obnoxious question, I’m going to say that I dearly love satellite imagery, and have used it a lot as an ecologist.
That said…ummmmm, okay, why do I want to send humans to a habitable world, and second, why do I want to bring them back? This is the whole inevitability of infection problem. Were I contemplating setting down on an unknown world, I’d really want to know its biochemistry first, before I sent an explorer down, to know whether the explorer is going to survive, and to know whether it will be safe to retrieve the explorer, or whether it is a one-way trip.
Landsat equivalents do a horrible job at that particular biological scale. They are necessary for determining broader-scale phenomena, such as atmospheric chemistry, temperature profiles, and finding whatever it is they want to extract. But throwaway probes to the planet’s surface are also necessary.
Heteromeles, that’s a question for the author – I’m just here to add some science (and some ideas!). Science fiction is full of examples of sending people to survey habitable planets. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it goes badly. Your idea would make a good story, you know.
I didn’t have any intent of covering everything an ecologist could possibly want to know in one post – this is part of a series covering worldbuilding and ecology. Here I wanted to talk about some of the things beyond straight visual-light photography that can be obtained from satellite sensors, like NDVI and drought indices, data that people who don’t work with these images may not be aware of. Biochemistry comes much later…