• Question: If you could have your own planet, what would it look like, what would it be called and what kind of speices would be on it?

    Asked by davieshobo9 to Amy, Drew, Julia, Sara on 22 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Hello again davies!

      Great question! I would really love to just pick one at random that had life and see what was there. That would be full of amazing surprises. But, if I was really going to engineer my own planet, here is how my story would go ….

      If I could have my own planet it would be about the size of Earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. Why a red dwarf? Well for one they have a pretty red color. But, more importantly they live a really really long time. They are the longest living stars, and can live for billions of years! (The Sun will have a lifetime of 10 billion years but that is nothing compared to a red dwarf!). The planet would have to be fairly close to the parent star – red dwarfs are colder than our Sun and I would want my planet to have liquid water (I personally get very thirsty and apparently water is essential to life as we know it!).

      The planet’s name would be Demeter (after the Greek goddess of the harvest and fertile Earth) with the hope that it would be a bountiful planet (really that’s just the first greek goddess that came up in google that I didn’t already identify with a stellar object! – I’d have to think on the name some more).

      As far as the life that would live there … that’s the tough part!! I would hope it would be extremely diverse. Since nature is far more creative than I, I think what I would ideally do is drop off a few microbes, and then come back in several billion years and see what happened. Here on Earth we started from just a small population of single celled organisms some 3.5 billion years ago and look at all that has happened!! I could never paint a world as beautiful as this on my own, so I’d cheat a little and let evolution and time help me out 😉

      Really fun question!! I am wondering, what kind of world would you build?

    • Photo: Drew Rae

      Drew Rae answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      I like this question. It has really got me thinking. I would want my species to be spacefaring, so I’d want to optimise the planet for spacetravel – but what would that take?

      Multiple moons – just to provide short term challenges.

      A ring system – to encourage commercial exploitation of space, and to provide material in orbit for spaceships.

      Multiple intelligent species who prefer different environments (maybe an aquatic and a land intelligent species) to learn co-operation and have different views on things.

      The intelligent species should have a pre-hensile tail, because tails are cool, and should be unable to stop their ears showing what they are really thinking and feeling.

    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      I think I’d have earth but with less people… less war and less pollution… utopia!

    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Hey davies…right, where to start?!

      Well I don’t think I really could make a planet as amazingly diverse as earth…and despite its problems I kinda like here! But this is how mine would go..

      I would have my planet orbiting its star every day except Thursdays…because by Thursday everyone needs a little cheering up and so it would be different. There would also be a drop in gravitational pull on Thursdays so that you could float up to the ceiling like a helium balloon. It would be a day off for everyone (except important people like the ones who work in cornershops selling chocolate).

      So my planet would have sea that was very similar to what we have now but if you took some of the water out and boiled it you would get Ambrosia custard – but only on Wednesdays. Everyone would speak at least 3 different languages and when you were 13 you would be able to speak to donkeys. If the donkeys decided they liked you they would tell the other animals and you would be allowed to learn a new animal language every year for the rest of your life. If the donkeys didn’t like your chat you would get sent to speak to an owl and if it thought you were really boring then that would be the end of your animal banter and you would have to just speak human for the rest of your days.

      There would also be some small butterfly-like creatures called plinkles that would turn into hodgkizaars when there was a thunderstorm…on Lazonday (18th day of the week) the planet would spin round so that its north pole was at the south – and everyone would get a free bagel.

      What would yours be like? 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: davieshobo9

    davieshobo9 commented on :

    Wow, very intersting planets! They are pretty cool, and lets only hope that there will be less war in the future! Thank you for answering!

    My planet would also be a bit like Earth, but humans would be adapted to live underwater because I love the sea. Sea creatures could talk like normal people and everyone would have an awesome pet animal, like in The Golden Compus! 🙂 We would use more of our brain power so we can lift things without touching them and use telepathity. Humans would now be able to communicate with other life forms in space and we would all live happily. Atalantis would be the Kingdom for awesome people and Unicorns would be the super police men of the world.

    If only we could design our own planet!