Theres No Sound In Space.

There’s no sound in space.

Everyone knows this. Every child born on a spacefaring world is taught that the vacuum of space, having only a few atoms per cubic centimeter, cannot by its nature conduct acoustic waves. This means that whatever sounds you hear while plying the void between worlds come from within your own spacecraft.

Some take solace in this fact, enjoying the silence and solitude that the endless deep embodies. Some prefer to bask in the bone-deep humming of the drive coils, pulsing their magnetic hymns of atomic power; or keep time by the steady, quiet chirps of the scanners watching the endless night all around.

But when the hull starts to whisper as you lie awake in your berth, singing your sins to you like a lullaby for the damned… the only way to escape it is to throw yourself out of the airlock.

For there’s no sound in space, and no one can hear you scream.

Mercury is a small, airless world in the deep inner Sol system, the closest planet to its sun and consequently a world of thermal extremes. Its solar day is over 1400 metric hours long, meaning that any point of the surface is exposed to sunlight for 700 hours or more. Because of this Mercury isn't an especially populated world –just under twenty million souls live and work almost entirely beneath its rocky crust– but the surface facilities shine brightly because there is no atmosphere to dull their light.

Much of Mercury’s 19.4 million inhabitants are concentrated in the capital city of Lóng Cháo, embedded into and under the surface of Rachmaninoff Crater (seen here on the terminator line, in the northern hemisphere). Its orbital space, however, is busier, serving as a hub for the ore traders hauling raw materials from one side of the solar system to the other.

Mercury is an autonomous territory of the United Sol System, as part of the Inner System Territories. Its flag, an inverted monochrome depiction of its penumbra, is shown below the main image.

more worldbuilding stuff! photobash of a future human-inhabited Mercury, plus its flag, created for my hard science fiction setting Astra Planeta. done using assets from Space Engine.

oh fuck you

my gf just visited and I literally slow blinked at them multiple times out of pure reflex. I hate this

the "cats slowblink to show affection so i do it back so they know it's reciprocated" to "i just reflexively slow blinked at a human being" pipeline

fungal cell walls are made of chitin, i.e. bug skeleton material. some of them produce chemicals that will make you see god, others produce chemicals that will make you meet him. they communicate electrochemically in ways we're only just beginning to decipher. they form symbiotic relationships more often than any other phyla. when they first evolved in the devonian era there was so much death in the world that their earliest forms were gigantic pillars of pure fungal tissue feasting on millions of years of unrotted carcasses. many species of fungi, savants of death though they are, are immortal. one whole genus of mushroom tastes like fucking chicken for some ineffable reason.

fungi are the living manifestation of decay and if there was any indication that god was real i'm unshakably certain god would be a fungus: silent, unseen, unnoticed, unbothered by the living world yet helping its cycles tick on ad infinitum. fungi are powerful, everlasting, unknowable, and should be worshipped.

tell me something nice

I live in Iowa and honestly I agree - the midwest sucks ass.

Iowa is a scam. I went to Iowa and there was just more Iowa. It's a conspiracy to sell corn.