Earth

Geography

Location

Earth is the third planet out from its sun, Sol. It has a single natural satellite, a selenic spherical planetoid called Luna, as well as millions of artificial satellites. One of its most notable orbital features is El Torre de Babel (or just Babel), a ground-to-orbit cable lift suspended from an asteroid in geostationary orbit. Its terrestrial contact point is an anchored floating platform in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Manta, Ecuador: Puerta del Cielo.

Surface

by NASA (Earth Observatory)

The planet Earth has six major continents: Africa, Eurasia, Australia, North and South America, and Antarctica. These sit in a global ocean, which has been split into several oceans in traditional naming conventions: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Oceans. Earth has an impressive diversity of biomes, created by the intersection of climate variation and biodiversity. From tundra to tropical rainforest, scrubland to coral reef, Earth's environments are its most valuable treasure.

Ecosystem

Earth is the abiogenetic origin point and native home of the Terragenia group of organisms, a highly successful and widespread type of life that includes the starfaring humans. Terragenid life, like all other known life, is based upon carbon chemistry; and like most life, utilizes the oxidation loop as its primary metabolic cycle. The dominant complex photoautotrophs on the planet utilize both forms of chlorophyll, lending its flora a vivid range of greens.
  Terragenia arose an estimated 4.5 billion metric years ago in warm geothermal pools on the young Earth, and spent most of that time as solely unicellular life. Multicellular life appears to have evolved just one billion years ago, and about half a billion years ago underwent an explosion of biodiversity. Roughly 350 million years ago, an impact event is hypothesized to have launched a small number of living extremophile microorganisms into space that managed to survive the long voyage to Jupiter's moon Europa. This collection of organisms evolved into the modern Europan subsurface ocean biota, and caused great surprise upon its initial discovery in the 2030s. Since humankind has begun inhabiting other planets, the terragenid tree of life has been carried to more than a dozen new planets, most prominently Mars.

Inhabitants

Earth is inhabited by two confirmed sophont species, only one of which has achieved technological civilization. Humans (depicted at right) thought themselves the sole sapient inhabitants of Earth for most of their history. However, in the mid-22nd century they were finally able to communicate intelligibly with the other sophonts of their planet: orca whales. Since then, biologists have come to the conclusion that multiple different genera of organisms on Earth exhibit the evolutionary trend toward sapience, including corvids, pachyderms, and octopi.

Resources & Industry

For a significant portion of human history, Earthly civilization's primary source of energy was combustion of geologically-condensed hydrocarbons: so-called "fossil fuels." However, this mode of power quickly destabilized the global climate, resulting in a mass shift into a combination of renewable-environmental and nuclear energy in the early 21st century. During the environmental reclamation of the next several centuries, almost all industry was moved offworld; either into low orbit or to Luna. The vast, incredibly destructive farming practices of the 20th century have been replaced by responsible biomass management planning. Earthlings eat what they can grow, catch, or more commonly print, leaving most of the surface of the planet to become wild again - at least, wild with human oversight.
  In the modern day, the dominant percentage of the work that remains Earthbound deals with biology: genetic archiving and export, ecological management, or, yes, even ecotourism. Due to Earth's status as one of a very small number of worlds in the universe with a truly indigenous and well-established biosphere, the planet has strict self-imposed restrictions on mass exportation. However, this rare and extremely high level of biodiversity allows Earth's primary natural resource to be genetic information, exported either via pure data, tissue samples, or genetic material isolate samples.