The Solar System of Great Lakes Earth
Great Lakes Earth is the third planet of the solar system, just like our Earth, 93 million miles from the sun, 8,000 miles wide and weighing in at six sextillion tons. But that’s the end of the similarities.
Back home, the moon has a diameter of 2159 miles and orbits Earth from a distance of 240,000 miles. You would need 81 of them to match the mass of Earth, and six of them to match its gravity. The moon that orbits Great Lakes Earth is far larger — 3200 miles in diameter. It’s also a little farther from the parent, orbiting from a distance of 400,000 miles.
It’s not just the life-planet and its moon that make this solar system different from ours. Mercury, the first planet from the sun, orbits at a much closer distance. Whereas ours orbits the sun from a distance of 36 million miles, the Mercury of AE 111 orbits the sun from a distance of one and a half million miles, spinning so fast that one Mercurial year lasts eighteen hours. Compared to Earth — both ours and theirs — Mercury’s twice as wide and eight times greater in mass. As a result of the intense heat and pressure from both the sun and the underground volcanoes, the carbon-rich surface is pretty much a whole crust of diamonds.
Venus orbits the sun from a distance of 15 million miles, a big difference compared to our Venus. An even bigger difference is size. Our Venus has a radius of 3760 miles — almost perfectly compatible with that of Earth’s 3959 — and a mass 82% that of Earth’s. In the solar system of Great Lakes Earth, Venus has a radius 175% wider than Earth and a mass five and a half times greater.
The next planet after Earth isn’t Mars, but what the people of Great Lakes Earth call “Neptune”. Two-point-six times wider and seven times greater in mass than Earth, Neptune is a literal waterworld — a thick atmosphere of oxygen, hydrogen, helium, methane and water vapor conceals an ocean so extensive that land makes up only half of one percent of the entire planet. It orbits from the sun a distance of over 140 million miles, putting it in the same exact position that Mars has back home. It is the thick atmosphere comprised mostly of greenhouse gases that explain how Neptune’s water could still be liquid.
The three remaining giants — Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus — are identical in size and distance from the sun, but they are named differently. Jupiter is named “Jove”, Saturn “Kronos” and Uranus pronounced “Ouranos”.
There are two important factors to consider that most scientists believe are connected to the orbital mechanics of our solar system.
The first and more obvious is the asteroid belt, leftovers of rock, ice and metal that survived the mighty pull of the gas giants.
There is a second, more complicated factor connected to the solar system — the Milankovitch cycles, named after Serbian geophysicist/astronomer Milutin Milankovitch. He proposed that the ice ages Earth had been experiencing for the past two-and-a-half million years were made possible by three basic factors:
Eccentricity (Orbital shape) — In an average ice age, the shape of the Earth’s orbit varied from 0.000055 to 0.0679 with the mean being 0.0019 over a cycle of 100,000 years.
Obliquity (Axial tilt) — In an average ice age, the earth’s axis varies from 22.1 degrees to 24.5 degrees over a period of 41,000 years.
Precession (Axis of rotation in relation to fixed stars) — Today’s North Star is Polaris, but won’t be the case forever — its supposed duration is 26,000 years.
The cause is now set. Now to investigate the effects these changes have on Earth’s nightscape, its Milankovitch cycles and even the asteroid belt (if it could still exist.)
