Nixy
(planet Kepler-452b)
Nixy is the only planet orbiting around the star Kepler-452, located roughly 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. Nixy was targeted as one of the promising candidates for housing non-terrestrial life by the first wave of uncrewed probes built by the Transeŭropa Demokratia Reto orbiting autofactory Ianus and sent out in the first two decades after construction of Ianus was complete in 86 GE. The uncrewed DeSitter Model B1 probe What Goes Around Comes Around arrived at Nixy to perform assessment in July 111 GE. The video relays that were rotated back to Earth immediately confirmed that Nixy did, in fact, have alien life.
Ecosystem
The ecosystem of Nixy is most often described as boring. The surface of the planet is hot, damp, rocky, and webbed with veins of rivers and interconnected lakes. The most complex organisms on the planet are featureless mushroom-like nubs that grow in colonies along algae-infested lake shores. Two factors have been theorized as contributing to both the lack of variety and the low level of complexity of life on Nixy. First, Nixy is the only planet orbiting Kepler-452 and therefore didn't have protection from stellar debris that large planetary neighbors would have offered. A continual bombardment by meteors over most of its existence would have resulted in repeated mass extinctions and prevented the development of more complex life. Second, the atmosphere near the surface is thick and water-saturated because of the high gravity and heat of the sun. This leaves the habitable regions of the surface unusually uniform across the entire planet: flat, with shallow still pools of water and muggy atmosphere. With a lack of differentiated ecological niches to fill, live on Nixy settled into a simple pattern of life forms that saturated the planet and had no environmental impetus to change.Notability
The discovery of life on Nixy in 111 GE spurred a resurgence in exploration that lasted a century. The Witten QR ship Face the sunshine and shadows will fall behind you made almost two dozen trips between Earth and Nixy in the decades that followed, shuttling teams of researchers back and forth both to collect data and to gather video and audio recordings of the alien world with which to wow the public. The mediaspace obsessed over video clips of the planet, and there was no end to the number of scientists willing to get in front of a camera and microphone to pontificate about what the discovery implied about the existence of alien intelligence and the nature of our place in the universe. Governments and private investors poured more money into space exploration, specifically with the goal of looking for alien life. Most people credit the discovery of life on Nixy for the launch of Project Expedition in the year 123 GE. The Ianus Orbiting Autofactory had churned out a second wave of Witten research vessels, the Model QS series, designed specifically for the exploration of planets believed to have organic life. Although there was no official scoring system that was universally accepted for calculating the probability of life on a planet before it was visited, the most commonly used approach was based on spectrographic methods developed centuries earlier. Because of competition bertween the ZCCA and the TDR, each used their own proprietary scoring method and directed the search strategies of their own ships. Despite all of this activity, for decades the only life turned up by any of the expeditions was primitive: slime-molds, algae, or the occasional fungus. A second surge of interest emerged in 181 GE, when a team of Zhongguo-Cruz scientists developed the Keji Scoring Protocol for evaluating the expected level of technology on a distant planet based on the information content in the patterns of its electromagnetic signals. This created enough of a wave of expectation for the attention of the public to ride until the Erlang Tragedy in 213 GE.Planetary Data
Planet Type
Rocky Super-Earth
Mass (vs Earth)
3.41x
Radius (vs Earth)
1.63x
Orbital Period (Earth days)
384.84
Assessed P(life)
0.66
Assessed P(tech)
0.08
First Contact Data
Contact Year
111 GE
Contact Vehicle
Contact P.I.
N/A
Contact Sponsor