A Home: Mars

Earth becomes a venusoid hellscape in the intervening 2000+ years between now and the stories of Doggyverse. Oceans boil into a soupy, toxic atmosphere that has assumed an unsightly pea-color. What remains of multicellular life lead simple lives near oceanic vents and secluded caves. Remnants of civilization loom in floodplains of detritus, eroded to pocked, rounded obelisks by centuries of corrosive precipitation and wind. At any glance, a miserable place fitting for nobody. Not even the Dogs.

Instead, they live on the second nearest neighbor, Mars. Unfortunately this means it is terraformed. Personally, I'm not super fond of terraforming Mars in real life, not only because it is wasteful but also because there is not really any good reason to do so. Saving humans from extinction is not something so flippantly solved by gluing your fingers to the [ctrl], [c], and [v] keys, but I digress.

This "new" Mars, while much smaller than Earth, is a diverse place. To the North, a vast sea, to the East and West are icy mountains, and to the South lies frigid tundra. In between these great boundaries are many familiar biomes. Around the equatorial coast are temperate rainforests and wetlands, while in from the coasts are grasslands and mixed forests of birch and pine. Further inland, there are more grasslands as the trees grow thinner, eventually leading to sprawling steppe with the occasional freshwater lake. The great canyons of Mars now hold grand ecosystems that change greatly with altitude.

The lower gravity of Mars also has the neat side effect of making plants very tall. While it seems obvious that this would happen, the reason behind this is quite intriguing! If you think back to biology class you may remember that trees (and other plants) have a special network of cells that make up xylem, which moves all the tasty things plants like to eat (nutrients, water) up to the leaves for that photosynthesis business. This takes a lot of effort on behalf of the plant, because water is not known for its lightness. Plants use the transpiration of small amounts of water to create negative pressure at the top of the plant, sucking up the water sort of like a straw but not really. The vacuums created in drinking straws have a length limit, above which the water will boil from a lack of pressure and rise no higher. Less gravity, less pulling on the water, less vacuum nonsense the plant has to deal with. Hooray! All this means big plants are very big, like really big. The biggest trees found here on Earth, California Redwoods, have an upper limit of about 120 meters, while on Mars, the same species could theoretically grow more than A KILOMETER tall. Eat your heart out, Burj Khalifa. (Check out this video which explains all this better than I could ever hope to.)

Theoretically, this means huge mushrooms, too. As a fan of Minecraft, big mushrooms are a very appealing idea. Perhaps they could be large enough to be larger and heavier than the very dogs of Doggyverse! That's the fun thing about worldbuilding: some things can be silly, but it all adds to your world. So. Big mushrooms, many of which can be eaten. I will hopefully talk about the eatery on Mars soon.

Of course, many of these gigantic plants and fungi require millenia of growth to populate such a large space as the entirety of Mars, and of those timescales there are less than two from which to get to the beginning of Doggyverse. This creates some obvious gaps in ecosystems, and many under-diverse areas. This leads to the grasslands and steppe of Mars. Grasses are, to say the least, weeds. They grow like there's no tomorrow, and were able to quickly coat the entire planet in cereal a short time after the planet's terraforming was complete enough to grow things. Wheat, rice, barley, millet, you name it! Of course, like the trees and the mushrooms, they get pretty tall. These prairie grains, normally no more than a meter or two, could possibly grow several times as much. Attack of the 6 meter wheat! 

But as it takes millenia for an ecosystem of plants to form, animals do as well! So, the repertoire of forest friends, as it were, is quite limited and mostly restricted to caniform mammals like weasels, racoons, and small seals, which feed off of fish and rodents. As a consequence of the limited food chain, there are no large predators other than the dogs themselves. What few larger animals that exist are herbivores like hogs and llamas. (Llamas are a favorite of the dogs for their warm wool, which is very helpful in the long Martian winters.) 

I am certain that as a whole, the entire Martian ecosystem is not as thoroughly thought out as it could be, and I hope to address this in the future with more blog posts. For now, I will just leave it here! Please let me know if there is anything I should look into more by commenting on this post.