Planetary type: Rocky world.
Region: Outer Communal Space
Natural satellites: single moon.
Age: 2.5 billion years (estimated).
Parent star: K-class yellow dwarf.
Surface gravity: 1.2 gees.
Atmosphere: 1.3 atmospheres, breathable with masks. 
Average temperature: 18 °C
Climate range: Wet cold to wet hot. 
Ecosystem classification: Carbon-based.
Solar revolution length: 235 days.
Day length: 28 hours.
Settlement Type: Scientific outposts.
Settlement age: 57 years.
Population: 2.500
Allegiance: Lebanese Space Interests.
Distance to Earth: 59 lightyears.

Oh, Carnia! It’s a great place! Well, not for one’s interstellar vacation, of course. It’s a hellpit. Higher-than-average gravity, eighty percent humidity all year round, temperatures well above the deadly wetbulb threshold at the equator. It’s a planet that wants you to sweat and choke. But it is fine. The galaxy would be a boring place if every garden world had to be fit for human settlement. What pushed me to live on Carnia is that it’s one of the few known planets that doubles as a time machine.

Carnia was first spotted by an automated deep-sky survey in 0.25 Interstellar, barely two decades after the emergence of the geometry drive. With a breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and ample evidence of complex life on the surface, it was tagged as a potential colonisation target and reached by a Starmoth Initiative survey team in 0.36, aboard the exploration vessel My Kingdom for Ada Lovelace. They found the planet in a peculiar state that had not been anticipated through remote sensing: it had nigh-complete cloud cover, with heavy rainfall occurring simultaneously on almost all points of the globe, probably as a consequence of a freak weather event. Probes sent below the clouds showed a lush landscape, dominated by ferns, moss and flowerless trees; the active continents eroded into deep oceans, where powerful storms raged on and on. This unusual combination of extant, complex local life and harsh weather conditions led the survey team to tag the planet as unsuitable for human settlement, and their ship moved on (it would later take part in the discovery of Elora, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a tiny bit more hospitable).

It would take until 0:57 for Carnia (which at this point was still known as PO-12589-EAU, as per Starmoth Initative map IDs) to be visited by a science team again, this time on Inyanga-class “All Tomorrows.”

They found that the global storm had not abated. Remote sensing data from the satellite left by “My Kingdom for Darwin” showed that it had been raining almost continuously for the past twenty years. A more detailed survey revealed entire geosystems defined by rain; young mountain ranges already smoothed out by water erosion, tree species that had evolved to collect and direct rainfall towards their symbiotes, heavy sediment deficits in exposed areas due to runoff, karstic networks the size of continents. Further studies unearthed large amounts of histic paleosol going back half a million years, and widespread presence of amber. All in all, every data point from the planet hinted at a single fact: it had been raining for the past five hundred thousand years. Thus, we gave PO-12589-EAU its current name: Carnia, after the Carnian Pluvial Episode (CPE) that occurred on Earth, two hundred and thirty million years ago.

Now, Carnia’s weather is not a continuous downpour, but the skies almost never clear. In over thirty years at the Carnian Research Institute, I’ve only seen the clouds part twice. At best (I’ve come to love rain), you get thick rainstorms that go on for weeks on end. At worst, you get a light drizzle with fog. The average annual precipitation on Carnia nears three thousand millimetres. This is twice as high as the estimated annual precipitation during the CPE (pre-Low Age research put it at 1,400 mm/year), because Carnia had a larger hydrosphere to begin with. Most of this rain exists in the form of *cyclic rainstorms* anyway, where at 100% humidity, the rain evaporates as it hits the ground, then comes back down again. But the ocean storms are really something to behold, even for Terran accustomed to hypercanes; before you’ve set foot on Carnia, you can’t quite measure the sheer power of a non-anthropogenic hurricane that rages on for months at a time.

And this is where Carnia becomes a time machine. Much like the Earth during the early Trias, before the CPE, Carnia used to be an arid planet. Its current climate does not only mirror that of the CPE, the broader trajectory of Carnia is very similar to what happened to our homeworld during the Triassic period. The CPE triggered a mass extinction that paved the way for the rise of the dinosaurs: we see the exact same process at work on Carnia with pseudobirds and symbiotic ferns.

There is still much to discover on Carnia. We remain unsure of what caused the transition towards a more humid climate; there are traces of powerful volcanic eruptions under the cenotes on the northern continent, as well as flood basalt eruptions on the southern continent that pump large amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the planet is currently at the apex of a one billion year-old orbital cycle. It is possible that all these factors worked in unison to create modern Carnia, or that one acted as a true catalyst. No matter what science ends up concluding, the detailed study of Carnia will allow us to dive deep into the past of the Earth. As such, we are astronomers without a telescope, observing faraway planets to learn about the homeworld, and I find this idea strangely moving.

Now, I have to leave you and let go of this message; in the forest below, the rain is calling to me.