Mastodon post 2026-01-18
The extra moons weren’t a new phenomenon. Early telescopic observations of Mercury and Venus reported small moons. Five hundred revolutions later, Mariner probe flybys—during the Century of Stupid—spotted them too. Scientists in the next century explained these away as telescope lens flare, observer visual glitches, or misidentified ultraviolet-rich stars emerging from occultation. Exactly the kind of thing a compromised astronomer would say. The probes completed their survey of the system and settled on the south pole of the moon that orbited the planet with the second most sentient life (the helium sprites on the tenth planet were considered too dangerous to approach). Better to encourage the third planet tetrapods to come to the polar crater where they could be suborned to act as proxy weapons. We worked all this out precisely too late.