Slushball

It's not at all odd we keep finding alternates where life never or barely developed. What's odd is how many we find where life did.

— Dr. Jorge Soria, Evolutionary Biologist

Baseline has faced many evolutionary tipping points over the aeons, and BREACH keeps finding evidence of roads thankfully not taken. Slushball is one such; stellar positions place the time as the present day, but the Earth is mostly glaciated, save for a thin (about 200 miles) equatorial band where icebergs drift among thick clumps of algae. The most interesting aspect of this world is that biosamples show signs of more complex life, probably geothermal, but the breach point is far from any hydrothermal vents.

Unlike Archipelago-2, where it seems the lack of continental drift was what halted the development of complex life, here, the continents are fairly close to their modern shapes; some other trigger, as yet undetermined, was missing to end the pre-cambrian glaciation.

World Type

Alternate Climate

Divergence

Proterozoic

Current Year

2023 or close enough