Imagine a skyline.
Above an unusually flat horizon, replace the standard blue Earth sky with a deep orange and then score it with crimson rents of high altitude cloud fringed with blues and greens. Below, where you would expect to see land, you see an endless plane of whirling gas; layers upon layer of dense atmosphere all the way down to crushing depths and a metallic Hydrogen core.
Ahead, a bruised wall of cloud fills your three-sixty degree augmented field of vision. This massive storm front, born in the lower parts of the planet, spirals in a world sized upwellings that billow high above you. Then there is the lightning. Electrical discharges thousands of times larger than anything the little rocky planet of your birth has ever seen create cascading flashes that light up the interior of the dark clouds with a terrible blue fire and cause your view to temporarily polarise.
You thankfully float outside this particular storm system, at a safe distance, and watch them ride the storm. They are the reason you are here.
Peppered against the swirling maelstrom are hundreds of thousands of tiny specs glittering in the morning sun. Tiny is a relative word manifest only through distance. You know these hydrogen-filled floaters are anywhere from fifty meters to a kilometre in length. The movement of reflective scales is how they communicate with one another over the distances. They speak more as a collective than as singular entity; each organism picking up the message and amplifying it, adding to it like words added to a sentence. We are only now scratching the surface in understanding what these complex light shows mean.
This herd is riding close to the storm front, feeding from tiny particulates in the upwelling with long transparent tendrils that trail below them like jelly-fish. You might ponder how form, so fit for purpose, could manifest itself both in the warm oceans of your home, and here.
Safely ensconced and hardwired into your floating cocoon, your course will take you deep into the herd; today you will soar with them, surfing the storm front to witness their language of light. Today you will observe, and record, and take notes and learn. Today there is no other place in the universe you’d rather be. Today you count yourself the luckiest human alive.