Did David Bowie Ask The Wrong Question?

I often do bait and switch on here and I should honour the title to some extent, so here it is. There’s much to admire about David Bowie and the world lost a genius a few years ago. I’ve blogged about him before and whereas I can’t be bothered to fish those bits out I do remember tracing his reference to superhumans in ‘Oh You Pretty Things’ back via Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Childhood’s End’ to Olaf Stapledon’s writing, particularly ‘Odd John’. But that isn’t what I’m thinking of right now. I’ll never forget the first time I heard ‘Space Oddity’. It was an oddity to hear that accent on the radio. I don’t know why exactly, because there were lots of southern English rock stars at the time, but somehow it seemed really, I don’t know, ground breaking. Of course he was groundbreaking in other ways. My ex is a big Bowie fan, and has found him a gateway into sci-fi, a genre she previously despised, but as I said to her, and for some reason I think this applies to him in particular, you can’t take things too far from his lyrics without ruining them. For instance, in the album ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and his Mott The Hoople single ‘All The Young Dudes’, we seem to be expected to believe that there will be a mains supply for electric guitars, organs and amplifiers during the apocalypse. In fact, maybe there will be and that’s a mark of his visionary nature, but it bothers me. They should’ve been acoustic.

What I have in mind today though is ‘Life On Mars’. This has now famously been used as the basis for the excellent time travel police procedural series, which to me felt like Sam Tyler travelling back to a time when things were “normal”. Unsettlingly, that series itself is now almost twenty years old and the same gap separates us from Windows 3.1 as Sam Tyler from Gene Hunt. Well, sort of – no spoilers! My take on the track itself, though, is that it’s about someone despairing of how life is here on Earth and hoping there’s life on Mars instead because at least then there’d be something better out there. I’ve said before that my greatest fear is that there is no life elsewhere in the Universe, mysterious encounters in Sussex chalkpits notwithstanding. This is also why I’m so peed off with the scarcity of phosphorus. Anyway, this is in fact a major reason why I’m so focussed on the possibility of alien life. I may have just written a nine thousand word long rambling blog post about silicon-based life, but the subtext is the same as Bowie’s song’s. As Monty Python put it, “pray to God there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ‘cos there’s bugger all down here on Earth”. I don’t entirely agree with that by the way. I think many of us choose not to think complexly, which is one reason we’re in this mess.

Okay, have I done enough of that now? Enough relatable stuff? Seriously though, I’ll try not to go off on one.

Because as you must know by now, it really looks like there might at some point have been life on Mars, according to recent discoveries there. I have to admit that at this point in the proceedings I have little idea what they’ve found, but I seem to remember it’s an iron compound which is found as a product of terrestrial life, possibly a sulphur one, which needs to have quite a lot of energy input to form but is then stable and has no known non-biochemical routes to its formation, that is, including the biochemical route involving the evolution of a technological species which can do sums like many of us, which I’m sure nobody sensible is suggesting. This is the latest stage in a long history of claims about Martians, and at some point it was considered so certain that there was intelligent life there that a competition for ways to communicate with aliens specifically excluded Mars because it was thought too easy. There have been claims of canals, lichens, and later on a scaled-down set of claims regarding something like bacteria. In particular there was the Labeled Release (American spelling) Experiment on the Viking lander which appeared to show positive results, i.e. the results which NASA had pre-decided would be best explained by life, but the problem was that the other two experiments were negative. It’s frustrated me until recently that they did this but right now it seems more like the way the scientific method works: come up with an idea, test it and then do everything you can possibly think of to prove a positive result wrong. On the other hand, looking at it non-scientifically at the time, it felt like they were in denial about the existence of life, possibly because it’s an audacious and potentially career-ending claim if it ends up being refuted, but also because it’s such an Earth-shattering claim. But this puzzles me a bit because in fact for a long time, since at least 1877 up until 1965, it was basically considered a dead cert that there was life there, and often also on Venus at the same time, and it didn’t seem to make much difference to the human race that we thought it was out there. Maybe this is to do with most people not being very focussed on space, but at least in the ’50s and ’60s this was definitely not so and in fact this was probably one source of inspiration for Bowie’s track. Getting back to Viking, it’s now thought that the results of the experiment were caused by perchlorate in the soil, a bleach-like substance which it’s also been claimed originated from the sterilisation process in the reaction chamber before the lander left Earth, although I think it’s now established that perchlorate is high in Martian soil. In fact I seem to remember (look at me failing to check my sources – sorry) that it makes Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ unfeasible, though maybe ingenuity would’ve got him out of his predicament some other way. Weir has since said that Watney could’ve washed it thoroughly first, so maybe, although wouldn’t he then have ended up with most of his water full of bleach? Maybe not. I’m not a chemist. There’s also been a view that the dendritic appearance of some terrain close to the poles is due to the action of microbes, something I went into in depth when I put the Martian calendar for 214 TE (telescopic era) together if anyone remembers that – it involved me throwing an inkjet printer into the larder with considerable force at one point.

What’s happened is that the Perseverence Rover in Jezero Crater has found what they call “leopard spots” on rock samples. Organic carbon-containing mudstones have been found to contain nodules and reaction fronts rich in ferrous iron phosphate and sulphide minerals. Vivianite is one possible candidate, which probably coincidentally is found in bivalve shells, and another is greigite, which is a ferrimagnetic mineral regarded as a biosignature, in other words a sign of life. Other processes which could have produced these minerals involve heating which doesn’t seem to have happened to the rocks in question as they would show other signs, for instance in their crystal structure. It seems that redox reactions have occurred there, that is, reactions involving the transfer of electrons between substances, one example of which is burning and another internal respiration. These rocks are around three thousand million years old, and at that time the same chemical reactions were occurring on Earth, mediated by microorganisms. So there are these two neighbouring planets on both of which chemical reactions usually associated with life are taking place. On Earth, it’s known that this is due to life, but what about Mars? The paper in question has eliminated other possibilities as likely explanations. Further investigation by NASA is of course not likely to occur due to funding cuts, but China might end up doing a sample return mission, that is, bringing samples back to Earth, in the next decade.

For me there are a couple of takeaways from this. One is that space exploration moves agonisingly slowly. This is probably an artifact of being born in the 1960s CE., but I was under the impression that there would be a human mission to the Red Planet from 1979 to 1981. This then got repeatedly postponed. The other is that science tends to do the same thing, although it’s also punctuated by revolutionary bursts of activity, according to the philosopher Thomas Kuhn anyway. It’s very cautious and tries hard to be boring. We seem to be edging very gradually into a position of accepting that there has been life elsewhere in the Universe, and that it was also found elsewhere in this solar system in a similar condition to its state on Earth at the time. Whether it exists on Mars now is another question, although of course “life finds a way”. Whereas that’s a bit of pop-culture tat, there is an element of truth in it and to be fair it’s quite a good line. You only have to look at a seedling growing between two paving stones to see that, but living on a practically airless, arid rock bathed in ultraviolet and dropping daily below the temperature of Antarctica is a considerably taller order than that. Maybe.

There are several possible worlds in this solar system other than Earth which may be hospitable to life as we know it. These include Venus, Mars, Ceres, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, possibly Jupiter, Enceladus, Titan and maybe even Triton, Pluto and Charon. Several of these are quite a bit friendlier to it than Mars, although the question of it arising in those places in the first place also arises. Maybe it didn’t arise on those worlds though, and simply seeded them having arisen in space. If that’s so, maybe it’s the cloud that formed this solar system which gave rise to life, which then arrived on various planets, moons, asteroids, comets, wherever, and either died or, metaphorically, took root there. If that’s so, with reference to the previous post on here, it would probably show up as having the same chirality of molecules as we, i.e. left-handed proteins and right-handed carbs. It’s been suggested that life here must have pre-dated the Earth for two reasons: it seemed to arrive almost before it was possible for it to form, and looking at mutation rates in DNA takes it back to a point before the formation of this planet. To clarify, there’s a set mutation rate in DNA and RNA which enables scientists to date roughly when diverse organisms had a common ancestor, and incidentally this is usually before the first definite members of two groups turn up separately as fossils, which could mean a couple of things. The complexity of many genomes has increased over time as well, and this too can be measured from the genes which organisms still share. If you extrapolate these rates back to the point where the minimum information for an organism to function is present in the genome, you get a period of about nine or ten thousand million years ago, or roughly twice the age of the Earth. This isn’t generally regarded as solid evidence though. What it does suggest, interestingly, is that not only does life here descend from organisms present in the solar nebula, but actually it’s from a source which existed before this solar system had even begun to form.

I’m not going to base anything firmly on that possibility, but others have been suggested, one of which is that life arrived here from Mars aeons ago, which is supported by the likelihood that Mars was probably actually friendlier to life back then than Earth was. These redox reactions may be from the exact same taxon of organisms on both planets. And this is where it gets difficult.

David Bowie asked “is there life on Mars?”, but was this the right question? Many people have said that if life can be found there, or in or on any other world in this solar system, it guarantees that there’s life elsewhere in the Universe. Well, it really, really does not. Suppose we do find incontrovertible evidence that there is, just now, life on Mars, and also on several other worlds in this solar system, and moreover that it’s remarkably similar in some ways to life on Earth, for instance possibly sharing some genes with us, and has the same chiralities in proteins and carbs as us. That means that all of that life has a common ancestor. That common ancestor might have arisen in this solar system, or at least locally before this solar system formed. In terms of chirality, maybe there’s something about the processes of the Universe which lead right- and left-handed molecules of the respective types to form and persist while their mirror images don’t, or maybe there’s something about mirror life which means it won’t function, in which case all life of the kind we know in the Universe would have those chiralities for some very fundamental reason, but we’re still drawing conclusions from a very small sample. Maybe there’s either just something about this solar system which makes it more likely that life would emerge here, such as the relative abundance of phosphorus, or maybe it just did emerge here against all odds because we live in a very large Universe, many of whose planets are covered in a reddish-brown tarry goo instead of life.

For all we know, planets and moons here could be rich in life forms, and that would be a cheering thought, but that doesn’t of itself guarantee that the rest of the Cosmos is not utterly barren. For all we know, there could be endless lifeless worlds filling the Universe, which nothing whatsoever wrong with them but simply because the chances of it arising are vanishingly small. I’m sometimes haunted by the thought of some very, very Earth-like planet orbiting, I dunno, Delta Pavonis or whatever, with a perfectly comfortable surface temperature, oceans, continents, rain, thunderstorms, rainbows, mud, puddles children would love to splash in, sunsets over idyllic beaches lovers could walk along, or other phenomena alien beings could appreciate in their own way if they existed, but which will never, ever even see a single bacterium before their stars overheat and destroy them. Trillions of them, all without life. And this solar system being full of life would be of no significance, no consequence to that situation, because life just arose this one time. And this is why I say that if it could be proven that life existed nowhere in the Universe, I would stop worshipping God. It’s like a deal-breaker in a relationship for me. I would be terminally angry with such a Creator for sustaining in existence such a vast and uninhabited Cosmos. It would be really bad.

This, then, is why I say David Bowie is asking the wrong question. It’s the right one if understood in terms broader than just Mars, that is, if Mars is just a stand-in for another planet or other location where life could persist. Mars is just our next door neighbour, and we already know our bushes might end up growing over the fence or our aphids might end up infesting next door’s roses. Big deal. The Universe is so big that the size of this solar system is nothing to it.

The Celestial Mythos

We’ve probably all imagined a group of prehistoric humans sitting around a campfire in the night, looking up at the stars and telling stories about them. Some of these stories crop up all over the planet in cultures which seem to have no connection. For instance, the Pleiades are very often called the Seven Sisters all over the world, and there are countless interpretations of Cynthia/the Moon either having a face or some kind of quadrupedal animal with long hind legs and a pair of projections on the head. I personally see a rabbit but many other people say it’s a face, which I can’t see. Given the uneventful nature of the lunar surface, presumably the earliest four-footed beasts crawled out of the water to see the same pattern as we see. The Seven Sisters, on the other hand, are younger than the non-avian dinosaurs and in any case the stars move around too much for them to be visible for more than a short period of time, geologically speaking, in a recognisable form, except for the Sun of course. In any case, it doesn’t stretch credulity particularly far to imagine Palaeolithic humans calling them the Seven Sisters too, or “Septm Swesores” many millennia later.

It seems clear, then, that we’ve long looked up into the night sky and made up stories about what we see there. We’ve put a ship up there in the form of the Argo, now broken down into the Poop Deck, Sails, Pyx and Keel (not sure about the Pyx). There’s a River, various monsters and various heroes, such as Eridanus, Hydra, Hydrus, Draco, Serpens, Ophiuchus, Perseus and Hercules. Stories also connect these to each other, for example with the Crow and the Cup being on opposite sides of the sky so that the former is always thirstily croaking for the contents of the latter. We imagined tales of heroes, rescue missions, voyages and fights with monsters, and we’ve done this for millennia. This is just Western sky lore of course, but you get the idea.

Now, there is a very broad genre referred to as science fiction. I’ve defined it in the past as “fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting”, and another way I look at it is fiction whose characters are ideas rather than protagonists. The reason I used the former was to exclude ‘Star Wars’. When I say ‘Star Wars’, I’m not talking about whatever happened to it after ‘Return Of The Jedi’ but the original trilogy of films, ‘Splinter In The Mind’s Eye’, the various comic strips and radio series, and I suppose the holiday Xmas special or whatever it’s called. I’m like Freddy Mercury in that “I don’t like ‘Star Wars'”. It’s possible, likely in fact, that it’s dramatically changed since I saw ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in about 1980 CE, and possibly even improved, but the reason I can’t stand it as I conceive of it is that it’s all about the spectacle and possibly a kind of mythic approach set in space, and also in a time and place, if that’s not too focussed a word, not able to be mapped upon our current time and place, meaning that it can be neither a warning nor an aspiration. It’s basically sword and sorcery dressed up in a sci-fi costume, and the whole thing just really winds me up. The heaps of scientific implausibility don’t help, but that kind of thing can occur in a much more engaging way, as for example it does in Brian Aldiss’s ‘Hothouse’. Because it attempts to communicate some kind of “message”, which is potentially a fairly crass thing to do in itself, to do with the idea that certain truths are timeless, and universalism is fine by the way, there’s no need for the setting. It could be in Middle Earth and it would make no difference. But what ‘Star Wars’ undoubtedly is, is space opera.

I’ll come back to slagging it off later, while taking a break to define various opera. The term “space opera” was coined as a pejorative term for a particular genre, or perhaps sub-genre, in about 1940, connected to “soap opera” and further back to “horse opera”, a possibly disparaging term for the Western, i.e. Wild West, genre of cinema. The last of these has long since fallen out of use, probably before Westerns faded from view, but soaps are still going strong as is the term. This is, I suspect widely known, but I’ll say it anyway: soap opera get their name from the fact that they were originally extended commercials for I think washing powder in the 1930s, and as “opera” seems to be a disparaging word, it’s clearly meant to classify these three types of cultural product as intellectually undemanding psychic chewing gum. I’ve followed three soaps in recent years: ‘Casualty’, ‘The Archers’ and ‘Ros na Rún’. Of these, the last is probably the most soapy, and I have to admit very enjoyable for just that reason. I have the RTE Player on this laptop solely so I can watch it, although I haven’t in a while because I’ve lost track of where I left off. ‘Casualty’ I preferred when it was like a kind of detective story of finding out what was going on in someone’s life, so for example an old woman with no medical experience manages to diagnose another patient waiting for treatment with myasthenia gravis or a blind woman is hit by a careless cyclist and finds her sight has been restored. I am, however, still able to enjoy it in differently than how I used to. ‘Casualty’ is a useful case in point here since it’s linked with the defunct ‘Holby City’. I maintain that ‘Holby City’ is science fiction whereas ‘Casualty’ is not, and the whole cluster of elements between the various series involved is quite revealing in this respect. ‘Casualty’ used to be drama whose plot depended on the setting to a greater extent than it does now, and the scientific and technological aspects of the storylines used to be more central to the drama, whereas now they are much more human interest oriented. ‘Holby City’, which, and I have to say this, ought to be an abstract noun, was science fiction because there was actual medical research going on in it such as drug discovery, the use of gold nanoparticles for cardiac therapy and whatever it was Marwood (John Gaskell) was doing before he immersed himself in the loch. So it was literally science fiction some of the time. The characters would pursue fictional scientific endeavours which were based on established real-world theories but had not been undertaken in that direction in real life, and that literally is science fiction. The plot did depend on the setting too, because, well, here’s a case study. Gaskell manages to reverse motor neurone disease for a patient in Portugal through stem cell therapy, then attempts to do the same for a patient with multiple sclerosis by removing a nerve from her ankle and “gluing” it into her spinal column with stem cells. Even though this leads to an infection, he refuses either to remove the graft or admit that he inadvertently caused it. My recollection is that this storyline ends with him drowning himself but I can’t see that on the summary I’ve just read. The Motor Neurone Disease Association complained about this story line as holding out false hope for sufferers, and this is I’m sure accurate but only one possible take on the issue. As I understand it, olfactory nerves have been experimentally implanted in spinal cords to bridge injuries caused by trauma, and this doesn’t seem that dissimilar, although it is dissimilar, and that’s the point: it’s a scientifically-based story which includes elements of the character’s arrogance and medical objectification of his patients, and it’s more likely to be perceived as holding out false hope if the series is seen as a mainstream medical drama. If it’s seen as science fiction, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” on which so much of that genre is based carries the audience through by framing it as an escapist fantasy: wouldn’t it be nice if my motor neurone disease could be cured? Hence ‘Holby City’ could’ve been better received in various ways if it had been understood as science fiction and not mainstream medical drama.

That willing suspension of disbelief operates elsewhere in story-telling, including of course magical realism and fantasy, but also space opera. It’s something that actually brackets space opera and science fiction together. However, science fiction is not space opera. SF is often seen as originating with Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, although that also has elements of gothic horror. It does, however, date further back than that. Kepler’s ‘Somnium’ is to my mind very clearly science fiction and also very clearly not space opera. The novel was published in 1634, and unsurprisingly recounts a dream whose protagonist travels to the lunar surface and witnesses the Earth seen from space, the captured rotation of a month-long day, the extreme contrast in temperatures experienced on that body between its day and night, describes Lagrangian points, and rather oddly has the location changed to be closer to Earth even though Kepler himself discovered the laws of planetary motion which placed it incontrovertibly where it is. It was written as fiction to avoid unwanted attention from the Church, as I understand it. It actually started as a dissertation and was published posthumously. Obviously the events described are imaginary, but the scientific principles are real and as far as I know there is no earlier example of this kind of literature known. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ dates from 1726, and focusses on satire although it does have some science fictional features.

To someone who knows about the generally reported history of science fiction, my placement of ‘Somnium’ as the first example of the genre might seem to be mistaken, because it looks like I’m ignoring something else which is a lot older and more significant. There’s a reason for this, which is probably quite evident from the distinction I made earlier, but for now I want to return to the idea of space opera.

So: space opera was described by Wilson Tucker in 1941 as a “hacky, grinding, stinking outworn spaceship yarn”. The referent was soon extended and altered from this, as it could easily refer to something on a relatively small scale, and applied to lively adventure stories involving often violent conflict in space. The canvas got a lot larger. The original phrase was meant to be insulting, and from the perspective of the more cerebral science fiction it feels justified. Just to be clear, space opera is a genre apart. It isn’t science fiction and it’s none the worse for not being it. The same, in my opinion, applies to ‘Doctor Who’, although that can occasionally dip into SF territory and it definitely isn’t space opera. It isn’t a bad thing that these are not science fiction, although they can be bad or good and they don’t particularly appeal to me on the whole. Space opera, crucially, has a grand scope, heroic protagonists, action-driven plots, romantic and emotionally evocative themes, melodrama, sharp moral distinctions and spectacular technology. It often also has aliens, but not always. ‘Star Wars’ as I know it is a good example of the genre. It is not, and I can’t emphasise this strongly enough, science fiction, even though many SF fans would disagree.

You may have picked up a note of disdain for the genre in this, and I’m not going to lie: I dislike space opera quite intensely. It thrives on spectacle, portrays conservative values and politics as permanent and is scientifically hugely implausible. These are, though, possible clues as to its nature and here, something interesting is going on. I intend to illustrate this with the question: what was the first space opera? “The answer may surprise you.”

First of all, ‘Star Wars’ is probably the most prominent space opera and shows the influence of predecessors, but it was easy to do that because the genre had already been well-established. The battle scenes are very obviously taken from war films. Other aspects are taken from the Saturday children’s matinée serials, particularly ‘Flash Gordon’ and ‘Buck Rogers’. The melée battles are akin to Robin Hood and Errol Flynn swashbucklers, and are one of the more obviously absurd aspects. As well as all that, there’s a more continuous space opera and sci-fi lineage, whose most obvious work is Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series. It just brazenly steals huge portions of ‘Dune’ without any hint of shame. The evil empire, a desert planet, the centrality of water management on Tatooine, a Messiah-like figure, a secret fraternity with psychic powers, and apparently ‘Star Wars’ even has Spice! It is of course said that good writers borrow and great writers steal, but because I don’t generally feel well-disposed towards space opera generally and loathe ‘Star Wars’, this bothers me more than it should, because I think George Lucas is an unoriginal writer who managed to pass the franchise off as something groundbreaking because the people it was aimed at didn’t read those sorts of books. And that’s forgivable given the doorstep-like nature of ‘Dune’, which must be offputting to many, but it’s not like even that was the first.

‘Dune’ is a reaction to the Foundation Trilogy. In ‘Dune’, feudalism is portrayed as the default form of human society. It encapsulates my nightmare that progressive politics might be a brief aberration in human history. It’s kind of like the Foundation Trilogy turned upside-down. Whereas the Mule is seen as a threat because he’s an influential individual with psychic powers who can disrupt the Seldon Plan, Muad’Dib is a flawed hero who can save the Galaxy through them. It’s very much about individuals mattering. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Herbert’s approach, even the fact that Asimov was a major influence on him, though as a way of showing how things shouldn’t be done in his view. ‘Dune’ also shares with Asimov the idea of a human-only Galaxy.

Going back to the Foundation Trilogy, this is a bit of an anomaly as the genre goes. A lot of Asimov’s writing consists of people having conversations in rooms far away from the action, and the Trilogy has a lot of this, although it does have space battles. Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning at this point that I’m talking about all of this as if nothing happened after about 1981, so I’m not interested in the TV series, in the ‘Dune’ films, later works in the Foundation series or its later links with the Robot stories, or whatever happened to ‘Star Wars’ after ‘Return Of The Jedi’. This is an historical perspective I’m trying to construct here. The Foundation Trilogy is Gibbon’s ‘Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire’ in space. Asimov admits as much. It differs from Gibbon in that at the start of the whole series, someone develops a branch of mathematics which can predict the broad future of history provided the scale is large enough and the populace as a whole are unaware of the predictions. ‘Dune’ was published in 1965. Asimov started the Foundation Trilogy in 1941. It’s a very dull read, I think, but it contains the essential features of space opera and also other very widespread tropes seen in it: a galactic empire, very large scale, space battles, innumerable settled and habitable planets and, crucially, faster-than-light (FTL) travel. I’m not aware of any space opera written in modern times which doesn’t have FTL starships in it.

Going further back again, there’s what looks like the beginning of the genre in the works of E E ‘Doc’ Smith: the later Lensman series and the earlier Skylark of Space. I’ve noticed that more recent editions of his novels now show them fairly as co-authored by Lee Hawkins Garby. This is a woman Smith went to school with who went uncredited for decades after his death, over to whom he handed all the “squishy, human, emotional bits” of his stories while he got on with the supposèdly meatier parts of the plot with all the starships and rayguns and stuff. I have read a couple of his short stories, but find his novels hard to get anywhere with, in a similar way to how intolerable I find ‘Return Of The Jedi’ which I can watch about ten minutes of with gritted teeth before I succumb to the urge to turn it off and go and do something less boring instead. Consequently, it’s a bit difficult for me to comment meaningfully on either Lensman or Skylark. It’s definitely worthwhile looking at the plot of the Lensman series because of what it reveals about space opera.

The basic idea behind the series is that there are two races of aliens who are manipulating the development of intelligent life in the Galaxy from behind the scenes: the Arisians, peaceful enlightened beings, and Eddorians, slug-like selfish and basically evil blob aliens from another dimension. The Arisians want to guide life towards enlightenment and the Eddorians just want to rule like mafiosi. In a secret breeding program mediated by subtle psychic manipulation, the Arisians gently nudge life on Earth and elsewhere in the direction of wisdom and heroism to counteract the plans of the Eddorians. The breeding program culminates in the emergence of the “Lensmen”, whom I assume to be universally male given the cultural setting of the time and place of writing. These are heroic and morally impeccable men who can bear a crystalline device called the Lens, which can only be worn by people of such character and functions as a telepathy device, universal translator, lie detector, protects against psychic attacks, destroys the minds of the enemy and verifies the status of the Lensman. That all seems highly convenient, I must say. The scope of the series is literally aeons.

The Lensman series began publication in 1934 in serialised form, as was the usual arrangement at the time. Several of its aspects are interesting in view of – well, something I’ll come to in a bit. It was preceded by the ‘Skylark’ series, whose first part was written in 1915, which to my mind makes it quite startlingly old, and the little I’ve read of it comes across as very old-fashioned in style. It begins with a scientist accidentally inventing a space drive, the idea being immediately copied by his enemy and the two of them using the principle to build starships and engage in a cosmic battle involving multiple star systems and planets. It seems to be far more primitive and sketchily written than the later series, but it’s also crucial in setting the pre-conditions for the space opera written afterwards, because of one major aspect: the date it was written. In 1905, Albert Einstein, acting on the Michelson-Morley Experiment, began to wrestle with the issue that the speed of light was constant in all directions regardless of the speed of the observer, and of course the ultimate solution to this problem is special relativity and the conclusion that it’s impossible to travel faster than light. Special relativity was generally accepted by physicists by the 1920s. However, E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s PhD was on bleaching flour with nitrogen oxides and its effect on baking qualities, because he was a food chemist, and at the time it may also have seemed that the speed of light being a hard limit was highly provisional and subject to refutation relatively (groan) easily. Over a century later, it seems very much baked-in. In fact it might even have been that he wasn’t even aware of Einstein’s theory when he started writing the series, and this has the interesting consequence that his version of space travel is kind of Newtonian, except that he also thinks inertia can be cancelled out without too much difficulty.

This one principle, that Smith started writing before special relativity was well-established, constitutes a sine qua non of space opera. Without some means of moving faster than light, or perhaps travelling without moving as with ‘Dune’, it just becomes completely implausible for scientific as well as other reasons. Later writers have had to come up with some kind of workaround for this, but it wouldn’t be there in the first place were it not for the highly specific timing of ‘Skylark Of Space’. It’s quite remarkable.

E E Smith was also writing at a time when H G Wells still had more than three decades ahead of him and even Jules Verne had only died recently. If his writing is to be considered SF, it still shows a remarkably inventive departure and spatial “zooming out” compared to his contemporary and near-contemporary. H G Wells does in fact make, so far as I can tell, a single mention of humans settling on an exoplanet, circling Sirius, but it’s after the Day of Judgement and God does it. There’s no technological method through which this happens and it isn’t part of a concerted, human-led expansion into space by their own devices in any way. This was in 1899. Compared to science fiction, space opera just seemed to have come along and plonked itself down unceremoniously in the middle of everything without any regard for plausibility or even being particularly pensive. It’s a very different beast than sci-fi. Another aspect of this is that Smith was able to write about this unknown realm over all our heads with the possible prospect of humans entering it one day in the very distant future. Olaf Stapledon, writing in 1930, envisaged human spaceflight not beginning for several hundred million years after the twentieth century. It’s hard to cast one’s mind far enough back to realise how completely fantastic the idea of going into space used to be, and yet this is well within living memory. It gives us a different perspective on space opera entirely.

Now for the elephant in the room. People who know the history of science fiction fairly well will have noticed that there’s one particular major work of literature which up until now I’ve completely ignored. There’s a reason for this. Far from disrupting my thesis, it really goes some way towards proving the point I will eventually be making. Before I get to it, though, I should point out that its context surprised me, as I’d always thought of the novel as an invention of something like the fifteenth century with works like ‘Le Mort D’Arthur’ and ‘Tirant lo Blanch’, then eventually ‘Don Quixote’. Apparently not. It seems to be seen as central to the nature of the novel that it’s written in prose rather than verse, which apparently started to happen in the early thirteenth century. Also, apparently it was independently developed in China. It needs a widespread readership, which is helped by literacy and the invention of the printing press, so it’s all the more surprising, to me anyway, that there is actually a total of five novels which survive in complete form from Ancient Greece: ‘Daphnis And Chloe’, ‘Aethiopica’, ‘The Ephesian Tale’, ‘Leucippe and Clitophon’ and ‘Callirhoe’. There are also fragments of others and a further complete novel survives in Persian translation. It’s extended prose fiction with a coherent narrative, plot and characters. I mean, I don’t know what more you want from me: these are novels. I know it seems anachronistic, but they existed and some of them survive. On the whole, they form a genre. They’re usually about two lovers whose love is tested by various difficulties, threats and temptations. Pirates are often involved and they tend to travel around the Mediterranean a lot, can be tempted by riches to break up. They might be compared to Mills And Boon, but with more gods. In fact, the existence of these novels, and the fact that they were written in the Koiné register rather than Katharevousa or whatever passed for it at the time, puts the New Testament into context for me. I feel that the Bible was completed as a text intended to speak to the common person and not the highly-educated. It seems to have the same audience, and in one case even a similar plot line.

Right: here we go then, the moment someone might’ve been waiting for: Lucian of Samosata!

Lucian of Samosata was a second century Syrian satirist writing in Greek who authored a satirical novel called ‘A True Story’. This was, as has been noted on YouTube, basically a space opera! I’m not kidding and this isn’t hyperbole. It’s a parody of travel writing and of the Odyssey. Lucian writes of a ship which, voyaging beyond the Pillars of Hercules, is captured by a whirlwind and blown all the way up to the lunar surface, where the Emperor of the Moon, in a world populated by strange creatures, is happy to meet fellow humans and turns out to be involved in a major space war with the Emperor of the Sun for ownership of Venus. This war is fought by giant vultures and warriors on the backs of giant ants and fleas the size of horses, and there are also spiders involved, spinning webs as part of the defence network. This last detail, incidentally, also crops up in ‘Blake’s 7’ and Brian Aldiss’s ‘Hothouse’. On leaving this conflagration, they go to live in a city inside a whale and travel to the Islands of the Blessèd, where he discusses with Homer whether he really wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. It breaks off abruptly with intimations of a sequel.

First of all, it’s clearly satire. The reason it has a narrative in outer space is to make it seem over-the-top, and it also reminds me of Baron Munchausen. Nevertheless, it does contain many space opera tropes, and the scale is part of that. It has outlandish alien beings, battle in space over another planet as territory, travel to other worlds and a “space ship”. The main difference, apart from being satire, is that it’s interplanetary rather than interstellar or intergalactic, but the scale is still very large. What it definitely isn’t, though, is science fiction. In fact it more or less couldn’t be SF because there wasn’t really any science at the time for it to be fictional about. However, whereas Lucian was writing in a situation where science was basically absent, Smith was also writing without complete information and on the cusp of a moment which would have placed major constraints on what he could convincingly write about. Both could project fanciful tales up into the unknown darkness of the night sky, as it were, and wallow in that freedom from constraint. I also suspect that Smith was entirely ignorant of Lucian’s writing or even existence. Both of them gave the atmosphere a lot of welly. Smith was melodramatic, Lucian comedic.

Taking a different stance again is a third author, Doris Lessing. I am very slightly familiar with Lessing’s writing, having read ‘The Grass Is Singing’. I probably should’ve read ‘The Golden Notebook’ and ‘The Good Terrorist’ but I haven’t. I think of Lessing as a thoroughly literary author and therefore beyond my understanding or ability to empathise with her writing, and also regard her, as I do many other such authors, with some suspicion as an insidious legislator of how one is supposed to be human. Some people with ADHD report the experience of running their eyes along lines of writing with nothing going in. This is not something I get with most writing but I’m pretty sure it would happen if I tried to read her. Also, calling a novel ‘The Good Terrorist’ doesn’t bode well for me as I think the concept of terrorism is only useful to the powerful, so it suggests a conservative outlook. Not to go off on too much of a tangent, this isn’t about the morality of terrorism so much as the idea that violence openly committed by a state is somehow more legitimate. Maybe she meant something else. It might be thought that it was right up my street, and maybe it is, but I doubt I’ll be reading it. I think she might show contempt for people who feel powerless and don’t know what to do to engage with making a difference to the world, which is of course me and many friends through my adult life. Regarding ‘The Golden Notebook’, one thing that might be relevant is an incident early in my relationship with Sarada. I have generally tended to keep at least two different sets of notebooks, one as my diary in a journalling sort of sense and the other for other stuff, for instance if I were doing that right now I’d probably write a lot about graph theory as applied to social media, but also other more personal stuff. Sarada suggested I combine the two, so I did that and it almost immediately gave me writer’s block, which I never experience, in both types of notebook for something like three years. Maybe that could be relevant, I don’t know. I’m almost wilfully ignorant of this kind of writing. I wonder if the separation into different notebooks represents a kind of fragmentation of her identity in a more negative way, probably in connection with the contradictions of women’s roles under patriarchy, but as I say that’s just a guess and I know nothing.

Just as I’m wilfully ignorant of Lessing’s writing, I strongly suspect that she was wilfully ignorant of science fiction and space opera. Nonetheless, she’s called herself a storyteller who feels the same push to write and tell stories as I experience, and going back to that Stone Age camp fire, she would’ve been sitting around it telling stories, perhaps about Canopus and Sirius. And she would’ve been, because it was before the patriarchy even existed. She might have been breastfeeding or kiss-feeding at the same time, but this wouldn’t have interfered with her story-telling urge.

Anyway, as is well-known, Doris Lessing wrote a five-novel series ‘Canopus In Argos’ whose first novel, published in 1979, covers the history of Earth as seen from the perspective of Canopus, an advanced civilisation observing accelerated evolution on this planet, known to them as Shikasta, translated as “stricken”. Earth is initially nurtured by Canopus but a misalignment of the stars leads to an interruption of the flow of the “substance of we-feeling”, and breaks the telepathic lock between Canopus and Shikasta. Consequently, Shammat, the rival empire to Canopus, is then able to seed Earth with discord, environmental destruction, violence and selfishness, hence the name “stricken”, having changed from Rohanda, meaning “fruitful”. Johor, the narrator, whose documents are scattered through the first novel, manifests himself as a human man to guide and enlighten a small group of humans and rescue the planet from turmoil.

The next novel, ‘The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four And Five’, is allegorical and depicts a planet divided into six zones, each at a different stage of spiritual development. Canopus appears to order a marriage between two individuals, the queen of the harmonious, egalitarian and feminine zone three and the king of the militaristic, patriarchy of zone four, to bridge their differences and learn from each other. Later, the king of zone four is ordered to marry the queen of zone five, a chaotic and primitive realm.

Then comes ‘The Sirian Experiments’, which concern a Sirian attempt to guide human development towards technological advancement and bureaucracy which tend to lead to catastrophe on other planets. There are two other novels but I haven’t read any of them and I don’t want to lose focus. But look at the first. Does it not sound to you, broadly speaking because I’m sure the style is very different, like the general idea of Smith’s ‘Lensman’ series? There are two rival cosmic agencies directing the history of humanity, one towards enlightenment, the other with more malign motives, and the more enlightened force leads to a hero being incarnated among the humans. It seems uncannily similar, and the thing is, I don’t think it’s “stolen”. I think Lessing knew practically nothing of space opera. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she would be well-informed about or value. And yet she apparently reproduced a novel whose general outline, though doubtless not tone or detail, is basically the same as E E Smith’s ‘Triplanetary’ so far as I can tell. Moreover, ‘Triplanetary’ began to be serialised in 1934 whereas ‘Shikasta’ was published forty-five years later in 1979. Smith’s series as a whole was a runner-up in the Hugo awards for all-time best series in 1966, losing out to the Foundation Trilogy, so it was also phenomenally well-known and celebrated. That’s like being a runner-up to the Booker Prize, so Lessing’s ignorance, and probably that of her readers and reviewers, is absolutely breathtaking. Just to get this off my chest, and bearing in mind that I don’t actually care for space opera generally, Smith had done all that four and a half decades previously, it was considered old hat by about 1940, although still admired in a retro kind of way, and then along comes Lessing and apparently it’s all wonderful and ground-breaking rather than a heap of tired old rubbish. This is really galling.

All that said though, I honestly don’t believe Lessing ripped him off. I think she was simply writing in ignorance, and in an environment that was equally ignorant, and apparently even proud of that ignorance, considering that genre fiction could not possibly have anything to teach them. These rather annoying preconditions, though, did create a situation where space opera could once again be reinvented, though doubtless in a very different and rather arcane form rather than as popular culture.

So then, there are three separate instances of the genre being created, each isolated from the others and in different circumstances. Lessing’s background was in politics, and incidentally she ought to be very much one of my kind of people, being active in CND, an ex-communist and so on. I know the kind of person she is and many such people have been my friends. Smith, by contrast, was a food chemist, like Margaret Thatcher in a way, and his work was the most influential as he basically created the genre we now call space opera. Lucian seems to have been primarily a literary person writing in the ancient world. All of them, though, seem to have stumbled upon the same genre, even in very different historical circumstances. To me this suggests that space opera was just “out there” waiting to be discovered, actually did get discovered independently at least three times, by people who had nothing in common with each other apart from all being part of Western civilisation.

How does this happen? Has it happened with anything else? And what are the essential features of the genre which define it? I can see an attempt at grandeur and scope, accompanied by a kind of operatic approach to emotion which maybe Lessing didn’t include. I’m just not sure. But I hope you agree that this is remarkable, and once something happens thrice it’s no longer a coincidence.

Pythagoras

I’m currently sitting on our favourite couch. It is in turn sitting in a room downstairs in our house in Scotland. We bought it in England and tried to get it up the stairs of our English house because our living room was upstairs there. We had enormous trouble getting it past the bends in the stairs and eventually I decided to measure the bend and the couch, so I measured the depth and height of the couch and then the three dimensions of which the bend consisted. Using the well known right angle triangle equation a²+b²=c² and taking the square root of c, I was able to calculate the hypotenuse of the couch. I then made the slightly more complex calculation of using the hypotenuse of the dimensions of the stair bend with the height of the ceiling above the stairs to work out the maximum length of an object which could be fitted through the gap, and since that second figure was smaller than c, I was able to prove, and I have to state this carefully to be precise, that the couch would not be able to fit into the space on the stair bend, and therefore it would be impossible to take it up the stairs and put it in our living room, so it remained downstairs. Now there could’ve been some other approaches, such as taking the feet off or the banisters down, but in fact both of those were part of the objects concerned and it wasn’t going to happen because I’m not Bernard Cribbins.

This is of course Pythagoras’s Theorem. People often say they never apply anything they learnt in maths to their lives after leaving school, leading me to conclude that either their lives are unnecessarily hard or that they don’t realise they’re using it, because this kind of problem comes up all the time in everyday adult life and I can only surmise that people think really strangely in this area. I scraped an O-level pass in maths and this is obvious to me. In fact I almost stayed in the CSE group and was the lowest grade person to go “up”. I should also mention that there is a famous Moving Sofa Problem in mathematics, but this isn’t that. The moving sofa problem is the question of which rigid two-dimensional shape of the largest area can be manoeuvred through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width. It didn’t help us because the stairs were three dimensional, i.e. they went up diagonally, turned through two ninety degree angles while continuing to ascend and the ceiling of the ground floor was in the way too. There migh be some couch-stair combinations which it could’ve been useful for, but not this one.

Most people know one thing about Pythagoras, and that’s that he’s responsible for Pythagoras’s Theorem that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the some of the squares on the other two sides of a right angled triangle. This also brings up the issue of the square root of two being irrational, i.e. not being expressible through a ratio, i.e. a fraction, because an isosceles right angled triangle with unit opposite and adjacent sides will have a hypotenuse length equivalent to the square root of two in units. As a child I thought this proved that units of measurement didn’t exist, but obviously that was my child’s mind failing to grasp things properly. The only thing is, Pythagoras probably didn’t think of his theorem. It’s more likely that in order to give it some kudos, people decided to attribute it to him, and it was known about before his time.

Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to satisfactorily answer the question of whether Pythagoras existed. He may well not have done. I want to start by mentioning a few other figures: Nero was the Roman emperor who fiddled while Rome burned and rebuild the city in a much improved condition; George Washington was the guy who cut down the fruit tree as a boy and admitted to it, saying “I cannot tell a lie” and Archimedes was that bloke who got in the bath which overflowed, giving him the inspiration to tell whether a crown was solid gold, and shouted “Eureka!”, running down the street naked. Or maybe not. I haven’t checked these and they’re very likely to be just stories, and actually the question of whom we refer to when we tell stories like this is a modern philosophical problem. So Pythagoras, by the same token, was an ancient Greek philosopher who discovered something important about triangles, was vegetarian, wouldn’t eat beans and thought numbers were very important to the nature of reality. That’s probably more than most people “know” about him.

So I’m going to start with the question of whether he existed. At least three other important Greek men wrote about him and his life: Aristotle the philosopher, Herodotus the historian and Iamblichus the Neoplatonist philosopher. There was a whole school of philosophy named after him which he’s said to have founded, although that doesn’t mean he existed. That school of philosophy has a consistent belief system rather than just being arbitrary unconnected beliefs, so there is such a thing as a Pythagorean philosophy. However, no writings at all can be attributed to him because Pythagorean philosophy was an oral tradition. It was passed on by word of mouth long before it started to be written down, and this of course means it could’ve ended up being distorted even if he did exist. There was also a tendency in the Greco-Roman world for people to attribute ideas and quotes to people to make them seem more important and respectable than they would’ve been perceived as otherwise, rather like how lots of quotes today are attributed to Churchill and Einstein that they never said.

And the thing is, Pythagoras as he was understood in ancient Greek sounds absolutely bizarre. He had a thigh made of gold, was able to be in two places at once and could converse with non-human animals, and there were a few other things about him which were odd-sounding. He comes across as a kind of magical cult leader and demigod, perhaps a shaman or a sage rather than a philosopher. This partly reflects how philosophy was not neatly parcelled off from religion and spirituality as it is today, at least in academia, and what we separate today was actually considered together until at least the time of Newton. The difficulty, in fact, is similar to those of establishing the nature of the real Jesus and Socrates. So we’re in a situation where the one thing everyone thinks they know about him isn’t true and he was seen as some kind of superhero with incredible psychic powers. But in a way the question of whether he existed or not is the most boring thing about him. Everything I say about him from this point on has therefore to be attributed to some kind of possibly mythical or otherwise fictional figure rather than any real person called Pythagoras living in Ancient Greece.

He was seen as an expert on the soul. In Ancient Greek times before him, nobody thought there was a separate soul which survives death. This was more an Ancient Egyptian thing, and for all we know that’s where it originated. Because of this expertise, combined with his belief in reincarnation he was said to be able to remember his past lives. He once got someone to stop beating a dog because he recognised the cries as those of a dead friend reincarnated in the dog’s body. This is also why he was able to talk to members of other species. And whether or not he existed, there was clearly a cult based on his apparent beliefs, and this cult was also rather strange. They believed that the right shoe should always be taken off before the left one but that the left foot should always be washed before the right, that no-one should eat anything red, and they were seriously into numerology and vegetarianism. In fact, before the invention of the English word “vegetarian”, we were called “Pythagoreans”. They also included both women and men, which seems to have been unusual at the time. We may assume that the idea of an institution which admits women to be the exception back then but we don’t actually know. You also had to be silent for five years once you joined. Returning to the vegetarianism, although they did believe in it, justified through the idea of human souls being reincarnated in other forms, they also believed in sacrificing animals to deities. There’s even a story that Pythagoras was once seen eating chicken and replying to the objection that he was supposed to be veggie and not eat live animals by saying that the animal he was eating was dead, and this makes me wonder if they were actually vegetarian or simply sacrificing animals so they could eat them. Even so, many veggies do have stories like that made up about them, and most surviving records about Pythagoras are about criticising him and his followers or lauding him and them. There isn’t much attempting to be objective. Incidentally, although he had a religious cult of his own, he still worshipped the Greek deities of the time and what they did was “extra”: it was still dodekatheism, as it’s known nowadays, but a kind of denomination of it rather than a separate religion.

Pythagoras was of course into maths, which he combined with numerology because at the time there was no distinction. He seems to have been the first person to connect mathematics to an attempt to explain the world. This particular notion has been extremely influential. Even today, a hard science has to include maths to be taken seriously. One of the reasons psychology emphasises statistics so heavily is that it wants to be a “proper” natural science. However, the way Pythagoreans approached maths and its relationship to the physical world back then seems quite different to how they’re approached now. For instance, even numbers were considered female and odd numbers male, and since the number 1 wasn’t considered a number at all because it didn’t have a beginning and an end, five was considered the number of marriage, as it was the union of the first female number with the first male number. The number seven was considered sacred because, being prime, nothing could make it up and it could make up nothing. Two was considered the number of justice because it enabled things to be divided equally into two halves. Three was considered to sum up the whole Universe as it was the first number to have a beginning, middle and end. He also discovered triangular numbers. The number three was considered to represent a human being, and was of course male, representing the threefold virtues of prudence, good fortune and drive. That almost sounds like it’s out of a contemporary self-help book.

Although the links Pythagoras made between numbers and the Universe were peculiar, he also connected geometry and arithmetic more thoroughly than his predecessors, because of the hypotenuse connection with the square root of 2, and because of his theorem, although that had been known to the Babylonians. He was the first person to come up with a method for constructing a dodecahedron, and connected many shapes to the Cosmos, bringing me to what ought to be the most famous thing he was known for: he was the first person to claim Earth was round. Remarkably, although this has turned out to be incorrect, his reasoning had no connection to any observations because science wasn’t there yet. In addition to that, he came up with the idea that Earth and other planets moved in orbits, although oddly not around the Sun but a central fire, and also that there was a counter-Earth, required to make up the numbers in the system. There are convoluted reasons for all this.

This initially peculiar link between the Universe and mathematics, once forged, has stayed ever since and may not in fact be as obvious as it seems. I have suggested before that one solution to the Fermi Paradox (“where are all the aliens?”) might be that they’re all really bad at maths compared to humans, but another solution may be that although they’re perfectly good at maths, they never had a Pythagoras to make a link between the two and it’s never occurred to them to apply maths in this way. Hence their science is still Babylonian in nature, or even less like Western European science than that. They never got any further. If that’s true, it makes Pythagoras, even if he never existed, an incredibly important figure.

Another aspect of all this is that we can look back from our own “rational” viewpoint and poo-poo the idea that he was an ancient Doctor Dolittle, could be in two places at once and remember past lives, when actually maybe he could do all of that and it’s our own restrictive mind sets which have stopped that from happening. This doesn’t sound sane, but when we consider what many Christians believe about Jesus it becomes more a case of us simply having decided that one ancient semi-mythical person has such attributes rather than the other. It only sounds crazy today because we chose to retain the deification of Christ rather than Pythagoras, which could be seen as practically a coin-toss. There is a world not far from here where many millions of people still believe Pythagoras had something in common with C3PO.

Another numerological aspect of Pythagoreanism was that nobody should gather in groups of more than ten because the number ten was 1+2+3+4, so ten in particular was a sacred number to them. This extended to them composing prayers to that number, and I find this interesting because it creates a link between mathematical entities and deities and other spirits. Platonism and intuitionism are two opposing views of maths. Intuitionism holds that humans invent maths as we go along, i.e. it’s a creation of the mind just like a poem might be, whereas Platonism holds that maths is discovered. It’s already out there before we get to it. So for example, there are considered to be eight planets in this solar system. Assuming there are no others, there were also eight planets when the first trilobites appeared 521 million years ago. In fact, at that point there was a number representing the global population of trilobites, as there still is today: zero. So does that mean that the number eight exists independently of human consciousness or, more precisely, the ability to count? I have a strongly atheist friend who is also a Platonist, and she acknowledges that it’s an odd position to be in. The Ontological Argument for God tries to bootstrap God into existence from the concept of God, and this perhaps reflects the notion that God exists as a concept in a more objective manner than an atheist or agnostic would usually be expected to think. The concept of God is “out there” in the Cosmos in some way, and maybe in the same way as maths is said to be by Platonists. But this, well, I’m going to have to use the word “idea” at some point, of deities existing abstractly is usually considered separately nowadays from the idea that squares or numbers exist. We have a partition in our thoughts which Pythagoreans had yet to erect.

This can be directed back on Pythagoras. Clearly the idea of Pythagoras does exist, although it seems to have varied. We have Pythagoras as the triangle guy and the first person to suggest that the world is round, although actually that might’ve been one of his successors. But Pythagoras himself may not have existed in the same sense that Elizabeth I of England did, and as such this accords quite well with the general attitudes of the time and the problems of ancient history. Also, back at that time and place, the Greeks seem to have taken their religion quite literally so for them Zeus was as real as Pythagoras whether or not we think of him as real.

On consideration though, I do think he existed in the way we generally understand existence today, i.e. not just as an abstract or mythological entity. The reason for this is that his cult existed and was quite forceful and distinct in nature. It seems to me that a requirement for a large group of people to avoid speaking for five years and never to eat beans sounds like the kind of thing a charismatic leader would get their followers to do, and it really sounds like cultish behaviour by today’s standards. It makes cults seem like constant fixtures in human life rather than phenomena characteristic of the modern world. This is probably not terribly surprising, but maybe this assumes too much, because it might be that cults with leaders are more recent developments connected to individualism and a tendency for people to seek complete answers to life’s problems. I haven’t checked, but I don’t think the Essenes had a founder or leaders.

Here’s the weird bit though. As I’ve said before, although Pythagoreans seem to have been the first people to link maths and science, from today’s perspective they seem to have come up with a list of arbitrary superstitions and ideas without a thorough connection to reality. But despite this, somehow they were able to assert the correct idea that the world is round, which to us seems to depend on observation rather than philosophical or mathematical abstraction. Nobody seems to have had that idea before. Later Greek philosophers came up with ways of testing this and measuring Earth’s size, but it wasn’t those careful tests which led to the initial thought. What are we to make of this? Maybe the idea crept in from somewhere else.

We still have the metric system. Does that maybe represent a similar superstition about numbers? We happen to have ten digits on our hands and it’s led to us producing a system which is easier to use than imperial because of how we count, but are we also partaking of Pythagorean mysticism there? We’ve put that into the box of rationality, but maybe it’s more to do with custom. Also it seems that the real mystery is how maths actually manages to engage with the world at all. Why would this be?

Pre-Emptive Moon Landing Denial

First of all, an apology. I’m generally committed to not referring to our natural satellite as “the Moon” because perspective is important, so I often call it Cynthia. I regret choosing this name, although it’s a valid label since it is one of the Greek lunar goddesses. Some others are Selene, which I like, Diana and Artemis. There’s an association with hunting because a bright nocturnal celestial luminary renders prey more visible. All of these names have a Western bias, so maybe that could be addressed for once as it would be good if one of the best-known and oft-mentioned celestial bodies had a non-European name. Because it also seems weird and distracting to keep calling it (her?) Cynthia, and indeed “her”, much of the time I refer to our companion in circumlocutory terms, so for example I talk about astronauts reaching “the lunar surface” or do what I just did. This is actually already why it’s been called “Luna” rather than “Mensis”, the older Latin name, since “menses” refers to menstruation and the Romans seem to have felt like they were referring to a “period” in the sky, which could’ve been quite positive but they were the Romans so it wasn’t seen that way.

Now for lunar landing denial, and there’s the circumlocution again. Humans did land on the lunar surface. Twelve of them in fact, between 1969 CE and 1972. Many people only remember Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, so I’m going to list all of them here: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Charles “Pete” Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt. There were also six command module pilots and three people who attempted to land but failed due to an explosion. Although I’m tempted to mention their names, along with the three Apollo astronauts killed on the launchpad, I think I’ve made my point: that twelve people have walked on the lunar surface. The reason this needs stating is twofold: most people have no recollection of the other ten and apparently lunar landing deniers are under the impression that there’s only one lunar landing to deny.

How can we be confident that they happened? Well, for example, there are laser reflectors on the surface placed there by Apollo astronauts used by astronomers all over the world, although also one on the Lunokhod automatic lunar rover put there by the Russians, footage of dust kicked up by the Apollo lunar rovers describes a trajectory only possible in a near-vacuum under about one sixth of Earth gravity, returnees develop cataracts significantly earlier than people who have never been there. Add to that that if it really was a conspiracy, all the people involved who knew about it would’ve had to have taken the secret to their graves or haven’t spoken up about it yet. I really can’t be bothered to go into too much detail about this, and other people have done it better than I could, but I’ll mention a couple of things. Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001’ came out around the same time as the Apollo missions, so he is often named as a co-conspirator, but his lunar landscapes look like others did before they were refuted by images from low orbiters or the astronauts themselves: they’re craggy and covered in cracks because the surface was thought to be more or less uneroded, but actual pictures show soft, undulating hills and fairly thick dusty soil, which however, wasn’t as deep as some astronomers expected and didn’t engulf the Lunar Module or the astronauts. The absolute minimum that happened was that the astronauts orbited and dropped probes, and that there was a sample return mission, and if they did all that they may as well have genuinely gone there. So believe me: humans have walked on the lunar surface.

HOWEVER

There is another issue.

Suppose it’s 1968. Apollo has yet to take anyone to another heavenly body. Moreover, it probably never will. This is because if it did, and that was the start of humanity spreading out into space and settling on other planets across the Galaxy, and at the time many people thought it was, that would probably mean that the total population of the human race would dwarf the number of humans who have lived up until now, since at a very conservative estimate there could be a million Earth-like planets suitable for us to live on in the Galaxy. Each of those would only have to have a total population throughout their human history of less than a hundred thousand for the chances of being born before or after Neil Armstrong to be fifty-fifty, and that’s a tiny number of people. Therefore the chances of him setting foot on the Sea of Tranquility are practically zero unless it doesn’t lead to any further missions to settle, there or elsewhere, or for that matter build any space habitats. Therefore, from the perspective of the late 1960s it makes perfect sense to assert that the Apollo missions will either fail or be fake. They’re a hoax.

Only they weren’t, were they? As I’ve just said, the lunar landings happened. Returning to the present though, 2024 right now, the same argument applies, although it is in fact rather stronger because now, more humans have been born than in 1968. We live in a young world. The median age of the world population is now thirty, meaning that most people alive today have been born since 1994. We also lived in a young world back then, with the baby boom for example, though that was just in the West. More people have lived now, and all of them have still lived on this planet. The chances of this happening have fallen for everyone who was born since 1972.

This is of course similar to the Doomsday Argument, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. The Doomsday Argument is an attempt to estimate whenabouts we are in human history by considering one’s birth as a random event in time. Given a thirty-year doubling time in human population growth and a birth in the late 1960s, such as mine, and assuming my birth was about halfway through the total number of human births ever, this would mean that the last human birth would take place around 2130. Right now, this seems to be an overestimate and for environmental reasons to do with climate change the human race can be expected to go extinct in about 2060. That said, human population growth is also slowing, and it’s a highly egocentric argument because if someone else, born say in 2006, were to make the same calculation, even given the same doubling rate of population the last human birth would take place quite a bit later.

We now have the Artemis program, aiming to return humans to the lunar surface in the near future, and to facilitate human missions to Mars. If this happens as described, it sounds like it would be the start of this species spreading into space and we are once again probably confronted with trillions of future humans whose existence entails that living before that happens is very improbable. This is the second time this has happened, in almost exactly the same way. The first time, it actually did happen. This time, just as I would’ve said in 1968, it won’t. Whatever has happened in the past has a 100% probability of having happened because it did happen. This is true in one sense. In another, it isn’t. For instance, if you chose a random nation state in 2000, it would probably be a republic, but if you chose one in 1700 it would probably be a kingdom, and the past can’t be perfectly known. It can, though, probably be known more accurately than many future trends and events. Anyway, this means that because humans did reach the lunar surface, they have a 100% chance of having done so. Paradoxically though, if the same prediction had been made in 1968, it would also probably be true. This does raise issues about the nature of probability.

There’s this thing called “immanentising the Eschaton”, which is forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church. It means trying to make the world end by bringing about the kind of things that seem to be prophesied in the Book of Revelation. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was accused of doing this because of the Cold War. Well, this is what’s worrying me right now: the Artemis program was looking ever more likely but we “know” that it can’t happen, because if it did it would make our current existence improbable. Therefore, events can be expected to intervene to prevent it and any other such events from happening, because we’re alive now and living on Earth rather than in space or on another planet. The more likely it becomes, the more drastic the event preventing it would have to be. We can be confident that no chain of events which leads to a high-population future off Earth can happen, but we don’t know why it won’t. Any extinction event is incompatible with future human beings being born and carries a high degree of certainty, so to speak, of preventing a “space future”. Nuclear holocaust, catastrophic climate change, pandemic, the Artificial General Intelligence apocalypse – any would be fine. We have what feels like an ever-lengthening list of apocalyptic scenarios.

There are ways in which both Apollo and Artemis could be predicted to happen. If they don’t lead to a likely expansion into space, they’re absolutely fine. Apollo was substantially a Cold War publicity stunt by the West, mainly the US, and could be expected not to lead to anything else. In fact, its scaling down and cancellation is possibly “predictable” simply because we’re still here. The same could apply to Artemis. If it’s just a pipe dream, it won’t happen. Also, if it’s hyped and does not in fact lead either to a permanent base or people going to Mars, we might also be safe. On the other hand, anything which looks like it’s going to lead to an open future of humanity living permanently off this planet immediately becomes improbable because of that, and the probability of that happening kind of retroactively “causes” events which prevent it.

This is not necessarily a pessimistic scenario. It simply means that if we have a long future, which right now seems very unlikely, it will be on Earth, and at no point will there be permanent settlements of fertile people in space or on other planets. It also suggests a rather weird solution to the Fermi Paradox – where are all the aliens? Maybe the solution is that everybody realises this and has a failure of nerve, so nobody takes the risk. On the other hand, it also suggests there is a Great Filter approaching. The immediate solution to the Fermi Paradox in this case is the very vague idea that something stops aliens travelling through space, assuming they exist. The obvious alternative is that there are no aliens. It would also mean that the Great Filter hasn’t already happened.

The Great Filter is the idea that sometime between the appearance of the simplest life to the existence of advanced interstellar civilisations, a significant barrier prevents them from reaching this stage. There are two major possibilities: it’s already happened and we’ve gotten through it, and it hasn’t happened yet but it will. It could be pretty benign. For instance, maybe everyone decides not to bother going into space because they want to solve social problems at home, become spiritually enlightened and lose interest in doing so. I’ve mentioned various attempted solutions on here, including the combined importance and scarcity of phosphorus, the possibility that we might just be swamped in a Galaxy teeming with civilisations, that everyone else might be really bad at maths or that we’ve committed some kind of faux pas that puts us beyond the pale. Another intriguing idea, and calling it a possibility may be going too far, is that civilisations get to the point where they discover backwards time travel and destroy themselves to the extent that they never existed in the first place or are automatically pruned by that very discovery. In a way, this might be the same as being that everyone else might actually be too good at maths: so good that they discover time travel using it and that causes them never to have existed.

The Great Filter could be divided into past and future, but there could of course be a third possibility: maybe it’s happening to us right now. Perhaps all our problems are combining together to wipe us out, or a specific event is occurring which is incompatible with us having a future of any kind.

But maybe Artemis won’t lead to an open space future. The plans after the lunar landing are vague and might not lead to anything much in the long term, so it could be a similar stunt to Apollo. The Chinese have a plan to build a base at the South Pole there too though, so the possibility of them making further plans could be considered. Another possibility is private enterprise taking over, but this might not be good. This is where I get into the whole “Up Wing” business, and maybe I shouldn’t go there. It could just be that due to the probabilistic argument, every attempt at a major space development project is destined to fail and Artemis is just one of those. The Chinese program is too, and all of this can be concluded by the simple fact that we’re around now, not having settled elsewhere in the Universe. It isn’t because of any particular reason so much as that our existence ends up selecting a future without space travel. It is, I’ve long thought, very odd that the predicted developments such as rotary space colonies and going to Mars did not come to pass, but maybe it’s just that if they had, the average human being would be someone living thousands of years in the future. If this is so, space exploration might simply look jinxed for no apparent reason. This does actually seem to happen in at least one particular case, referred to as the “Mars Curse”. Only 53% of missions to Mars succeed completely. This may not even be specifically because of something Mars does, as the flights have been known to fail before even leaving the atmosphere. Rather than adopting a superstitious approach, maybe it’s just because of probability: it scuppers the chances of humans getting there if we don’t find out enough about it, so that’s what happens.

If it really is true that the probability argument works, there seem to be at least two applications to prediction here. One is the Doomsday Argument in general, which appears to have fairly major flaws (for instance it might just predict the end of mortality or pessimism rather than the human race because it focusses on the births, but could be about the thought of extinction itself becoming extinct). Another is the possibility of eliminating an apparently plausible future, which may also connect to the Fermi Paradox. But might there not be other things which this kind of argument could predict? The Mars Curse could be a real thing which does not, however, have any causal or for that matter acausal explanation, but is just how things happen to be. It seems to me that this has potential, but it’s all rather imponderable.

Meanwhile in the real world, Artemis faces delays and constantly recedes from the near future, like the invention of efficient fusion power. What a surprise.

Neutrinos & Neŭtrinoj

Okay, let’s just go hell for leather on this. Most of it is just going to come out of my head.

When I was seven, I was really interested in nuclear physics. I had this naive idea that if I knew everything all matter and forces were made of down to the smallest level, I would effectively know everything, full stop. The error of this thought was borne in upon me when I realised I had no idea what the scientific name of the freshwater shrimp was, anything about that animal’s anatomy and so on, and more broadly that just because you knew everything about the building blocks of everything in the Universe didn’t mean you knew much about the things that were made of ’em. Seven year olds, eh?

However, one thing that did impinge upon my learning was that atoms were made up of electrons orbiting a nucleus made of neutrons and protons, that the nuclei were held together by the strong nuclear force carried by pions, light was made up of photons, and protons and neutrons were part of a larger class of fairly massive particles called hadrons, which were generally composed of smaller particles called quarks held together by gluons. This is now such a long time ago that nuclear physics has changed considerably since then and some of the ideas are very outdated. For instance, at one point it was thought that quarks were made up of smaller particles called “rishons”, whose number of types enabled the standard model to be simplified by seeing them as pairs of rishons of a few kinds. Only two types of rishons would be needed for there to be four types of quark. Also back then, the top and bottom quarks had yet to be detected, so people mainly talked about up, down, strangeness and charm, and it hasn’t been lost on me that that’s the title of a Hawkwind album. This was, however, about three years before the album came out and at the time I would’ve been entirely contemptuous and condescending about this piece of music with pretentions to be high art. I should hastily add that I’m not like that any more.

Now it was quite easy for my undeveloped child’s mind to understand all this. Basically, each particle had mass, charge (or no charge) and spin, and these properties defined what that particle was. They were divided into bosons and fermions, and also leptons, mesons and baryons according to their mass from light to heavy. I was for some reason particularly excited about mesons. Many of these particles are unstable, and when they break up their mass, charge and spin need to be conserved. To take a completely wrong example, say there’s a meson with a mass five hundred times that of an electron. If it broke up into two smaller particles, if each has a mass 250 times that of an electron, that would conserve mass. However, this is totally wrong because some of a particle’s mass is lost in binding energy, so each of the pair would actually have a mass more than half of the meson’s. That’s not in any way a real example but because I’m ploughing on at a rate of knots, I’m not looking any details up and can’t remember the properties of a pion, for example. Leptons, incidentally, are not like that. They’re stable, lighter and not made of anything smaller. This is about mesons and baryons. If you asked my seven-year old self, I’d be able to give you the properties, but my late middle-aged and addled brain can no longer so do.

But, more simply, if a neutral particle emits an electron it will become positively charged because electrons are negatively charged and that needs to be preserved.

Not all objects have mass at all. If an object has a mass of zero, it has no choice but to move at the speed of light, which is actually not the specific speed of light but just the fastest speed there is, to quote Monty Python. Neither must every object have charge. Most objects we come across in everyday life, such as combs and loo rolls, tend to have no charge most of the time although if you comb hair with a comb it will become charged and be able to pick up small bits of loo roll, so it does happen. On a subatomic scale, though, there are essentially charged particles, namely the electrons and protons making up atoms, but there also have to be the uncharged neutrons which balance out the nucleus and prevent it exploding. Both protons and neutrons are made up of charged quarks which together add up to one unit of positive charge or no charge because they cancel each other out or they don’t. So that’s also simple.

Spin is however really not simple. Although this makes no sense to our macroscopic brains, spin is quantised and a property like charge and mass. Also, even more strangely, a particle can have non-integral spin, and if it does, it needs to be flipped over twice to reverse its spin. Look at it this way: there’s a gyroscope spinning in a clockwise direction when viewed from above. Usually, to make it spin anticlockwise all you need to do is turn it upside down. If, however, it had non-integral spin, if you turned it upside down, it still wouldn’t be spinning anticlockwise and you’d have to flip it over again to make it spin the other way. This is very weird and as I’m typing this I wonder if I’ve got it wrong but it’s been said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand it, so presumably I do understand this because I don’t.

So why am I bothering to mention this little detail? Well, it was discovered some time ago that the way subatomic particles break down must conserve mass (taking into account that some of their mass is converted to energy when they’re stuck together), electrical charge and also this other property, spin. In order for this to work properly, there must be massless and chargeless particles. These particles seem to be nothing, but they aren’t because they have spin. These are neutrinos, and they come in various types because they’re leptons and they have corresponding more tangible particles, so there are for example muon’s neutrinos and electron’s neutrinos. They are of course bloody weird. The way they’re detected is by filling enormous buried underground tanks with dry cleaning fluid and trying to detect the tiny number of atoms which are changed by interaction with them. Since they’re produced in nuclear reactions, the Sun emits them. It’s been said that a million neutrinos passed through a wall of lead a light year thick, almost all of them would come out the other side. They virtually do not interact with matter. About forty-odd years ago, there was a problem understanding the Sun because it wasn’t producing enough neutrinos. In other words, the massive tanks of dry-cleaning fluid under the Alps or wherever they were kept were not producing detectable numbers of different atoms. I mean, I don’t know how you detect a couple of altered atoms in six hundred tonnes of dry cleaning fluid, but apparently you can. I’ve probably missed the point. Incidentally, I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent but I find it kind of annoying that there is a thing called “dry-cleaning fluid“. How is it dry-cleaning then, eh? And while I’m at it, it used to be used to decaffeinate coffee, or something similar did, and it always used to give me a stomach ache when I drank it. Tangent alert!

Okay, so my point is that for whatever reason I didn’t have any problem accepting that neutrinos existed even though they were massless and practically didn’t interact with matter, at the age of seven. In fact, in 1987 it turned out that neutrinos did in fact have some mass because a couple of hundred thousand years ago, a star exploded in one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies and the neutrinos took a few seconds longer to get here than the light, implying that they were travelling more slowly than light and must therefore have mass.

Now for the famous problem.

Centuries ago, Johannes Kepler worked out that the time it takes a planet to orbit the Sun can be worked out straightforwardly from its distance. To quote Kepler’s Third Law, “the squares of the orbital periods of the planets are directly proportional to the cubes of the semi-major axes of their orbits”. Semi-major axis is the mean distance of a planet’s orbit from the Sun. Isaac Newton generalised this law to come up with the law of gravity, and it’s supposed to apply to everything in the Universe. There’s a lot more, but this is the important bit. It means that if you look, for example, at the triple star system next to the Sun, you can work out from the masses of Proxima Centauri, α Centauri A and B and their distances from each other how long it takes them all to orbit each other. The much closer A and B are close in mass to each other and take eighty years to orbit and Proxima, which is eleven thousand times the distance of Earth from the Sun, takes 550 thousand years to orbit the other two, whose total mass is what matters. However, it doesn’t stay this simple.

If you look at a galaxy, you might think you can calculate its mass from the number of stars in it and their sizes. Galaxies rotate very, very slowly: our solar system takes something like 225 million years to orbit its centre. It ought therefore to be expected that the time taken for a star twice as far out from the centre to orbit this galaxy should be the square root of the cube of twice as long as 225 million years, i.e. a little under three times as long. However, it actually only takes about twice as long. Why?

Obviously you can’t see everything in the Galaxy. If you were looking at this solar system from α Centauri, even with a fantastically powerful telescope, you wouldn’t be able to see Jupiter, any of the other planets or moons, any of the dwarf planets or any of the asteroids, and between the stars there are also rogue planets wandering in interstellar space, dust, maybe black holes and brown dwarf “stars” too dim to see as well as potential comets very slowly orbiting sheer light months from the Sun, so there definitely is missing mass which means galaxies would seem to rotate faster than just counting up the stars would predict, and also, coming back to neutrinos, they also increase the mass of galaxies somewhat. However, for this to work as a way of accounting for how fast galaxies spin, and also how quickly galaxies “near” each other affect each others’ motion, well over three-quarters of the mass of a galaxy would have to consist of this sort of stuff. Maybe it does, but it probably doesn’t because for example 99.8% of the mass of our solar system is the Sun. Therefore it probably isn’t lots of ordinary invisible matter doing this.

Therefore, scientists decided that there must be something called WIMPs – Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. This is by contrast with MACHOs – MAssively Compact Halo Objects – which is the idea that there’s a roughly spherical cloud of massive ordinary matter also orbiting galaxies outside the plane of the arms. I’m about to come to the point by the way. To me, and to a lot of other people, WIMPs seem to be invented just to explain the problem. They’re most of the matter in the Universe, but they conveniently do not interact with the matter we’re familiar with. I paused there because I almost wrote “do not interact with ordinary matter”, but in fact if this is true they actually are “ordinary” matter, and it’s atoms, molecules and light which aren’t, in other words all the stuff which can be detected. Hence I think this is silly and go with a different hypothesis, which is MoND – Modified Newtonian Dynamics. This is the idea that the explanation is that Newton’s laws of gravity only work on relatively small scales and break down if you consider them over thousands of light years or further.

All this said, I am perfectly well aware that I’m no physicist. I did have my doubts about the cosmological constant as a teenager but just thought it was because I didn’t understand physics, then it turned out Albert Einstein had the same doubts and found it embarrassing, so maybe I should listen to my intuition more. Maybe people can be too embedded in their area of expertise to realise the flaws in their thoughts. Or, maybe an outsider just doesn’t understand properly and only thinks she does.

But my point is not about this but ageing and how people accept and reject things as they get older. As a child, I liked the idea of neutrinos because they were absurd and weird, and therefore fascinating. As a fifty-seven year old, and in fact even when I was quite a bit younger, I find the idea of dark matter, which is what I’ve just described, hard to accept even though it’s quite similar in a lot of ways to neutrinos. And that’s the process of becoming more conservative as you get older, and therefore this now becomes not an abstruse argument about physics or cosmology but personality and maturity.

There has been a pattern where young people start off left wing and become right wing old people. This is apparently less true than it used to be. Why this happens is another question. It may be that as one acquires wealth and possessions, one realises that one’s position of poverty and the apparent need to depend on the state for financial support was temporary and would also be for other people, and therefore things will get better or easier if one takes responsibility for things. Or, it could be that as one’s career advances, one makes moral compromises and therefore descends into self-deception and rationalisation for them. Or, again, maybe it’s cognitive decline and an inevitable process of being more easily duped by politicians and media-based propaganda. Conservative ideas are more appealing because they’re about the “good old days”. If this last one is so, the answer to a drift to the right may be just to decide that one was more likely to have been correct before one started losing one’s marbles and freeze one’s political opinions at that stage, but when new situations arise it can be harder to apply those principles than it used to be.

Why has this image appeared at this point on this blog post? Well. . .

I accept that neutrinos exist. Once upon a time, in 1887 CE, a guy called Lazarus Zamenhoff living in Poland invented a language called Esperanto, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. It was designed to be simple and logical, and was specifically constructed in a Europe where the various powers had been at each others’ throats for centuries, so the vocabulary was mainly based on Romance, Germanic, Greek and Slavic roots, plus a few completely invented words. In order to make learning it easier, Zamenhoff introduced the idea that words could be plugged together to change their meaning in a completely regular way, so for example the prefix “mal-” would turn a word into its opposite: “bona” means “good”, “malbona” means “bad”, and more controversially, “knabo” means “boy” and “knabino” girl, and in fact in the original version of the language all the gendered terms are unmarked when masculine and marked when feminine in this way. This is sexist but there are practical reasons for it. As in natural languages which mark this kind of gender, there are ways of working round it.

One of the possible flaws in the language is what this approach to word building does to words which are similar in many languages. For instance, take the English word “school”. In French this is «école», in German ,,Schule”, in Indonesian “sekola” and so on. All words which look and sound similar. In Esperanto, the word for school is “lernejo” – “learn-place”. This is easy to form and break down, and it reduces the need to learn a more opaque word, but the chances are that in many cases the word will already exist in the learner’s native language and there may at least initially be some puzzlement.

Germaine Greer’s famous book is called ‘The Female Eunuch’ in English, the language it was written in. The Esperanto word for “eunuch” is the rather logical word “neŭtro”, related to the adjective “neŭtra”, meaning “neuter”. However, since unmarked nouns in Esperanto usually refer to males or inanimate items, “neŭtro” means “male eunuch”. “-Ino” is the feminising ending. Hence the Esperanto word for “female eunuch” is “neŭtrino”! I don’t know whether Greer’s book has been translated into Esperanto or what its title is if it has, and I also don’t know what the Esperanto word for the elementary particle is, but logic suggests that neutrinos are called something else in Esperanto and the word “neŭtrino” does in fact mean “female eunuch”. If not, the chances are that when Esperantists talk about fundamental particles they say that there are vast tanks of dry-cleaning fluid under the Alps intended to detect female eunuchs and that when scientists detected Supernova 1987A, they noticed that female eunuchs don’t move at the speed of light. Well I could’ve told ’em that.

So what’s my point? Do I have one? Surprisingly, yes. As I’ve got older, like many other people my acceptance of novelty has become less flexible and although I was fine with neutrinos I wasn’t fine with dark matter. Neutrinos were discovered in 1956, though they were theorised earlier. ‘The Female Eunuch’ was published in 1970. Esperanto had its rules laid down in 1887, and although better-designed versions of the language have been proposed since, it’s difficult to accept them because the whole point of Esperanto was that it was supposed to be a single language which everyone could use. I actually think Esperantido is loads better but I wouldn’t use it because it isn’t the original. This rigid design is reflected in the fact that these two concepts, the female eunuch and the neutrino, have happened in the world getting on for a century after the language was devised, but it isn’t open to accepting new ideas in that way. As such, Esperanto represents exactly what happens to us as we get older, but not because we compromise or become more conservative, but simply because we were designed for an earlier age, in the case of Esperanto, one where neutrinos were unknown and second-wave feminism was unthought of.

It occurs to me also that second-wave feminism itself has also been superceded and may be in the same position, but that’s another story.

黑暗森林 – The Dark Forest

I’ve just heard an excellent podcast episode called ‘The 3 Body Problem Problem’, which you can listen to here. It’s very wide-ranging, and be warned, rather despair-inducing. I’m not going to go into too much depth about it, but I am going to talk about the Dark Forest Hypothesis in its social and political, and maybe psychological, setting, which is what that podcast already did.

The new Netflix series ‘The 3-Body Problem’ is an eight-part adaptation of 刘慈欣 (Liú Cíxīn)’s famous and award-winning novel, 三体, the first of a trilogy called ‘地球往事’, translated as ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’. In order to engage with this series in sufficient context, I feel like I’m going to have to zoom out so far that the actual trilogy itself is going to end up looking like an invisibly small dot on an invisibly small dot, and I don’t want that to happen so I’m going to have to break it down a bit. I am deliberately posting names and titles in 汉字 (Hanzi) because of the issues it raises. Two things about this: I am more used to Wade-Giles than pinyin romanisation and I prefer traditional Hanzi to simplified because the latter is trickier to associate with the ideas it represents. Looking at simplified Hanzi, which is what this is, is like having a migraine because there are bits missing from the characters which one really could do with being able to see. Yes this makes me a dinosaur, but non-avian dinosaurs would still be around today were it not for their “left hand down a bit” mishap 66 million years ago and there was basically nothing wrong with them.

I’ve read the first book of the trilogy. I didn’t so much not want to read the rest as find it an unnecessary financial outlay, so it ended there. Netflix too might end it there because they apparently haven’t had as much success out of this extremely expensive series as they’d hoped, so like several other series they may well cancel it way before time, while in the meantime adding lots of fluff to stories which were supposed to end like ’13 Reasons Why’, and while I’m at it, that book and series is interesting because it’s basically ‘An Inspector Calls’ for the twenty-first century and yet manages to be quite unfortunate in its implications regarding bereavement of people who have killed themselves (I don’t use the S-word because it’s not a crime). Anyway, before I get irredeemably off-topic I shall post a

Spoiler Warning!

and be done with it. So if you want to enjoy ‘The 3-Body Problem’, don’t read past here.

Before I get into the broader issues with the Netflix series and the book, I thought I’d explain what the Three Body Problem itself is. First of all, it’s fairly easy to work out where Cynthia (“the Moon”) and Earth are going to be at a given time, so for example we can easily work out when the phases happen, when it rises and sets, how far away they are from each other, when eclipses happen and how long lunar months are, and by extension the times of the tides. A lot of these things are also linked to Earth’s rotation, but the mathematics are fairly straightforward, although because both Earth and Cynthia move in ellipses relative to each other and the centre of mass (the “baycentre”) about which both orbit is not at Earth’s centre, and it would really help to know calculus, which I don’t, to make these calculations. Likewise with the Sun and Earth we know when the equinoctes and solstices are and how far away the barycentre of the two bodies is at any given moment to a high degree of accuracy. This is because Earth, Cynthia and the Sun and Earth are two bodies each when considered in that way. The fact that we can work out all this stuff in both cases also shows something else: that there are some straightforward pretty much accurate solutions for three bodies provided they’re in certain arrangements with each other. There are actually a lot of situations when the movement of three bodies fairly close to each other like the three mentioned here can be determined quite accurately. The case described here is simplified by the fact that Cynthia is both close to and much less massive than Earth and the Sun is much further away and more massive than either. Another very useful case is that of the Lagrange Points, where the balance between the gravity of two of the bodies is equal, leading to a stable point associated with them. Examples of this are sixty degrees behind or ahead of a planet or satellite in the same orbit, some cislunar point between a planet and its star or a planet and its satellite where the gravitational pulls are equal and cancel out, and some translunar point where the pull of Cynthia and Earth are again equal. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, these points form a kind of “rapid transit system” around the Solar System which minimise the energy required to get between the various asteroids, moons and planets. There are other situations too. However, the Universe isn’t usually that neat and the majority of interactions between three bodies in fairly close proximity to each other are chaotic.

You really do need to look away now if you want to avoid spoilers.

The  三体 (Sān tǐ) are technologically competent aliens native to the Alpha Centauri system in the story. The Centauri system is in reality a ternary star system. Two Sun-like stars, one somewhat more massive and warmer than the other, orbit each other at a distance of between eleven and thirty-six times Earth’s distance from the Sun, whereas eleven thousand times the Earth-Sun distance, known as an AU (astronomical unit) from the barycentre orbits a much less massive red dwarf, Proxima, famously the closest star to the Sun except that since it takes half a million years to orbit the system so for some of the time it’s further from us than the other two, ignoring the fact that the entire system and the Solar System are both in their own orbits around the Galaxy. Right now, though, as its name suggests, its the closest. This situation, where two stars orbit each other much more closely than a third, is very common in the Universe and seems to be the most stable arrangement: the stars arrived in these positions after some chaotic behaviour and have now settled down. However, in 刘慈欣’s book, he imagines that a planet situated near these stars would have a chaotic orbit, some of the time getting too hot for complex life, sometimes getting too cold, sometimes being seriously perturbed by their gravity and sometimes almost being ripped apart by it and suffering severe volcanic eruptions. Life on such a planet could be imagined to be very difficult. It’s worth noting that this is not the real situation for most possible orbits of planets in the Centauri system, although it would be so for certain positions, such as for a planet halfway between the Sun-like pair or orbiting the Proxima far enough away to be strongly influenced by that pair’s gravity.

Due to the chaos of their home world, the 三体 decide to travel to Earth, and while doing so they also decide to harness the power of human intelligence by getting us to solve their world’s three-body problem through a VR video game where the player is put on the world in question, represented in a way humans can relate to, and has to find a solution to their predicament.

The first book, ‘三体’, begins in the 1960s during 毛泽东’s (Máo Zédōng’s) Cultural Revolution, where a scientist, 叶哲泰, is being denounced in a Struggle Session for his teaching of Einsteins Theories of Relativity. He is in fact killed in the process and his daughter, 叶文洁, is sentenced to hard labour followed by prison. This leads to her becoming very cynical about the human condition and our ability to improve things ourselves. Later on, she is employed as an indentured servant practicing science at a military base attempting to send and receive messages from any alien civilisations which might exist in other star systems, apparently focussing on the Centauri system. One day, she receives a message from an individual altruistic alien telling her that humans must at all costs cease to attempt broadcasting their existence and attempting to message aliens because it puts us all in danger. Because she now believes there is no way humans can sort out their own problems, 叶文洁 does the opposite, sending an enthusiastic message of welcome to the 三体, i.e. the aliens, and they proceed to plan to invade Earth, a process which will take four centuries because they can only travel at one percent of the speed of light.

There’s plenty more to both the series and the original trilogy, but this is enough to be going on with in terms of the details of the first book, and there is a particularly crucial point which is named after the middle novel of the trilogy: “黑暗森林”, or “The Dark Forest”. 刘慈欣 is not actually the first person to propose this idea.

Anyone who has read much of my blog will know that I think about the Fermi Paradox more than occasionally, but just in case you haven’t come across this, the Fermi Paradox, mentioned by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 CE but not originally his idea, is this: the Universe is vast and there are innumerable Sun-like stars and planets orbiting them, and also æons old, so that life could have evolved from microbes to humans almost three times over or more given its age, and yet we hear nothing from intelligent aliens, are unaware even of the existence of life anywhere else in the Universe and have never been visited by them. In other words, “where is everybody?”. I’ve mentioned a few of the more interesting attempts at solving this problem in this blog. For instance, it might simply be that everyone else is really bad at maths and therefore there’s no rocket science on alien worlds, or it could be that the element phosphorus is always essential to life but is too scarce for it to happen very often, and when there are intelligent life forms, they can’t get out of their little oasis of phosphorus to reach other star systems, where in any case they’d have to take phosphorus with them to establish an outpost. One simple solution is that there’s no life anywhere else in the Universe at all. One I was keen on for a very long time was that other civilisations have something like the ‘Star Trek’ Prime Directive, that they can’t interfere with developing civilisations until they reach a certain stage of development. It could also be that there are plenty of civilisations which reach something like a twentieth century level of technological development but then end up wiping themselves out in a nuclear war, destroying themselves through climate change or developing artificial intelligence which then decides they’re a threat and kills them all. Note that I say “twentieth century level”: we could be living on borrowed time here.

Quite a lot of this is not at all reassuring. Perhaps even less reassuring is 黑暗森林, which is as I say not actually an original idea although it was 刘慈欣 who actually named it that. The exact metaphor was used by Greg Bear in the 1980s. The idea is this. There is silence out there because aliens elsewhere in the Universe are aware that broadcasting their presence would threaten their existence due to potentially hostile threats from other star systems, and humans are simply too naïve to realise what a bad idea it is to tell all and sundry we’re here. We don’t know any of them from Eve, and they could be really dangerous. They could just go, “ooh juicy, another race to enslave and another nice planet to conquer” and do something horrible to everyone. Another way of putting it: “it’s quiet. Too quiet.” It’s like the silence that falls over the clichéed hostile bar when someone from the Other Side enters.

Now I do not like this solution, to say the least. Obviously in saying that I could just be all weird about it and say, “well I don’t like this any more than you do, but facts is facts and it is what it is,” but that’s not what I’m saying. I might not like the course of a fatal disease or the policies of a particular political party, but it’s still possible to find that particular pathology interesting or the implementation of a particular set of policies fiendishly clever or elegant in a Machiavellian way. In this case, however, I see the solution itself as pathological, and apparently I’m not alone in that as you will find if you listen to that podcast. But I already had these misgivings before I heard it. The problem is that it’s very negative and cynical, which doesn’t necessarily make it unappealing, but more than that, it seems to be a reflection of the current state of the society, or perhaps world, in which it was written.

Because the thing is,  ‘地球往事’ is horribly, horribly grim and oppressive feeling. Suppose you look up at the skies and you see stars, an infinite horizon, endless hope and possibility and most of all for me the feeling that the atrocities and Hell we’ve made for ourselves on this small blue dot is as nothing compared to the hope the splendour of this unknown Universe around us shows. Even if it’s devoid of life entirely, it’s still magnificent and majestic, and moreover in spite of the actual Three Body Problem as opposed to the book, most of it works for pretty much of the time in one way or another. And if it isn’t devoid of life, there’s the optimism and awesomeness of a Cosmos replete with possibilities of friendship and fascinating variety. “Infinite variety in infinite combinations” as the Vulcans say.

There’s hardly any point in saying this, but just because something is appealing doesn’t make it plausible. I might be looking up at the sky with foolish, immature and groundless optimism. Absolutely, that could be so, and it’s very hard to decide whatbecause of the silence we all experience from the vast emptiness that surrounds us. So I don’t like it, but more importantly, what do the myths we make up say about us? What does it mean that 刘慈欣, in the 中华人民共和国 (People’s Republic of China) of the twenty-first century CE, is able to get this idea out to popular culture in the West via Netflix? Were there obstacles placed in front of him by the 中国共产党 (CCP) difficult to overcome, or were they not placed there in the first place because he perhaps has a knack of saying what they want him to say? Is he an establishment or an anti-establishment figure, and what does it mean that Netflix are apparently happy to stream what might be 中国共产党 propaganda? Or is it universal in some way, and if so is that universality a good thing or a bad thing?

‘ 三体’ has also been adapted by 腾讯 (Tencent) into a very different version. I know about 腾讯 on a personal level because someone close to me worked in 中国 (the Central State, i.e. China) for some time and the only way we could send messages to each other was through their app, QQ. Now I didn’t trust QQ very much at all and I was careful what I said on it, and I believe that was justified. One way of looking at this is that I’ve been duped by Western anti-Chinese propaganda, but it’s not that simple. QQ is their social media. Our social media are about as trustworthy, and this is not at all to say that 中国共产党 is better than the global megacorps. It’s more that they’re equally bad. It’s not about not trusting 中国. It’s about not trusting any big faceless organisation of any kind, because they simply will not have the interests of the ninety-nine percent at heart. We all know this.

Getting back to the actual Three Body Problem as understood in physics, it seems fairly clear that 刘慈欣 uses it as a metaphor for how unrestricted social systems are chaotic and unpredictable. A laissez-faire economic or social system, or a liberal or social democracy is just such a chaotic system, but it can be simplified by totalitarianism. If the likes of 中国共产党 and 腾讯, i.e. a few large organisations with a high degree of control over society, exist, we no longer have a chaotic Three-Body Problem but at least a special case of the problem like that of the Lagrangian Points or the Sun and Earth. Society can be made sense of and predicted. Likewise, in the West we have something like the social media firms, able to socially manipulate us all, and the US Republican Party, greatly simplifying the West through that extreme degree of control and gaslighting. So Netflix will be fine with streaming ‘The 3-Body Problem’ and by clamouring for a second season, which I must admit I personally want, we’re actually saying yes please, let’s have some more of that tasty propaganda.

There’s more than this though. ‘Star Trek’, and even more so Iain M Banks’s ‘Culture’ series and Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’, all provide a hopeful mythos for the nature of the wider Galaxy and optimism for the future. To quote from Banks’s ‘State Of The Art’:

Here we are with our fabulous GCU, our supreme machine; capable of outgenerating their entire civilization and taking in Proxima Centauri on a day trip…here we are with our ship and our modules and platforms, satellites and scooters and drones and bugs, sieving their planet for its most precious art, its most sensitive secrets, its finest thoughts and greatest achievements…and for all that, for all our power and our superiority in scale, science, technology, thought and behaviour, here was this poor sucker, besotted with them when they didn’t even know he existed, spellbound with them, adoring them; and powerless. An immoral victory for the barbarians.

Not that I was in a much better position myself. I may have wanted the exact opposite of Dervley Linter, but I very much doubted I was going to get my way, either. I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want to keep them safe from us and let them devour themselves; I wanted maximum interference…I wanted to see the junta generals fill their pants when they realized that the future is––in Earth terms––bright, bright red.

Instead of such a myth, we are now asked to adopt 黑暗森林 as the explanation for the silence of the heavens, and maybe beyond that to accept that that silence justifies fear of the Other, and through that fear, as occurs later in the trilogy, that totalitarianism is the only answer. Does that sound at all familiar? Does it perhaps sound like certain members of the Republican Party rejecting democracy and freedom of the press in favour of Project 2025? And yes, it most definitely sounds like something coming out of 中国, but it’s equally at home in the West, and I happen to be mentioning the US Republican Party here but it applies just as much to many other Western countries, including Britain.

You may have struggled with my incessant use of 汉字 in this post but all that really is, most of the time, is a way of transcribing ideas into ideograms like our &’s and @’s. Just as we might look over at that country and think that the Central State has essentially foreign ideas based on the thoughts of “Chairman” Mao, we might also imagine that the capitalist West is free from such things. But it isn’t. It suits the West just fine actually. Nor is the Central State in any wise Communist, because by definition any economy with a stock market isn’t Communist. It’s just as capitalist as we are and it’s actually better at it, to the extent that certain people could learn from them how to be even more capitalist than they are already. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

We are aware that encounters between White people from Western Europe and racialised people elsewhere, such as in Afrika, the Americas and Oceania, have not generally ended well for the latter, and this has often been associated with a mismatch in technology. We might attempt to deduce that this is also what would happen if another species from elsewhere in the Universe with superior technology encountered humanity. However, that makes the rather major and unwarranted assumption that aliens are like us. This is unlikely, partly because they’re alien but also because in this scenario they’ve reached another star system. It also assumes that the greed and materialism dictated by the European-derived economic system is a law of nature and that there’s no other way things can proceed.

This, though, is how I see things going. Here we are on Earth with increasing threats to our civilisation, mostly self-inflicted, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction, anthropogenic climate change and artificial intelligence, among other more prosaic problems. In the meantime, we haven’t been back to Cynthia for over fifty years and there’s no sign of us building large space colonies or going to Mars. Hence we’re missing out on the Overview Effect, or Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Rocket To The Renaissance’, both of which could stand a good chance of changing global consciousness, we have no orbital solar power stations which could satisfy all of our energy needs and enrich Third World nations around the Equator, and various calamities could, and probably will, befall us which space exploration and settlement would’ve prevented. On the other hand, suppose a civilisation out there somewhere has thriven and got past this, or hasn’t got itself into such a pickle in the first place. Those are the kinds of civilisation which we’re likely to end up contacting, because the others simply aren’t viable. Which kind of civilisation we are remains to be seen to some extent, although I know which one I think we are. Or maybe every species of this kind just ends up annihilating itself.

The attempt to contact aliens depicted early on in this series and book is an act of hope, of optimism, which is depicted as bringing down utter catastrophe upon the world. Well no, I’m not going to adopt that view, particularly when it seems to suit certain social forces exceedingly well. I prefer the other. Hence if technological cultures exist elsewhere, they would be of the following kinds: unable or unwilling to leave their planet and perhaps quite healthily uninterested in doing so, in which case they’re not a threat; capable of space travel but also wiping themselves out before leaving their solar system, and yes those would be hostile but are not a threat; able to leave their systems but unwilling to contact us for various reasons; able to leave their systems, peaceful, coöperative and friendly. Or, there could just not be any intelligent life anywhere else. Any of these options has nothing to do with the Dark Forest, is more inspiring than that and is less likely to be useful for political oppression. So there!

Sodding Phosphorus!

Here is a sample of the aforesaid element:

Phosphorus has two main forms, or allotropes. When first extracted, it’s white and extremely toxic. The form illustrated above is red phosphorus of course. Left to itself, white phosphorus gradually turns into its red form, which is why the so-called “white” allotrope usually looks yellow:

By BXXXD, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1096986

This is not, however, supposed to be “all about phosphorus”. Rather, it’s about two issues which affect the element, both to do with life, one on this planet and one in the Universe generally.

I’ll start by explaining the importance of phosphorus to life as we know it. There are six elements making up most of the body of a living organism on Earth. These are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. Carbon is important because it can form chains and rings from which complex molecules can be built. It’s notable that even though silicon is far more abundant on this planet than carbon, life is nonetheless carbon-based. This is to do with things like carbon’s ability to link itself into chains, form double and triple bonds with other atoms, the fact that its atoms are small compared to silicon and the difficulty of getting silicon out of molecules such as silica which may be formed as a result of any putative biochemical processes. Carbon dioxide, the analogue of silicon, is a gas at fairly low temperatures and can be incorporated into other structures. It so happens that I do think silicon-based life is possible, but it would have to be created artificially and exist in some kind of closed environment whose contents were carefully selected. The chances of silicon-based life arising without intelligent intervention are very low. The greater terrestrial abundance of another element should be considered again here, but not right now. Hydrogen and oxygen are of course the constituents of water, a compound which is really unusual in many ways, such as its unusually high melting and boiling points on the surface of this planet, its ability to dissolve other compounds and the fact that it gets less dense as it cools below 4°C. These properties mean respectively that the chemical reactions needed for life as we know it can occur at a temperature where there’s enough energy for them to take place but not so much that they’d be unstable, that the compounds are in a liquid medium conducive to reactions in the first place and that the oceans, lakes and rivers don’t freeze solid from the bottom up. The two constituents are useful in their own right. Oxygen and hydrogen are components of countless compounds, including carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins and fats. Oxygen, unlike chlorine which has been considered as a possible alternate breathing gas for alien life, can form two bonds, meaning that it isn’t the dead end single-bonding atom which the halogens are. Nitrogen is a essential component of protein via its presence in amino acids. Amino acids have a carbon connected to a carboxyl group and an amino group, which can bond together to form chains, and a functional group such as a benzene ring or a sulphur atom which can have other biological functions. Proteins, in other words. There are also chemicals called alkaloids which occur mainly in plants and vary a lot, which have striking pharmacological effects, and the nucleotides are also rings containing nitrogen, encoding genes in DNA and RNA. Nitrogen is actually so reactive that it bonds strongly to other atoms, including other nitrogen atoms, and consequently it’s vital that various organisms can uncouple it and combine it for the benefit of the rest of the biosphere. This is known as nitrogen fixation and is performed mainly by bacteria and certain plants, and also by lightning, but if life had to rely on lightning to do this, it would not be widespread and nitrogen fixed by lightning would be the limiting factor in global biomasse. Sulphur is significantly found in a couple of amino acids and allows proteins to form more complex shapes as are needed, for example, by enzymes and hormone receptors, because they form bridges with other amino acids making the molecule tangle usefully together. It’s also found in hair, nails and various other substances such as the substances responsible for the smell of garlic and onions. Sulphur is actually a bit of an exception in the chief elements required for life because sometimes it can be substituted by either selenium or tellurium, and there are amino acids which have these elements in sulphur’s place, but both of them are much scarcer than sulphur.

Then there’s phosphorus. Phosphorus has more limited functions than the others but these are incredibly vital. It forms part of adenosine triphosphate, which organisms use to transfer energy from respiration to the other functions of the body. It also forms part of the double layers of molecules which form membranes and allow controlled and specialised environments to exist in which the chemical reactions essential to life take place, and also enables substances to be packaged, as with neurotransmitters. Thirdly, it forms the strands of sugar phosphate which hold DNA and RNA together, so even if it didn’t do anything else, some kind of method would have to exist to store genetic information. This is perhaps the least vital role though. A more restricted role is found in most vertebrates, in that it forms part of the mineral matrix of bones and teeth, but there’s plenty of life that doesn’t do this and the usual substances used to make hard parts of animals are silicates and calcium carbonate, among other rarer examples such as iron pyrite. Nonetheless, humans need phosphorus for that reason too, as do our close relatives. However, even the closely related sea urchins use calcium carbonate instead.

Hence several facts emerge from all this. One is that an apparently similar and more abundant element can’t necessarily be used for a similar function, assuming here that life can start from scratch. Another is that elements can get themselves into such a strongly bound state that it would take too much energy to use them for it to be worth it for life. A third is that life will sometimes substitute another element for the one it usually employs if it can. If a rare element is used, there’s usually a good reason for it.

Now the first problem with phosphorus is that it’s much more abundant inside a living thing than in its non-living environment, and the cycle that replenishes it is very slow. Phosphorus usually becomes available to the biosphere on land as a result of continental drift, the formation of mountains and erosion and weathering, and it’s lost to the land when it’s washed into rivers and the sea, where it disappears into sediment before becoming available again millions of years later. In the sea, it’s less of a problem but still a significant one because it’s only available to life as phosphates and it’s often found as phosphides instead. Ironically, there’s also an overabundance problem with phosphates in fertilisers being washed into bodies of water and leading to algal blooms, which can in fact be of cyanobacteria rather than algæ as such. Since some microörganisms can produce extremely powerful toxins, this can lead to massive marine die-offs and contaminated sea food. Where I live, a nearby reservoir was afflicted by an algal bloom and had to be closed off for quite some time, and this can also poison wildlife on land. These can also lead to high biochemical oxygen demand, which is where all the oxygen gets used up and the water becomes anoxic, which is incidentally a cause of mass extinctions, though on a much larger scale, in the oceans. This happens because phosphorus is relatively scarce and a significant limiting factor in how much life is possible in a given area, so a sudden influx of usable phosphate is likely to cause a chemical imbalance.

The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus, Joseph Wright, 1771 and 1795.

This painting is thought to refer to the discovery of the element by Hennig Brand in 1669. Brand discovered it when searching for the Philosopher’s Stone, by heating boiled down urine and collecting the liquid which dripped off it. It turns out that this is actually quite an inefficient process and it’s possible to extract a lot more of the phosphorus by other means. The allotrope illustrated in the painting is unfortunately the highly toxic and dangerous white variety, so the alchemist is putting himself in peril by kneeling so close to the retort. The point to remember in all this is that phosphorus is found in urine, not in huge amounts but enough. This points towards a particular problem, highlighted by Isaac Asimov in his 1971 essay ‘Life’s Bottleneck’, which points out that humans “may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal, and plastics for wood, and yeast for meat, and friendliness for isolation—but for phosphorus there is neither substitute nor replacement”. Urine goes down the toilet and is flushed into the sewers, processed in sewage farms and the phosphorus from it ends up in the sea. It does gradually return to the land in biological ways. For instance, a seagull may die on land and her bones may become part of the terrestrial ecosystem, or she might just poo everywhere and return it that way, but the occasional gull or tern conking out in Bridlington is no compensation for millions of people flushing the loo several times a day. By doing this, we are gradually removing phosphorus from the land and returning it to the sea, whence it won’t return on the whole for millions of years.

Two ways round this suggest themselves. One is to eat more sea food. For a vegan, this is unfeasible and in any case fishing causes a lot of plastic pollution and is unsustainable, but of course it is possible to eat seaweed, and I do this. The other is not to allow urine into sewage in the first place or to process sewage differently. I have been in the habit of dumping urine in the garden, although I haven’t done this as much recently. It also contains potassium, and in particular fixed nitrogen, so in diluted form it is indeed useful for raising crops. However, this is on a small scale and a better system might be to process the sewage differently and put it on the land, being careful to ensure that harmful microbes and medication have been neutralised before doing so. Regarding seaweed, dulse, for example, is 3% of the RDI of phosphorus by dried weight, compared to the much lower amounts in most fish. Cuttlefish is the highest marine animal source. Human urine averages 0.035%, so you’d have to eat a lot of seaweed. However, in isolation, if you don’t, there will be a constant loss of phosphorus to the land. Guano is one solution, but not ideal and only slowly renewable.

The other problem with phosphorus follows from the same scarcity and the same use in living systems, but is more cosmic in scale, and I personally find it more worrying: phosphorus is rare on a cosmic level. In a way, all atomic matter is rare in this sense because the Universe is, as the otherwise really annoying Nick Land once said, “a good try at nothing” (apparently nobody has ever quoted that before, so that’s a first!). The cosmic abundance of the different elements looks like this:

The Y axis is a logarithmic scale, so for instance hydrogen is about ten times as abundant as helium and even in terms of mass is more common than any other element except helium. One notable thing about this graph other than the clear rapid decline in abundance with atomic number (the X axis) is that it zig-zags because even-numbered elements are more frequently found than their odd-numbered neighbours. This is because many elements are formed by the collision of α particles, which consist of two protons and two neutrons. Phosphorus is flanked by Silicon and Sulphur on here, though it isn’t specifically marked, and its atomic number is fifteen, i.e. an odd number. Chlorine, which is quite common in living things because it’s part of salt, is less common still.

Elements are formed in various ways, and this relates to how common they are. The Big Bang led to the formation of mainly hydrogen and helium a few minutes later, as soon as the Universe was cool enough to allow their nuclei to hold together and their nucleons to form, although they would’ve been ionised for quite some time rather than being actual atoms. Small amounts of lithium and beryllium formed in the same way, and if the graph is anything to go by this looks like it might’ve been the main way beryllium in particular formed. Then the stars formed and the pressure inside them led to helium nuclei in particular being pushed together to form heavier elements. The crucial step in this phase is the formation of calcium when three helium nuclei collide. Then, a number of other things happen. The star may end up going supernova and scattering its heavier elements through the local galactic neighbourhood. It may also form new elements in the process of exploding through radiation. This was until fairly recently thought to be the main means heavier elements were formed, but another way has recently been discovered. When a star not quite massive enough to become a black hole collapses, it forms into what is effectively a giant atomic nucleus the size of a city known as a neutron star. When these collide, they kind of “splat” into lots of droplets. Neutrons are only stable within atomic nuclei. Outside them they last about a quarter of an hour before breaking down, and they often become protons in doing so. This means that many of the neutronium droplets form into heavier elements, which are then pushed away by an unimaginably powerful neutrino burst from the neutron stars and again scattered into the galactic neighbourhood. Two elements, beryllium and boron, are mainly formed by cosmic rays splitting heavier atoms. Some, particularly transition metals such as chromium and manganese, formed in white dwarf stars which then exploded, and technetium along with all the heaviest elements, have been generated by human activity.

At first, the abundance of phosphorus didn’t seem to be a big problem. However, after studying supernova remnants, scientists at Cardiff University seem to have found that there is a lot less produced in supernova than had been previously thought. This means that phosphorus is likely only to be as common as it is here in this solar system in star systems which formed near the right kind of supernova to generate it in relatively large amounts. Couple this with the essential function of phosphorus in DNA, RNA, membranes and ATP, particularly the last, and it seems to mean that at this point in the history of the Universe, life as is well-known on Earth is likely only to be found in initially localised areas, surrounded by vast tracts of lifeless space. The systems containing life would gradually separate and spread out through the Galaxy due to the migration of the stars as they orbit the centre of the Milky Way, but they would remain fairly sparse. However, as time goes by and the Universe ages, there will be more such supernovæ and phosphorus will slowly become more common, making our kind of life increasingly likely. If life always does depend on phosphorus, we may simply be unusually early in the history of the Universe, and in many æons time there will be much more life. This possible limitation may have another consequence. We may be living in a star system isolated from others which are higher than average in phosphorus, meaning that to exist as biological beings with a viable ecosystem around us elsewhere, we would either have to take enough phosphorus with us or make our own, and even the several light years between stars which we already find intimidating is dwarfed by the distances between phosphorus-rich systems in the Galaxy, which may once have been near us but no longer are, and not only do we have to schlep ourselves across the void, but also we have to take a massive load of phosphorus with us wherever we go.

But that is biological life as we know it. A couple of other thoughts occur. One is that there could conceivably be life as we don’t know it. This doesn’t work as well if the substitution of phosphorus is the main difference, because if that could happen, it presumably would’ve happened with us, and it didn’t, because other elements with similar functions would’ve worked better if they were more abundant and out-competed with the life which actually did arise unless there’s something about this planet which does something else like lock the possible other options away chemically or something. However, there could just be drastically different life, based perhaps on plasma instead of solid and liquid matter on planets and moons, which has no need for phosphorus or even chemistry, on nuclear reactions taking place between nucleons on the surface of a neutron star as suggested by Robert L Forward’s SF book ‘Dragon’s Egg’, or even nuclear pasta inside neutron stars. Maybe it isn’t that life is rare in the Universe, but that life as we know it is, partly because it needs to use phosphorus.

There is another possibility. We are these flimsy wet things crawling about a planet somewhere in the Galaxy, but we’ve also made machines. In our own history, we are the results of genes, and perhaps also mitochondria and flagella, concealing themselves inside cells and proceeding to build, through evolution, relatively vast multicellular machines to protect themselves. Maybe history is about to repeat itself and we are going to build our own successors, or perhaps symbionts, in the form of AI spacecraft which go out into the Universe and reproduce. Perhaps machine life is common in the Galaxy and we’re just the precursors. There is an obvious problem with this though, mentioned a long time ago: what’s to stop swarms of self-replicating interstellar probes from dismantling planets and moons and making trillions of copies of themselves? If this arises through a mutated bug in their software, it would be to their advantage, and they could be expected to be by far the most widespread “life” in the Universe. Yet this doesn’t seem to have happened. If it hasn’t, maybe the beings which built these machines never existed either. Or maybe they’re just more responsible than we are.

«Je ressens la pluie d’une autre planète»

It’s a trite cliché that artists have to draw what they see, and with twentieth and twenty-first century art it seems to be false. Perhaps with Fauvism an artist might attempt to concentrate on how she might see a particular shade or hue and paint it as that colour throughout, or at least that’s the impression (!) I got. In fact it seems to be nothing like that, but it does force the viewer to see the geometrical components of a scene while retaining one’s emotional relationship therewith, or maybe the artist’s feelings. Cubism, a couple of years later, concentrates on geometry while removing emotion.

Right now I feel that my tour of the Solar System has to some extent placed me in the second category, but only somewhat. I expect, if someone had genuinely visited other worlds, if their experience of Earth on their return would be more emotionally charged. I’m sure they’d never be the same again.

There will be something like poetry. Where it starts is another matter.

In the park near us, there’s a small fountain in a pond. Its drops describe a series of parabolas. These parabolæ radiate from the central showerhed and rise maybe fifty centimetres from the water surface. They remind me, right now, of nothing so much as a volcanic eruption on Io. With its exceedingly tenuous atmosphere and gravity less than a fifth of Earth’s, the fountain of ejecta from Io’s volcanoes resembles the fountain in the park but is cyclopean in extent, being over 150 kilometres high. However, the same laws of physics govern the movement and form of the drops. This was the first alteration in perception I became aware of.

Swerving into herbalism territory, like most Western herbalists my stock-in-trade substantially comprises a series of bottles containing what probably look like thick brown liquids to most people. These are usually ethanol and water solutions containing dissolved active ingredients of the plants in question. I could go into more depth about the more subtle distinctions herbalists perceive in the appearance of these tinctures, but for quite a number of them the residue remaining if some is spilt and the solvents evaporate becomes a tarry, often reddish-brown substance which is often a mixture of tannins and other compounds. Tannins are generally linked rings of organic molecules with hydroxyl and oxygen groups. Bakelite is another example of a substance made of these phenolic rings, and the brown or black appearance of a caster, mains plug or saucepan handle is often due to this. And out there in the depths, or maybe heights, of the outer Solar System are countless worlds covered in tholins, which are in some ways similar to this residue, though not necessarily phenolic. The sticky, reddish-black tincture residue is substantially similar to the same stuff coating the surface of many TNOs.

Another parallel with herbalism occurs when certain worlds are cold enough to have frozen nitrogen on their surfaces, such as Pluto and Triton. This brings tholins into contact with the element, leading to the formation of organic compounds containing nitrogen. These are quite similar to alkaloids. Alkaloids are a group of compounds which each have some of the following characteristics: they all contain nitrogen and have a markèd physiological action, tend to have rings including a nitrogen atom, and originate from plants. There are exceptions to the last two and the function of the alkaloid for the plant in question isn’t clear – they may act as reserves of fixed nitrogen. Alkaloids include caffeine, nicotine, atropine and cocaine. There are research programs to find novel alkaloids in rainforest plants for medical use, a race against time thanks to deforestation. Well, heinous as that may be, it so happens that many outer system worlds are coated in nitrogenous organic compounds, and this is just me but I do wonder if there are many such compounds out there. Maybe there could be heroin mines on Charon. The Universe doesn’t care about that.

The way tholins spread across the surfaces of the likes of moons and asteroids is reminiscent of how mould, lichen or plants colonise a new habitat. They are, as I’ve said before, a fork organic chemistry can take when free from technological influence instead of coming alive. It’s literally true to say that there’s an organic quality to tholins. Alternatively, maybe the way tholins went on Earth involved a freak accident with them coming to life. Consequently, when I look at a road surface, wall, pavement or other stone-like artifact, I see a parallel to the surface of a distant planet, where reddish-brown tar is gradually being deposited, just as moss and lichen gradually creep across these fresh plains. The difference is that in spite of the amazingly gradual encroachment of lichen at about a millimetre a decade, it’s still thousands of times faster than the rate of tholin deposition.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Dungeness. This area of Kent, held constantly in place by shingle lorries shuttling to and fro 24/7, is an example of a rare type of habitat known as a shingle bank whose largest examples on Earth are it and Cape Canaveral. The delicacy of this landscape is such that walking across it will leave footprints visible decades later due to the slow-growing foliose lichen living there. It has to be said that putting one of NASA’s main launchpads there is rather questionable, and much of what I’ve been able to write about in this series is contingent on environmentally questionable launches from that location. Dungeness at least has a lot in common with the lunar surface in that the footprints and human influence there, and doubtless in Cape Canaveral too, are extremely durable. Dungeness has been compared to “the surface of the Moon”, and this could equally well be inverted to comparing the surface of a distant planet to Dungeness. Titan in particular springs to mind.

On the whole, the view from moons, planets and asteroids on the Universe is either obscured or clear. There is a strong tendency for conditions to be close to extreme here. Either the sky is completely clear or completely cloudy. This is not universally so. For instance, on Mars clouds do occur but on the whole the sky is empty of them. Earth is cloudier than Mars but not as cloudy as Venus. This is one situation where I may not be aware of conditions outside the British Isles and over much of the planet the sky is either usually clear or mainly cloudy, but there are even so areas where there are, for example, little fluffy clouds in a blue daytime sky. The clouds on this planet are usually mainly water ice or water vapour, but the volcanoes are usually silicate rocks.

It needn’t be this way. Martian clouds are generally either water ice or dry ice, i.e. carbon dioxide. On the outer planets they’re various, sometimes evil-smelling, substances like ammonium hydrosulphide or hydrogen sulphide. On Titan they’re methane, and form a largely uninterrupted deck of obscurity. One notable thing about all these clouds is that none of them actually constitute a substantial part of the world in question’s atmosphere. Our own atmosphere, for example, is not mainly water vapour, and if it was this planet would be very like Venus and completely uninhabitable with no rivers, lakes, seas or oceans, because steam is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Likewise with the prominent clouds elsewhere in the Universe. Even so, there are circular storms, thunderstorms and plenty of cloud types approximating our own, as well as the same formations. On Mars, Earth and perhaps elsewhere, a peak can push a body of air up past the point where it starts to form clouds, and on its leeward side chains of clouds can develop in similar manners. This is of course not always so. Rain clouds of any kind whose drops actually reach the ground are only found on Titan and Earth in this star system. Something like snow is more common, but is sometimes the atmosphere itself freezing. Hence when you look at the sky, you’re seeing clouds like those on countless billions (long scale) of worlds throughout the cosmos.

These processes and structures can be composed of less expected materials in other star systems. A particularly easy kind of planet to detect by the method of looking for light being dimmed by a large body passing frequently between us and the star is the “Hot Jupiter”. These are, as the name suggests, somewhat Jupiter-like planets, but differ from our own largest planet in that they orbit their primaries in a couple of days and are far hotter at their cloudtops than any planet’s surface in our own system. Consequently, although they too have clouds “like” ours, they’re actually made of substances like droplets of molten titanium or quartz, or perhaps crystals of the same. Meanwhile, circling the Sun and doubtless innumerable other stars further out than Earth, the converse situation exists, with volcanoes made substantially of water ice and erupting water instead of silicate, while the clouds are made of ice or water vapour instead. This is as extreme compared to a world like Enceladus, Titan or Pluto as the silicate clouds are to us.

Taking the comparison a bit more deeply, the water that erupts out of volcanoes in the outer system emerges from a mantle of flowing slush analogous in the same way to our own rocky mantle, which does flow but is not really fluid as we understand the term as it’s extremely viscuous, but just as far out moons hide internal water oceans beneath a superficial veneer of ice, though sometimes a very thick crust thereof, so does our home world secrete a deep ocean of rock. It’s easy for us to imagine that somewhere like Europa or Enceladus could be concealing a vast reservoir of sea water replete with its own version of fish because we are ourselves familiar with that from our own seas. Extending that to our own mantle, who are we to say that there are no “fish”, perhaps silicon-based, hundreds of kilometres beneath our feet? After all, the ocean of rock is hundreds of times larger than the ocean of water on our home world. This can only be speculation, at least right now, and it’s hard to imagine how it could become anything else. Maybe there is an extremely hot Earth-sized planet whose lava oceans do contain life forms, or maybe not, but we’re looking for “life as we know it” when the one thing we really do know about life elsewhere is that we know nothing of it, or even of its existence.

And perhaps we will never know. Clearly nothing we’re aware of now could rule out the presence of other life off Earth, because we have an example of life here, but although there are numerous reasons we could project onto the sky that might make it implausible, it’s entirely possible that we’ll simply never know if we’re alone in the Universe, and that might apply even if we embarked on an exploration of it. Even if our entire Galaxy proved to be lifeless apart from us, there might be no particular reason for it other than luck, and another galaxy, such as Andromeda, could have life, and if not that a different galaxy so many gigaparsecs from us that we’ll never know it exists. Right now there doesn’t seem to be any kind of mathematical or scientific argument which would be able to give us an answer to this question. It’s rather like the existence of God. You can be “theist”, believing that there is life elsewhere. You can be “atheist”, observing the Universe and the physical laws which decide what can be in it and deciding that life is just a fantastically improbable freak accident, thus committing yourself to the probability that terrestrial life is all there is. Or, you can be agnostic, and simply withhold an opinion on the matter, while holding out for the possibility that there is or is not on a kind of faith-like basis. It’s even possible that we will never know if there’s life within our own planet.

Getting back to precipitation, there is a line from the TV series ‘Wonder Woman’ which seemed highly dubious when I first heard it. A man from the future visits the late 1970s and remarks to her that there are planets made of diamond where a stick of wood would be a previous commodity. At the time I suppose I assumed that other planets were more like our own than they in fact are, because remarkably for such a soft and unscientific franchise as ‘Wonder Woman’, with the likes of disappearing handbags and invisible aircraft, this is in fact so, and you don’t even need to look outside our own star system to find such planets. Both our ice giants are probably so rich in diamonds that they’re as common as icebergs in the Arctic or hailstones on a spring day, and wood would naturally be unheard of. Wood is also associated with life of course, and we have no idea how specific it is to Earth. If it is, it’s like blue john, which only occurs in one place in our Solar System and probably for many light years further than that, in the Derbyshire Peak District.

Water has influenced the appearance of the Peak District in a couple of significant ways which give the area its distinctive character. One is through the erosion of potholes and other caverns and another is the various effects of glaciers, such as causing lakes to form by blocking rivers and the presence of isolated boulders a long way from their original locations. It isn’t clear what actually happened there in that respect during recent ice ages, but it seems that ice-related erosion and weathering relatively close to melting point where ice expands as its temperature falls is likely to be characteristic of Earth as an ongoing process rather than anywhere else in the system, although during certain relatively short-lived catastrophes this does seem to become significant. The difference here is that in many places the temperature has fluctuated around the range where this takes place, making it a dynamic and repetitive process.

Looking up, we may see Cynthia. I’ve been rather startled to find recently that for some reason flat Earthers perceive her as luminous! She looks like nothing so much as a ball of grey rock to me. A varied and beautiful one to be sure, but not luminous. This impression, though, is not confined to our satellite. The other planets in the system do in fact look like bright stars to the naked eye. Even so, there are noctilucent clouds, which are so high in our atmosphere that they reflect sunlight considerably later or earlier than sunset or sunrise. It’s simply that unexpectedly daylit items in the night look so bright by contrast that they’re practically luminous, but not literally so. It illustrates how much the human eye can adjust to light and darkness that Cynthia can appear to shine. Yes, there is moonlight. Also, the light from the white door in our bedroom reflects onto the blue-painted wall, almost bringing us back to Fauvism.

When Sarada became aware that I tended to get bogged down in details, she recommended a book to me which I very much enjoyed: ‘The Mezzanine’, by Nicholson Baker. Baker’s book, which can hardly be described as a novel, focusses on the minutiæ of the quotidian in a manner possibly reminiscent of «A la recherche du temps perdu». Whereas I find the latter unhealthily self-absorbed (though I haven’t read it), the former caught my attention and was easy to relate to. It has no real plot and has been described as having a “fierce attention to detail”. As a young adult, I used to write long descriptions which I couldn’t turn into stories. Fortunately, Baker has succeeded in getting a work using a similar approach published. Most of our experience, mine at least, consists of such thoughts and unfinished mental doodles. One difference is that ‘Mezzanine’ finishes these. The approach taken is somewhat reminiscent of a minor poetic movement of the late twentieth century called “Martian Poetry”.

Martian Poetry is a small and fairly transient subgenre of poetry whose most famous piece is Craig Raine’s ‘A Martian Sends A Postcard Home’. This can be found here. It can take a while to puzzle out, but refers to such things as books, telephones and sleeping together. It’s a series of riddles, but more than that. Published in 1979, it uses unusual metaphors to make everyday objects and experiences fresh and unusual. It’s a little like the real-life ‘Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’ and it raises the question in my mind of who the narrator is. When I wrote the previous post, I realised I’d created a problem. I had no idea who the aliens describing Earth were and I had to come up with a semi-feasible model of their own world, anatomy and physiology before I could begin to portray our home planet. In particular, I had the alternatives of making their comfort temperature hotter or colder than ours, and chose colder because more of our own star system, and in fact the whole Universe, is colder than Earth’s surface rather than hotter. Once I’d done that, I had something I could relate to and a perspective from which to conceive of Earth as others see it. Craig Raine, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do that. We can, however, glean something about the narrator because of the metaphors used, which can be contradictory. For instance, he uses the word “caxtons” to describe books, which he sees as avian, multiwinged creatures. This is a spiky-sounding word with its C and X, and calls to mind a rustly, fluttering thing which one might imagine capable of flight, and certainly it confers that capacity to its reader’s mind, but calling it after the fifteenth century printer anchors it in human life, and even in England. Nor does Craine play fair with the reader when he later describes mist as making the world “bookish”. The problem Craine sets himself is that of not being able to make the narrator Martian enough, because that would seem to make the poem less comprehensible.

I tried fairly hard to find another example of a Martian poet, but all I could uncover was Christopher Reid’s ‘The Song Of Lunch’, and even then I was only able to see the Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman TV movie version. It has a somewhat similar quality but as the action, such as it is, proceeds, it injects elements of plot and tension into the story and is much more conventional. It can currently be viewed here.

What makes these different from my own perspective of seeing a fountain in the park and thinking of the plume on Io’s Tvashtar Patera is specificity. I’m looking at the world in a kind of Cartesian way. I see the parabolas described by the water and consider the similarity, which does make me view them afresh, but there are only specific and sparse details and the comparison is with a specific alien environment. This cognitive estrangement can, however, be broadened and make the whole world surreal. I can remember one guy describing the experience of going swimming as stripping naked, putting on a pair of turquoise pants and immersing himself in a bluish liquid in a large blue room with various other similarly-attired people, and this is indeed surreal, and is more general than the constrained and sporadic examples I’ve mentioned above.

Neurodiversity has sometimes been described as being on the wrong planet, and there’s a website, wrongplanet.net, with this name. But which planet is wrong? Maybe it’s this one. “We” who are neurodiverse might be on a planet which, as a whole, treats us badly and makes assumptions which the rest of us will never be able to guess. This planet could be morally wrong. However, that’s unfair. In fact it isn’t the planet which treats neurodiversity so much as Homo sapiens. And the planet we come from isn’t wrong either. It’s actually the same planet: a conjoined twin Earth with as much right to life as Neurotypical Earth.

That brings us to the Véronique Sanson «chanson» quoted above. The line from Kiki Dee’s English version of the song has always puzzled me – “I feel the rain fall on another planet”. It comes across as a complete non sequitur. Sarada says I’m overthinking it. The original makes more sense: I have undergone such a life-changing experience that I am sensitive to the whole Universe. Now I have a grandchild (and a teenage grand-niece as of the other day, incidentally, which makes me feel really old), and I’m not comparing the experience of considering the Solar System’s other worlds in their own right to losing one’s virginity, but yes I am. I haven’t undertaken a project as grand as the so-called “Grand Tour” because all I’ve done is sit in the living room and typed stuff about the likes of Enceladus, but even that relatively mild enterprise has changed the way I see the world, and we all know about the Overview Effect, so who knows what would await us out there culturally or psychologically if any of our species crossed the lunar orbit?

A Large Terrestrial Planet Orbiting A Yellow Dwarf

After an extensive sky survey covering the planetary systems of a wide range of mid- to high-mass long-lived stars, a number of interesting systems were identified. Although scientists have traditionally focussed on stars suitable for life, with some success, the decision was made to widen the parameters for consideration to larger and more luminous examples in order to prevent observer bias. In particular, a fairly large and hot star was located whose planetary atmospheres showed a number of interesting features. The star was named Sol.

Sol is on first examination not the ideal location for life-bearing worlds. The star itself is considerably more luminous, hotter and more short-lived than our own and there is a notable absence of planets in the habitable zone, occupied by asteroids in this system. Moreover, there is an unusual absence of any planets with the mass of Planet, and therefore moons such as our home world, where life can arise and evolve straightforwardly, are completely lacking. The problems with life arising in this system are multiple. The lifetime of the star is relatively short, the system inside the asteroid belt is above the boiling point of ammonia, which in any case tends to get broken down by the radiation.

In the inner system, there are a large number of moons, all of which are however not particularly hospitable to life. Although three of the four gas giants have large moons, only one has a substantial atmosphere and is too cold for life as we know it to thrive or even appear there. Even so, this proved to be the most hospitable environment and a base was established there from which to mount missions to the other worlds in the system. None of the moons were at all promising. However, just out of curiosity, it was suggested that we investigate the inner system, in spite of its presumed hostility to life.

The situation did not at first appear very promising. There was only one relatively large satellite and even it was too small to maintain an atmosphere. The fourth planet had two small asteroid-sized moons which were even less promising, and the inner two planets had none at all. Two of the planets were large, and of these the outer planet was the host for the single large satellite, although it was considerably smaller than Planet itself. The fourth planet is close to our own world in size but is less dense and has very little to no ammonia on its surface and a tenuous atmosphere incompatible with the existence of most liquids.

Although slightly less hostile than the second planet, the host planet attracted attention because of its rather unpromising moon. It was found that, most improbably, the moon was of such a size and distance from the planet that it would perfectly cover the planet’s star from some locations on the planet, a situation which may well be unique in our Galaxy. This attracted attention to the solid surface of said planet, henceforth referred to as Sol III.

Sol III is a large, hot and rocky planet with a highly corrosive atmosphere and a surface largely covered in an expanse of molten dihydrogen monoxide rock, a substance henceforth referred to by its systematic standard name of oxidane. Runaway exothermic chemical reactions periodically occur on the surface where the likes of thunderstorms and volcanic eruptions trigger destructive processes which it might be thought would completely transform the surface. However, it has been found that in many cases this reaction can be limited by the presence of the liquid oxidane, which prevents dioxygen and the compounds in question coming into contact. Although the atmosphere is mainly (di)nitrogen, over a fifth of it consists of free dioxygen at sea level, becoming ozone some distance above the surface. Although the moon shows captured rotation, Sol III does not, rotating once every 24 hours. This has the consequence of causing the molten rock to flood the margins of the isolated land promontories twice every rotation. Any organism able to survive the extreme heat of most of the solid planetary surface unfortunate enough to find itself in such a location would be swiftly boiled to death by such events. Even away from the lava fields, liquid rock often falls from the sky, so there is little respite elsewhere on the planet.

There are exceptions to these conditions. There is a small area on the west side of one of the southern land promontories where this precipitation rarely or never takes place and many other regions close to the equator where it’s a relatively uncommon event, and these areas are free from the rivers and other bodies which make conditions so hazardous. The liquid is also quite corrosive and somewhat acidic compared to ammonia and tends to eat away at the solid surface of the planet. There are clouds of vaporised rock higher in the atmosphere which sometimes reach ground level. Near the poles the situation is slightly more hospitable, since these areas stay below oxidane’s melting point, and near the south pole temperatures are comfortable through most of the planet’s orbit and relatively normal crystallised oxidane.

Surface gravity is about triple our own, which would make it difficult to tolerate for long, and immersion in liquid would be one strategy to enable us to survive for long periods on the surface Sol is bluer than our own sun, with the result that the landscape, seascape and items within it have a blue tinge. This particularly applies to the lava plains dominating the surface and the sky when free of cloud. The higher gravity also flattens the solid surface, most of which is below the level of the lava, reducing the relief still further.

Considering the oxidane as a simple bulk substitute for our own ammonia, the chief difference between Sol III and our home moon is that the majority of the world is covered by an interconnected body of water, into which streams and rivers tend to feed, unlike our system of independently interconnected lake networks. Its mineral nature is emphasised by the presence in solution of many minerals, partly due to the strongly solvent properties of the liquid. More than half the solid surface is in permanent darkness and only just above oxidane’s melting point, though still far above the levels compatible with life as we know it. Also common here is a manifestation of the even hotter interior of the planet, also found on land, where even the silicate minerals melt and flow like ammonia. The silicate volcanism of Sol III, though, is physically still quite similar to our own oxidane volcanism, except that the volcanoes produced tend to be flatter and have less steep sides.

Technical terms have had to have been invented for the surface features of the planet. The lava fields are referred to by the arcane classical term “ocean”, and the giant island promontories as “continents”. Although the ocean is a single entity, there are also lakes on the surface which are not linked to them. These tend to be purer oxidane because of the reduced volume and time available to dissolve the underlying rocks. The ocean itself is conceptually divided into four sub-oceans, referred to as “northern”, “western”, “eastern” and “southern”. Currents running along the last three also mean that there is in a sense a further ocean not separated by land from the others. There are six continents. A relatively hospitable one is situated in the southern polar region, where the temperatures remain low enough for practically the whole surface to be lava-free. The corrosive atmosphere and high gravity, of course, remain. Most of the surface from the northern coasts of the polar continent is molten although the smallest continent, referred to as “Southern” is relatively free of precipitation. There are then two triangular continents, both linked to northern ones, referred to as “West Triangle” and “East Triangle” . The larger one, East Triangle, has two large areas free of precipitation but like Southern is extremely hot. West Triangle has a small stretch with practically no precipitation. Adjoining East Triangle is the Great Continent of the northern hemisphere. This is the largest continent of all, and its northeastern region is again cool enough not to kill someone quickly. The same is true of the final continent to be mentioned, the Lesser Northern Continent, although this and the Great Continent become very hot nearer the equator.

The surface of the planet is young. Unsurprisingly, the oceans are in constant motion, but the oxidane also eats away at the solid surface over a much longer time scale, although the occasional catastrophe can make major changes very quickly. WInds are another significant erosive factor. Also, in a process not found on our home world, the surface as a whole is constantly remodelled over a period of millions of years and the continents move around, collide with each other forming island chains and mountain ranges and split apart. This is, however, a very slow process. One consequence of this along with the erosion is the near-absence of impact craters.

A paradox of Sol III is how such a hot planet with a highly reactive atmosphere can remain in a fairly stable state rather than all the dioxygen reacting with the surface rocks and being removed from the atmosphere. The solution to this is quite remarkable: there are two balanced biochemical processes, one combining oxidane and gaseous carbon dioxide into energy-storage compounds with the aid of stellar radiation which releases the toxic gas as a waste produce, and another which combines the energy-storage compounds with dioxygen and releases carbon dioxide. Things were not ever thus. The planet went through a stage early in its history at an equable temperature, though still higher than our home world, with a harmless and hospitable atmosphere. Then, a certain group of microbes developed a mutation causing them to release the poisonous gas and the pollution of the atmosphere killed much of the biosphere. Hence not only is there life on the planet, in profusion in fact, but it actually requires the extreme high temperatures, molten lava and toxic atmosphere to survive. Although there are a few less extreme environments on the surface free of oxygen, all life on the planet uses molten oxidane to survive. Only a very few species could survive at temperatures we would consider comfortable or even survivable, and at such temperatures they’re in a dormant state from which they can only emerge in conditions of extreme heat. There is no true overlap between conditions life on Sol III would find tolerable and our own definition of survivable conditions.

Leaving microbes aside, some of which have biochemistry a little closer to our own with the proviso that they don’t employ ammonia, the larger organisms on the surface fall into three categories, which are covered below. It might be thought that the high gravity would make a buoyant environment more suitable for life, and in fact there is indeed more life living within the oxidane than out of it, there is also plenty of life outside these conditions. Although land life on Sol III tends to be smaller and stockier than the kind we’re familiar with, it’s as diverse and widespread as it is on our home world. One difference is that our own life originates from three different stocks due to our independent lake networks, whereas all life on Sol III is related because it originated in the ocean, or at least spent a long time evolving there before becoming able to leave it and exploit other niches.

One form of macroscopic life tends to use a prominent green pigment to absorb red light from the star to drive a nutrition-synthesising process. Its reliance on red light may reveal how life on Sol III is at a disadvantage compared to life on worlds near to redder stars. It’s this process, known as photosynthesis, which was responsible for poisoning the planet and causing the extinction of most life forms earlier in its history. Most large organisms reliant directly on photosynthesis do not move much of their own volition and the terrestrial varieties often bear colourful genitals which attract motile organisms to bear their semen to other members of their species and fertilise their eggs.

Another form of life tends to be able to move of its own accord and survives by consuming the bodies of other, often living, organisms. Their anatomy and physiology is usually centred around their need to move dissolved gases around their bodies, which they often manage using a system of tubes and one or more pumps. Their reliance on dioxygen and need to remove carbon dioxide gas from their tissues necessitates that all of their bodies need to be in close contact with a respiratory fluid, and all of the larger organisms also have entire body systems to deal with gases, either dissolved in the water around them or present in the air. In the case of the dominant class of animals, as they are known, on the land, this has limited their size as they rely on tubes open to the atmosphere. Incredible though it may seem, most animals can’t survive more than a few minutes without a constant supply of dioxygen.

The third form of life forms a kind of bridge between living and non-living parts of the food chain. Like the photosynthesisers, these are largely sessile and immobile, and tend to live off a substrate consisting of the dead or diseased bodies of other organisms. They do not photosynthesise. Many of them consist of subterranean mats of fibres which produce occasional fruiting bodies above ground level. Some of them are also parasitic. Without this group of organisms, there would be an ever-increasing unusable biomasse which would eventually cause all advanced life on Sol III to grind to a halt.

Animal evolution on Sol III went in a somewhat surprising direction. Unusually, a particular kind of fluid-living animal developed a hard internal skeleton and its descendents were able to use it to aid their movement rather than the more usual arrangement of holding them in place. These have proliferated into a variety of forms, though they constitute a small minority of species on the planet and animals themselves occupy much less biomasse than the plants (the photosynthesisers). Of all these species, one rather large, by the standards of the planet, type has become dominant over the planet through a technology based initially on the use and control of the runaway oxidative reaction and the discovery of language, which is acoustic and mediated by means of the organs which evolved to exchange gases. Remarkably, in spite of the intense gravitational field, these animals are able to achieve an erect bipedal gait.

It should be noted that the pace of animal life on Sol III tends to be very frenetic. This seems to be due to the high temperature and the employment of dioxygen as a means of releasing chemical energy. This hyperactivity doesn’t apply to plants to the same extent. It’s all the more so for those animals whose bodies rely on their own heat to drive their metabolism, and unsurprisingly this includes the technological species. Dormancy is a less significant phase of life for many animals living on the planet, partly because the years are shorter and in many parts of the world the seasons are less extreme. However, many species do become dormant on a diurnal basis for a considerable fraction of the planet’s rotation period, often when it faces away from the star, and depriving them of it for surprisingly short intervals leads to increasing mental derangement. The need of such organisms for food, oxidane and their respiratory gas is quite extreme compared to our own. This constitutes a barrier to space travel, as it means they are unlikely to be able to survive interstellar space voyages as easily as we can. This may not be a bad thing because there is a tendency for some members of the species to be quite violent, but this is also likely to be self-limiting. However, it’s probably better not to speculate too much about this aspect of their nature without more data.

One major lesson to learn from the complex life present on Sol III is that we may have restricted views on what constitutes an hospitable environment for the advent and evolution of advanced life forms. Before this discovery, the proposal that a sophisticated biosphere could exist on a planet two-thirds covered in molten rock with a dense caustic atmosphere capable of eating through metal, with a high gravitational field and temperatures far above boiling point over most of its surface, circling an ageing Sun much hotter and more massive than our own would have seemed ridiculous to all. These life forms can not only tolerate living with acidic molten rock in an aggressively reactive atmosphere but have evolved in tandem with it to the extent that depriving them of the gas for more than a few minutes is uniformly fatal and they need a continual intake of liquefied dihydrogen monoxide to survive more than a couple of rotations of their home world. Who knows what the inhabitants of Sol III might consider suitable conditions for life given their own extreme circumstances?

Any resemblance to Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Report On Planet Three’ is not entirely coincidental.

Are We Out In Dullsville Now?

If you go back to where I started this series properly, you’ll find that I produced a post, whose name and location I’ve currently forgotten, introducing the Solar System from the outside in. I’ve now returned to the outermost part of the system except for the Oort Cloud, and I ask myself, are these outer reaches really dull? Well, they are in a literal sense of course, in that the Sun is pretty dim at this distance, but the wide separation, small size and low temperature of worlds, if that’s the right word for them, combined with the facts that nothing has ever visited them and that they’re hard to detect, means that they might also be exceedingly boring. I can imagine people travelling to them who want to get seriously away from it all, and from other people. In fact, there’s a scene in an Iain M Banks novel about someone who has done precisely that. I think it’s ‘Excession’.

There’s a lot going on in the regions near the Sun, and I use “near” quite loosely as I intend for it to apply to Jupiter and Saturn, the latter being well over a milliard kilometres from it. Incidentally, why is it we get stuck at kilometres? I’ve just fished out an obscure English word to describe a distance which could easily be referred to as a terametre, and yet we never say that. The further out one goes, the less is happening, with the occasional exception such as Triton’s liquid nitrogen geysers and the mysterious brightness of the surface of Eris. Average distances between worlds increase, temperatures plummet and the Sun looks ever dimmer. That said, it’s still possible, for example, to imagine a world so cold that it has oceans of helium II which crawl over its surface and climb mountains, or outcrops of superconducting alloys which generate incredibly powerful magnetic fields. I don’t know if either of those things are possible, because the 3K background temperature of the Universe might rule them out and helium only becomes superfluid at 2.17K, but there have always been surprises. Few people would’ve guessed that Neptune has winds which blow faster than the sea level speed of sound, for instance. Perhaps high winds on a very cold planet would cool it below the temperature of deep space.

Considering the history of the Universe, a frantic and hyper beginning slows down continually, through the current stelliferous era and other less and less eventful stretches of time until basically nothing is happening. Space is rather like this too. Not a lot goes on in the Oort Cloud.

Even so, there is stuff out there. For instance, there’s a planetoid nicknamed FarFarOut, which is 132 AU from the Sun. Also known as 2018 AG₃₇, FarFarOut is about four hundred kilometres across, which means it could be round. It actually swings round to being only 27 AU, closer than Hamlet. It takes 718 years to orbit and at its maximum distance of 132.7 AU the Sun is almost 18 000 times dimmer than from here. There’s also 2019 EU₅, which averages 1 380 AU from it and has a maximum distance of 2 714 AU. These figures are highly uncertain, but if the aphelion is correct (it could be considerably greater or less), sunlight at such a distance is finally weaker than our moonlight and the planetoid takes fifty-one thousand years to orbit the Sun at a mean velocity of about eight hundred metres per second. With such planetoids, it becomes difficult to judge their actual trajectories because they move so slowly and haven’t been observed for long.

There are now five human-built spacecraft out there: Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2 and New Horizons, the last being the newcomer, only launched in 2006. Voyager 1 was manœuvred out of the ecliptic so it could get a good view of Titan, and is therefore heading out into the scattered disc rather than the Kuiper belt. It’s 153 AU from the Sun at the moment. Voyager 2 is 130 AU out. Both were launched in 1977. The Pioneer probes have been going for rather longer but are actually closer, at 129 and 108, but they’re all now over twice as far away as Pluto ever gets. New Horizons is a mere 50 AU from the Sun right now. Now a viable claim is made that the Voyager and Pioneer probes are now in interstellar space because the pressure of the solar wind is weaker than the ambient “flow” (I suppose) of charged particles between the stars, but there are still planetoids orbiting out there, even ones which never dip into the volume inside the heliosheath. Isaac Asimov’s novel ‘The Currents Of Space’, though its science is out of date, uses the idea of similar flows as an important plot point, so this is one possible way in which the outer part of the Solar System might not be boring. Processes taking place within the heliosheath which influence planets, asteroids, moons and so forth would not operate beyond it. For instance, any magnetospheres which exist out there would not be thrown into asymmetry by the solar wind, and larger and denser atmospheres could exist out there, although the only elements able to maintain a gaseous state at such temperatures would be hydrogen and helium, and in fact ultimately helium. It also means the useful isotopes found in lunar regolith would be absent from many trans Neptunian objects and this reduces the utility of mining for them.

There are a dozen known planets, dwarf planets by the IAU definition of course, which reach 150 AU or more from the Sun. This is one motivation for not calling them planets. If they were, they’d now outnumber the major planets. The same is, though, also true of asteroids and centaurs, and asteroids were simply called “minor planets”. The whole thing seems a bit silly and solves a “problem” which had in any case already been sorted when such concepts as major and minor planets, or planetoids, were invented to address the issue after the discovery of Ceres, in the early nineteenth century CE. Right: I’m going to resolve not to go on about this for the rest of this post as I’m sure it’s getting old. These objects include Haumea, Quaoar, Eris, Sedna, Makemake, Albion, Gonggong, Pluto itself, Varuna, Arrokoth, Arawn, Chaos, Ixion and Typhon. Others are also named, but most don’t come up much in discussions or news, and most of them have provisional designations. To be honest, some of them just stick in my mind because of their names, particularly Quaoar but also Makemake and Gonggong. FarFarOut has a predecessor which isn’t so far out called FarOut. There are two zones: the Kuiper belt, which consists of objects orbiting near the plane of the inner system, and the Scattered Disc, comprising objects whose orbits are more tilted. The second category developed because of the gravitational influence of the outer planets, although it occurs to me that this might also be the region where the Sun’s influence and the traces of the solar nebula become less relevant to them. There is also a third region, the Oort Cloud, which is in really deep space beyond either of the others, whence some comets originate, and extends for over a light year in every direction. TNOs are also distinguished by colour (Eris springs to mind but that’s a special case as far as I know). They’re either steely blue or bright red. A classification kind of cutting across this are the poorly-named “hot” and “cold” categories. Cold TNOs orbit close to the ecliptic and are usually red. Hot TNOs have tilted orbits and range between the two colours, which means that the red ones are the “cold” ones.

By Pablo Carlos Budassi – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94143935

One of the weirdest known trans Neptunian objects is Haumea, illustrated above. This has three remarkable features. It has a ring, two moons and is ellipsoidal but far from spherical. It counts as a dwarf planet. Its unusual shape is called a Jacobi ellipsoid, and is rather surprising. It intuitively makes sense that a rapidly-spinning body would be thrown outwards at its equator and therefore assume a kind of tangerine shape, or perhaps even a discus shape, as seen clearly with Jupiter and Saturn but also with most major planets including Earth to some extent. Venus and Mars are somewhat different, the former being almost spherical and the latter having a more egg-shaped form due to the Tharsis bulge. This more intuitive shape, an oblate spheroid, is quite common and the torus is another quite remarkable stable shape which, however, is hard to envisage actually forming in the first place. There is a notorious (to Sarada and me) pebble classification system called Zingg (two G’s), which divides them into spheres, discs, rods and blades according to their X, Y and Z axes. This used to be a source of joy to us due to its apparent obscurity, but has its uses, and Haumea counts as a blade. Each axis is markèdly different to the other two. Lagrange, who discovered the points of gravitational equilibrium around pairs of masses responsible, for instance, for the trojan asteroids in the orbits of several major planets and the trojan moons in the Saturnian system, held that the only stable shape for a rapidly rotating body of a certain size was the oblate spheroid, but counter-intuitively, this turns out to be wrong. This is the gateway to a whole branch of geometry involving ellipsoids.

Haumea’s axial dimensions are 2 322 × 1 704 × 1 138 kilometres. It spins once every three hours and fifty-five minutes, which is particularly high considering its size. Comparing it to Pluto, for example, that planet takes six and a half days to rotate and has a diameter of 2 377 kilometres. Not only is Haumea considerably smaller and less massive but it also spins three dozen times faster, causing a much stronger centrifugal effect. I have to admit that not only is it entirely unclear to me why Haumea is this shape beyond the simply fact that it’s spinning really fast and has thereby had projections drawn out from it, but also I can’t understand the maths behind it. If this can happen once, maybe there are larger planets out there somewhere with the same shape, maybe even Earth-sized ones. It seems unlikely, at least because a larger object would tend to be more spherical, although there could be other reasons why it might happen such as a nearby massive body pulling it out of shape. Haumea was probably hit some time in the past by something which sent it spinning wildly. It also isn’t clear that it’s reached hydrostatic equilibrium although it’s very large for a solid object if it hasn’t.

Haumea is the Hawaiian goddess of fertility and childbirth. The planet’s moons are named after her daughters, Hi‘iaka and Namaka. It’s thought to be rocky with a surface layer of water ice and seems to have a red crater near one of the geometric poles (i.e. on the equator). I’m guessing the reddish colour is due to tholins. Haumea seems denser than most other Kuiper belt objects, including Pluto, and may be as dense as Mars or Cynthia. It has crystalline water ice on its surface even though its temperature ought to cause the ice to become glassy. There may also be clay on the surface, and cyanides of various kinds. Hence the very surface would often be highly poisonous to ærobic life forms, including humans. There is no methane, suggesting that it was boiled away in the heat of impact.

The ring spins once every twelve hours, in other words a third as fast as the planet. The moons are small and probably result from the collision. Another thing which probably results from the collision is the Haumea family. In other parts of the Solar System, there are various families of objects, for instance the Vesta family, which consists of Vesta plus the asteroids which have been chipped off it, including some meteorites which have arrived on Earth. The Haumea family is the only identified group of objects beyond Neptune, and originates from the collision. They’re all water-ice at the surface and are fairly bright. Some may be up to seven hundred kilometres in diameter and count as dwarf planets in their own right. They average between forty-one and forty-four AU from the Sun. One of them seems to be in the family but is red.

Haumea itself is 43 AU from the Sun on average and has an orbital eccentricity of a little under 0.2. It takes 283 years to traverse this orbit, so it isn’t enormously further away than Pluto and in fact it gets closer to the Sun than Pluto does.

Another name which sticks in the mind belongs to the dwarf planet Sedna. This is one of the reddest known objects in the system and is also tied with Ceres in being the largest moonless dwarf planet. Sedna is one of those planets which makes me wonder whether it’s one of many undiscovered ones, because it was discovered due to happening to be almost as close as it gets to the Sun at 76 AU. Even that distance is almost twice Pluto’s. It takes 11 400 years to orbit the Sun and gets out to five and a half light days from it. The last time it was there, there were mammoths on this planet and the pyramids had yet to be built. It’s around a thousand kilometres in diameter, like Ceres. It’s named after the Inuit goddess of the sea and its denizens. The extremely elongated orbit, which has an eccentricity of almost 0.85, could be explained by the presence of an extremely distant and large planet. It’s part of a class (as opposed to a “family”, as in the Haumea family) of objects whose perihelia are greater than 50 AU and mean distances over 150 AU from the Sun. These orbits have an eccentricity of around 0.8, so although that’s the definition, in actual fact they’re considerably more elliptical. It’s been established that there are no large planets in the system beyond Pluto to a considerable distance, although there is the question of a missing ice dwarf. That would, however, not be detectable by current methods and wouldn’t explain the sednoid bunching of orbits. It’s also been suggested that the sednoids move thus because they were influenced by nearby stars back when the Sun was young and part of a cluster of baby stars. There are occasional stars which seem to be almost twins of the Sun due to similar proportions of heavier elements (often referred to in astrophysics as “metals”), suggesting that they were once our companions. Alternatively, they may have been captured from those stars early on in the history of the system. The other two objects falling into this category are Leleakuhonua and 2012 VP₁₁₃.

As well as the usual tholins, Sedna is covered in frozen nitrogen and methane, which is present generally but absent from Haumea, probably due to the collision. Its orbit looks like this to scale:

By Tomruen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60453344

There may be amorphous carbon on the surface. Unfortunately the term “amorphous carbon” is ambiguous as it can mean charcoal- or soot-like carbon, which in fact consists of graphite sheets haphazardly arranged, or it can literally mean amorphous, i.e. glass-like, carbon, which might have special properties such as being a high-temperature superconductor and being harder than diamond. I suspect they mean the former – just a load of boring old black gunk like you might dig out of a coal mine.

Sedna is special because it isn’t. It’s probably an example of a very numerous class of objects orbiting way out beyond the influence of Neptune in the Oort Cloud. We happen to know it’s there but there are likely to be many, many more examples way outnumbering the objects known in the inner system whose orbits haven’t so far allowed us to detect them. That said, the presence of tholins is related to the influence of solar radiation so it might not be typical of them.

Another planetoid is Arrokoth, unique in being the only trans-Neptunian object other than Pluto-Charon and their moons to have been visited by a space probe, New Horizons. It was nicknamed Ultima Thule, but this was later deprecated due to the association with Nazi occultism. It was actually named in a Pamunkey ceremony. The common “dumb bell” appearance shared by two of Pluto’s moons, some comets and other objects is also seen here. It’s thirty-six kilometres long altogether but consists of two smaller fused planetesimals, fifteen and twenty-two kilometres in length. Planetesimals are the bricks which make up planets and moons, and have never been seen in their raw form before. If a twenty-kilometre object is typical, Earth would be made up initially of over a hundred million of them, having long since melted together and lost their identities. There are interesting substances on its surface, including methanol, hydrogen cyanide and probably formaldehyde-based compounds and complex macromolecules somewhat similar to those found in living things. The basin in the foreground, which is probably a crater, is a bit less than seven kilometres across and called Sky. The axis of rotation passes through the centre of the dumb bell.

Arrokoth is a “cubewano”. These are named after their first discovered member, 1992 QB₁. Also known as “classical Kuiper Belt objects”, cubewanos are often in almost circular orbits less than 30°from the plane of the Solar System, but are also often not. They have years between 248 and 330 times ours, the lower limit being defined by the plutinos with their sidereal periods close to Pluto’s. I’ve mentioned them above. They’re distinctive in not being particularly distant (relatively) and also not having orbits connected to Neptune’s.

Quaoar is a particularly large cubewano. Its name is from an indigeous people called the Tongva in Southwestern North America, although for a time it was called “Object X” as a reference to Planet X and because its nature was unknown. You can see the planetary definition crisis developing here, as it was discovered in 2002. It was first imaged in 1954, but like many other bodies went unnoticed for many years. It takes 289 years to orbit the Sun and is 43 AU from it. It seems quite dark, suggesting that it’s lost ice from its surface, which has a temperature of -231°C. It has a moon to keep it company, like many other trans-Neptunian objects. The diameter is around 1 100 kilometres.

Previously, the largest known TNO was Varuna, discovered in 2000. This may also be a “blade”-shaped planet like Haumea, and is just barely beyond Pluto’s average distance from the Sun at 42.7 AU, taking 279 years to orbit. It seems to be less dense than water and its average diameter was recently estimated at 654 kilometres. It takes six and a half hours to rotate on its axis.

I feel that this series is now drawing to a close. However, there are many objects I haven’t considered, such as the Neptune trojans, the possibility of Nemesis and the question of what large objects may be swimming out there in the depths of the Oort Cloud. There is also one planet I haven’t given its own post. It’s a small blue-green planet, third from the Sun, and will form the subject of my next post.