When I was six, I set myself the task of memorising the then known moons of Saturn, and it stuck. Even today I can easily reel off “Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe”. Several times that number of moons are known to orbit Saturn today, but even ten sounds like a lot. There are a couple of oddities on this list, but today I’m actually going to be talking about Janus. Sort of.
“Sort of” because Janus is not necessarily what we thought it was. It was sometimes, but at others it wasn’t. Janus was discovered in 1966 CE but although it had an unofficial name, it wasn’t officially called that until 1983. In the meantime, it had been discovered that “Janus” wasn’t what everyone thought it was. In the opposite situation to Venus, which had previously been called the morning and evening star (Phosphoros and Hesperos) and in ancient times was not recognised as the same thing, Janus turned out to be two separate moons. This led to confusion about the nature of its orbit, since it would appear to “jump around”. On arrival at Saturn, the Voyager probes were able to take a picture of two moons which seemed to be on a collision course with each other but were obviously still there in spite of previous apparent collisions, and it emerged that “Janus” was in fact two moons sharing the same orbit and swapping over when they got close to each other. Hence another name was needed, and one moon kept the name and the other was called Epimetheus. Epimetheus was in a sense the first Saturnian moon to be discovered by the Voyager missions and therefore has the number XI, but it had been seen before and just not recognised for what it was. Janus is considerably larger than Epimetheus, at three million cubic kilometres as opposed to 820 000, and since both are too small to be round it makes more sense to refer to their size by their volumes. Janus is in fact 203 by 185 by 152.6 kilometres, whereas Epimetheus is 129.8 by 114 by 106.2 kilometres. Neither are drastically far from being spherical and are, like a lot of other bodies of that size, potato-like in appearance, if potatoes have craters.
The situation with Janus and Epimetheus was the first time I realised that gravity doesn’t just attract. Janus and Epimetheus zoom around Saturn at around sixteen kilometres per second, kind of treating their common orbit like a race track. The inner moon catches up with the other, at which point they swing around each other and the inner becomes the outer. This works because the gravitational attraction between the moon in front and the one behind causes one to speed up and enter a higher orbit and the other to slow down and enter a lower one, after which they separate, i.e. move away from each other. In other words, the acceleration due to one moon “falling” towards the other leads to it being “pushed” away, so to speak. It would be interesting if some kind of jiggery-pokery from this happening could be harnessed to provide something which looks like anti-gravity, but it’s a very special case and I really don’t think it could be.
At their minimum distance, Janus and Epimetheus are only fifty kilometres apart. Since they are actually larger than that even in their minimum dimensions, each would practically fill the other’s sky at these times. Larger moons approaching at this sort of distance would smash each other to bits with their gravity, and it’s possible that this has already happened and caused the situation to arise in the first place. Maybe the two used to be a single dumb bell-shaped moon back in the day. The exchange occurs once every four years or so because at other times they aren’t close enough to have that influence on each other.
This is Janus itself:
Since the moon is only two hundred kilometres across, an individual pixel in this image would have a width of about two hundred metres. It isn’t minute, but it is fairly small. On the other hand, it’s also large enough to approach being round and doesn’t give the impression of being “cute” like some small moons and asteroids do because the features on its surface are not out of proportion. I only realised in the last couple of days that it was (kind of) discovered in 1966 because to me it’s always been there, which of course it sort of has, but it’s also a bit surprising that it was only discovered eight months before I was born, just after the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ had slipped off the number one spot (it was actually Tom Jones but I’ll breeze over that. He’s okay, but – well, you know).
There are four named features on Janus, named after characters from the legend of the twins Castor and Pollux, like other features on Epimetheus. These are Castor, Idas, Lynceus and Phoibe, all craters. There is a faint dust ring, about five thousand kilometres across, around the orbits, which isn’t surprising as they presumably claw at each other wildly every four years as they pass each other, which is bound to raise some dust, although it’s attributed to meteoroid impacts. They’re also shepherd moons, which isn’t just an album by Eithne but also refers to moons which keep rings in place and maintain their neat edges. Janus does a slightly better job than Epimetheus because it’s more massive, so the A Ring, which they shepherd, is neater when Janus is closer than when it’s the other way round. It’s also probably a rubble pile, hence the ring, and it’s quite icy. These two things together make it very light for its size, rather like Saturn, at sixty-three percent that of water, so it’s actually less dense than Saturn. It’s possible to measure this from the moons’ gravitational influence on each other. Surface gravity varies due to the irregular shape but is around a six hundredth of ours. It’s reddish-brown.
I might as well do Epimetheus while I’m at it. Epimetheus I would’ve expected to be paired with a moon called Prometheus as they were brothers, but apparently not. I also knew a cat called that so it’s a bit weird typing that name here. Here it is, seen from a pole:
It looks a lot more “moony” than Janus to me, because it has proper-looking craters. In fact I’m surprised how different they look. It was realised in about 1978 that astronomers were probably dealing with two different moons, and one of the Pioneer probes might have taken a picture of Epimetheus but it was too vague to enable it to have its orbit plotted. The craters are called Hilaeira and Pollux, which figures. There’s actually a photo of it with the shadow of the F Ring across it:
That’s it, more or less. Not a lot to say about such tiny moons. Oh, just that Janus used to be the god of doors and has a face on both sides of his head, which makes you think Janus the moon is special because it always has one face looking at Saturn and the other out into the rest of the system, but actually that’s normal for moons, in Saturn’s case all the way out to Titan.
The outermost of the planets known in ancient times, Saturn was traditionally considered the limit of the Solar System, a symbolism reinforced by the fact that it has a restrictive-looking set of rings around it. Oddly, Saturnine herbs are partly distinguished by having prominent rings, among other things, even though the association with the planet pre-dates their discovery.
Saturn is a couple of things. It’s the most squashed planet. It’s like it’s been “sat on”. Geddit? Seriously though, it’s flattened to the extent that its polar diameter is 9.8% less than its equatorial. This isn’t as obvious as Jupiter’s because the ring obscures its shape and seems to cause an optical illusion that it’s rounder than it really is. There are two reasons for its oblateness. One is that it spins very fast, with a day of roughly ten and a half hours. It’s difficult to be precise because like Jupiter it doesn’t rotate as a solid object would but has several “systems”. The other is that it’s also the least dense planet, also making it the softest. It’s actually less dense than water. If it were possible to put a tiny version of Saturn in the bath, it would float like a rubber duck. Its average density is only 69% that of water, which is lower than any solid element except lithium. It even looks like it’d make a good pool toy or floatation aid.
According to the Ætherius Society, Saturn is where the Interplanetary Parliament, er, sits. The beings who rule over this Solar System are said to be enlightened golden spheres twelve metres in diameter. However, not many people agree with the tenets of that religion and reject the idea outright. I have no idea why they think this, but in general the religion is a lot less harmful as some other “flying saucer religions”, so to speak.
Before Voyager’s time, Saturn’s rings were divided into three, with actual gaps as well. There was the A ring, on the outside, split by Encke’s Gap which is about 325 kilometres wide, but the most obvious gap is the Cassini Division, 4 800 kilometres in width. An Atlantic-sized gap. The area this gap surrounds is the B ring. Both of these rings are opaque, but an inner ring, known as the “Crêpe Ring” is partly transparent and objects can be glimpsed through it. When the Voyagers got there, unsurprisingly the rings turned out to be a lot more complex than that, and in fact they look more like the grooves on a record, not in terms of spirals but because there are hundreds of concentric rings. There was previously a plan to send the Voyager spacecraft through the Cassini division but it turned out to have plenty of rings within it itself. Encke’s Gap contains a braided ring and a moon which has been called Pan.
Saturn is one of four planets known to have rings, but until the late 1970s CE it was considered unique in this way. This changed when a star in front of which Uranus was passing appeared to blink on and off at the same intervals on either side of the planet, and within a couple of years the Voyagers were able to photograph those rings while the spacecraft were near Saturn. Even still, Saturn’s rings are by far the most spectacular and brightest, the cleanest in fact. Saturn is in general positively gleaming, bearing in mind it only gets one percent of the sunlight Earth does per square metre. This isn’t as dingy as it sounds because the human eye would adjust easily to that without there being any obvious difference after a while. Speaking of dinginess, like the rest of the system Saturn is overshadowed by Jupiter. It’s smaller and further out, and as far as we’re concerned also further away. Thus before anyone was able to point a telescope at it, apart from being on the edge of the system it was relatively dim and insignificant. It’s still brighter than first magnitude and doesn’t vary much on account of it being ten times our own distance from the Sun, meaning we observe it as between nine and eleven AU away, making a difference of only around a third, and because it’s a superior planet we never see it as a crescent and it’s nearly full most of the time.
The rings are extremely thin compared to their width at around fifty metres, and since Saturn’s axis and orbit are both tilted with respect to Earth, they are sometimes more visible than at others. This confused the first astronomers to observe the planet through telescopes because it meant the features they appeared to be able to see changed shape and size and even completely disappeared. The earliest such observer, Galileo, thought he saw two spheres accompanying it on either side, which incidentally he referred to as “planets” (in Italian or Latin presumably), showing how the concept of planet changes over the centuries. This was in 1610. Soon after, others were able to see the rings but were baffled by their sudden disappearance until they realised it was because we were seeing them edge on. This range of angles would also apply to the moons, and rather annoyingly to anyone who might be visiting, all the larger closer moons orbit close to the plane of the rings and you wouldn’t really be able to see them. Only Iapetus, whose orbital inclination is 15°, has a good viewing angle and unfortunately it’s also quite far out, so Saturn would look nice but it wouldn’t dominate the sky like it does closer in. While we’re on the subject, Saturn is likely to be invisible from Titan due to constant thick cloud cover, but it would show the rings a little. Maybe if you were there you could set up a sightseeing service to take tourists above the clouds and look at the ringed planet.
In a sense, Saturn’s rings extend all the way down to the atmosphere, meaning that there must be constant meteor showers at the equator. I don’t know how this would be replenished. Maybe it can’t be and that’s why the Crêpe Ring looks like that. They reflect more light than the cloud tops and are edge-on to us at alternate intervals of thirteen and three-quarters and fifteen and three-quarters years due to the eccentricity of the planet’s orbit, which is 5.2%, thrice ours. The Crêpe Ring is also known as the C Ring and there are a number of others, although many would best be thought of as groups of much smaller rings nowadays. There’s the even fainter D RIng, which is inside the Crêpe Ring and ends around seven thousand kilometres above the cloud tops. The outer edge of the A Ring, beyond the Encke Division, is split into more widely separated narrower rings and there are three moons orbiting near them. The largest, or rather least small, of these is the F Ring, near another moon. All of these are called “shepherd moons”, which of course is also the name of an Eithne album, and they keep the particles in place in the rings. There are also coörbital moons, which swap orbits regularly.
The G Ring starts 2.8 radii from the centre of Saturn, which places it beyond the Roche Limit of 2.44, within which large objects would be unable to hold together. The main part of the rings is somewhat within the limit, but doesn’t extend right up to it. D and G can only be seen from forward-scattering light, and D is also drowned out from here by the planet’s glare. From the other side of Saturn both of them are easier to spot. In fact the progress of the four Pioneer and Voyager probes beyond the planet made it possible to see the rings from the other side for the first time, and also send signals through them to see how they were altered by and interacted with the ring materials, like shining a light through fabric to inspect the weave. This enabled scientists to determine that A, B and the Crêpe Ring are all water ice and that the range of particle sizes was between micrometres (able to scatter visible light) and decametres (the size of a double decker bus or so, able to scatter RADAR frequencies), but are mainly at least a few centimetres in diameter. Thus the material consists substantially of roughly snowball-sized chunks of water ice, although it can be much larger or smaller.
D may go all the way down to the cloud tops, although presumably this would make it unstable. It’s more of a region than a ring. The Crêpe Ring has grooves like the rest of the ring system, but they don’t correspond to gravitational resonances as might be expected. It also has two gaps, one 270 kilometres, or about the distance between Inverness and Dumfries, and another variable gap, more elliptical, between thirty-five and ninety kilometres wide.
Either side of the rings for about sixty thousand kilometres is a very thin cloud of hydrogen at a density of about six hundred thousand particles per litre. This is probably liberated from the ice in the rings by radiation.
The B Ring is redder and it’s been guessed that this is due to iron oxide, but I can’t help thinking it’s more likely to be tholins, but maybe it’s just me. It just seems like Saturn isn’t dense enough to have loads of iron available to do something like that, although that might depend on where the rings came from in the first place. But then, I’m not a scientist and iron does turn up in odd places sometimes, such as in Martian soil even though Mars is the least dense rocky planet. What do I know, eh?
B and the Crêpe Ring have a sharp boundary. There’s no gradual attenuation into the translucence. It just happens. The
The Cassini probe detected spiral ripples in the inner rings which are attributed to currents in the interior of the planet having a gravitational influence on the particles. Interestingly, these clumps and sparse areas are reminiscent of the arms of a spiral galaxy for me, which amount to “traffic jams” and are more like sound waves moving through the rings than permanent structures. Hence there’s a disc with spiral grooves associated with sound waves. Remind you of anything?
There are also spokes, which are harder to explain. These are dark radial features stretching across the rings upwards from Saturn, which maintain their integrity as they move around the planet. I may or may not have mentioned them in connection with plasma at some point. The reason this is odd is that one would expect them to smear out along the rings’ circumference because objects orbiting further out should be moving more slowly, hence the words “move around” rather than “orbit”. It’s thought that they’re held together by electrostatic charges. They persist for twenty to thirty hours and seem to be subject to the rotation of the magnetic field, as they rotate with the planet, unlike the rings generally. After this period they start rotating with the rings orbitally, which causes them to disperse. They’re found in the B Ring. Their relatively small size when they form suggests the fluctuations in the magnetic field are local and short-lived, lasting no more than a few minutes.
Attempting to write about the rings raises another issue. Looking at Saturn with a pole at the top tempts one to believe they’re horizontal, once again like a record sitting on a turntable (now I’m wondering if there are vertical record players), but in fact the A ring is above the Crêpe Ring rather than beside it. The spokes might be thought of as clouds of particles hovering above the rings but they are actually north or south of them. This would mean that when they return to orbiting around the planet, they will tend to move away or towards the equator, which is tantamount to moving away from or towards the rings, and all would move towards them within a period of around six hours and become lost among the fragments.
They also fluctuate in thickness over a period of hours, which can be seen in time lapse films of the rings in close up. This seems to be caused by the presence of satellites within the rings, or within other rings, and is possibly tidal.
The biggest apparent gap, visible from Earth through a good telescope, is the Cassini Division. Although it was thought to be empty before probes were sent there, it turns out to have about the same density of material as the Crêpe Ring, so the plan to send a probe through it would’ve led to the spacecraft being destroyed. It’s slightly elliptical and the width of North America, so like Galileo Regio on Ganymede it emphasises the sheer scale of the system that we can barely see it from here. Although it’s elliptical, varying by 140 kilometres in width, it’s centred on the centre of Saturn rather than being at one focus. I should probably explain this. According to Kepler, planetary, and in fact satellite, orbits are elliptical with the Sun at one focus. There was a notorious mistake on the last English pound note where one of the orbits shows the Sun at the centre rather than a focus, which will illustrate what it means:
It can be clearly seen that the largest orbit is centred on the Sun whereas the smallest is off-centre, as it should be. Then again, maybe the kind of people who forge notes are really obsessed with astronomy and would accidentally correct it! If you draw an ellipse using a loop of string secured to paper with two drawing pins and a pencil to draw the outline, the pins will be at the foci. The reason the Cassini Division doesn’t show this, I think, is related to emergent effects related to the collision of particles within the rings, but this is my guess. The spokes, as I mentioned, also don’t conform to Kepler’s Laws. All that said, the actual position of the Cassini Division does seem to be determined by the orbit of Mimas, the closest large moon, as the outer edge of the B Ring, which is where the Division starts, has a period of exactly half of that body’s.
The other gap visible from Earth is the Encke Division, which is somewhat further out and seems to be part of a general breakup in the integrity of the rings at the outer edge. It’s towards the edge of Ring A. When Voyager 2 was leaving for Uranus, the star Dschubba passed behind (i.e. in our direction) the rings and was eclipsed several times as the Encke DIvision passed in front of it, so there are several ringlets within the gap, and also some are eccentric.
Due to the grooved appearance of the rings and the fact that the gaps are not actually empty, the idea of orbital resonances causing them doesn’t quite work because whereas there’s a threshold from Earth observation which assigns some parts of the rings to gaps and others to, well, “ring”, this is not the situation observed near Saturn itself, and there are too many rings for orbital resonance to be the only explanation for this. My personal feeling is that the rings seem to have their own special case of physics in a similar way to how Earth’s land surface has. Here on Earth, we expect moving objects to slow down and stop on most flat surfaces and for heavier objects to fall faster than light ones, among other things, and some people tend to generalise that to the Universe in general, where it won’t work. Likewise, the presence of multitudinous ring particles, colliding with each other and becoming statically charged and repelled, among many other things, seems to lead to a special environment not at all like Earth but also unlike an ordinary orbital environment such as is found around Jupiter. Although there are other ring systems, they are nowhere near as dense and spectacular as Saturn’s. This doesn’t answer the questions in detail, but in a way it would be surprising if it did behave intuitively like a load of bodies obeying Kelper’s Laws because there are just so many of them. One idea is that there are density waves triggered initially by orbital resonances, but which then ripple outwards under their own momentum, creating the LP-style pattern we see.
As I recall it, there used to be two theories about what the rings were composed of. One was that it was ice, the other that it was rock. I tried to come up with a compromise where they were rocks coated in ice. This was when I was about six, and little was known about the place because no spacecraft had ever visited. It’s an example of my attempt to resolve an issue by finding a compromise between two opposing viewpoints. I’m not sure I would do that today, but my aversion to conflict often drives me in this direction. Another personal take on this is that it’s been so long since the Voyager probes discovered the detailed appearance of the rings that it’s hard to imagine things being any other way, but before they got there, the Pioneers’ cameras not being good enough to reveal that structure, everyone assumed they were smooth apart from the broad divisions we were familiar with and the Encke and Cassini divisions. It’s hard to remember what everyone used to think they were like. The question arises of whether there actually are smooth ring systems out there. Jupiter’s probably is, but it’s also quite insubstantial. Around another star system, or perhaps long ago in the history of this one, there may be or might have been extensive smoother rings, such as around the moonless Venus
This raises the question of how they got there in the first place. One relevant aspect here is that they seem to be temporary and in fact even the features which have been mentioned may be more transient than permanent fixtures. The rings themselves could be gone within a hundred million years, and since it’s fairly unlikely that we’d be around that close to their demise, the chances are they weren’t there soon after the planet formed, although another set of rings may well have been. The current set is probably less than 200 million years old, which is younger than the first dinosaurs and mammals. The chances are that the rings never formed part of a single larger object but are instead a collection of comets and asteroids which were captured by the gravity of the planet, although I don’t see how this makes sense because if they’re temporary it sounds much more like they were a single object which was broken apart. Asteroids are often rubble piles, so it does make sense that there was never a single object.
The whole subject of the rings is so involved and extensive that it’s almost like I’m talking about a different entity than the planet, but they’re also such an essential part of how we think of Saturn that it can’t really be mentioned without mentioning the rings themselves. Even so, we happen to be in a period of less than five percent of the Solar System’s age so far when Saturn has these rings. Maybe at another time Jupiter’s rings were much more obvious.
Moving on to the atmosphere, which in Saturn’s case is basically the whole planet, being so tenuous, the situation isn’t as simple as Jupiter’s because unlike the giant planet, Saturn is tilted. Whereas Jupiter is almost a model of simplicity, Saturn has an axial inclination of 27°, and since its years last almost thirty of ours it has seasons lasting more than seven years each. This leads to the same sort of “blowiness” as we get in spring and autumn, but on a far larger scale and a much longer period of time. Saturn’s cloud tops are also considerably colder than Jupiter’s, but like Jupiter it emits about 60% more heat than it absorbs. This is also less straightforward than the other planet because it can easily be accounted for there by it being so huge that it’s taken this long to cool down, but in Saturn’s case this is not so.
While I’m at it, this would probably be a good place to talk about the consequences of Saturn’s size and tilt. I’m personally guessing that shadows cast by the rings influence the weather. Twenty-seven degrees of inclination is slightly more pronounced than our own 23°.4 and all other things being equal the seasons will be somewhat more pronounced than ours, but also, the ring shadow reaches 48°from the equator, which creates a large colder area in darkness for long periods at a time, most pronounced during mid-summer and mid-winter. For the former situation there will be a particularly big temperature difference between the mid-latitudes under the Sun and those under the shadow. This would cause powerful winds into the area which would be weaker but still exist during the winter. It also has photochemical effects because the influence of ultraviolet light from the Sun is absent under the shadows. And it is “shadows” because of the various gaps such as the Cassini and Encke divisions.
Another markèd aspect of Saturn is, well, its aspect as the most “squashed” planet. It’s twelve thousand kilometres wider at the equator than the poles, giving it a gravitational pull almost 23% less there. Furthermore, since it takes only ten and a half hours to rotate on its axis, the centrifugal effect is quite large, though not so much as it on Jupiter. The average surface gravity at cloud top level is about the same as ours at sea level. Wind speed is as high as 1 800 kph, which is fifteen times hurricane force on the Beaufort Scale. Cloud top temperature is between -185 and -122°C.
Saturn has a rather blank appearance as a whole and is easily upstaged by its own rings, but it has some similarities to Jupiter in that it’s banded and has oval storms on its “surface”. The comedian Will Hay was also an astronomer and his chief claim to fame in that area is that he discovered one such storm, the Great White Spot, in 1933 CE. As an astronomer he made himself known as W T Hay in order to separate the two parts of his public life. He once said that if everyone was an astronomer there would be no more war because everyone would have life on this planet in perspective. On 3rd August 1933, he observed the spot on Saturn while Cynthia was quite bright and Saturn quite low in the sky, so conditions were far from ideal. Other astronomers were able to confirm its presence at about the same time. He made these sketches of the phenomenon:
His finding was published in the British Astronomical Circular on 4th August 1933. In a reference to the rise of Hitler, the ‘London Evening News’ published a cartoon of Hay standing on the rings and observing dark trouble spots on Earth, which actually chimes really well with his own attitude of getting perspective on human affairs by realising a sense of their relative scale. As a slight aside, I know I’m typing this with Russian manœuvres and Western posturing over the Ukraine, and it might look like I’m just ignoring it, but what I’m trying to do is provide the “Overview Effect”. When I make the observation, for example, that the Cassini Division is the width of North America but not even visible through a mediocre telescope from here, that’s meant to indicate how petty our squabbles are and the ultimate unity of this planet. If Hay’s drawing of his Great White Spot is proportionately accurate, it had a diameter about five times Earth’s, and this is important. Our own problems are of course major, but this makes the planet seem all the more precious because it’s a tiny oasis of life lost in the vastness of the Cosmos, even just of the Solar System. If the orbit of Neptune was scaled down to the circumference of Earth, Earth on that scale would be about the size of a double-decker bus or large tree, or perhaps a medium-sized back garden. That’s not insignificant but it’s still a lot smaller than the world, and that’s just the bit with the planets in it. I have seen a couple of Will Hay films by the way but didn’t get an enormously clear impression of what his cinematic work was like. I would expect it to be rather dated, and the same might be said about his astronomy but it still has the same effect.
Great White Spots are of course named after Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, but they’re harder to, well, spot from here because they aren’t red and Saturn is about twice as far away and somewhat smaller than the next planet in. Also known as Great White Ovals, they appear in the northern summer every twenty-eight and a half years. In 1876, Asaph Hall, who discovered the Martian moons, used one to time Saturn’s rotation period, although that assumes they don’t move relative to whatever counts as stationary for Saturn, which like Jupiter and the Sun is hard to define. Oddly, none were seen before that one even though telescopes had been good enough for a very long time, and it’s thought that before that, Saturn was undergoing a quiescent period similar to the one which has sometimes made the Great Red Spot (GRS) disappear, so there would’ve been some before the telescopic era but nobody would’ve been able to see them. They also appear alternately in the northern temperate zone (NTZ) and at the equator. This makes them similar to the GRS in that they occur in one hemisphere but not the other, in this case the opposite one. They differ in that they leave long trails and have lightning. They also don’t have “eyes”, unlike Earth’s hurricanes, but are active all the way to the centres. It appears that Saturn’s atmosphere is more humid than Jupiter’s and when it cools, rain or snow takes heat away from it, being proportionately much heavier than the air, which is mainly hydrogen and helium, than Earth’s nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. This cooling effect means there are weaker air currents in the upper atmosphere, which results in a colder and very stable condition only disturbed in the summer when the Sun heats it up again and gives rise to storms. An individual storm can be larger than Earth, as was Will Hay’s for example.
Like Jupiter, Saturn is divided into zones and belts, like this:
The polar regions are of special interest and I’ll be returning to them, but for now the northern region is much bigger than the southern, reaching down to 55° whereas the Southern Polar Region reaches down to only 70°. The brightest part of the planet is the Equatorial Zone, bisected by the narrow Equatorial Belt, which could be constantly in receipt of D Ring fragments. It’s the EZ which has the ovals along with the NTZ. Many of these are hard to see from here due to being covered by the rings much of the time, although they’re so thin that everything is visible when the planet is edge-on to us.
The whole planet is rather bland-looking and therefore differences in the clouds are harder to see, if there are many. Features over a thousand kilometres across are only about a tenth as common as they are on Jupiter. All the way through this bit, I feel like I have to compare to Jupiter and that seems quite unfair. Why can’t Saturn just be considered in its own right? Nonetheless it is also the planet most like Jupiter. There is not much helium at six percent. This is thought to be because by about two æons ago, the planet had cooled enough for helium to rain out of its lower atmosphere onto the core. This was very deep down and under enormous pressure. It doesn’t mean the planet cooled down to the extreme low temperatures required for helium to become liquid at sea level pressure on Earth. Helium, incidentally, wouldn’t behave like it does in our atmosphere. Because Saturn has such a low density, and also so much hydrogen in its atmosphere, helium is twice as dense as its air and would tend to sink. This process took the heat from the then warmer upper atmosphere into the depths, which is thought to be why the centre of the planet is hotter than might otherwise be expected.
The internal heat is a factor in driving the weather systems. On Earth, most of the heat comes from the Sun although some is trapped by greenhouse gases and volcanoes would sometimes make a very minor contribution. On Saturn, most of it comes from below, and given that it’s further from the Sun than Jupiter, proportionately more than on that planet. Most heat is lost from the poles and the least from the equator, meaning that the poles can be the warmest parts of the planet. I’d expect the oblateness to contribute to this as at the poles there are twelve thousand fewer kilometres for the heat to make its way through than at the equator, meaning that the atmosphere forms an uneven insulating blanket wrapped around the interior.
There are the usual problems of defining the surface of a gaseous body. In this case it’s fairly clear, because the cloud tops are also the point at which the temperature reaches a minimum at around -183°C and is higher both above and below it. This does, however, mean that the troposphere, i.e. the layer of atmosphere immediately above Earth’s surface, is actually below the surface on Saturn. The top layer of clouds is one of several, the top being ammonia, beneath which is ammonium hydrosulphide. This is one of the chemicals used in “stink bombs”, so the planet might look beautiful but it actually smells revolting. Its boiling point is 56.6°C, so there is adequate range for the existence of these clouds in aerosol form. Below them are water vapour clouds like we have here. These are getting on for two hundred and fifty kilometres down, where the pressure is about ten times that at sea level on Earth. Saturn’s clouds tend to be similar colours and are thicker than Jupiter’s, with fewer gaps, all of which contribute to the planet’s uniform appearance from space.
Because Saturn is the least dense planet, and in connection with that has lower surface gravity, the pressure increases more slowly with depth. The atmosphere is both less dense and lighter. Coincidentally, it’s also lighter in the sense of not being as dark, although in another sense there’s only a quarter of the sunlight present at Jupiter’s orbit, but it does reflect more sunlight.
Saturn has a diameter of 116 460 kilometres, which is nine and a half times ours. This makes it something like seven hundred times Earth’s volume although the oblateness makes this complicated to calculate. However, its density only being 68.7% that of water, a “Saturn” the size of Earth would have lower gravity than Cynthia’s at the surface. It also wouldn’t hold together very long for that reason. It also gives it eighty times our surface area, which means that Earth is to it roughly as Australia is to Earth. Hence Earth is actually a somewhat respectable size compared to the planet, being equivalent to a small continent, although that does also include all the ocean. In terms of land, Earth is analogous to the Sudan on this scale. As far as Jupiter is concerned, it’s feasible to be more exact due to the oblateness of both planets. It’s 83% of its diameter and has 69% of its surface area and 57% of its volume. However, its mass is considerably smaller at only 29%, which illustrates a tendency found among exoplanets that on the whole they don’t get much larger than Jupiter because beyond that mass the interior just gets increasingly compressed. While I’m at it, there is also a big gap between the largest planets and smallest stars which remains unexplained, and there are also “puffy planets” and large planets which are in the process of forming and contracting.
A layer of haze above the clouds might be hiding some of the cloud activity further down. The temperature also contributes to the light appearance as many of the clouds are made of frozen white or pale yellow crystals. There are a number of jet streams. The equatorial one has a velocity of 1 800 kph, which is two-thirds of the speed of sound in that region but supersonic for our atmosphere. Then there are three easterly jets in each hemisphere with latitudes of forty, fifty-eight and seventy degrees. All of these are quite stable and durable. However, unlike Jupiter the winds don’t correspond to the stripes. Surprisingly, the winds are symmetrical with respect to the equator, which they “shouldn’t” be because the planet is tilted and has seasons which are in some ways more distinct than even ours. This suggests that the winds extend deep into the planet and that it rotates as a series of nested cylinders, because the heat from the Sun doesn’t seem to be the main influence on the winds. If it were, there would be more seasonal variation. This also means that some of the cylinders actually reach the core, and these are more likely to be different in the different hemispheres, meaning that the polar regions further than 65° from the equator are likely to differ more than the temperate and equatorial ones.
If the visual contrast is ignored, there are many similar structures in Saturn’s and Jupiter’s atmospheres. The jet streams in both are thought to be powered by eddies. However, on Saturn they’re four times stronger, can be twice to four times the width and don’t relate to the banded cloud structure.
Saturn’s hexagon in false colour
No account of Saturn’s atmosphere would be complete without a reference to the Hexagon. Jupiter has its Great Red Spot, Saturn its Hexagon. This is a hexagon (really?) in the north polar region whose sides are 14 500 kilometres wide. It was first detected by Voyager 1 when it passed over the north pole. However, it took another six or seven years before anyone noticed it because there was so much information available. It was initially thought to be the result of a storm happening on the edge of the northern polar region but when Cassini visited more than twenty years later, but less than an entire orbit of Saturn later, it was still there, tough at that point the north pole was in darkness so it was imaged in infrared. It has now been seen from Earth. Also puzzling is the complete absence of a similar shape at the south pole. Jupiter doesn’t have a hexagon, but it does have a polar vortex surrounded by eight other equidistant storms. Other planets with atmospheres also have them, including Venus, Earth and Mars. Mathematical models were able to produce triangles but not hexagons. After some time, it was suggested that the shape emerges from a wave passing around the northern polar circle of the planet of a certain length which interacts with itself to produce a kind of interference pattern. It rotates once every Saturnian day of ten and a half hours. What we see is quite like active noise cancellation, where a wave of reverse phase (troughs and peaks in opposite places) is used to reduce sound level.
Another aspect of the Hexagon is that it has certain things in common with the former Antarctic ozone hole. Both are atmospheric regions sealed by a rotary jet stream, whose atmospheric composition differs markèdly from their surroundings. Over Antarctica, the jet stream prevents ozone from entering from outside and concentrates CFCs inside, then the winter conditions exacerbate it. On Saturn, large droplets cannot pass into the polar region, again due to the jet stream, and again winter conditions strengthen this effect. Also, the Antarctic ozone hole was worse than the situation in the Arctic, so both structures exist over only one pole.
The central vortex is about four dozen times the size of a typical hurricane eye on Earth. The colour of the Hexagon changes – it can be blue or red. Presumably the blue is due to the same effect which makes the cloudless sky blue here and is connected to the size of the aerosol droplets, which are smaller inside the shape. It spins counterclockwise, though quite slowly compared to the rotation of the planet as a whole, insofar as it even does rotate in one piece, but some of the vortices within it spin clockwise. To the human eye, the area would look like this:
The central hurricane, PIA14947, unlike the Hexagon, does have its counterpart at the south pole. It’s a little under two thousand kilometres in diameter, and takes only six hours to rotate, so unlike Earth, whose poles are stationary and polar regions rotate slowly on account of it being a solid object, Saturn’s poles rotate faster in terms of revolutions per minute than the rest of the planet, and the inner ring moves even faster, at the same speed as sound on Earth at sea level although it doesn’t break the sound barrier for that part of Saturn.
The south polar vortex is eight thousand kilometres across. Although I’ve heard that “conditions” mean there is no hexagon there, that doesn’t really explain it to me and I haven’t managed to find out why there’s this asymmetry. With Earth, the Arctic and Antarctic regions are very different due to the presence of an ocean at the North Pole and a continent at the South, but this doesn’t apply to Saturn. Nor does it have anything to do with spacecraft visiting it at particular seasons, as Cassini was there for quite some time and the Voyager probes flew by during different seasons compared to Cassini. The south pole is 60°C hotter than the equator, which has been likened to discovering Antarctica is hotter than the Sahara, and given that Saturn as a whole is so much colder at cloud level, the contrast is even more dramatic. Clouds around the area are thirty to six dozen kilometres higher than their environs. This is known as an “eyewall” and has only otherwise been seen in hurricanes on Earth.
I haven’t mentioned the interior of the planet in detail yet. The scale of the interior is somewhat different than Jupiter’s due to the fact that Saturn is smaller, has much weaker gravity and is less dense. Both planets’ magnetic fields are generated by liquid metallic hydrogen near the centre, but in Saturn’s case the amount is proportionately smaller at forty-six percent of its diameter as opposed to Jupiter’s seventy percent. The interior of Saturn has relatively little helium compared to Jupiter’s. The rocky core is about the size of our own planet, but also has three times our mass. These differences relate to those between the weathers of Jupiter and Saturn. The magnetic field is around a thousand times stronger than Earth’s. Like Jupiter, the “true” rotation of the planet can be found by monitoring its radio waves, which have a period of ten hours, thirty-nine minutes and twenty-four seconds, the peak in strength being defined as local noon. The centre of the magnetic field is 2 400 kilometres north of the centre of the planet itself, but it’s also the only planet whose magnetic field is almost perfectly aligned with the axis of rotation. A compass on Saturn would actually point to geographic north.
That, then, is it for Saturn. I was rather surprised how long this one took me although I did also write about twenty thousand words of fiction while also writing this. Even so, Saturn is quite an involved planet, mainly because the rings are so prominent and important but also because I didn’t want to neglect the planet itself, which is as interesting in its own right. And you might think that now I’ve got to Saturn, I’m half way through my coverage of the Solar System. Not a bit of it! Saturn has so many moons that this is still the first half of my “trip”, as do Uranus and Neptune, although Saturn’s moons are much better known, and although Jupiter has four large moons and Saturn just ones, some of its smaller moons are large enough to be thought of worlds in their own right and this skews the half way point way down the line.
The first time I saw images of Jupiter’s moon Europa, it reminded me, for some reason, of a softball. I realise it looks a lot more like a cue ball than that, and I can’t explain why I got that association rather than the other. Because I was thinking of a relatively pristine object, it always makes me feel that it’s a bit worn out, scuffed, dirty and in particular scratched, and it makes me feel like I’ve got dusty hands like I’ve just picked up a mucky ball in dry but dirty conditions, as prevailed in our sports hall at school. I may be wrong about this, but my impression of Kent generally is that it’s rather dustier and sandier than the English Midlands, and that does make sense given its slightly warmer, drier climate. Over the channel it seems to become slightly more so, but I don’t know because it doesn’t seem like the difference is that big. The average annual temperature in Canterbury is 11°C and precipitation is 728 mm. Compare this to a place I don’t live (because I don’t want to doxx myself) but do live fairly near, Oakham is slightly drier at 716 mm precipitation annually and slightly cooler at 9.8°C, so in fact it seems not to be true.
But this post is not about the climate of East Kent but if anything, the climate of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Europa is in some ways very Earth-like in a way no other planet (see here for why I’m calling it that) is. It’s the smallest Galilean at 3 126 kilometres in diameter, which makes it slightly smaller than Cynthia. There are of course more than six dozen still smaller Jovian moons and if we could see Europa from the distance we see the lunar surface from, it would look about the same size, but would be four and a half times brighter and lacks the shadows our satellite has due to its flatter relief.
The “accident” of its naming opens it up to comparisons to the pretend continent with a similar name, and it’s also worth explaining why it has the same name, so let’s start with that. Europa the mythical, or possibly historical, figure was King Minos of Crete’s wife. There have been attempts to connect the name to the Akkadian word for “west”, ‘ereb, and that’s quite neat because it then allows Asia to be connected to a word for “east” and Afrika to a word for “south” (I think), but it may not work. It might also mean “wide face”, which is how it sounds in Greek. As usual for these stories, Zeus abducted or raped Europa, and this time he was in the form of a bull hiding in her father’s herds. This was commemorated as the constellation Taurus. The association with Europe is therefore somewhat surprising, but the way it worked was that it was initially applied to cis Balkan Thrace by the Greeks, then became the name of a Roman province including that area, which was then used to supplant the division which had emerged between the eastern and western Roman Empire. I have to say this explanation really feels like it has a lot missing from it. The element Europium is named after it, and just in passing I want to say that Europe is a fake continent. It’s actually just Eurasia’s biggest peninsula, and from that rejection, Asia is also a misleading name. There’s just Eurasia. That said, I regard myself as Northwestern European, while recognising that this doesn’t refer to my origins in a part of a continent but just as from that part of that peninsula. (This may be enlightening). This is the convoluted route whereby Europa came to refer to two such different things.
The surface of the roughly Cynthia-sized Europa is three times the size of the terrestrial region at thirty million square kilometres. This makes the planet’s surface twice the size of Antarctica. Another way of thinking of this is that Europa’s surface is equal in area to the combined area of Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean. We kind of have our own Europa right here, as well as our own Europe, but the Europa orbiting Jupiter is colder even than the South Pole in midwinter, at least on the solid surface, at a temperature of -160°C. The temperature at the equator varies daily between -141 and -187°C. The poles are actually warmer than the equator at night, and the north pole is warmer than the south at those times. This range of temperature happens to be the one (below freezing) where the properties of water ice change most.
Europa is very bright, having a surface of water ice, although it doesn’t reflect as much light as Enceladus as its surface is “dirtier”. Compared to the other Galileans, it’s composed much more like the inner planets, being mainly silicate rock with an iron core. The chief difference is that its surface is solid water ice with an ocean of salt water underneath. Back in a period referred to as the Cryogenian, Earth was in a somewhat similar state with a crust of ice covering a salty ocean over silicate rock and an iron core of course, although Earth is much larger than Europa and it had continents and oceans underneath the ice, unlike the moon, which is probably more homogenous. This was 700 million years ago, and is sometimes thought to have stimulated evolution enough to trigger the Cambrian Explosion.
It’s difficult to talk about Europa without talking about the possibility of life, so I’m going to break my self-imposed rule here and do that. It wasn’t initially clear whether the ice was simply frozen solid or covered a water ocean, but the latter appears to be so. Salt water can be detected by space probes because of its ions, which being charged behaves differently in terms of magnetism than fresh water. The surface, though mainly water ice, is also covered in sulphates and there is some sulphuric acid, but these may well be from Io’s volcanism. Like most moons, Europa faces the planet it orbits at all times, giving it a leading and a trailing hemisphere, and the sulphates, which include Epsom salts, and sulphuric acid are mainly deposited on the latter, indicating that it doesn’t come from the ocean but from Io, or it would be evenly distributed. The leading hemisphere, by contrast, has sodium chloride on its surface. This would lower the freezing point of the water, making it more likely that “life as we know it” could exist there. There is a “found footage” film, ‘Europa Report’, which takes pains with accuracy and depicts complex multicellular life in the ocean, and ‘2010’ also shows complex life there. The main difficulty as I see it is that although the situation isn’t as bad as on Io, the radiation belts are still significant, but I presume the ice provides shielding. As well as the other constituents, there’s dry ice and frozen hydrogen peroxide, the latter of which is thought to be formed by the radiation.
If there is life, it’s likely to derive its energy from deep-sea vents, as also happens on Earth, and like Io, the energy for this volcanism comes from the flexing of the crust and planet from tidal forces of Jupiter and the other Galileans. This is thought to be responsible for the cracks on the surface. Also like Io, Europa’s surface is almost devoid of craters, strongly suggesting that it was liquid more recently than Ganymede and particularly Callisto, the two outer Galileans. When the Voyagers visited, the encounter was relatively distant and the moon wasn’t mapped in as much detail as the others, so the knowledge and research done into the moon lagged behind that on the others. Three types of feature were identified: lineæ, which are the “cracks”, flexūs and maculæ. It was from “macula” used in this naming that I first learnt the Latin word for spot, as in “immaculate”. None of the features are very high or low and the surface is unusually smooth. There are currently forty-five named lineæ, formed when cracks appear in the surface and material seeps up from the interior to fill them, which then freezes. Salt is highest in the lineæ.
Europa takes three days and thirteen hours (plus a bit) to orbit Jupiter. Like most other moons its day lasts as long as its orbit. This period is significant because it’s almost exactly twice Io’s. Roughly every three and a half days, Io and Europa are within a quarter of a million kilometres of each other, making them larger than Cynthia in each other’s skies and this causes them to pull on each other, raising tides in their surfaces and elsewhere and heating each other independently of solar radiation. Perhaps surprisingly, although Europa is the least massive moon of the four Galileans, it has the second highest gravity at 0.134 g, somewhat lower than Cynthia’s. The next moon out, Ganymede, also the largest moon in the Solar System but I’ll come to that later, again has almost exactly double Europa’s period. The Darian calendar, originally designed for Mars, has been adapted for use with the Galileans.
The surface is covered in icy regolith, substantially broken down by the radiation, with grains about the same size as snowflakes, though presumably not so regularly formed. This means it would be possible to ski on Europa, although there are no real slopes. Also the radiation would quickly kill you unless you had really good shielding on your ski suit. Maybe one day. Incidentally, radiation shielding doesn’t have to consist of lead or some other heavy metal, and synthetics work quite well. That said, I don’t know how powerful the radiation is there. It’s weaker than on Io though, and unlike Io, Europa doesn’t have the flux tube. However, although it was long considered quiescent, it does have cryovolcanism. There are domes on its surface which may have volcanic origins and of course it seems to have actual volcanism, or rather volcanism like Earth’s, in the form of deep sea vents. The cracks in the surface, which rapidly freeze over, expose water which evaporates into the atmosphere like steam. And yes, it has an atmosphere, though even thinner than Io’s, but unlike Io’s the main constituent is oxygen. This is generated by the radiation splitting the steam and Europa’s gravity being insufficient to hang onto the hydrogen.
Finally, the Galileo probe was deliberately pushed into Jupiter’s atmosphere to destroy it because of its own discovery of a salt ocean on Europa, to protect any potential life which might exist there.
Sometimes I think I should just go through all the major bodies in the Solar System on this blog because so many of them suggest themselves. This post in particular has an interesting origin. I sometimes try to generate blog ideas using an AI technique called a generative adversarial network. When I did this yesterday, I put a number of post titles in and was rewarded not with a list of titles but some body text which looked like it came from a post about Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and it actually made quite a bit of sense. I’ve since deleted it, but it was the inspiration for this.
When the Voyager probes reached Saturn in the early ’80s CE, I was really surprised to find that Titan had a mainly nitrogen atmosphere like Earth’s which was actually denser than ours. I don’t know if it was news to astronomers or not. Titan had been thought to be potentially the largest moon in the Solar System, but I think it was the Voyagers that established that it wasn’t. Unlike the Jovian satellite system, which has four planet-sized moons and a large number of assorted objects orbiting it at various distances, Saturn has one very large one, several medium-sized moons and an even larger number than Jupiter of much smaller ones. At first glance, Titan seems to be a bit anomalous, and it is in fact quite unique in the Solar System in being the only moon with a substantial atmosphere. Other moons do have tenuous gaseous envelopes, but Titan’s is thousands or millions of times thicker than any of the others, and even thicker than ours. Among the terrestrial planets, only Venus has a more substantial atmosphere.
In fact there are ways in which Titan is the most similar world to Earth in the entire system. Not only is its atmosphere of similar composition, being mainly nitrogen like ours, but it’s also the only place other than here where bodies of liquid, including lakes and rivers, can be found on the solid surface along with islands. There’s even a similar division as we have here between fresh and salty water in the form of methane containing ethane and purer methane, and it also rains there and there are forms, including pebbles, which are shaped by liquid erosion. The last is also true of Mars but there it’s more historical. At the same time, the surface gravity there is about the same as on Cynthia (“the Moon”). This would seem to make Titan this weird floaty place where not only is the gravity weak, but also the atmosphere is thick enough to slow the fall of really quite massive objects. Dust particles float in our air. On Titan, they could be at least the size of grains of sand and do the same. The surface level pressure of Titan’s atmosphere is over 1½ times ours at sea level, but is not merely fifty percent denser than ours because the gravity is also lower. It’s actually something like nine times the density, with correspondingly higher buoyancy, further enhanced by the lower pull downwards. This would make any winds much stronger at the same velocity.
The surface temperature averages out at around -182°C, although it also varies a fair bit. Because Titan is orbiting near Saturn’s equatorial plane and Saturn is itself tilted, its seasons are determined by its planet’s orbit more than its own, as it usually the case for moons. This gives it seasons around 7½ years long. A spacecraft would need to stay in the vicinity for almost three decades to observe all the seasonal changes. There is also photochemical smog formed in a similar process to that in urban areas, and this reflects some of the heat from the Sun back into space, making the moon colder than it would be if its atmosphere were clearer, but methane is also a greenhouse gas so the overall effect is that it’s warmer than a bare moon such as Dione would be at that distance from the Sun. Like Earth, Titan has a layer which absorbs ultraviolet light high in its atmosphere. Like many other moons Titan’s spin is locked to its planet, giving it a day lasting just over a fortnight. Saturn would appear ten times the diameter of the Sun from Earth in Titan’s sky, except that this would only be visible above the haze. However, eclipses would only occur rarely because of the angle at which Titan and Saturn orbit the Sun. The rings would also be practically invisible because it’s so close to their plane. This is true of most of the moons of Saturn, sadly, and they only become visible from the outer satellites, by which time the planet looks quite small. Eclipses would occur at the same time of day and only at the equinoctes, their maximum duration being about five hours.
Although there is no direct evidence for life on the surface of Titan, it resembles the larger moons of Jupiter in having a watery mantle like the rocky mantle of Earth, which could constitute a habitat for life as we know it. However, thicker layers of water may be less suitable for life because they’re further from energy sources and may not have very concentrated salts. The fact that this is a possibility, however, raises the question of whether inorganic life forms might exist in the magma mantles of rocky worlds, which I’ve mentioned elsewhere. The surface is less promising, at least if one expects a polar solvent and organic life, because there simply are no liquid polar solvents on it. To explain, some liquids consist of molecules which are more positively charged on one side and more negatively charged on the other. A very good example is water:
This difference in electrical charge allows water to dissolve a very wide variety of substances, which are then able to react with each other. There are plenty of other polar solvents in existence, including ammonia:
and formaldehyde:
All of these molecules are quite common in the Universe, although water is the most. All of them have a certain asymmetry to them which renders them polar. However, the melting point of ammonia is -77°C and that of formaldehyde is -19°C, so neither would be liquid on Titan. The liquids which are plentiful there are ethane and methane, both of which are non-polar and not good solvents. Hence they can cycle around like water, evaporating from the lakes into the clouds which then become saturated and fall as rain, and possibly snow, forming streams and rivers, and generally behave rather like water, but that’s never going to contribute to biochemistry like ours, which is all we know.
One unusual chemical which is found on Titan is cyclopropenylidene. This consists of molecules made up of a triangle of carbon atoms, two with double bonds and linked to hydrogen atoms: C3H2. It has two free electrons and is therefore highly reactive. It’s unique to Titan in this solar system although it is also found in interstellar space. It’s of the kind of molecule which might form purines and pyrimidines in combination with nitrogen, which are the information-carrying parts of DNA and RNA – genes in other words. However, although such substances might form on Titan, they’re unlikely to get anywhere due to the absence of polar solvents, so the likelihood is that the chemistry of Titan is going to be constantly on the brink of producing life but never quite getting there, until that is the Sun heats up in thousands of millions of years time and melts the water ice. At that point, the whole moon will become a very deep ocean which will slowly boil into space, so life might just start briefly and then get cooked to death, but it’s not going to happen for something like fifteen hundred million years if it does. This could be taken as a salutary demonstration of the fragility of life in the Cosmos but it probably won’t be.
Other gases or aerosols in the atmosphere include propane, hydrogen cyanide, cyanogen, diacetylene, methylacetylene, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. All of these are at less than one part per million. Much higher is the six percent of helium present. All of the hydrocarbons are more concentrated than they are on Jupiter and Saturn. The moon orbits within a torus of rarefied hydrogen which has escaped from its gravitational pull but not from Saturn’s, extending in to the orbit of the next large moon in, Rhea. The list of gases includes a couple which contain nitrogen and are, I’m guessing, the result of reactions with cyclopropenylidine. Hydrogen cyanide in particular is a vital step on the way to amino acids and DNA. The hemispheres differ in colour, the northern hemisphere being darker and redder at the time of the Voyagers’ encounters.
NASA considered Titan so important that of the two Voyager missions, Voyager 1 was sent over Saturn’s south pole to bring it as close to Titan as possible, which sent it out of the ecliptic (the plane of the Solar System) and ended its mission to the planets. Had that failed, Voyager 2 would’ve been sent on a similar trajectory and Uranus and Neptune would still never have been visited. I’m personally glad that this didn’t happen although there’s not a lot going on with those two compared to the two larger gas giants. This means that the two spacecraft are heading in very different directions and are already very far apart. Voyager 1 is heading towards the red dwarf star Gliese 445 in Camelopardalis, which is towards the next arm in of the Milky Way, although it isn’t currently in the position where it will be encountered and it will pass 1.6 light years from it in four hundred centuries’ time. Voyager 2 will pass near Ross 248, another red dwarf in Andromeda, and that name of course indicates that it’s heading out of the Galaxy in the approximate direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. Voyager 2 is further out than Voyager 1 right now by about nine times the distance of Earth from the Sun.
The Cassini-Huygens mission made Titan the first moon to be landed on by a terrestrial space probe. Huygens sent back this image of the surface:
The geography of Titan is now quite well-known thanks to both the Cassini-Huygens mission and the Hubble space telescope. One bright area, about the size of Australia, that springs to mind is Xanadu, and one of the seas is called Ligeia Mare. Unlike the lunar “seas” or maria, these are real bodies of liquid. Another sea is called Kraken. The seas can be seen to glint in infrared sunlight from orbiting spacecraft, or rather the one orbiting spacecraft which has been there to detect that. There are wind-blown streaks of particles hundreds of kilometres in length. The rivers have carved out canyons. There are flash floods and torrential downpours interspersed with long periods of drought. Craters are practically absent due to liquid and wind erosion.
Economically speaking, Titan is a potentially useful place. It has easily available hydrocarbons on the surface in vast quantities for use in petrochemical industries and as fuel, whether or not that would be environmentally desirable. These resources, unlike the vastly greater ones on and in the gas giants, are also only weakly anchored to the moon gravitationally, although there is a thick atmosphere above them. However, the atmosphere itself is a potential resource of the same kind. Whether that’s desirable is another question entirely, and of course I believe in orbital solar power, which would be much easier to achieve than acquiring resources from this moon. Nonetheless this formed the basis of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic 1976 novel ‘Imperial Earth’, where a third-generation clone of the original governor of Titan travels to Earth to have himself cloned again and celebrate the US quincentennial. This is kind of Clarke’s equivalent of Asimov’s ‘Bicentennial Man’, written to celebrate that event. Another prominent science fictional reference to the place is found in Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘The SIrens Of Titan’, which inspired the Al Stewart track of the same name. This novel was pieced together at a party in a few hours off the top of Vonnegut’s head. It’s the first work of his, as far as I know, to feature the Tralfamadoreans who appear much more prominently in ‘Slaughterhouse Five’. Although it is a good novel, the moon is not very prominent in the story and its characteristics don’t drive the plot. As far as I can recall, the world’s richest man Niles Mumfoord has become trapped in a ‘Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum’ on the way to Mars and is now distributed in a spiral stretching from the Sun to Betelgeuse, becoming manifest on bodies as they cross its path. On Titan, however, the spiral is in perfect sync with its orbit and therefore Mumfoord is permanently manifested there, meaning that he effectively lives on the moon full-time. He is able to see the past and the future since he’s no longer localised in space-time. However, this is not the main plot of the novel, although Mumfoord does influence events. A major theme in the novel is that of free will and determinism, which kind of links back to yesterday’s post. Here’s Al Stewart’s take on it:
For some reason I’ve never been able to understand, the novel is used on risk management courses. The book also has the catchphrase “I was the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
There are two successful SF novels simply entitled ‘Titan’, one by Stephen Baxter, the other John Varley. Both are too optimistic in their timeline. I haven’t read either, but the Baxter novel forms the second volume of his NASA Trilogy, whereof ‘Voyage’ is absolutely awesome. That I have read. I seem to remember the film ‘GATTACA’ ends with a mission to Titan but on the whole I regard cinematic SF as a minor and inconsequential cul de sac compared to the main written tradition. I wish it wasn’t though.
Leaving fiction behind, Titan’s magnitude from here maxes out at 8.2 which is something like eight times too faint to be seen by the naked eye (and maybe a hundred or so for me because of my poor eyesight), meaning that alone among the Saturnian satellites it can be seen through binoculars with at least 60 mm aperture. Right now it’s in Capricorn and very close visually to Saturn itself, meaning that it might be easy to identify but on the other hand might be obscured by the planet’s glare. That’s the real Titan, discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens, hence the name of the lander. I always think it’s important to anchor astronomy in what you can actually experience personally, but since I live in England and have terrible eyesight this is unlikely in this case. Nobody will ever go there of course, but they could and it wouldn’t be that difficult, and there’s even a crass commercial reason for doing so. Long after we’ve become the victim of a series of accidents ourselves in some easily avoidable but still inevitable way which nobody could be bothered to do anything about, life might just flicker into being briefly in the last days of the Solar System, just before being boiled to death. So that’s something at least. And after all, not taking any risks is the greatest risk of all.
It may not be obvious to more recent readers of this blog, but there used to be substantial ‘Star Trek’ content here. I reviewed every episode of TOS and gave a more general overview of the Animated Series and TNG. You can probably find them if you search for episode titles. I think there are around fifty of them. However, I am not a Trekkie or a Trekker. I don’t have a problem with Trekkers. It’s just that I think TV and cinema are not ideal media for science fiction because they rely more on the visual than the cerebral, and often have no choice but to appeal to a wider audience, which can lead to watered down content and in particular scientific implausibility, which I find really grating and distracting.
Spoilers for ‘Star Trek’, The Iliad and ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ follow.
That said, I do have a particular interest in ‘Star Trek”s Mirror Universe concept and have given it considerable thought. Just in case you don’t know, the ‘Star Trek’ “universe” is in fact more of a duoverse, if that’s the word. Whereas it does have various parallel timelines, one of its biggest distinctive contributions to popular culture is the idea of “dark” and “light” versions of its universe, although the emphasis is of course very much on the light one. This idea has been adapted to other franchises, in the case of ‘Buffy’, in at least two different ways.
The idea is introduced in ‘Mirror, Mirror‘. The away team are on the Halkan homeworld having failed to negotiate for dilithium mining rights, and beam up during an ion storm. This leads to them teleporting aboard an Enterprise in a universe very unlike their own in the sense that all the worst parts of human behaviour have come to the fore and the best parts are repressed and the Terran Empire holds sway. Meanwhile, their counterparts from that universe have arrived aboard the Enterprise we know and love. The Terran Empire is basically fascist. “Behaviour and discipline has become brutal, savage” as Kirk puts it in his log in his much-imitated style. This mirror universe concept was later developed in subsequent works, both canonical and non-canonical, such as ‘In A Mirror Darkly’, a number of DS9 episodes and notably in ‘Star Trek Discovery’, which however I haven’t seen because I dislike the general ethos of the series.
People have had various thoughts about the nature of the Mirror Universe which often involve the common idea of a point of divergence (POD), used to explain alternate timelines in general. That is, a particular event in the past turned out differently, leading to a fork in history. This is a common science fiction trope and can be seen in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ and ‘SS GB’ for example. One claim, made in non-canonical writing, is that the POD occurred during the Trojan War when Achilles kills Priam rather than showing him mercy, but even accepting that this occurred this could also be seen as symptomatic of the general atmosphere of the universe rather than a specific turning point. I admit to not having read the book in question because, as I’ve said, I’m not really a Trekker.
What looks at first glance to be a very fruitful possibility here is Harlan Ellison’s ‘The City On The Edge Of Forever’, which I reviewed here. Dr McCoy, Kirk and Spock go back to the 1930s CE and rescue a peace campaigner from being killed in a car accident, which leads to the US becoming non-aggressive in the Second World War and the triumph of Nazism. This might be expected to lead to a scenario where there’s a fascist interstellar empire dominated by humans, but in fact there is apparently no Enterprise at all, and quite possibly no interstellar human presence. This would not have happened in the Mirror Universe. Instead we would’ve seen the hostile, aggressive version present in ‘Mirror, Mirror’.
There are a few other suggestions. One is that the Terran Empire is a continuation of the Roman Empire, which I imagine would accord quite well with the Trojan War turning out differently. Another is that it simply represents the triumph of fascism in the mid-twentieth century, and a third suggestion is that it means the Age of Enlightenment emphasised opposition to democracy more strongly. However, the problem with all of these is that if it were as simple as a mere POD, or even several, we wouldn’t see what we do on screen. From a real-world perspective, it isn’t possible to show a completely alternative dramatis personæ from the majority of the episodes in a given series, so instead the same characters exist with different personalities. One impressive thing about ‘Star Trek’ is that it manages to make a virtue out of the necessity of working within the constraints of being a popular TV series and walking a tightrope between being liberal-progressive and still acceptable for mainstream American TV, and of constraints can be very stimulating to creativity. The presence of the same cast and props, scenery and the like is a different kind of restriction, but one which has been used very cleverly in these episodes.
Like some other people, I would go a different way with the idea. One possibility and I think the answer is to be found in a surprising place: phasers.
There is another episode of the original series which I think goes some way towards explaining what’s going on if you choose to accept it. In ‘The Tholian Web‘, the Enterprise discovers a “ghost ship”, the USS Defiant, which Spock establishes is trapped in an “interphase”, and humans affected by it become aggressive and murderous because the fracture in space “damages” the human nervous system. Kirk vanishes but appears in a mirror in Uhura’s quarters. It turns out he’s appearing at regular intervals and is beamed aboard, leading to him becoming permanently physically manifested.
In the mirror universe in 2155 CE (‘In A Mirror Darkly‘) the Tholians detonate a tricobalt warhead inside the gravity well of a dead star, creating an interphasic rift to 2268 in the “Prime” universe. This is retconned as the cause of the deaths of the Defiant’s crew in a mass murderous rampage, and allows the Terran Empire to access twenty-third century technology.
Phasers and disruptors work by producing artificial particles called nadions. They can also be used to close subspace fractures, similar to the fractured space encountered by the Enterprise in ‘The Tholian Web’. In some TNG episode I can’t track down, Geordi La Forge and one other character find themselves on an empty version of the Enterprise while having apparently disappeared from the prime version.
This is what I think nadion particles do. In the real world, and presumably in the Star Trek duoverse, particles manifest as waves of probability. If the likelihood of them being in a particular position in space is plotted on a graph, this will show up as peaks and troughs like a wave form. These waves have a particular phase. When a quantum goes out of phase, if it’s a boson it can cancel out another boson and there can instead just be nothing in that position. Fermions are different due to their spin and cannot cancel each other out. Nadions, in my opinion, change the phase of particles in general, such that they cannot interact with particles in the prime universe. It’s also known from Star Trek canon that there is a void between the prime and mirror universes. When a phaser or disruptor is fired at a life form or object, it doesn’t destroy the object or kill the life form, but shifts its phase so that it is no longer in ordinary space but in the interphase void. This is what happened to Kirk in ‘The Tholian Web’, although in his case the particles making up his body hadn’t been fully shifted out of phase and therefore periodically came back into phase before slipping back out, like an interference pattern. This is nightmare fuel, because it means that when a phaser or disruptor is fired at someone, rather than killing them, it shifts them into a void where they may, depending on how well they’re protected, suffocate or die of thirst slowly over a period of days in black nothingness.
Now back to the mirror universe. The mirror universe is out of phase with the prime universe. People in the mirror universe have the same disruption to their nervous systems as was seen in ‘The Tholian Web’, making them more aggressive and violent. However, their societies and biology have evolved to cope with this. In the meantime, in the prime universe we tend to see people behaving in a much more peaceful and calm manner than they do in our own world, which we generally tend to put down to the fact that they’re living in a post-scarcity utopia. This, in my head canon, is not the case, or rather it is, but there’s a cause for it. I would claim that the prime universe comprises matter in an optimal phase. Hence the mirror and prime universes are not separate timelines but two versions of the same timeline. Moreover, they depend on a third, more fundamental universe which is intermediate. Events in both of them are dragged along by this third universe and don’t follow exact cause and effect, because if they did there would be very rapid and radical divergence between the two other universes. There must be a common controlling factor between them. The “prime” universe is in fact not prime at all, but as divergent as the mirror one.
Finally, I would also claim that this third fundamental universe is our own reality, not literally of course because ‘Star Trek’ is fiction, but in the sense that our future is neither dystopian nor utopian but something in between. We can glean certain things about our future from the nature of both universes, such as the fact that there are other intelligent life forms in the Universe, that the protagonists we encounter in them also exist in our own future and that there is some space-faring organisation involving humans, but it’s a kind of average place.
To conclude, I do think it’s worthwhile as well as entertaining to speculate in this way because applying real world physics to ‘Star Trek’ to see how it would be difficult to make work helps one to understand how the actual Universe works. For instance, if what I’ve just suggested is coherent it would mean that there are no fermions in the ‘Star Trek’ universe, which is true in a sense because it consists only of images on screens and the photons which impinge upon our retinæ. This also connects to the Holodeck, Emergency Medical Hologram and Captain Proton threads, since in ‘Star Trek’ it seems that light does resemble the matter composing the likes of Picard, Janeway and the Enterprise much more closely than it does in reality. Also, it provides two fruitful sources of fan fiction: an intermediate, morally neutral future involving the same characters and setting, and a horrific void into which the victims of phasers are ejected to die slowly and horribly. So it’s all good.
Yesterday I alluded to the fact that for many people, Saturday 26th November 1977 turned out to be a very important day. It also turned out to be important to me because it completely changed my perception of ancient astronaut hypotheses, and it was also the day the first episode of the ‘Doctor Who’ episode ‘The Sun Makers’ was broadcast, making it quite memorable for me in two ways. It’s also made me realise that I’ve got the date wrong for the last Saturday in November 1982, which was 25th rather than 26th, since 1982 has the same calendar as 2021 but 2022 has the same as 1977.
I always think of 1977 as the most typical year of the 1970s, just as 1968 is for the ’60s and 1984 for the ’80s. It’s odd, because the quintessence of a decade is often associated with hindsight with a relatively early or late part of that time period. The ’60s makes us think of the counter-culture, Vietnam war, protests, psychedelia and hippies, but for most people alive at the time those weren’t that significant and many of the features we now think of as happening in the ’60s didn’t become manifest until quite late on. It’s also been said that the popular image of a decade often reflects what the following decade was actually like. 1977 was Silver Jubilee year, the year British punk became very prominent and also the year personal computers as we might recognise them were first marketed widely. Zooming in on my life and the events of that November, it was probably the year I came off my ADHD medication, though that’s hard to date, and definitely the year I changed primary schools from the awful one to the good one. It was also the last year I didn’t appreciate pop music, although I was into ABBA. On 26th November 1977, ‘The Name Of The Game’ was number 1, about to change to ‘Mull Of Kintyre’, which just went on and on and on into 1978.
I can actually tell you a fair amount of what I did on that day, because unfortunately it involved watching a lot of TV. As I mentioned yesterday, I watched the ‘Horizon’ special on BBC2 about ancient astronauts, which of course had that influential closing statement which was to mess with my head for years afterwards. Then I had dinner, which probably consisted of salami, lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes with white instant coffee and two sugars. Chances are I was wearing a brown jumper over a grey shirt and brown corduroy trousers with slippers. I would’ve watched ‘Swap Shop’ that morning and gone on to make copious notes on some nerdy subject in the afternoon, possibly gone to the river to look at wildlife, played with my friend Vicky and maybe fumed about the forthcoming release of ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’. I would’ve read my library books, which again would probably have been about wildlife, and possibly read some of my own story books such as ‘Ring Of Bright Water’ or ‘A Skunk In The Family’. This was also the one year I used italic cursive handwriting, which was perfectly neat but rumoured to be frowned upon by my likely secondary school. I would’ve felt conflicted about my television watching, and this is where it gets interesting.
It was pure chance that I happened to be watching BBC TV rather than Southern, the local ITV network, although we were a BBC family, because at 5:10 pm, while I was watching ‘Horizon’ and being disabused of the notion of ancient aliens controlling human history, the picture on ITV wobbled and a deep, pulsing regular note began as the following words were intoned in a distorted-sounding voice:
This is the voice of Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you. For many years you have seen us as lights in the skies. We speak to you now in peace and wisdom as we have done to your brothers and sisters all over this, your planet Earth. We come to warn you of the destiny of your race and your world so that you may communicate to your fellow beings the course you must take to avoid the disaster which threatens your world, and the beings on our worlds around you. This is in order that you may share in the great awakening, as the planet passes into the New Age of Aquarius. The New Age can be a time of great peace and evolution for your race, but only if your rulers are made aware of the evil forces that can overshadow their judgments. Be still now and listen, for your chance may not come again. All your weapons of evil must be removed. The time for conflict is now past and the race of which you are a part may proceed to the higher stages of its evolution if you show yourselves worthy to do this. You have but a short time to learn to live together in peace and goodwill. Small groups all over the planet are learning this, and exist to pass on the light of the dawning New Age to you all. You are free to accept or reject their teachings, but only those who learn to live in peace will pass to the higher realms of spiritual evolution. Hear now the voice of Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you. Be aware also that there are many false prophets and guides at present operating on your world. They will suck your energy from you – the energy you call money and will put it to evil ends and give you worthless dross in return. Your inner divine self will protect you from this. You must learn to be sensitive to the voice within that can tell you what is truth, and what is confusion, chaos and untruth. Learn to listen to the voice of truth which is within you and you will lead yourselves onto the path of evolution. This is our message to our dear friends. We have watched you growing for many years as you too have watched our lights in your skies. You know now that we are here, and that there are more beings on and around your Earth than your scientists admit. We are deeply concerned about you and your path towards the light and will do all we can to help you. Have no fear, seek only to know yourselves, and live in harmony with the ways of your planet Earth. We here at the Ashtar Galactic Command thank you for your attention. We are now leaving the planes of your existence. May you be blessed by the supreme love and truth of the cosmos.
This was a bit odd, and I missed it. It didn’t affect the whole of the Southern ITV region, just the area covered by the Hannington transmitter in northern Hampshire. I’m not sure which transmitter our TV aerial and TV received best but I know it wasn’t Bluebell Hill because our relatives on the other side of the Medway were always complaining about it. It seems unlikely that we’d be using Hannington, particularly because the Chartham transmitter was about a kilometre away from our house, but for some reason our reception wasn’t good. Southern TV apologised for the intrusion, which was later mentioned by ITN. It was also parodied on ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’:
It was said to be possible to hack the Hannington transmitter because it was provided with a signal from another transmitter in the Isle of Wight rather than via a wired connection, but I don’t know much about these things although I’ve long been curious.
Most people would agree that the Southern TV signal interruption was a hoax, but as far as I know nobody has been found or admitted responsibility. It lasted about six minutes. A few people have taken it seriously all along, and references can be found to Vrillon and Ashtar Galactic Command all over the internet. The name Ashtar was used by the contactee George Van Tassel, who said he was channelling it from 1952 onwards. Unless the text actually includes the name Vrillon, therefore, it may not have originated with this message. The broadcast is also a lot more po-faced than the Max Headroom signal interruption of the 1980s, and I personally suspect that although it was a hoax, there was a serious intent behind it by someone who was concerned about the state of the world at the time. It can also be appreciated, as things often can be, as symbolically true, and there is a warning to heed there which was not, however, paid attention to. I don’t mean by any means that it was real, but it does express legitimate concerns. It was also obviously ineffective, but it is in a sense an attempt at achieving political change, rather like demos, in such a way that it’s less likely to put people’s backs up.
What I wonder, though, is what would’ve happened if I had heard it at that impressionable age. On that very same day, a single statement made on ‘Horizon’ had big consequences for how I ended up thinking about the world and history of the planet that lasted years. Other people heard this broadcast and dismissed it as a hoax, but this particular ten year old, sitting here at the age of fifty-three, could well have been very swayed by that in just the way I was by ‘Horizon’, and ended up believing something equally bizarre but somewhat different. What would it have done to me? Because I really think it would’ve done something to me as I was at that particularly impressionable age. Presumably there were other children in the area at the time who did go down that route, and I don’t know where it leads.
I also think it’s interesting what else was going on on television at the same time. The actual interruption spanned a news programme and a Looney Tunes cartoon on ITV. There were two other channels. As I’ve mentioned, BBC2 was transmitting what seems to be a highly germane documentary on Erich Von Däniken deceiving his readers, and BBC1 was about to start showing a Robert Holmes ‘Doctor Who’, again, high-quality science fiction programming. It seems odd to me that these things would occur together. A week earlier it had been ‘The Image Of The Fendahl’ and a documentary on dinosaurs being warm-blooded, which wouldn’t’ve fit nearly as well but is also coincidentally similar in theme as both of these are connected to prehistory and fossils. A week later it was the second episode of ‘The Sun-Makers’ and a documentary about human-powered flight. I’m surprised to find, incidentally, that I remember all of these clearly forty-three years later. But the interesting thing, and I may be seeing a pattern that isn’t there of course, is that it really does seem to be an unusually sci-fi infested spot in the TV schedules, and I wonder if that influenced the timing. It just seems significant. It may be nothing, but it’s tempting to pursue it further.
There were also other relevant events in the temporal vicinity. 15th August was the date of the “Wow!” signal, which I suspect was incorporated into Iain M. Banks’s ‘State Of The Art’. This was the best candidate for an alien signal transmission ever detected by a radio telescope. The famous Voyager 2 and 1 probes had been launched on 20th August and 5th September respectively, each carrying a record put together by Carl Sagan as a message to aliens. The Carpenters’ cover of the Klaatu song ‘Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft’, the official anthem of World Contact Day, was at Number 16, down from 10 the week before. These could all have contributed to the atmosphere of focus on space and radio signals at the time. But all of these bits of information could just be coincidence. That said, I do think there was a motive for someone to broadcast that message, and a reason why it might have occurred to them to do so. The World Contact Day (15th March) message is interesting in this setting. This is an annual attempt to send a telepathic message into space which has been going on since 1952, organised by the International Flying Saucer Bureau, and reads as follows:
Calling occupants of interplanetary craft! Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet EARTH. We of IFSB wish to make contact with you. We are your friends, and would like you to make an appearance here on EARTH. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of EARTH. Please come in peace and help us in our EARTHLY problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality. Let us hear from you. We are your friends.
This is to some extent a reversed version of the Vrillon message. The idea that radio signals have been rippling out from this planet for a century or more is inaccurate and in fact nothing would even be detectable from Proxima Centauri, but I’m guessing (and I’ll check in a minute but want to give you an impression of the uninformed version of my thoughts) that the point of that Carpenters record, which would’ve got more airplay than the Klaatu version, was to send a message via the radio stations of the planet which were transmitting it at the time, for nine weeks or so. (I haven’t been able to confirm or refute this).
Although the IFSB was founded in 1952 by Alfred K Bender, he closed it down quickly when approached by the original Men In Black, he claimed. Apparently, the attempt to contact aliens telepathically had been successful, and they turned up and told him, “We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious.” Again, although I don’t think this has anything to do with aliens, I wouldn’t put it past the CIA or NSA to scare people in a theatrical manner to create a mystique surrounding secret military aircraft, so I don’t know, maybe this did happen, although not as a result of successful telepathy.
The Vrillon message reflects the Zeitgeist, which was very focussed on outer space at the time. ‘Star Wars’ was about to become a box-office phenomenon when previous films in the same vein had gotten nowhere. There was a tendency to look outward which I believe was about to be antagonised by the rise of IT. I should probably go into this later on, but I have a pet hypothesis that space exploration and information technology tend to work against each other and that this has a profound effect on our species. Looking at 26th November 1977 from the perspective of 2021, and in particular the Vrillon message, I’m left with the impression of a strong popular culture focus on space, space travel and ideas of benevolent aliens. One striking thing about the content of the message is its paternalism and support for peace and progress. It doesn’t resemble the hostility of abduction stories, for example. Sadly, this is one thing which has changed a lot in the intervening years, and not for the better. We seem to project our subconscious hopes and fears onto the stars, and it probably says a lot about the states of mind prevailing in society when we come across these phenomena. There are still a few people who have managed to weave Vrillon of the Ashtar Galactic Command into their belief systems in a positive way – I haven’t seen any claims that it was an alien false flag operation for example – so maybe there’s hope, but it seems like a distraction from very real social problems which space travel would ultimately have helped to solve.
A Box Of Chocolates 