BIG NEWS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Photo Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)

There’s a new neighbour in the ’hood and it has the astronomy community buzzing. A team called the Pale Red Dot project at Queen Mary University in London has discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour. Finding Earth-type planets orbiting other stars is becoming a regular thing, but when it’s orbiting the star nearest to us, that’s very big news. The Alpha Centauri binary star system is usually called our nearest neighbour, but there’s a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri (loosely orbiting the Alpha Centauri system) that’s just a little closer at 4.25 light years. The newly-discovered planet, Proxima b, is thought to be a rocky planet with a mass similar to Earth or a little more, in an orbit closer than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Thanks to the much lower energy output of a red dwarf star, such a close orbit is still within a range that should allow liquid water to exist—what scientists consider the star’s “habitable zone”. So life of a kind we would recognize could possibly survive there, although it wouldn’t have an easy time of it. The planet is probably tidally locked, keeping the same face to its sun all the time—only areas near the night/day dividing line would avoid getting either too much sun for comfort, or an endless cold night. On top of that, Proxima Centauri occasionally sends out burst of x-rays and ultraviolet radiation that might kill off any life trying to gain a foothold there. We also don’t know anything about the planet’s atmosphere. All in all, for any kind of life to exist on Proxima b would be a real long shot (though some scientists consider it a better bet than Mars).

So why all the excitement?

Maybe there’s a lot of astronomy research that’s driven by pure scientific curiosity, but I’d argue that the question we most want answered is, “Are we alone in the universe?” That’s why it was such a thrill when the first planets were confirmed around other stars. Why we get an extra kick when we find planets that are similar to Earth, and especially when they’re in a star’s habitable zone. We can’t help feeling that any of those just might be home to another intelligent race, or at least some form of life that doesn’t come from Mother Earth. But all of those planets discovered so far have been unthinkably far away—there’s no way to reach them within any meaningful timeframe using foreseeable technology (dropping in on the neighbours would take thousands of years in travel time).

Now we see the possibility of a living planet practically next door in galactic terms. Yes, it would still take thousands of years to get there using current technology, but some of the most promising engine tech being developed, like nuclear pulse propulsion or fusion rocket drives might take us there in less than a century. Even more significantly, this new discovery provides the incentive to make that effort.

Humanity is at its most brilliant and daring when faced with a challenge that’s daunting, but still feels achievable. Getting to the Moon was a perfect example—enormous resources were required to make it happen, but first there had to be the will to make it happen. Now, when you combine our most compelling cosmic mystery—the search for other life in the universe—with a target that involves serious obstacles but doesn’t feel completely unachievable, you’ve suddenly got something that can light a fire under our collective backsides.

Yes, we’ll still need to wait for better information about the new planet’s atmosphere, gravity, etc., perhaps from the European Extremely Large Telescope due to enter service in 2024.

But in the meantime, we’ve got a new place to go and an eons-old reason to go there. That makes the discovery of Proxima b a game changer.

ARE ALIENS BUILDING MEGASTRUCTURES?

Are there alien races so advanced that they can turn their whole solar system into a construction project?

If you follow astronomy news, you’ll know that there’s been a lot of interest since last year in a star designated KIC 8462852, also informally called Tabby’s Star after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian at Yale, who’s devoted a huge amount of her time to studying the star after it was first flagged by some amateur stargazers. According to data from the Kepler Space telescope, Tabby’s Star has been getting dimmer over recent decades, but not consistently, and not because of any known kind of star behaviour. It undergoes strange “dimming events” that might see it lose 2% - 3% of its brightness over a period of time. New research shows that it’s not just occasional flickering, but an overall steady decline in the star’s output as well. Scientists have no solid explanation—some have suggested a cloud of dust or other material getting in the way, or possible a swarm of comets, but none of these ideas explains every aspect of the data.

So could it be that Tabby’s Star is home to an alien race so powerful it has built mammoth structures in space that are blocking or even capturing their star’s light?

No one will commit to that scenario, but Boyajian herself plans to study the star for a full year, and others will explore a wide range of evidence to learn whether the star’s fluctuation is natural or…alien-made.

Mega-sized artificial space structures aren’t a new idea to scientists, and especially not to science fiction writers. Writer Olaf Stapledon mentioned the possibility of a race harnessing the entire energy of its home star back in 1937 but it got widespread attention when physicist Freeman Dyson published a paper about the concept in 1960. It came to be known as a Dyson sphere or Dyson shell—although Dyson himself proposed a large number of vast power stations orbiting a star, the popularized form of the concept became a shell of material, drawn from asteroids and moons, that would totally enclose a sun, capturing every bit of its output, and consequently making it disappear from view to any other solar system (except for heat and other energy radiating from the back of the shell, presumably). Writer Larry Niven invented the Ringworld, a wide band of solid stuff kept in orbit around its star, its inner surface providing a huge amount of living space and lots of energy for the race that engineered it. Dan Alderson came up with the idea for the Alderson disk, like a giant vinyl LP record perhaps extending to the orbit of Mars or even Jupiter with the sun as the spindle in the center. The disk could also be given an up-and-down motion that would make the sun ‘bob’ above and below it, making both surfaces habitable. Later, Larry Niven and fellow writer Gregory Benford invented the Bowl of Heaven—basically half of a Dyson sphere for living space and energy capture, but with a hole in it through which to blast a stream of highly-energized particles forced out of the sun, like a rocket engine, making the whole star system into one stellar-scale movable spaceship. Now that’s what I call big concept.

Could Tabby’s Star be dimming because beings there are constructing a ringworld, or a Dyson sphere, or some other mammoth object we can’t even imagine?

Maybe, but there have been lots of other times when hopeful scientists have suggested alien intervention as the explanation for phenomena that turned out to be natural, from the too-regular-to-be-natural radio emissions of pulsars, all the way back to the canals on Mars, ‘discovered’ by Percival Lowell (not to mention an embarrassing finding by a radio observatory in Australia that turned out to be caused by the scientists’ microwave oven as they reheated their coffee!)

Still, if we ever do discover other intelligent life “out there”, this is probably how it will be done. So I shouldn’t discourage the wishful thinkers too much. And what effect will it have on us, if such a thing is ever proven? Will it send us into a panic, or inspire us to perform unimaginable feats ourselves?

You know which one I’m hoping for.

OUR FUTURE IN THE OCEANS

I’ve had a lifetime love affair with the underwater world. Influenced by everything from Jacques Cousteau films and TV specials to the ancient Sea Hunt TV show with Lloyd Bridges, I’ve spent a lot of my swimming time under the surface—on purpose! As a pre-teen I made my own “underwater habitats”, anchoring plastic garbage pails to the bottom of our backyard swimming pool, and submerging overturned canoes in lakes. Naturally, I became a scuba diver as an adult, fascinated by shipwrecks and coral reefs—if you visit a tropical vacation spot and don’t spend time underwater on the reefs, you’re missing some jaw-dropping beauty that the above-water environment just can’t match.

I loved to read science fiction stories about the undersea world, too. There have never been that many. Except for the iconic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke stands as the earliest major undersea SF work I can remember. Peter Watts’ Rifter series and Michael Crichton’s Sphere are standouts too. And yet, I’m convinced that our oceans will play an even bigger role in human life of the future than they do now.

From ancient times, oceans have provided essential transportation routes, and today the shipping and shipbuilding industries comprise nearly ten percent of the economic value added from the oceans worldwide, and about five percent of the employment, according to recent reports. Fishing (wild) and fish processing are the largest economic sectors (employing 36% of the workforce) but maritime and coastal tourism comes an impressive second (23% of employment). In terms of economic value, offshore gas and oil is extremely important. But I expect that this whole picture will be very different a hundred years from now.

Wild fish stocks have been devastated by overfishing, pollution, ocean acidification, and climate change. As the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere increases, ocean waters will become even more acidic (affecting the entire oceanic food chain), currents will shift, and fish populations will struggle to recover. If we want to continue to eat seafood, it will have to come from aquaculture. There are serious problems with fish farming that must be overcome, especially related to the spread of disease, and genetic threats from interbreeding. But it’s reasonable to expect that a century from now we’ll see giant aquaculture installations patrolled by submersibles (like Clarke imagined in The Deep Range). We might not raise whales for their meat, but certainly fish and crustaceans, and some years farther into the future we’ll have mammoth production facilities for edible forms of algae, like spirulina, drawing nutrient-rich water up from the ocean depths for the crops, while being self-sufficient in energy thanks to the water temperature differences (like geothermal sources we use today). The algae farming business will explode as soon as we develop food processing technologies that will turn the raw algae into more palatable forms of protein. Drop into a vegan food store sometime and see what can be done with vegetable-based fake meat.

I expect oil and gas production in the oceans to increase over the coming decades, but the environmental risks will eventually be more than we’re willing to stomach. Instead, energy production from offshore wind farms, ocean tide-powered turbines, and possibly the raw energy of ocean floor volcanic vents will all be developed into significant industries, as long as we’re careful to avoid degradation of the environment. I hope (and believe) that we’ll be wise enough to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, which will reduce some of the most hazardous ocean shipping. We also need to become less obsessed with consumer goods, or at least opt for more locally-produced foods and goods, out of concern for the environment (and plain good sense). So ocean shipping will decrease in the coming century or two, but it may be replaced by increased tourism, as populations in developed countries age (and flock to cruise ships and beach resorts) and the middle classes of developing countries become able to afford such luxuries.

Even if we do cut back on oil and gas extraction in the oceans, there’s every likelihood that we’ll go after other resources in the ocean floor as they become harder to get on land. But the environmental impact could be a nightmare, so my personal hope is that we’ll turn to the asteroids for our minerals and chemicals, and not to the seabed. A better alternative would be to develop more efficient ways of extracting minerals from seawater itself, especially since that could tie in with desalinization machinery, producing much-needed fresh water in an increasingly hot climate. After all, the water created by such efforts will return to the ocean as rain and river runoff, replenishing what is taken.

Will we ever have undersea colonies under vast transparent domes, like some pulp stories and comic books have portrayed? I hate to say it (because the geek in me will be heartbroken) but probably not. To live under the ocean full-time we will have to genetically alter our own bodies, either to cope with the side-effects of breathing high pressure air for long periods of time, or to actually enable us to ‘breathe’ water ourselves, like fish. I think genetic science will eventually be capable of both, but there will be no reason to do either on a large scale. Robotic machinery will be much more efficient at doing any task we need done in the underwater environment, and living underwater will never be a practical remedy for overcrowding the land surfaces of our planet. Giant floating islands, maybe, but not vast domed cities on the ocean floor.

Still, if you’re an underwater junkie, don’t despair. Where underwater cities may never be practical, a premium hotel industry on the seafloor might do just fine.