Oceanworlds Page 3

  For the last nine years, Derya had become ostracized as a fringe physicist pursuing something akin to alchemy, all puff and no magic, feeding himself by being an exceptional lecturer at a second-tier German university. The problem stemmed from his inability to validate Commandment 1 without demonstrating Commandment 2. And observing the supposed white dwarf was next to impossible, as it orbited too close to Arcturus the red giant, hidden behind its brilliance. A firefly around a searchlight. The ‘next to’ attached to ‘impossible’ was because there is a phenomenon called an occultation, where an object is hidden by another that passes between it and the observer. A solar eclipse is a good example. However, Derya was going for an exceedingly rare event where an object from our Solar System gets in front of Arcturus for a few seconds. The light would be attenuated to a billionth, which may allow observing its improbable companion.

  For the last nine years, Derya had spent every minute of supercomputing power he had gotten his hands on—including half the computational budget of his physics department—to calculate the trajectory of every known object in the sky.

  That elusive object turned out to be Uranus, and it was about to cross in front of Arcturus in two hours, seven minutes, and twenty-eight seconds.

  Two-thirds of the wall-sized screen was occupied by an unremarkable diffuse circle of chalky red light against a dark background sprinkled with tiny stars. The biggest eye in the world stared at Arcturus. There was nothing for Janusz and Derya to do but wait the last two minutes.

  “… I’ve known you since we were roommates in college. Right before our professional lives divided, as you like to say, with me studying stamp collecting while you studied the one and only science there is,” said Janusz.

  “As a person I mean.”

  “You are an asshole. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met—”

  “No, Janusz. I mean, what do you think of me … as a friend?”

  Janusz was embarrassed at this violation of Deryan etiquette. “I have seen you three times since we graduated, Derya … you didn’t show up at my wedding. You still haven’t met my wife—if you leave a soup unattended for too long, it goes cold.” He interrupted the difficult silence that followed, “Anyway, how are your folks? Azra? Fatma?”

  “Family is good. A little estranged—sometimes, you know.” I think the right word is ‘disowned.’

  “You’ve been doubling down for years. You’ve burned all the ships and all the bridges, no fallback, like Cortés invading Mexico. Why?”

  “Things are easy when you have no choice. I have no choice because I am stuck with the conviction that I’m right.” There’s a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like a moron, Father used to say.

  “That’s ballsy.”

  Derya shook his head. “That’s desperate.”

  They remained frozen for the last eighteen seconds, big green numbers flashing on the screen. Nine … eight … seven … six … five … four … three … two … one …

  Nothing.

  Nichts.

  Nada.

  Janusz slowly turned to Derya in dread.

  Derya was immobile, fixated on the screen. His chest rose and fell irregularly.

  Long, terrible, weighty seconds dragged on, big red numbers flashing on the screen.

  Gaze long into the abyss, and the abyss also gazes into you. It’s over. I’m finished. Derya tried to speak, but only a grunt came out. He raised a heavy finger and pointed at a wall clock.

  “It’s … an atomic clock.” Derya did not react, so Janusz continued, unsure. “The most accurate timekeeper … on Earth.” This time he nodded at a funeral pace.

  Almost a minute had gone by when the screen darkened for three fathomless seconds. Derya’s gold-winning triumphal screams made Janusz uneasy. It was gratifying that Derya’s orbital data crunching was done correctly, but this was an ocean, a world, a galaxy apart from anything related to a white dwarf.

  The replay slowed the occultation 7x, showing the precipitous dimming of Arcturus as Uranus passed in front. Nothing looked abnormal. It surely did not look like a binary star.

  “Can we go from visible to ultraviolet?” asked a changed, confident Derya.

  This time, as Uranus occulted Arcturus’ core, a much smaller deep blue sphere appeared left, well within the star’s circle, connected with an umbilical cord to the main star. The greedy white dwarf was stealing mass from the red giant, and cosmic gluttony is punishable by death.

  If and when it reaches a mass about 1.4 times our Sun, the physical forces inside can no longer support its own gravity and the ensuing collapse skyrockets its temperature, creating an out-of-control fusion chain reaction that within seconds triggers a supernova.

  Janusz sat down out of necessity.

  This was one of the most important and certainly the most worrying astronomic discoveries of the century. A new branch of astronomy would soon be born, exclusively dedicated to researching Arcturus.

  The two were transfixed.

  “The start of your fame may mark the beginning of the end for us humans.”

  “Nemesis divina. I’m just its messenger.”

  “Am I … considered in the discovery?” asked Janusz sheepishly.

  “I’m all for sharing. Just not today.”

  * * *

  1 Northern Chile is to astronomy what Las Vegas is to gambling. Not the only option, but the only one that no real astronomer can ignore. About half the worldwide telescope capacity resides there.

  It has the lowest atmospheric humidity anywhere on Earth, and it is at a high altitude. The very low population density guarantees low light pollution. And not all views of the sky are created equal: the center of our galaxy is at a latitude thirty degrees south of the equator, visible year-round from there.

  The ancient civilizations looked up at the river of milk slashing the heavens from end to end for enlightenment and spirituality. We cannot. In today’s world, most of us have never seen the Milky Way firsthand, the galaxy in which we live. In fact, 80 percent of the world and 99 percent of US and European populations live under light-polluted skies. What was once a deluge of stars outcompeting in brightness against a pitch-black background has become a charcoal gray with a handful of timid stars and planets. The more we know, the less we see. On top of this, 88 percent of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere, where the galactic disc and center are only visible all night long during the month of July.

  2 The mirror’s massive enclosure dome slowly slid open, revealing the tapestry of the Milky Way.

  “Allow me a few minutes to show you the cosmic museum above. We are going back in time … light covers in a second a distance equivalent to eight loops around Earth, yet the fastest speed in the Universe is modest, pitiful really, when dealing with the enormity of space—” said Janusz.

  “Come on, Polack.”

  “Pluto is five light-hours away. Voyager 1, the furthest human-made object, which happens to also be the second fastest, launched in 1977 and right now is eighteen light-hours away from Earth. The edge of our Solar System, a light-day. The nearest sun, Alpha Centauri, 4.4 light-years—”

  “Save this for your grandma.”

  “Galactic bulge. Zoom to target. Pan left to right,” Janusz dictated to the control room computer. The 3,000-ton structure began to rotate while the mirror changed pitch. The entire wall became a cloud of light crammed with nebulas and tens of millions of stars in a desperate dance of death orbiting the invisible supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Staring at the incomprehensible vastness unfailingly readjusts human problems to their proper insignificance—except if you were Derya that night, as the extreme high of the last weeks, days, and hours was capsizing and sinking fast. “We are in a rural part of the Milky Way. A nondescript, unglamorous region in the outskirts of one of its spiral arms. A backwater. The bulge is 26,000 light-years away.”

  “I didn’t exactly study art history in university,” said Derya. Or maybe I did. “F
ather and us didn’t make all these sacrifices so you could become a poet.” “Astrophysicist.” “Poet.”

  “Asshole.”

  “People keep saying that to me. There could be some truth to it.”

  “I’m not asking. You suck it up. This is how much I charge—UY Scuti.” The telescope slowly turned around. “Bear with me, now it gets fascinating. How much do you know about the star UY Scuti?”

  “Is this Jeopardy! for retards? Will you throw me a bone now?”

  “UY Scuti, a red hypergiant, is the largest star known to us and it’s 9,500 light-years away. If you ever felt significant, hear this. If Earth were the size of a cherry, Jupiter or Saturn would be a basketball, the Sun a sphere that’s as tall as a refrigerator. UY Scuti? Everest-high,” Janusz was lost in his own reverie. “And we haven’t even left the Milky Way. Let’s visit a neighbor galaxy: NGC 5566, 65 million light-years away. The image that will hit our retinas in minutes departed from there 65 million years ago. We are seeing live into the past, right at the extinction of the dinosaurs. A time machine. If you are not in awe, you’re simply not human.”

  3 What would happen if a white dwarf orbiting Arcturus boomed into a supernova?

  First, the good news: blissful ignorance for thirty-seven long and golden years.

  Second, the omen followed by wrath. One dandy day, from one instant to the next, the sky would develop a blotch much brighter than a full Moon and many times larger. For months it would bathe the Earth with a cocktail of ultraviolet radiation that gives a tan even at nighttime, then drops back into relative obscurity. For the next 333 years nothing much happens as Death gallops at about 10 percent of light-speed in the form of a giant expanding sphere, except that the night sky facing Arcturus becomes an ever brighter swelling nebula. Until it reaches us. What happens next is speculation. Possible side-effects may include the atmosphere facing the nebula blasting off, and a shock wave traversing the globe at the speed of sound through the remainder. In any case, the planet is probably cleansed of that irksome, sticky thing called life.

  5 | The Spark

  Two months later, Sunday, December 17 2023

  Thirty-four major newspapers around the world ran the same full-page paid article. Below is page five of the UK’s Financial Times. The title occupied the upper third in attention-grabbing, sky-blue Helvetica against the salmon pink background; the rest was plain text.

  LETTER TO HUMANKIND

  My name is Pete Drake, United States Senator for Virginia and former astronaut. I have Stage IV cancer and these are my farewell thoughts. I want to thank Yuri Milner for the generous funding that made this possible. Please do not think of me as a Republican, or an American, or a white male. I am a person among 8 billion others. A person who cares about the future of our species. Arcturus precipitated this letter, which should have been written decades back.

  In 1961, President Kennedy changed history by defying the impossible. Eight years later, on July 20 1969, the entire Earth stopped to gaze with dreamy eyes at the Eagle landing on the Moon. And the impossible was no more.

  You knew this. But sometimes it’s useful to restate the evident. Triteness trivializes, even this pinnacle of everything that humanity stands for. This was monumental, and let’s remember a few reasons why.

  How short is eight years? Boeing takes a decade to design a new airplane that shares 90 percent of the DNA of its predecessors. Enter the Space Race: before Gagarin’s 1961 flight, the farthest humans had ventured into the heavens was just over eighteen miles, a mere third of the way to the Kármán line, aka the edge of space. Boundless ingenuity, irrepressible boldness.

  Stunning complexity. The Apollo program demanded new mathematics, new engineering, new materials, new instruments. A modern commercial jet aircraft has about a million parts, perfected over decades of incremental improvement. Saturn V, the launch rocket for all Apollo missions, had 3 million parts built from scratch. The NASA workforce in charge was, on average, 27 years of age. An engineering kindergarten. Boundless ingenuity.

  Safety margin? Armstrong landed within seconds of running out of fuel and crashing. A computer glitch, a broken landing leg, a failure of the single engine, or a problem in the rendezvous would have stranded them. No evacuation plan. No way to rescue the crew. This mission was the most challenging and hazardous enterprise ever undertaken. I say again: irrepressible boldness.

  Entering the 70s, the gateway to the Solar System was wide open. A manned mission to Mars slated by the end of the decade. Five decades later it’s 2024. Last time humans left Low Earth Orbit was 1972. We traded exhilarating discovery 250,000 miles away from Earth for running in circles 250 miles above it. Millions of kids venture further to attend college than we have traveled from our planet during this time. How would an 8-year-old respond if we asked her to order these two realities chronologically? In some ways, we race backward in space.

  And with each new day, the dazzling Apollo program becomes an ever-increasing, towering barrier for space exploration. What did you say? When a smartphone in anybody’s pocket has more computational power than all of NASA back in 1969?

  Boldness appears to be inversely proportional to progress. In 2004, President Bush unveiled a plan to return humans to the Moon in sixteen years. It was scrapped in 2011 in favor of a manned Mars mission somewhere in the late 2030s, far enough in the future to guarantee no material efforts or accountability. The White House swapped the Moon back in 2017, with a return mission planned for late this decade. The magnificent compass set by Kennedy requires a brave presidential directive to accomplish a well-defined mission, within a short period of time. Do not hold your breath while you wait for change. I should know.

  The disease has crept into America’s former temple of innovation. NASA funding is no longer guaranteed and its budgeti gamed yearly by political winds and whims. Let’s assume we are just about to head back to the Moon. There is an all-important, tacit rule borne out of Apollo’s humongous shadow: no casualties allowed. The most spectacular accomplishment of our civilization came without a single death in space. Half a century ago. But space is unforgiving and really very hard. No amount of preparation and resources can eliminate its multiple, cumulative, correlated all-at-stake risks. Yet a fatality could compromise NASA’s very existence. Hence the conundrum. The agency whose mandate is space exploration has incentives stacked against manned exploration of space. Yesterday’s success is today’s roadblock.

  Many inside NASA think returning astronauts to the Moon is harder than before. It’s the Sword of Damocles dangling over them. The same that explains the flip from irrepressible boldness to unmitigated risk aversion: the visionary NASA aerospace contractors of yore have become bureaucratic fat cows devoted to “outsourcing to sub-contractors, and then the sub-contractors outsource to sub-contractors, and so on. You have to go four or five layers down to find somebody actually doing something useful. Cutting metal, shaping atoms”—Elon Musk. The same that explains the flip from boundless ingenuity to unalloyed conservatism. Using one spacesuit for launch, walking on the Moon, and re-entry as every Apollo mission did is an impossibility with today’s requirements: too uncomfortable, lacking too much mobility, too risky. The rocket must be even bigger to allow for exercise equipment, toilet, galley. The laundry list is long and swelling.

  Rocket science that no longer lives up to its reputation. Manned space exploration in perennial hibernation. So what? We have more immediate concerns, like hunger in Africa.

  No, we don’t.

  Let’s ignore the ticking bomb of climate change, which threatens livability on our planet. Or that every dollar spent in space has historically returned between $7 and $14 back to the economy. Or that satellites are finding aquifers and improving crop yields in drought-struck East Africa. Or that exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.

  Let’s concentrate instead on a three-story house called Earth. From time to time, a pea crashes against one of its walls. Big deal. Yes. Last time it did, t
hree-quarters of all living things were no more. But a grain of salt is no slacker: in 1908, a 200-foot-tall asteroid exploding over Siberiaii razed 80 million trees over an area the size of 300,000 soccer fields.

  Right now, in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the faraway Kuiper belt, or the mysterious Oort cloud, there’s a twilight-of-civilization asteroid or comet with Earth’s name on it. The only question is timing. Hopefully it won’t strike today, hopefully not in a decade, because we would be unable to save ourselves. The more we look up, the more worrying it gets. Each week our inventory of asteroids and comets grows. But many reflect little to no light, so we won’t see those until the sky is ablaze.

  How can a boulder the size of a city obliterate humanity? Weigh it, then calculate the energy required to accelerate that mass to over ten miles per second. It’s 700 times the total energy used worldwide in 2020. That’s equivalent to a billion Hiroshima nuclear bombs detonated simultaneously.

  So, I hope we agree it’s urgent and crucial to reignite manned space exploration, so we can learn to divert peas and salt grains, and have a second home (Mars?) for when the pitch-black pea turns up. Robert Heinlein once described Earth as being “too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all of its eggs in.” There are dangers against which the only defense is being somewhere else when they happen.

  What can we do? How do we solve the deadlock we’ve been in since 1972?

  Lucky for us, technological salvation is coming. But don’t look to the space agencies. This time, against all odds and conventional business logic, it’s the private sector. Specifically, two visionaries and their creations: Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

  It’s November 2015. Houston, we have a problem. A cynic, smug, cozy, oligopolistic $300 billion industry gapes in horror. Unfortunately, a technical quantum leap has just happened. Oh no! The foul smell of innovation. The decades-long feast is drawing to a close. No more rear mirror and blinders. Compete or die. In a coincidence that feels like destiny, within a month from one another, Blue Origin and SpaceX independently returned rockets from space and self-landed them. This is the Gutenberg printing press of space travel.