Life as a Planetary Explorer
This episode is sponsored by ExpressVPN. “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” - Judith Thurman So, last month we began a look at surveying habitable interstellar star systems, where we first focused on the astronomy side of things, looking for biosignatures or signs of good planets from light years away with telescopes. A couple weeks back we looked at the role of interstellar probes, principally flyby probes that could get to systems far quicker than a probe designed to orbit a world. Today’s episode, looking at what it would be like to be a planetary explorer, is a direct sequel to that episode, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to pause and go watch that episode first. As a quick recap though, in that episode we
created a hypothetical example for illustrating the process of how we might respond to a possible techno-signature signal that we received from the Epsilon Fornacis System in the year 2100 AD. Epsilon Fornacis is a 12-billion year old binary system 100 light years from Earth, in the Fornax constellation of the southern hemisphere named by astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1756. We introduced 6 programs to pursue answers. The first was a signal sent to the system,
complete with our lexicon. The second was the commission of a powerful telescope to indefinitely watch the system, named Nicolas. The third was an automated flyby probe, Louis, which passed through Epsilon Fornacis a millenia later, in the year 3100 AD, and detected an anomaly as well, when passing by a Super Earth in orbit of the primary star which is now designated Louis Epsilon Fornacis, or the planet Lef. The fourth was the probe carrier Lacaille, which arrived around Lef on January 1st, 4100 AD, and began deploying a satellite grid to surveil the planet. The fifth was the scout ship Firefly, which also moves into orbit Lef a few days later
and begins waking its crew from hibernation on January 4th. The sixth is the armed colonial fleet Musketeer, composed of three vessels, the Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, which is already decelerating into the system as our explorers awaken, and will be only a few days of communication lag time away, with that decreasing until Musketeer arrives early in July of 4100 AD. When we went to sleep in 2100 AD, hibernation was still a very new process, thoroughly tested on animals and simulations but barely tested on people, especially those in good health as most nations frowned on or even outlawed healthy individuals letting themselves be frozen, in an attempt to check if the process worked. In this case it is a process of freezing conducted after a lot of nanotechnology has been introduced and the reality is that it is revival, we were dead, and now we’re being thawed and we’re not entirely surprised our memory is rather hazy as we awaken, 2000 years later. Every cell in our body requires repairing and that includes our brain cells. We are also being cured of a disease noteworthy principally for being still fatal in the year 2100 AD but expected to be cured fairly soon at that time, and that turns out to be the case as we look it up after seeing it on our own medical readouts.
The Firefly’s on board library and wiki apparently has been updating and is fully updated to the year 4000 AD. The medical database notes that the disease was cured in 2122 and that the entire crew of the space scout Firefly, except the captain, had injected themselves with it in order to qualify for legal hibernation freezing on short notice, which had an exemption for those suffering from a disease with high lethality rates and no confirmed cure. Apparently, there was something of a show trial about it in the 22nd century, once the process had been proved reasonably safe, and the captain, which is us, was exonerated on the charge of conspiracy to infect others and leading a mass suicide. Apparently there was also a movie about it a few years after we left, and we’re a bit surprised at the choice of actors, particularly those playing ourselves in the movie.
It is no rarity for pioneers and explorers to have problems with the law back home, but we’re rather glad we do not seem to, at the moment anyway. We also happen to have already had a different lethal ailment and its what had gotten us into being an early volunteer for the exoplanet exploratory service before the Epsilon Fornacis matter had even begun, when most of the volunteers for the handful of scout missions planned, were scooped from the small portion of the populace that was terminally ill but otherwise qualified to explore. Given that we had to leave behind our families and friends, folks who were terminally ill were generally more likely to volunteer for eternal exile anyway. Go on ice and wake up centuries later when it can be cured, and do some exploring too, that was how we and most of our pre-anomaly peers felt.
Everyone else on this mission was picked quickly from expert volunteers who wanted to go explore this possibly inhabited system, but had never been off world explorers before. With the exception of our XO, no one else but us have even been off Earth before this mission. Recovering from being frozen for 2000 years and having your partially thawed body undergoing cellular reconstruction is definitely a good time for reflection, and you do not want to make any mission critical decisions till you’re sure you’re fully restored and you have your cabin door locked and your message traffic silenced. You’re getting messages from Musketeer Fleet, whose crew did not hibernate and have been fixated on this mission for 2000 years, offering advice, suggestions, demands, and so forth. Your last message to the admiral of Musketeer Fleet, who had been asking, or honestly ordering you, to wait to go down to Lef till they arrived mid-year, was that the admiral didn’t pay your salary. The admiral’s reply was to ask who we thought was paying our salary right now. Which is a pretty
good point. At the moment, we look like death warmed over but our medical readouts say we’re healing well and are now effectively an ageless transhuman. We were getting a salary and we did have some bank accounts and investments, but who knows if those rolled with compound interest or got eaten by some eventual change of government or culture. We could be trillionaires or paupers, and even our most recent update, a century old from signal lag, could be critically out of date. Someone has been making sure we get historical, entertainment, and technological updates and we have been getting correspondence. We just haven’t read it yet, because there’s a lot of it. Everyone knew about this mission for the last 2000 years and when it would arrive and tons of message traffic came in just the last month, everything from well wishers to those demanding you not land on Lef, from kooks to government leaders, and you’re not entirely certain which is which and there’s a backlog of tens of thousands of messages. Many seem to be groups asking you to
give them a shoutout or even to put patches on your uniforms with their logo, in exchange for considerations. This planetary exploration is brought to you by Jupiter Shipyards. There’s that big mission waiting down below on Lef with the now increasingly obvious signs intelligent life has been here before us, but you can’t really block out that while 2000 years ago, and maybe a week of personal time ago, you were shaking hands with the captains of the Musketeer Fleet in orbit of Earth, drinking champagne and posing for photographs with dignitaries of various powerful nations, corporations, and groups, and now you’re sitting there watching a giant desert of planet rotate beneath you as your ship spins around twice per minute to simulate gravity. You’re not sure if any of those great nations and groups remain. You’re not sure if everyone you know is dead or not, because life extension treatments were definitely becoming a thing before this mission was even on the radar, but you are betting two thousand years of living has at least thinned their numbers down and probably left them very unlike how you remembered.
Your memory is still foggy but you think some of your crewmates left spouses or children behind. Our ship itself is pretty primitive and has a number of systems that could be upgraded, and mostly automatically, some indeed have been, but many require your authorization to continue. You can’t just say yes either, everyone knows where you are and what you’re doing, and your upgrade data could be telling the ship how to make itself a big bomb, and you have twenty centuries of spam, hacks, pranks, and well-intentioned but bad suggestions to screen out. This was anticipated as a possibility, but original mission planning was all built around colony and scout missions to systems within a dozen light years of Earth, and only a dozen such missions had been dispatched when the original weird signal arrived at Earth late 2099 AD. And it is now listed as the original signal because another was received in 3200 AD, apparently having been transmitted shortly after the Louis Probe passed through. That probe reports having been hit with what is interpreted to have been a Radar ping and a Lidar scan from Lef’s Moon, Aanwijzing, a rocky body about half the mass of Earth’s own Moon. The Lacaille
Probe Carrier dispatched many probes there too, though in truth it sent them all over the system, but focus is on Lef and Aanwijzing for possible clues for our hypothetical courageous explorers. It isn’t lost on us that as the captain of the Firefly, originally scouting mission #13, slated for scouting Epsilon Indi’s orange and brown dwarf binary system, just 12 light years from Earth, that luck is not something we should be relying on. Not two thousand years in the future with a crew we didn’t originally train with for a mission that everyone now agrees is going to involve some sort of contact with aliens. So what about that crew? Well the default one was all about asteroid surveyors and astrogeologists, because that was quite a booming business in the late 21st century with all those asteroid mines opening up and folks contemplating how to build bases and mines throughout the system, and as outposts around other stars. Here though, we had to throw together a team and that resulted in us,
with a background in asteroid mining, our XO, who ran freight and passengers to and from those mines and served as security on those ships. Then we have the others, a xenobiologist - which is strictly theoretical at this point, a geologist, an expert in cryptography and linguistics, ship’s archivists, ship engineer, our shuttle pilot who is also the ship assistant engineer, and some other people whose specialties don’t matter as they appear to have not properly survived hibernation. Oh, and the ship’s computer, which is a fairly intelligent AI though not at fully-human intellect, parallel to its sibling, the Lacaile Probe Carrier’s AI. So the situation on hand is that we can loosely pinpoint that there’s a scanner of some sort on or near Lef’s Moon, and that down on the surface, which is a thin-aired desert, there is a weak signal coming from down on the planet in the ULF band range. Ultra-low frequency signals being noteworthy for being able to penetrate even thick rock and dirt, it is not too surprising that the only signal emerging from the clearly dead world below would be one able to pass through layers of sandstorm buildup. The atmosphere is principally oxygen,
nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, and Lacaille’s analysis is that atmospheric pressure is now down to 5% of Earth normal. This matches well with estimates from both Telescope Nicolas centuries back and Probe Louis’s flyby analysis. This means the team will need to wear spacesuits on the surface, though will be able to extract oxygen and nitrogen from the air. Lacaille’s more detailed analysis has found no water and the world below is parched worse than Arrakis. Analysis indicates that eons ago, as Epsilon Fornacis’s primary star
aged and grew brighter, the oceans boiled away as the once cold superearth of Lef slowly warmed. However the current tectonic modeling is not producing anything reliable. Probably the modeling of tectonics in the late 21st century just wasn’t up to the task of handling a superearth that formed when the galaxy was much younger and is now boiling away. You signed up for this mission though, so you’re going to get it done, but you are really wondering if you want to be spending countless centuries leapfrogging through time and space to survey worlds. Most of which will be dead and boring planets. Of course, when you think on it, a team of a handful of you probably would need several lifetimes to meaningfully explore a planet even just to take ground samples, something the Musketeer Fleet’s Admiral seems to be making a point of in the communiques from them.
Yours will be the first foot to step onto this alien world and that is awesome, yet at the same time, you’re not even sure you’re getting paid, or that your crew is getting paid, you’re not sure if your crew is really required to follow your orders anymore, and you’re not sure what you’d spend your money on anyway, or where. So as we drop down to the surface of a once living world, we figure this at least means there may be other ones out there with life on them, not just rocky or icy balls of dead worlds. But this one is dead, this one is hot enough that we’ll be wearing cooling suits as we land in what ground-penetrating radar indicates is a basin now filled with sand 300 meters deep, above a rock layer and where that signal is coming from.
It is weak, and we erect a wide reflective tent over the top of our base site nearby, as we set the machinery to excavate down at an angle to reach the beacon, but by late January, we already have some new information and extrapolations. Over on that moon we have found a simple receiver and transmitter buried in a crater that pokes its nose up as our own probe approaches and spreads solar panels to absorb power for a time before it emits a powerful signal with similar patterns on the front and rear of the emission, presumably identifier or header data. We do not approach further with drones, opting to leave that for Musketeer. We’re expecting
to find that the probe contains a large amount of Palladium-107 and Silver-107 isotopes, the latter being the beta-decay product of the former, which has a half-life of 6.5 million years, a very endurable if weak power generator. Probe Carrier Lacaille’s infrared sensors picked up a flower-shaped object floating in a polar orbit around Lef at the edge of its Hill sphere that had a hotspot. We believe this is a telescope left there to monitor for anything approaching Lef and then to scan and transmit to the moon for louder re-broadcast. It has solar panels as its flower petals and drone camera imagery indicates micrometeor damage. It seems likely this is the probe that scanned our own probe, Louis, a thousand years back and that while expanded to perform its job it was damaged. We believe it had been doing its job for
millions of years, so it would seem both sad and improbable that it would be broken by our arrival. But it likely had been spending virtually all of its time as a dense package, protected by its own folded up power collectors and was only vulnerable when it popped open to scan and transmit, and this might have been the first time it did its job. By early February we have dug a tunnel down to the beacon on Lef and removed the sand around what we now believe was not the ruins of an alien civilization, but rather, the ruins of a base of other off-world explorers doing as we are doing. The beacon is a simple device, powered by the beta-decay of a large amount of palladium-107, and on cracking it open we can easily estimate its age at 10 million years, roughly when humanity’s ancestors split from chimpanzees, indeed we can get much more accurate, down to nearly a century.
It is a bit harder to nail down the exact date of the other beacon stored nearby that it seems modeled from, but we can put it at approximately 25 million years ago. Here on Lef, a world 12 billions year old, but gone desert long ago, one wonders how many times aliens have visited this world to unlock its secrets, only to find the ruins of previous explorers. Lef appears to have held intelligent life since before Earth even existed and shows many geological epochs that are a dead giveaway of massive artificial engineering, but we don’t know that life originated here either, maybe it came as colonists, just like the folk’s from Musketeer, maybe many times. Nor do we know what happened to those first inhabitants or anyone who visited after, indeed the world may have died and been recolonized or terraformed multiple times, not necessarily by the original civilization. Maybe aliens from different homeworlds or even long-lost colonists coming to check on their homeworld, or coming from their homeworld to check on a lost space colony? In the decades to follow, we will learn far more, though we ourselves will be back in hibernation, after some change in crew and upgrades, courtesy of Musketeer Fleet, whose colonists will be continuing the investigation for centuries to come, exploring the prior visitors relics, and eventually colonizing the world using technologies previous invented to terraform Venus. We are instead headed to explore not another planet, but rather, what we think might be a deep space habitat, thousands of AU out from the Epsilon Fornacis binary, the nearest of a large number of dots on an ancient map of this region of space, as we begin tracing this mystery of ancient alien Planetary Explorers, and where they went, which appears to be many worlds, hopefully all as interesting as Lef was, or more, and where we can get some answers to our questions.
Including for us at least, the mystery of why and how they did their job as explorers. Okay, so a couple notes on realism. First, it would seem pretty likely that your first wave of scouts and colonists out to other systems would get themselves passed en route by upgraded spaceships, able to move far faster than your first ships. Though that’s hard to say.
For a context, when Columbus traveled to Caribbean that first time in 1492, his ships took about a month, and ships more or less still took that timeframe for the trip for centuries. It would be well into the 19th century before we saw a big speed and cargo jump with steam ships, with long range airflight coming in the 20th century along with supersonics flight later in, almost 5 centuries after. Half a millenia is a long time, and our flight time to this system was four times as long as that. We’ve gotten rather used to accelerating technological development but when it comes to traveling through space, barring FTL – which I don’t think we will ever get – there’s a ceiling on how fast you can go and one that most depends on your power supply. I don’t think our colony ships will tend to get overrun by faster cousins born later, but mostly because I expect we’ll rapidly get to the point of marginal improvements and that a lot of times we’ll be able to make those upgrades en route.
You can’t ignore follow ups as a factor in things like this, for instance, you might have left Earth after a bad breakup or divorce or estrangement. It's hard to imagine even those who were dedicated to their job abandoning a happy family and home life. The reality is that not many people are going to be jumping on board a ship to the edge of forever if life is going great back home, and one of those faster follow up ships that you might rendezvous with might have that ex or estranged kid or parent on board, deciding they wanted to mend fences.
You are leapfrogging through time as much as space, something we’ve seen explored in classics like Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for Dead novel, or Alastair Reynold’s House of Suns. Should it turn out the galaxy is full of life, or full of ruins of life, or full of aliens who go out and colonize for a bit, then die off, then there’s doubtlessly many chances for exploration but the key notion is that you’re not just going to land on some planet and poke into an archive for a few days or even years. It’s a planet. So to complete your xenoarchaeological mission is going to be a process of centuries and it requires a whole community.
Your xenobiological mission, if life is still extant, is going to take just as long. Millions of species, millions of years of fossils, possibly total alien functioning of life that might not even have DNA or any real parallel to our own cells and biochemistry. So, you’re not personally going to visit a world then another and another.
Even a Gardener Ship style approach, to send out ships that replicated along the way, pausing at systems for refueling and resupply to deposit a colony and move on to the next system, can only let you visit multiple worlds as an explorer if you’re sending clone duplicates. Others will beat you to the action and this will be true even if we discovered a means of faster than light, FTL, travel or communication. Because the USS Enterprise doesn’t find a new planet to explore every week, it stays at each planet for decades just to brush the surface of that exploration and other ships go to other worlds. One possible exception might be if you were yourself the uploaded mind serving as a von Neumann probe, like Bob from Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse series. In that, the space probe with its original human-copied mind – Bob – gets to explore countless worlds with himself and his copies and copies of copies, and they have FTL communication to share information. And that is one case where your probes might be crewed by human level AI, in this case uploaded human minds with augmentation, because in theory at least, the flyby probe racing by or destined to be abandoned on some godforsaken rock ten thousand light years from home can transmit its last mental save state back with its mission data, before running out of juice or blowing itself up, as an alternative to either fate. Though maybe
that probe goes dormant and waits millions of years to speak to a follow up mission, from home or from aliens, and truth be told anyone coming from home millions of years later is going to be pretty alien to you. Otherwise, the planetary explorer probably gets one mission and one that is both very long and probably very classically boring, unless you’re a geologist or other specialization that could find new wonders on each iteration of countless barren planets. In that regard I really don’t expect to have a shortage of volunteers, it is an entirely new planet, but they are effectively volunteers too because I can’t see them getting meaningfully paid, except in satisfied curiosity and prestige, which might be valuable coin in post-scarcity civilizations. It's a pretty good coin nowadays and in the past too. Now before I spoil everyone’s dreams from science fiction, of exploring new worlds and civilizations, for boldly going where no man, or uploaded mind, has gone before, that’s actually one example where classic exploration might happen. Next week we’ll be exploring deep space
habitats, more as an extension of last week’s episode on crawlonizing the galaxy than this week’s story was, but it is likely we would find far more abandoned deep space habs than planets, and places like an O’Neill Cylinder Habitat could be explored by a single team in a short time, like with the classic novel rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. We also need to contemplate how space really gets colonized if you are using uploaded minds, because you might be finding big computers with vast numbers of virtual worlds inside them for you to explore but which require you explore them using the native architecture. You can go visit the equivalent of Tolkien’s Middle Earth but you get to do it on a sailing ship, not a spaceship, and by foot and with pencil and paper as your recorder, not a pocket supercomputer. So too, if it turns out there is a multiverse and you can travel around it, then you are pretty much guaranteed to find countless Earth-like and quasi-earth-like alien worlds to explore. What’s really neat is, if we do find an abandoned alien world to explore, it might be one of thousands of layers of civilizations stacked on top of each other over billions of years, with millions of huge orbital space habitats around it, each habitat and each layer containing tons of classic items of interests to explorers and archeologists, but also with huge cyberspaces to explore. If you thought a pyramid was an impressive tomb,
what about one a thousand time bigger containing a billion crypts, each of which has a durable power supply and virtual worlds inside it that the crypt’s occupant made or cared for or simply represented the world they lived in during their life, like a living interactive journal, kept going at a snail’s pace for eons. Each of which could be visited and explored, each possibly with their own physical laws, and diverging as eons moved by. So on the one hand, science fiction has probably given us some false expectations for what life as a planetary explorer would be like, but on the other, it may be those false expectations were not nearly grand and adventurous enough compared to what awaits us on alien worlds. So in today’s episode I mentioned the captain being afraid that being on ice and a hundred light years from home might mean any emails were unreliable, out of date, containing false information, and potentially even viruses or intentionally flawed upgrade designs that could look like good improvements but blow the ship up when activated.
While at the same time the captain has to worry about the crew’s every action getting armchair quarterbacked back home and protecting them from getting hacked or mined for data. Cybersecurity is going to be just as important in the future as it is today, where every site you visit, video you watch, or message you send, gets tracked & data mined unless you take active steps to protect your data and privacy. The foundation of that security is not letting anyone, including your Internet Provider, spy on your websites then sell that data to who knows who. Even when that’s allegedly protected, that just means your data is only as safe as their own cybersecurity measures and big websites get hacking attempts non-stop, and putting yourself into incognito mode doesn’t help with that at all. But a VPN, or Virtual Private Network, like ExpressVPN, does.
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All right, that wraps us up for today and for June, but we have a lot in store for July as we open the month up on Thursday, July 7th with a look at Deep Space Habitats, those built far from any star to call their own. Then we’ll have our mid-month Scifi Sunday episode, Primitive Aliens, and the challenges of interacting with them, on July 10th. Then we’ll continue our tale of galactic colonization with a look at seeking to escape to Extragalactic Sanctuaries on July 14th, and we’ll see just how enormous a challenge that can be and what almost incomprehensible resources those hunting for you might have at their fingertips. Then we’ll return to
the Fermi Paradox to ask where all these enormous habitats and megastructures we discuss on the show might be and what their apparent absence indicates about the Universe. After that we’ll look at two of the most mysterious things in our Universe, Black Holes and Dark Matter, and if dark matter might be black holes. If you want alerts when those and other episodes come out, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and hit the notifications bell. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, and would like help support future episodes, please visit our website, Isaac Arthur.net, for ways to donate, or become a show patron over at Patreon. Those and other options, like our awesome social media forums for discussing futuristic concepts, can be found in the links in the description.
Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!
2022-07-03 18:27
