Allen Shoff's Blog, page 3

New Year, New Site

Welcome to the brand new website for the writings and musings of Allen Shoff, contemplative science fiction author! Sadly, the upgrade did not go quite as smoothly as one might have hoped, which has forced me to recreate everything from scratch and resulted in the loss of my older posts. Thankfully, I didn’t have that many, and the only ones that were truly difficult to replace (the microfiction) were saved elsewhere.

I intend to be updating this blog more regularly in the future, as it’s a lot more stable now in its new home. If you’re interested in reading more about what happened to the old blog and why it’s gone, leave a comment here or on Facebook and I might do a brief write-up.

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The Loneliest Race

I wrote a very short microfiction piece on a subreddit that highlights speculative fiction trumpeting humanity and its accomplishments, /r/hfy (for “Humanity, F— Yeah!”). Called “The Loneliest Race,” the idea was very simple: science fiction is rife with stories about Forerunners, Ancients, and other precursor civilizations; what if we were the precursor civilization for others?

Check it out and comment over on reddit!

Fireworks

On the 299th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Edward Gibson found himself troubled by a remarkable case of déjà vu.

He couldn’t have dreamed this before; the only thing less likely than a dream was this reality. Certainly it felt like a dream: his limbs moved with a sluggish stubbornness, his vision blurry and clouded, the glow of soft lights bobbing like faeries around him. But his reason told him that these sensations were genuine, that his legs ached from ceaseless activity and his eyes still burned from the close call with a phosphorus grenade the day before. Officers walked nearby, their reassuring whispers easing fears, their carefully policed flashlights casting dancing shadows on the dirt and fractured concrete below their feet. No, this was real, as real as the pain from the open blisters on his feet and the gritty shrapnel dust in his hair.

He tried to ignore the feeling of unease, that prickling sensation that rumored that he was but a puppet in a vast choreographed dance. The theologian in him began to draw a smirk to his face, but weariness squelched it before it left his mind. The soldier in him hated that idea.

Around him in the darkness, hundreds, maybe thousands, marched silently, rugged boots thudding softly on the pavement, rifle straps and buckles muffled to a sullen clinking of muted metal by bits of cloth. Their officers hadn’t needed to impress upon them the gravity of the situation to ensure silence; fatigue did that, as did fear and the incalculable weariness of combat. The militiamen and their American allies couldn’t have laughed had they tried.

To the north, a terrible and momentary false dawn lit the clouds with scathing brightness. A thundering, rolling rumble echoed through the soil moments later. Then another flash split the sky, followed by another and another—a rain of fire coupled with delayed cracks of thunderous violence. Gibson looked as around him weary faces gazed skywards, eyes twitching from the constant assault of light, mouths opened with wonder. The officers prodded the stragglers with harsh whispers, yet even they found themselves entranced by the sheer spectacle. The artillery roared and thundered and shouted with abandon. Gibson’s ears rang with the cacophonous diatribe. Diversion, they called it; feinted attack for strategic withdrawal, yet he called it the dawn of the reign of Hephaestus: an empire of ash, a kingdom of fire—

And then, without warning, there it was. The wisp of memory, half-imagined fragment tormenting him with thoughts of predestination, leapt fully-formed from his mind. A young girl, laughing, danced down the boulevard of his thoughts. The smell of charcoal mingled with the wisps of smoke from sparklers. It was the Fourth, the Fourth of July, a particular year from his youth; his younger siblings laughed and danced and cheered as each new firework exploded brilliantly in smoke-obscured sky. But he stood apart, smugly content in his scrawny male adolescence. He dreamed, but not of independence. He carried a lawn chair, slung across his shoulder like a rifle; manicured grass faded into the bitter snowdrifts of Chosin. He imagined each concussion as an airburst of a shell; he closed his eyes to blot out the garish festive colors.

“Eddie? What’s wrong?”

His father had noticed his silence as the boy stalked the sidewalk ahead of rest of his family. Five meter spacing, his dream self said. Keep the platoon widely spread to prevent heavy grenade casualties. He responded quietly.

“No, dad, nothing’s wrong. I’m just enjoying the fireworks.”

His father laughed.

“Well, typically, Ed, you actually watch them. You know, with your eyes. I’ve heard that they look a lot better that way.”

The young man smiled slightly.

“Sure, dad. I’ll keep that in mind.”

On the darkened road in Kaduna, Edward Gibson wished this moment would last forever. He grasped tightly to the recollection—the sounds of his siblings shouting and mother laughing and the neighbor’s dog barking in a frenzy at the thudding skybursts—yet still it faded. The half-remembered scent of charcoal disappeared into the pungent odor of burning cordite and superheated brass; the lawn chair on his shoulder melted away into his rifle; sooty fatigues replaced his youthful t-shirt. The memory vanished as it had come, and he was alone.

On the shore of the river, the artillerymen continued their deadly duel with their counterparts north of the city. They stood resolute near their guns, night blind and deafened by each concussion. Whistling shells leaped into their midst from enemy counter-battery fire, and from time to time a gun would vanish in an explosive death of twisted metal and shrapnel. Yet the marching lines continued to dwindle into the distance, passage assured by the death of each man at his gun.

A young Nigerian near Gibson, scarcely a teenager, began to whisper under his breath, words half-formed and almost inaudible. A nearby soldier joined him, and the fragments of a tune floated in the breeze, sung in the hoarsest of whispers by men with parched, smoke-choked throats. And yet it was beautiful.

“The minstrel boy, to the war has gone, in the ranks of death you’ll find him….”

Several more took up the song, voices quavering just above a whisper, the soft thud of boots providing a percussive accompaniment.

“His father’s sword he hath girded on, and his wild harp slung behind him….”

The officers looked silently from man to man. The moonlight revealed tears tracing down the cheek of the captain.

“’Land of Song!’ said the warrior bard, ‘tho’ all the world betrays thee, one sword at least thy rights shall guard, one faithful harp shall praise thee!’”

Gibson closed his eyes to block out the garish lights; he felt each flash against his eyelids. All around, he could hear the sound of fireworks.

The Siren’s Song

It was not the first time the boy heard an Orphean dirge.

It began with a whispered cadence, the softest of consonants drifting in the air. The rumbling of orbital artillery punctuated each repetition as the rhythm of words began to assert itself, assonant syllables accented by poignant pause. The chemical fire to the boy’s right crackled loudly for a moment as a gust of wind buffeted it; he could taste the acrid smoke coating his throat.

What seemed like mere moments before, the air had buzzed with a thousand martial sounds, screams of the dying mingling with the hellish shuddering whine of railguns. The boy lay behind crumbling printcrete, shaking as each massive round tore the air with fierce cracks. He hadn’t fired his rifle; it seemed futile, even vulgar. In the sky above, the thick black clouds roiled angrily and suddenly split asunder as a series of shots streaked down from orbit. A building vanished into an expanding cloud of debris; a moment later, the thunderclap reached him, punching him in the chest and driving him closer to his slab. He shut his eyes tightly to hide the images of anguished figures silhouetted against the flames. In the eternal purple twilight, the scurrying humanoid shapes seemed more wraith than man. Oh father! We war against spirits, not men; how can we kill a ghost?

#

It was only two years before that an Orphean delegation had first returned to their ancestral home. Sons and daughters of the Arks, their ancestors had left the Earth behind. Some were religious visionaries, yearning for a new world to birth their utopian dreams; some were political dissidents, fleeing their oppressors; some were wanderers, desperate to sate that all-consuming evolutionary urge to crest the next hill. The world they chose as their own was barren and cold, atmospheres thin and sunlight weak. Years passed as the terraformers worked their craft, while the thousands of colonists waited in the ships, confined by harsh corridors of metal, segregated into ghettoes of distrustful factions. Patiently they waited, and while they waited they sang. Their songs brought them through their tribulation; their songs gave their new home its name: Orphea. And when the air grew warm enough and the rivers grew large enough and the plants grew strong enough they left their orbiting prisons and came to Orphea, their feet touching new rock and their lungs breathing new air. But they never forgot their songs–a living memory of the suffering they had endured.

A century passed before the men of Earth stumbled across Orphea, so isolated was she by vast clouds of interstellar dust and the sun’s potent radiation. Some among the decadent nations of Earth, burdened by often-unprofitable colonies, resolved that Orphea would provide them with their salvation. Brasilia dispatched a cruiser to carry a delegation back to Earth, eager to impress upon the Orpheans the benefits of submitting to the paternal wisdom of the Federation.

And so it was by this chance collision of peoples that the boy found himself standing amongst a crowd of hundreds of thousands. Inside the National Congress, the Orpheans spoke in secret with the vast array of senators and deputies; outside, the crowd remained strangely hushed.

When the doors of the Congress opened, even the barest whispers of the crowd died. Three Orpheans appeared, two women and one man, dressed in stately silver robes which caught the sun like wavelets in a pond. The foremost woman walked with a gait both proud and tired, and her straight black hair starkly contrasted against her white-pale skin. Her eyes betrayed a lifetime lived in darkness and twilight, and tears sprang from them as she resolutely resisted the impulse to shield herself from the unfamiliar sun. The Orpheans never showed sign of weakness.

The woman clasped her hands before her and said nothing as she descended the long ramp, flanked now by security officers. The crowd watched her careful descent in an eerie stillness, cowed before her powerful presence and the solemnity of her gaze. Finally, at the bottom of the ramp, she halted and spread her arms wide, palms upturned and eyes closed. Tears, now of emotion rather than the assault of the sun, dropped from her cheeks to the sides of her slender neck. She opened her mouth and the boy’s world dissolved into her song.

The crowd seemed to vanish before him, leaving nothing in his vision but the Orpheans–or rather, her. The song that emerged from her lips defied language: to call it music would pervert it. Her mournful sweeping tonality wove a world into being, as real as the fabric of her robes, and he felt its strands crystallize into images in his mind. He saw Orphea laid before him like an ochre gem, narrow winding rivers tracing the surface like veins in marble. His toes scratched the planet’s gray-brown dust; his eyes drank in meandering ribbons of shimmering and giggling color framed by starless sky. He wept as he saw dim twilight turn to murky dusk and back again, and he laughed with joy as he saw the indomitable Orpheans beat back the night with glistening cities, scattered oases of light. He did not know how long she sang, or what words she spoke. The Orpheans knew that she mourned the end of peace between their long-lost cousin peoples; the boy heard an irresistible song of love.

His mother wept when he told her that he would enlist to join the military invasion of Orphea; his father grudgingly accepted that his son might yet prove a man. Neither would have understood had he explained his reason: he alone could comprehend the intense yearning to hear that melody again. And so he endured the brutality of training, the arduous voyage aboard a crowded fleet carrier, the eternal twilight of Orphea, the murderous fury of the resistance–all with the hope that perhaps he would again experience that glorious sound. The only song he heard was the wailing of the dying.

#

The boy pressed his cheek against the dirty street and shut his eyes, trying to forget the visions of devastation. One of his friends lay nearby, sightless eyes staring into the Stygian darkness. The buzzing rounds and echoing thumps of the orbital barrage had faded away; the railguns had one by one fallen silent as soldiers died at their posts. Several large vehicles burned ferociously nearby, fiery tongues licking the purple sky and spewing angry clouds of smoke. It was quiet now, but for the first murmurings of the song.

A new voice joined, raw emotion accenting the soaring tones. The very notes seemed to ache with grief and with loss; she seemed to hold back tears with every breath. He could not understand the words, but he knew exactly what she said. Grief needs no translation.

The boy’s dark, wet blood seeped down the road in slow rivulets.

A muscle spasm shook his whole body with convulsions, and when it ended, he felt weak, so weak that he could barely keep his eyes open. His vision slowly dulled, the dim twilight above him growing darker with each passing moment. The ragged wound in his abdomen hurt less than he expected. He found that he could not move his arms, and so with effort he lolled his head to the side to look down the street. More of his platoon lay strewn across the pavement, their remains littered with blood-slick debris. And walking among the dead were the wraith-like forms of Orpheans.

Their pale skin contrasted sharply with their dark coats, and they seemed to fade in and out of clouds of smoke that twisted in the harsh wind. They knelt at each of the fallen, pausing for a moment before continuing, while others lifted weapons from where they lay. One figure detached from the group and approached the boy, face hidden by a dark mask. Horrified, he tried to defend his presence on their soil, shouting aloud that he was there out of love, that he did not want a war any more than they did–but all that emerged from his mouth was a wheezing cry that ended in a choking cough. As the ghostly form approached, it resolved into the graceful curves of a woman; as she lifted her mask, he saw a face lined with sorrow. She knelt by his side, glancing at his mortal wound, and brushed her fingers across his cheek with motherly compassion. He wept.

And suddenly, a new song emerged, escaping from the woman’s throat like an uncaged dove. The song enveloped him and lifted him away from soot-stained slab of printcrete. He could taste the soul of Orphea itself. The auroras danced, and he danced with them. The boy opened his eyes and gazed into the vibrant face of the singer. A slow smile crossed his lips as the last, quivering breath left his lungs.

This time, she sang for him.

Regular blogging is hard

The fundamental problem of writing a blog is thinking of something profound, interesting, or useful to say. I know there are some people who are able to do this on a daily basis, even multiple times a day, developing an idea and writing it down for the benefit of their large audiences. Other people may not actually have anything useful or inspirational or poetic to say, but they say it anyway; some may have little to say but when they are inspired to speak it is fantastic.

I find myself paralyzed by indecision whenever I have an idea that might be good enough to make it into a blog post. I don’t want to be another one of those people filling the internet with endless blathering, but I also feel the pressure of having this blog sit empty. Watching the previous post date drift farther and farther into the past without an answer is a profoundly unpleasant feeling.

So here is an update on what I’ve been doing. The second novel still sits at about 1/5 of the way to completion, but I’ve set it aside for now in the interest of trying my hand at some short stories and microfiction. Those of you who knew me during my undergraduate years might recall the universe I created with several friends, and the short “vignettes” we wrote set in this universe. Well, that universe is the same one as all my fiction takes place in now, and those vignettes are all still “canon” in the universe. I have taken some of these old vignettes, updated them to what I hope is a superior writing style to that used by college-me, and have been submitting them, along with new fiction, to various science fiction magazines and e-zines. I guarantee there will be an excited post here if I receive back an acceptance from one of these ‘zines!

While I’m doing this, if I write a story, or update one of my old ones, and it just doesn’t strike me as enough to officially submit for publication, or if it is rejected from publication, I figure someone should be able to read it. I’ll be posting these stories, sometimes with a short introductory explanation, sometimes not, in a new section of this blog called “Stories” which will be linked from the main page as well as from the general blog. The first of this list, “The Siren’s Song,” should go live today.

I’d love comments about the stories. I think the best possible way to improve my writing is to actually hear reviews from people about it. Honest criticism is the best way for me to be able to share my universe with you all, and I look forward to discussion in the comments!

Proxima Centauri, Part II: The Facepalmening

It will not surprise those of you who listened to my interview on Catholic Idaho to know that I was once an evangelical Protestant. It may, however, surprise you–given my great love of science and science fiction–to learn that I shared similar views with your standard, garden-variety evangelical about cosmology. In a label, I was a Young-Earth Creationist. That in itself is a story for another day (and perhaps a much longer story than can be contained by a single post!), but the heart of the matter is that when I came to my slow, reasoned return to Mother Church, the douse in the Tiber did more than reshape my theological understanding; it gave me a whole new perspective across all areas of my life, including my understanding of the balance of faith and reason and the very nature of the universe.

In my former creationist days, I voraciously read the tracts and articles of Answers in Genesis, hoping to find some smoking gun or clever argument to entirely discount modern science once and for all. While Dr. Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box was fairly compelling to a layman, it took my conscious ignorance of its many reasoned detractors for it to maintain its potency. Ultimately, I was never able to find a single book that actually provided a compelling case that held up under scrutiny–but again, that is a story for another day!

I bring up Answers in Genesis (hereafter AiG) because of a humorous coincidence. Google Now, intuiting that I have great interest for “exoplanet” (as it so ungrammatically articulated it), brought a recent article on AiG to my attention regarding the discovery of Proxima Centauri B–an event I briefly addressed in a previous post. I read it with a bemused smile until I reached the final paragraph, at which time I knew I absolutely had to write something, anything to bring to my (admittedly-tiny) audience my frustrations about this article and this philosophy in general. In brief? This article is the perfect synopsis of why the world thinks Christians ignore scientific truth.

I will address the article, found on the AiG website here, in a series of responses after a block quote citing the relevant passages.

“The impetus for the search for exoplanets is to find planets on which life is possible.”

Certainly that is partially true; NASA’s page about the James Webb Space Telescope points to studying the “formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth” as one of its stated goals. However, there is something to be said for knowledge for the sake of knowledge here. As the article correctly states, thirty years ago we didn’t know of a single extrasolar planet, and now we have confirmed upwards of 3,500, with many more to come as the analysis of the data from Kepler continues to reveal new worlds. Is that not laudable in itself? But this is a digression from the real problem with this article.

“The vast majority of extrasolar planet discoveries clearly are hostile to life.”

Well, yes, insofar as we can tell from our distant perch. The way I read this generalization implies that the exoplanets we’ve found are those which could potentially support life, but are faulty in some way. The truth is, our current methods of discovering exoplanets biases the discoveries heavily towards gas giants, massive planets large enough to block a measurable amount of light from their parent stars or to tug the stars by their gravity enough to be observable from Earth. Once the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes are operational, however, expect the number of Earth-sized or super-Earth-sized exoplanets to skyrocket. But again, this is honestly a nitpick with his tone that I would have likely overlooked had I been more friendly towards the site at the outset.

“What qualifies an extrasolar planet as being earth-like and hence a possible haven for life?”…

This is where start to see the foreshadowing of the author’s argument. I think it is important to note what the actual press releases and articles (in reputable sources, mind, not the hoo-rah cheerleader rags) state about the discovery. Take the ESO’s article, for instance. The scientists have said that their analysis shows the planet is likely 1) within the habitable zone, which is defined as the region around a star where the temperature on the surface would be sufficient for water to exist in liquid form, and 2) potentially is a rocky, rather than gaseous body. This article, among others, cautions that the planet is likely tidally-locked, is likely pummeled by radiation from its parent star due to its close proximity, and has a year of about 11.2 Earth days. In other words, this ain’t Earth, and this ain’t anything close to Earth. But it is, however, both the closest exoplanet we’ve ever found, and (likely) a rocky, Earth-sized body, which is absolutely fascinating in and of itself.

Dr. Faulkner at AiG, however, takes an intensely negative perspective on the discovery. The main body of the article is him essentially trash-talking Proxima Centauri b. Geez, buddy, what did the poor little guy ever do to you? To him, it seems almost silly to get excited about this planet: the atmosphere is likely stripped away due to a lack of a magnetic field, dampened by tidal-locking (true); the radiation of the sun would probably murder anything on it (true); tidal-locking means the temperatures would be aggressively hot or horrendously cold depending on which side of the planet you were on (true). Nothing said here was false, but it seems almost baffling to find someone react so negatively about such an exciting, monumental discovery–until you read the next paragraph and it all makes sense.

“Evolutionists understandably are excited each time an extrasolar planet, such as Proxima Centauri b, shows any possibility of being earth-like. In their worldview, there is nothing special about the earth, because if the earth is special, that suggests design. Therefore, the vast majority of evolutionists assume that there must be many earth-like planets, with life abounding in many places. However, it doesn’t take very long to realize that each of these supposed earth-like planets have severe problems that reveal that they are anything but earth-like. What do biblical creationists expect? In the creation account of Genesis 1, we see God taking great care to create a world for man’s habitation. This is explicitly restated in Isaiah 45:18. From this we conclude that the earth truly is unique and that there are no earth-like planets. We find that the best science available agrees with this.”

Hooooo boy. Lucy, we’ve got some unpackin’ to do. First, two quick points, then back to the quote-response format.

Evolutionists. That’s a broad term for a diverse group of “anyone who disagrees with me,” ain’t it? But sure, we’ll roll with it, if that’s what you want.
Nothing special about the earth. I assume he’s referring to the mediocrity principle, which states that the evolution of life on earth, the formation of our solar system, and the other phenomenon that we have ourselves experienced here on Earth are typical throughout the galaxy. Wikipedia calls it a heuristic and a philosophical notion, but it is important to note that not all “evolutionists” base their perspective about the universe on this or similar (Copernican et al) principles. For instance, there are a good number of “evolutionists” that ascribe value to the Rare Earth Hypothesis, many of whom are not theists or Christians at all. To these scientists, looking at the data, they come to the conclusion that the conditions necessary for the Earth to exist, or our particular solar system to form, and life itself to take the form that it has, is so vanishingly rare that Earth may well be one of a handful or even the only example in all of the cosmos. There are those, of course, who disagree, like Sagan, Hawking, Drake, and many others, but that is the whole joy of scientific inquiry: things aren’t settled until they’re settled, and even then new discoveries can arise that turn old understandings upside down. It’s exciting, really; but please ignore that and accept Dr. Faulkner’s blanket statement that scientists cannot abide uniqueness because it suggests design.

“However, it doesn’t take very long to realize that each of these supposed earth-like planets have severe problems that reveal that they are anything but earth-like.”

Of the handful we’ve found, Dr. Faulkner. In a tiny sliver of the sky, probed by a single satellite and a handful of ground-based telescopes in a mere few decades, with significant limitations on the size of bodies we can discover. This attitude is akin to an explorer sailing a few miles away from shore, looking through his spyglass, and saying, “Well, it’s water all the way, obviously. No point in looking any more at this stage.” It is impossible to make any sort of reasoned prediction about the prevalence of Earth-like planets without more data; if it were, we wouldn’t have the Rare Earth v. Mediocrity Principle debate at all, it would be settled one way or the other. But it gets worse from here.

“What do biblical creationists expect? In the creation account of Genesis 1, we see God taking great care to create a world for man’s habitation.”

He also took great care to make a universe, I’d point out. And God inspired the authors to write the Bible for our road to salvation; it doesn’t make sense for Him to take the time to discuss the Wootles of Snerpa IV, if they exist. I’d note that the Bible speaks very sparingly of angels too, but it doesn’t make them any less a fully-fleshed (fully-spirited?) and important part of His creation.

This is explicitly restated in Isaiah 45:18. From this we conclude that the earth truly is unique and that there are no earth-like planets. We find that the best science available agrees with this.

Woah there, Dr. Faulkner. Talk about leaping to conclusions. This is his proof text for the assumption of all assumptions, Isaiah 45:18:

For thus says the Lord,

who created the heavens

    (he is God!),

who formed the earth and made it

    (he established it;

he did not create it a chaos,

    he formed it to be inhabited!):

“I am the Lord, and there is no other.

I’ve wracked my brain to even represent this logic, but I’m coming up short.

1) God created the heavens.

2) God created the earth to be inhabited.

∴ There can be no earth-like planets.

Yeah, see, just not working. Okay, I’ll try not to be so facetious. I’m no logician, nor am I a philosopher, so I’d love a good explanation of the exact logical fallacy here (post in the comments!). The terms of his argument are just so unrelated that it’s hard to even point to a single fallacy to explain it. It makes no sense to use the passage from Isaiah to conclude that the Earth is unique; all that passage says is that God made the Earth to be inhabited. It says nothing about its uniqueness, and does not address any other planet (this is a major, systemic problem with AiG, trying to use the Bible like it’s a science textbook, but we’ll pass over that for now; for the sake of argument we’ll go from their starting premises). Dr. Faulkner is taking a single case, the Earth, and making a blanket assumption about all planets in the entire universe when 1) we haven’t seen even the barest fraction of them, and 2) the Bible doesn’t talk about them!

At the end of the day, it’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing because the Church nurtured and grew the sciences to lead us to a better understanding of the Creator. However, because of articles and authors like this, people around the world see faith as somehow intrinsically opposed to scientific inquiry, and set up this modern farce of Faith v. Science we see played out in countless movies, shows, debates, and discussions. To the Catholic, true faith and true scientific knowledge cannot be incompatible, because scientific truth, theological truth, and historical truth are all Truth, and there is but one Truth. Our job is to find it, and whether it be through careful contemplation of the sacred mysteries of God to long days staring into the microscope or telescope, each new discovery–including Proxima Centauri b–has value precisely because it broadens our knowledge of this universe, and, in a tiny but important way, gives us new insight into its Creator.

“Catholic Idaho” radio interview audio available!

On August 30 I was interviewed on the “Catholic Idaho” program airing on Salt and Light Radio. It was a great experience, and I look forward to having another chance to chat with Brian and the rest of the team in the future!

Below I’ve included a link to the interview itself as it aired. The interview begins at 18:32.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! Do you have any questions you want answered more fully, or questions that you have? Let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/saltandlightradio/Catholic_Idaho_Show_11_083016-PODCAST.mp3

Proxima Centauri

Few things stir the imagination quite like the announcement of newly-discovered exoplanets. Within the space of a single lifetime, our understanding of our cosmos has grown so dramatically that it is hard to believe that the first true confirmation of extrasolar planets came in 1992–a mere twenty-four years ago–with the announcement of the three planets in orbit of the millisecond pulsar PSR1257+12 on February 25, 1992.

Since then, due to both the tremendous success of the Kepler Mission, launched by NASA in 2009, and the vast improvements in ground-based telescopes, the Exoplanet Catalog now boasts a remarkable 3,518 confirmed planetary bodies in orbit around alien suns. More than three thousand in twenty-four years! Each new discovery brings entirely novel and often unexpected stories: the so-called “carbon” or “diamond” exoplanet candidates like WASP-12b or 55 Cancri e; potential ocean planets, a la Star Wars’ Manaan or Venus in Perelandra, like Gliese 1214 b or Kepler-22b; or perhaps most dramatically, lonely rogue planets like PSO J318.5-22. Each of these discoveries results in a wave of euphoria, at least for me, as I realize that so much of what we’ve written in fiction over the past one hundred years is not overly imaginative, but if anything, fails to capture the unique drama of the billions of stars (and planets, as we now know!) that orbit just our own galaxy’s center.

But this news in particular has started a firestorm of excitement, because Proxima Centauri b is no ordinary exoplanet, (likely) doomed to be forever out of our reach. This planet, announced just last month in Nature, orbits the nearest star to our own sun. Think on it! This star is only four and a quarter light years from us–practically touching in astronomical terms–and this planet is not merely some super-Jupiter or garden variety ice giant, but somewhere around 1.25 Earth masses: an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone–that is, the zone within which water can remain liquid. This planet orbits so close to her mother star–twenty times closer than we to our own sun!–that completes an orbit every eleven days, yet due to the dimness of the star, the surface temperature could still be quite comparable to our own planet–if, of course, this exoplanet has an atmosphere, for an atmosphere provides vital thermal inertia to stabilize daily temperatures.

Much is speculative at this point, but the news is still exciting. And what a boon for fiction writers! Although Proxima Centauri has already had its share of fiction relating to it over the years, I would not be surprised to see it rise to the forefront again in the next few years. And why not? Science fiction has always led the way in predicting the future, and helping us to wrap our minds around the discoveries of the present.

Come on, Breakthrough Starshot!