Fascinating alien worlds
Fantasy and sci-fi writers have so much fun creating worlds for their stories to take place in. We have total power – but, with great power comes great responsibility 
For me, at least, the geography, physics and inhabitants have to make a certain amount of sense, although every year scientists find strange animals or flora/fauna that exist way out in left field.
What is one to make of the Titan Arum, otherwise known by the enticing nickname of Corpse Flower? The flower part, of questionable attractiveness, is the largest in the world, and consists of a central spike-like spadix that’s been described as looking like a baguette (not to me, it doesn’t), surrounded by a deep red petal of sorts that smells like rotting meat. To make itself even more attractive, the tip of the spadix is about the same temperature as a human body, which is thought to mimic a carcass but also helps the ‘scent’ disperse in the air. It’s not a carnivorous plant – instead it attracts flesh flies and carrion-eating beetles to crawl around what they think is a decomposing carcass and in the process pollinate the plant.
New York Botanical Garden corpse flower in bloom June 27, 2018; By Sailing moose – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70296828I mean, seriously, how did such a bizarre plant evolve? On the flip side, there’s a preying mantis that looks so much like a gorgeous orchid that insects flock to it, only to be unceremoniously eaten alive.
An adult female orchid mantis mimicking a Phalaenopsis orchid; By Philipp Psurek – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6385085So if our planet can host such a weird assortment of inhabitants, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine all kinds of creatures on other planets.
There’s a tendency among fantasy writers to create worlds that resemble ours very closely, but that goes with the genre and is what readers expect. Science fiction can make greater leaps of the imagination.
It certainly helps when astronomers discover new heavenly bodies, and it’s amazing what they can figure out about such stars and planets even from enormous distances. Just last month the discovery of a new planet orbiting an “ultra-cool red dwarf” star was announced, stirring up all kinds of excitement, both for the nature of the dwarf star, which is only half as hot as our sun and much dimmer (100 times less luminous), and the weird life of the planet itself.
Although they sound like something rare, ultra-cool red dwarf stars – M dwarfs – actually comprise over 70% of the stars in the Milky Way. Their lower temperature, caused by slower hydrogen fusion in their cores, means that they can survive far longer than brighter stars/suns. While our own sun will burn for about 10 billion years before it turns into a gigantic red devourer of nearby planets, M dwarfs will continue on for perhaps 90 billion years longer than that. That would mean they present a longer window for life to develop on their planets, but also that they could be the last stars left shining in the universe. How cool is that (pun intended)?
This M dwarf is only around the size of our planet Jupiter – about 43,441 miles in diameter. By comparison, our sun is 865,000 miles in diameter.
The physics of such dwarf stars suggests that they could anchor numerous terrestrial planets – those with a solid surface – of a temperature that could potentially host forms of life. Maybe.
In the case of Speculoos-3b, the name given to the planet orbiting the newly-discovered red dwarf, life would be hard to imagine. The planet orbits the sun every 17 hours – making one of its years shorter than a single Earth day. As a result, Speculoos-3b receives almost 16 times more radiation per second than our planet does; it likely doesn’t even have an atmosphere to live in.
The planet is what’s called “tidally locked”: one side always faces the sun while the other remains in eternal darkness. If you visited it, you could literally ‘go over to the dark side’, which, inside an environmental bubble, might be the only place to survive (should you not mind burning a lot of electricity). But who knows what kind of life might already exist? There are enough creatures on earth that thrive in seemingly impossible environments that I don’t think we could discount a kind of life we have no reference for here on Earth.
And here’s a thrilling plot twist: what if a colony was established there, and then a hundred years into the future the planet began to rotate on its axis?
So if the human race is able to venture far out into the stars, as so many of us sci-fi oriented writers love to speculate about, and can find a habitable planet or two near an M dwarf star soon enough to survive the blazing inferno our own sun will one day turn into, who knows what kind of life we might find out there? (In case you were wondering, our sun is about 4.6 billion years old – almost half way through its projected planet-friendly lifespan. Perhaps we’d better get searching )
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