Seeker

by Douglas E. Richards

Seeker was silent for several seconds and then resumed. “As you have recently come to learn,” it continued, changing gears, “there are many billions of planets in your galaxy. But as you are also coming to appreciate, your solar system is quite unique. Only in the last few of your decades has it become clear to you how many of your assumptions about solar system formation were wrong. “You had thought that solar systems would be arranged like your own, with small, rocky planets closest to the sun and massive gas giants farther away. But this is not the case at all. You imagined that planets in solar systems would be comfortably spaced apart like yours, and would trace relatively clean, relatively circular orbits. Again, this is far from the truth. You imagined that all solar systems would have a single star at their centers. Yet you have learned that eighty-five percent of them are part of binary star systems, in which two stars orbit closely around each other. “The truth is that the actual arrangement of planets in most solar systems is inimical to the emergence of sentient life. Their orbits are erratic. They don’t have gas giants in the right places, to attract and deflect asteroids that would otherwise crash into hospitable planets too frequently to allow civilization to emerge. They don’t have ridiculously large moons, like you do, to help stabilize their orbit and climate. “In addition, you’ve also recently come to realize that your Earth is, in fact, a second generat...