Exhalations whizzing in the air

Life imitates art!

Cathode-ray Jupiter

The new, improved solar system, 4

Jupiter’s magnetosphere is a strange mixture of the impressive and the disappointing: a vast, wobbly pancake of ionised gases, hundreds of millions of kilometres wide and large enough to hold the Sun several times over, it would be wider than a full Moon in Earth’s sky, if it radiated any visible light.

But it doesn’t.  Talk about wasteful.  The largest single structure in the whole solar system is just sitting there, like an invisible Mount Everest.  And all it takes is a sprinkling of the right ingredients and a bit of a kick to get something truly worthwhile.

Io, the innermost of Jupiter’s larger moons, is our base of operations.  This highly volcanic moon is already pumping megatonnes of dust and gases into the magnetosphere, and its molten interior will be a handy energy source for our arrays of high-wattage lasers.

These beams will light up the plasma – cunningly doped by dumping suitable chemicals into Io’s magma – in all the gorgeous colours of sodium-green, oxygen-red and sulphur-blue, turning Jupiter into a huge near-vacuum tube with pixels the size of minor planets.

Io’s orbital period of 42 hours will give our display a refresh rate of 0.000006542 Hz, not the best on the market, but as it’s all powered by Jupiter’s rotation and gravity, it’s completely carbon-neutral.

Dark matter

Molecular astronomy

The new, improved solar system, 3

Shiny moons and new planets may be all right for the gawking masses, you may ask, but what of those of us with more refined tastes? The adventurous chefs of tomorrow won’t be content with merely Earthly delights, and fleets of robot probes will scour the system for new and ever more absurdly expensive ingredients and techniques.

Moon dust is unsealed at the table and sprinkled over the amuse bouche. As the glittering powder is exposed for the first time in millions of years to a moist, reducing atmosphere, the fleeting bouquet, comparable to Sichuan pepper, freshly-cut glass and burnt gunpowder, will arouse the most jaded palate.

Martian salt, with its unique brick-red colour and sour, alkali undertones, is the idea garnish for sous-vide loaves leavened with Titanian anaerobic yeasts and poach/baked for three weeks.

Forget glacier melt or deep ocean water: nothing is as untouched, or as recherche, as comet water, frozen in the depths of the Oort cloud since long before the Earth formed. Its bracing ammonia-and-tholin tang makes it an ideal accompaniment for seafood.

Assemble the asteroids

The new, improved solar system, 2

It was once thought that the main asteroid belt of our solar system had its origins in a mysterious ‘fifth planet’ which orbited between Mars and Jupiter until it was destroyed millions of years ago by a catastrophic explosion, possibly involving primeval forms of Mentos and cola.

Modern astronomy frowns on this theory, depending as it does on a faintly embarrassing piece of numerology known as the Titius-Bode law, and prefers to blame the asteroids on the meddlesome gravitational influence of Jupiter. But just because the fifth planet never formed in the first place, it doesn’t mean that we can’t make one, and the materials are already to hand.

A solar system without asteroids will be a tidier and more well-proportioned place, with no pesky chunks of space rubble dropping out of the sky and causing extinction events.

It’s simply a matter of magnetising a couple of the bigger nickel-iron asteroids and waiting for them to glom onto each other in an ever-growing clump. Non-metallic asteroids can be hauled in with nets or static cling.

As a bonus, we get to make a new planet to spec, which will be much more fun than terraforming Venus or Mars. Renovations are such a bore.

Nerds may object that the total mass of all known asteroids is only 4% of the mass of the Moon, but remember that we’re building this thing from scratch. It’s not like it has to be solid all the way through. And anyway, once we get around to cleaning them all up, there are sure to be many more asteroids than we thought, just like when you move house.

Ice the Moon

The new, improved solar system, 1

It may come as a shock to you, but the albedo, or reflective brightness, of the Earth’s Moon is 0.12, which is very, very dark, about as dark as this: █

Much like a goth caught in the beam of a powerful searchlight, it only seems bright to us because it is reflecting the Sun’s rays against the even deeper black of Space Itself.

And because we’re used to it. Used to a dowdy, dim, low-wattage Moon, a lump of dusty black rock which is barely bright enough to prevent us stumbling drunkenly over tent-ropes and falling into campfires at night.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus, by contrast, has an albedo of 99%. Think of how bright that would be, if it were not languishing in the backwaters of the solar system.

I’m not proposing to move Enceladus into the Moon’s orbit: that would be ridiculously expensive. All we need to do is spray-coat the Moon in something white and powdery. Think of the gloriously warm, moonlit nights we would enjoy, basking in the rays of a highly-reflective and fully solar-powered Moon.

(Of course, the term ‘ice’ here does not refer to actual frozen water, which would probably melt. In astronomy ‘ice’ has a special technical sense, and refers to any form of sugared frosting.)

Space junk

This “Archaeological Inventory at Tranquility Base” contains some thought-provoking items:

6. Neil Armstrong’s Apollo Space Boots, Model A7L (2)

9. Empty Food Bags (2+)

11. A Gold Replica of an Olive Branch, Traditional Symbol of Peace (1)

26. Medals Commemorating Two Dead Cosmonauts (2)

50. Urine collection assembly, small (2)

51. Urine collection assembly, large (2)

Breakfast on Hyperion

Zurek and Paz calculate (not recently — this is fun, not breaking news) that if Hyperion were isolated from the rest of the universe, it would evolve into a non-localized quantum state over a period of about 20 years. It’s an impressive example of quantum uncertainty on a macroscopic scale. –Cosmic Variance

Pushing my head through a few layers of rubble, I rested against the crumbly wall of my crater to enjoy the dawn. The sun rose in the south, hesitated, coughed and set very quickly again a couple of degrees west. It then smeared itself underneath the sky and sent a lazy ribbon spiralling east-nor-east, behind Big Lump, which is where east-nor-east has been for the last few weeks.

It promised to be a beautiful day, bright and sunny but with only a hint of decoherence. A neatly laid table set with silver cutlery and fresh white bistro linen appeared next to the crater. It held a plate of soft poached eggs, two buttered muffins, a silver pitcher of hollandaise sauce, a pot of freshly made tea and the mummified head of a bull giraffe. I rearranged the dusty debris of the crater wall into a comfortable beanbag shape – I don’t know how people can live on non-porous worlds, it’s really very convenient and cozy as long as you remember not to breathe in when your mouth is covered – unfolded my napkin and politely tossed the giraffe’s head towards the southern horizon. It spun gently for a while, silhouetted against the Rings, and then blossomed into an impressive brown and yellow aurora.

There was a small frog where the yolk of the second egg should have been. It turned out to be slightly overdone, but you can’t expect everything to be perfect.

Space: 1999

Earth’s Moon floating in the sky of an alien planet, the shapes as familiar and as remote as those of one’s own face in a mirror.

It’s the most beautiful sf image I can remember seeing on tv as a kid. It justifies everything about this show. Yes, everything, even the outfits that make most of the guys look paunchy, and that one episode which terrified the living crap out of me when I was about eight, the one with the wiggly alien thing that ate people and left their corpses all smouldering and covered with cobweb stuff.

Also, the theme song is a total funky freakout.

I only watched the pilot on the DVD I rented, so I don’t know if the image of the Moon in the sky actually looked any good; I don’t think it could live up to my expectations.

Aestheticising catastrophe

BLDGBLOG interviews science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.