Lonely Planets

by David Grinspoon

  answer to “Are we alone?” is “Yes.” What we really want to know is if

  there is anyone else to talk to.

  Now that we’ve found science, we fancy ourselves masters of the uni-

  verse. Like a terrible two-year-old, we won’t take “no” from the cos-

  mos. Tell us, dammit! Cosmic Evolution is a pretty good story and get-

  ting better all the time. But now we want someone to compare notes

  with. So strong is our desire for certainty in the face of this grand mys-

  tery that we cannot resist the urge to vastly overinterpret every bit of

  potential evidence.

  We are like desperate lovers waiting by the phone, fretting about the

  silence, then hanging on every nuance of every word. Our hunger leads

  us to find significance whether or not it is there. Like relatives at a

  séance straining to hear their dear departed knock on the table, we can-

  not bear the hush from the great beyond. We find signals in the noise of

  existence and read into them the conclusions that we want to reach.

  In a recent issue of Skeptical Enquirer, a pseudoscience was described

  as a belief system that “begins with the desired answer and works back-

  So What?

  149

  ward to the evidence.” Does astrobiology escape this description?

  Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Science is supposed to serve the

  truth, without prejudice or bias. If we are going to aspire to this ideal,

  then we must sometimes be able to say “we have no idea” about an

  important topic.

  We obsess over the meaning of every twist in our narrative, but are

  we just studying tea leaves that settled at random? For now, we have to

  live with the uncertainty of not knowing. We can hold fast to unsup-

  ported opinions if it makes us feel better, but who do we think we’re

  fooling?

  While we wait, look, and listen, we can keep revising and studying

  our autobiography. Sustained study, contemplation, and revision of our

  story will help us build our intuition about the ways that living planets

  can evolve, and will sharpen our perceptions and our ideas as we search

  the cosmos for other life stories.

  As the American astronomer Harlow Shapley (1885–1972) liked to

  say, “Mankind is made of star stuff.” For 12 billion years, we’ve been

  riding the cascading energy flows of gravity and starlight, haltingly

  pulling ourselves together into conscious beings. I like to think we’ll

  share these realizations with creatures on other worlds, born of the

  same expanding, cooling, coalescence, who ponder their own histories

  and wonder whether or not we exist.

  The Lives of Planets

  10

  The secret of good science fiction is that the author

  should be free to invent anything he or she can think

  Image unavailable for

  of, providing no one can prove that it’s wrong. No

  electronic edition

  one can prove that intelligent creatures are not

  swimming in the planet-wide ocean of Jupiter. No

  one will be able to prove it until we send spacecraft

  into that vast unknown sea.

  —BEN BOVA

  Image unavailable for

  Why does every fucking poem mention the ocean?

  electronic edition

  —ERICA JONG

  T H A N K Y O U , L U C K Y S T A R R

  I have a confession to make. Part of the reason why I’m in this plane-

  tary game stems back to a strange and powerful vision I “received”

  back in the fifth grade, when I happened upon an interplanetary time

  vortex transmitting extraordinary extraterrestrial visions from the

  1950s. This information was communicated to me across time from the

  brain of Isaac Asimov, using a primitive device called a “typewriter.”

  His Lucky Starr series, full of obsolete but utterly captivating ideas

  from pre–space age astronomy, provided my earliest vivid awareness

  that planets are places. It was also my first serious literary addiction.

  These interplanetary adventures featured the exploits of David

  “Lucky” Starr, space ranger. Lucky, working for the benevolent and

  powerful Council of Science, was a detective, scientist, and action hero.

  His sidekick, Bigman, was a tough little Martian. Though they wound

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  up in some tight spots, Lucky and Bigman always managed to blind the

  crooks with science and reason, ultimately insuring that peace would

  guide the planets. I eagerly devoured Lucky’s battles with saboteurs

  under the big Sun of Mercury, terrorists on Mars, pirates out among

  the asteroids, interstellar invaders in the rings of Saturn, and mind-

  controlling aliens beneath the oceans of Venus.

  I was turned on to the Lucky Starr books by my grandmother Sally

  G, a.k.a. Grammy, an old friend of Asimov’s. They had worked

  together at Boston University where she was a reference librarian and

  he a biochemistry professor secretly spinning science fiction yarns. For

  a time he hid these from the academic thought police by publishing

  them under the pseudonym Paul French. Grammy was quite fond of

  him and took great pride in his success. For decades after my Lucky

  Starr fixation, she continued to give me a copy of every new novel

  Asimov wrote up to his death in 1992—which added up to quite a

  shelfful. Shortly before she passed away in 1995, her ninety-five-year-

  old body running out of gas, but her mind still sharp as a tack,

  Grammy gave me her worn copy of The Stars, Like Dust (1951),

  Asimov’s second novel, which bears the inscription “To Old Lady

  Green Spoon. Love, Isaac.”

  My parents and the Asimovs ran with the same crowd, so I had the

  good fortune to meet him. Isaac was a kind of adult that kids love: he

  poked fun at everything in a conspiratorial way that made you feel like

  you were in on the joke. Asimov stayed on the scene as a writing

  machine for over five decades, tirelessly using science to enlighten and

  entertain the masses. He was a devout positivist, a true believer in the

  power of rationality and science to lift humanity out of the gutter, and

  his fictional heroes were always champions of science. In this he felt part

  of a movement, a ringleader of the closest thing to a religion I grew up

  with—rational humanism. The optimism inherent in planetary explo-

  ration, and the possible futures it could help create, seemed an integral

  expression of these ideals. For me, it all started with Lucky Starr.

  For Lucky’s adventures, all written between 1952 and 1958, the

  arena was the entire solar system on the eve of real planetary explo-

  ration. Science fiction writers and fans speak reverently of a golden age

  that began in the thirties and ended roughly (and not coincidentally)

  when the space age began. Asimov’s planet-conjuring was informed by,

  and helped to inform, the latest ideas of astronomy. He was one of the

  architects of the planets of the golden age.

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  Some of these golden age planets seemed so complete and compelling

  that it has been hard to leave them behind. Back then it was widely


  accepted that Mercury spun on its axis perfectly in time with its orbit,

  always keeping the same face to the Sun, as the Moon does to the

  Earth. This made for a planet one-half of which was always broiling

  day and the other perpetual frozen night. In between was the twilight

  zone, a frequent fictional setting for indigenous life or human settle-

  ments. Now we know that Mercury doesn’t really have one side locked

  to the Sun in this way. All sides are gradually rotisseried.

  Even tougher to lose were the deep, warm oceans of Venus, where

  Lucky battled monstrous jellyfish and telepathic frogs. When Mariner

  2—the first human-made spacecraft to successfully visit another

  planet—flew past Venus in 1962, just a few years after Lucky’s exploits

  there were written, the fabled, fertile oceans had vanished without a

  trace, leaving a parched, red-hot surface. When Venera 9 landed in

  1975, there were no jungles or swamps, just rolling volcanic rock and

  dust. Science can be cruel to our fantasies.

  As we rocketed farther into space, we gained our first close-up peek

  at each planet. In dramatic, often anxious, moments of revelation, one

  by one the beloved worlds of the golden age became antique visions,

  imaginary yet familiar places solidly grounded in obsolete science.

  We are just now finally learning about the existence of other planets,

  scores of them, orbiting other suns. It will be some time before our

  knowledge of any of these new worlds approaches even our 1950s-era

  knowledge of our own solar system. In the meantime, science fiction

  writers ought to have a field day connecting the dots and filling in the

  blanks.

  C O N N E C T I N G T H E D O T S

  Before this age of exploration, we were not entirely clueless about the

  planets. We had blurry photographs and measurements of temperature

  and atmospheric thickness. But our acute desire to know the other

  worlds has sometimes led us to overinterpret our pictures, constructing

  images of planets that, in some cases, seem as though they should really

  exist. Perhaps they do, elsewhere. If you believe in the principal of plen-

  itude, then somewhere there is a Mercury with one side locked toward

  its sun and a bio-ring girdling its temperate longitudes, a Venus with

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  warm seas, and a Mars cut with canals and adorned with shrubbery.

  Someday, some bored million-year-old cyborg will build this golden age

  solar system out of fallow molecular clouds for a science fair project.

  When we started going to other worlds, we got a reality check on

  hundreds of years of science and fantasy. We learned that the most rig-

  orous of scientists and the most imaginative of storytellers had consis-

  tently tended to picture the other planets as much more like Earth than

  they really are.

  Planetary qualities have been assumed Earth-like unless proven oth-

  erwise. When observations force us to accept a more deadly or alien

  environment, we still find visions of ancient, destroyed Earths buried

  beneath wasted landscapes, or future Earths waiting latent beneath the

  skin of dead or dying worlds. Home is where the heart is, and wherever

  we travel, Earth shines back at us, the beginning and the end of all our

  journeys, the standard by which worlds are judged.

  This tendency to view the planets as minor variations of our home

  world, rather than accepting them on their own terms, has always been

  especially pronounced for those two that flank us in the solar system.

  Venus and Mars, the nearest worlds to home, are our closest siblings

  both as the crow flies (assuming the crow has a pressure suit and a

  rocket pack) and in physical resemblance.

  Believing is seeing. We often saw what was familiar and comforting

  and missed that which was truly alien. For centuries before the space

  age astronomers knew that Venus had bright clouds and a thick atmo-

  sphere. These facts encouraged scientific fantasies of a warm, water

  world—a twin Earth. Through telescopes our aqueous eyes saw aque-

  ous clouds. When we finally sent our robots, we were shocked to find

  clouds of strong acid shrouding a scorched earth where no water could

  condense.

  What we knew of Mars also once seemed encouraging. We’ve known

  for centuries that Mars really does have a “normal” length of day,

  rotating once in just over twenty-four hours. This astonishing coinci-

  dence encouraged us to think of Mars as a modified Earth. It was long

  assumed that the bright polar caps easily seen through telescopes were

  made of frozen (you guessed it) water, seasonally melting and refreez-

  ing. Biologist Joshua Lederberg, writing in Science in 1960, expressed

  the mainstream view when he wrote, “The most plausible explanation

  of the astronomical data is that Mars is a life-bearing planet.” Now we

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  know that the ice caps are largely frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) and

  not a drop of water can persist in the frigid, wispy Martian air. On both

  Venus and Mars we saw white and inferred green.

  B E G I N N I N G O F T H E E N D

  Real comparative planetology first became possible on December 14,

  1962, when Mariner 2 whipped past Venus and radioed home disquiet-

  ing news about the surprisingly sweltering and utterly dry surface. The

  New York Times ran an editorial entitled “Venus Says ‘No’ ”:

  The finding of extraterrestrial life in some form similar to that on

  earth, even at the lowliest stage, would lend support to the wide-

  spread belief—rooted deeply in the aspirations of mankind—that

  life as we know it is not unique to this insignificant corner of the

  universe, but exists in many other systems similar to ours through-

  out the universe. Indeed, there has been speculation among scien-

  tists, philosophers and poets that some of these systems have

  reached a stage of evolution much superior to ours. The message

  from Venus now reduces hope of finding evidence in support of this

  speculation to one half, so far as our solar system is concerned.

  Mars now remains our only hope of turning this universal

  dream into reality, and the evidence so far is not very encouraging.

  The message from Venus may mark the beginning of the end of

  mankind’s great romantic dreams.

  And so an era of romanticism ended, and an age of exploration

  began. It was hard to give up on our relatively unconstrained fantasies,

  but the exciting prospect of voyages to unknown lands and an unend-

  ing stream of new discoveries helped ease the pain.

  F I E L D O F D R E A M S

  Each new planetary mission reached farther, replacing vague expecta-

  tions with clear glimpses of a reality that had been waiting patiently

  since the world was made. For my generation, the planets have, one by

  one, gradually been transformed from unknown arenas for speculation

  and fiction to places we have visited, photographed, scratched, and

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  sniffed. Sometimes I have to remind myself that this is not a normal

/>   part of growing up.

  The first generation of planetologists, the people who designed the

  initial exploratory missions to the planets and who also trained my gen-

  eration, were not themselves trained in planetary science. They had to

  invent it. Our impending ability to travel to other worlds, and the need

  to interpret what we would find there, had forced the question “Who

  knows how to study planets?” The answer was astronomers, geolo-

  gists, meteorologists, physicists, and chemists. All those who had been

  describing the Earth and the heavens as seen through their own disciplin-

  ary lenses would now have to work together to figure out the planets.

  This was a great challenge because each field has its own subculture

  and language. The sad truth is, it is not just the public, the “layman,”

  who can’t understand what scientists are saying. Quite often, we can-

  not understand each other. Sometimes, however, a task arises that

  demands that we leap out of our disciplinary trenches, into a no-man’s-

  land where the view is wider. In the early sixties, the imminent stream

  of new information flowing toward Earth from the other planets cre-

  ated a sudden need for a new, multidisciplinary framework. All the

  blind men, accustomed to studying the terrestrial elephant from their

  own perspectives, would have to get together and make sense of the

  new beasts in the planetary zoo.

  Out of this need, a synthetic culture of planetary science was some-

  how made. Today, many academic departments call themselves

  Planetary Sciences, and their faculty ranks are filled with a growing

  number of people with planetary science degrees. A steady stream of

  newly minted Ph.D.s are being churned out, waiting to inherit their

  mentors’ offices. We have become a field.*

  This young science is the best example I know of a truly interdiscipli-

  nary field, a distinction that carries special challenges and joys. I loved

  going to grad school in a department where students both scramble

  over rock outcrops on geology field trips and spend nights on the

  mountain in telescope domes. Meetings are always an adventure, with

  topics ranging from the atmosphere of Pluto to the craters of Mercury.

  Who wants to be a specialist? At a planetary conference you have to

  describe your work using language that can be followed by a general

  *Also sometimes called planetology or comparative planetology.