Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  “Right. We’ve waited four years.”

  “Five minutes is all I’m asking. Let me savor the significance of the moment.”

  From Derya’s vantage point he saw the Mole some 200 feet away. The Sun was about to hide behind the western wall. Back on Earth dusk followed sunset by about half an hour, as the atmosphere kept bouncing sunlight around until our star was deep down over the horizon. Here sunset was nightfall. The last rays gave an otherworldly honey glow to the infinite candles of light at the top of the wall convincingly imitating a twilight.

  Derya eventually pressed the button. In went the Mole to explore a sea of mysteries and, perhaps, answers.

  Later that night, with the Mole already over 300 feet deep, there was a strange blue glow coming out of the borehole. Cherenkov radiation, high-energy electrons passing through the liquefied ice around the cryobot. The column of frozen ice functioned as optical fiber, and the high reflectivity of the walls mirrored and bounced the light, whose only escape became the mouth aperture.

  Much closer, on top of the boulder outside Caird, a collecting box was gathering falling snowflakes from the geysers. Right there, in that collector, may be a microbe about to change the course of history. With that accumulating sample, tomorrow they would test for signs of alien life.

  Sergei stopped reading and put the tablet down. Derya was a goner, snoring just below the decibel threshold that earned a slap. This was the most dangerous part of the sleeping ritual, when Sergei’s mind was unoccupied in the transition between reading and falling numb. He closed his eyes and hoped for the best. Everything was running smoothly, ramping down for slumber. He had almost made it when a grunting coming from his neighbor threw him off. A date flashed in his mind—twenty months next month. The demons in the recesses of his mind—eating something, hopefully memories—had been provoked. The sadness washed over and threatened to drown him. He gulped down a sleeping pill. I just need to keep busy for fifteen more minutes to push the unbearable over to another day.22

  * * *

  21 Unoccupied and waiting, Derya focused on the Mole a dozen feet out, chock-full of U-235.

  He began an unsolicited soliloquy. Sergei seemed accustomed enough to ignore him altogether. “Uranium is one of the heaviest atoms in the Universe, packing ninety-two protons in its nucleus. And like every element above iron, it’s only born in that most titanic of explosions.” Just like the gold from our wedding bands. Derya & Karl. Originally forged not by jewelers but inside a supernova. A marriage made in heaven—until you said no, cunt. “See, uranium comes in different flavors, U-235 being one of the most prevalent, having 143 neutrons for a total nucleus count of 235. It’s unstable and decays into stability by breaking into smaller atoms, radiating heat in the process. But without intervention, the splitting rate is excruciatingly slow, with a half-life of 704 million years. No wonder it has been used for dating the Earth. Any questions so far?”

  “Hmm,” said Sergei absently.

  “But here’s the thing: being born slow doesn’t sentence you to a dull life, as nuclear physics has discovered—I mean, look at Yi. Anyhow, by 1934 the work of the great Enrico Fermi led physicists to bombard heavy atoms with neutrons, earning him the Nobel Prize barely four years later. Nuclear fission is born. A nuclear fission reactor like the one inside the Mole accelerates the natural atom-splitting rate by millions of times for controlled chain reactions.”

  “And billions of times in the case of uncontrolled ones, known as nuclear bombs—at least in Russia,” said Sergei.

  “Correct, and it all begins with one single neutron striking into the nucleus of a uranium atom. Ignoring the human horror unleashed a millionth of a second later, it’s hard to be a physicist and not be mesmerized by it. So, this neutron slams against the atom’s center, splintering it. Some of those 143 neutrons will slam against other atoms. Repeat this eighty times and you have a nuclear explosion.”

  22 In his mind he entered Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Winter Palace and teleported himself to the Library of Nicholas II. He committed the palace to memory many years before for mnemonics when he was at university. A few months back he started using it as refuge, safe recollections that kept him away from Iman. The library was a two-level room made of dark wood in the English Gothic style, with bookcases placed along the walls. He imagined himself walking in and climbing the narrow staircase leading to the upper gallery. Now his mind was not only detached from his body, but the place itself gave the impression of being inside an Anglo-Saxon castle during the Middle Ages. With the protection of two deep layers of separation from reality, he picked out a book for tonight, about life.

  What is life? There’s no more fundamental a question for what happens tomorrow.

  The scientific community struggled long with this one and only in 1992 did NASA arrive at a consensual answer: “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”

  That’s pretentious and confusing. The straightforward answer is I know life when I see it. A bird for instance.

  But that’s mistaking life with being alive. If a bird reproduces and the offspring is a duplicate of the parent, it doesn’t qualify as life. Replace ‘bird’ with ‘virus;’ it doesn’t cut it. You can see the subtlety more clearly with an inanimate object that imitates life: a fire. It grows, consumes food, and creates imperfect descendants. What’s missing?

  That Darwinian evolution thing.

  In 1861, two years after he had published one of the most influential books of all times, On the Origins of Species, Darwin speculated that all organisms that have ever lived on Earth may have descended from one primordial form. Time proved him right. The fact that you—Sergei Dmitrievich Lazarev—are reading this book while your gut has been colonized by thousands of different species of bacteria, all of you descendants from the same ancestor, testifies to the ultimate requirement for life: evolution.

  Define ‘evolution.’

  When a cell divides, it attempts a flawless duplication. This is achieved in the immense majority of cases. However, in exceedingly rare circumstances the high fidelity copying of the ancestor’s DNA is imperfect, creating a mutation. This mutation is usually detrimental to the offspring. Nevertheless, it occasionally increases the ability of the new cell to compete, survive, and reproduce. This is Darwinian evolution. A variation arising from an unintentional mutation, which is then filtered by natural selection: the survival of the fittest. Back to the definition of life, it requires those mutations to happen sporadically and to be heritable.

  Elaborate.

  The concept of ‘heritable’ entails information. Information being modified and carried over with each new biological iteration. This information, the book of life describing every structure and process that happens inside a living organism, is stored for all life on Earth in the genetic code. DNA is the largest molecule known to man, at 200 billion atoms, comprising an amount of information comparable to 175 Bibles in the case of humans. Its alphabet comprises four letters, each letter itself a molecule called nucleotide. Yet this huge amount of data resides in every living cell, and in the case of complex life—including all animals and plants—inside its nucleus. There is no objective measure of big or small, everything needs frames of reference. The human body is composed of around 40 trillion cells. That makes cells huge compared to viruses. About 100 trillion atoms against 200,000.

  However many trillions and complications, all this is just me.

  But you can’t be so arrogant as to think of ‘you’ as one monolithic being. You’re nothing but an ensemble of cells, each self-sustaining and independent. Each second, millions of cells in your body are dying, while hopefully millions are being born. You need cells, cells don’t need you. Need a demonstration? Blood donation. Red blood cells can remain refrigerated outside the body, perfectly blithe, for forty days. And so the requirements of the human body are the aggregation of the requirements of its cells. Complex life forms are masterpieces of cell cooperation, dictated by the sp
ecific instructions encoded in DNA.

  Blessed to have 175 Bibles packed inside each of my cells, but how do those instructions get implemented?

  The arms and legs of those genetic instructions are proteins, which act as structural elements of the cell and perform a vast array of functions. The fundamental building blocks for proteins are amino-acids, twenty of which are arranged in different configurations like Lego pieces to compose any of the millions of different protein types in the human body. Metabolism is the process beginning by eating other animals and plants, then broken down to the level of amino-acids and sugars by our digestive system, which are then used to fuel cells and make more cells for reproduction, growth, or repair.

  Let’s cut to the chase here, it’s getting late. Is life an extremely rare occurrence or something fairly ordinary?

  Because we only have direct knowledge of life on Earth, all of which descends from a single ancestor, our sample consists of exactly one data point to extrapolate its prevalence and chemistry across the Universe. We still have no answer for what are purportedly the two most transcendental enigmas of the human race: Are we the only ones in the Universe? And how did life on Earth originate?

  We may never solve them. After all, Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—yes, he was American, but his father was born in the Russian Empire.

  Yet one lone microbe invisible to the eye, which may be freezing its ass off waiting for tomorrow’s interrogation in that collecting box right outside the hatch, would be enough to clear up the first one. So far, the evidence for alien life is a paradox. On one hand, the fact that life took root on Earth 4 billion years ago, while the bombardment from the early Solar System hadn’t stopped, looks like a strong indication that, given the right conditions, life takes hold quickly. On the other, there’s not one sign of life anywhere we’ve cared to look. Mars has been unable to provide even a pointer of a molecule made by life, presently or at any point in its long and once wet past. Same with the exploration of the rest of the Solar System.

  And then there’s Enceladus.

  Yes. And then there’s Enceladus. Life on Earth requires three primary ingredients: liquid water, the right chemical ingredients, and a source of energy for metabolism. Over 99 percent of the mass of living things comprises four chemical elements: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. All of them detected by the Cassini probe in Enceladus’ plumes.

  Doing well.

  Yes, but prerequisite number three is stringent. On the whole, life-as-we-know-it depends on the Sun, directly or indirectly. Yet the giant ocean of Enceladus is completely devoid of sunlight. Impossible roadblock? We don’t know, but it could have been. Then in 2017, during the months leading to the probe’s immolation, Cassini sniffed silicate crystals as well as molecular hydrogen, H2. The former all but guarantees hydrothermal vents in a rocky seafloor. The latter is a source of food that sustains microbes in deep, dark undersea environments on Earth. The two combined are the very conditions found in that most famous of white smokers, Lost City. It is increasingly accepted that a jet-black oasis on the bottom of Earth’s oceans was the cradle of life. It’s hard not to feel these are almost sci-fi times, with a previously inconsequential moon having, on closer inspection, a big sign saying “Free Life Samples.”

  I say we should feel optimistic.

  Conditions suitable for life are not the same as life in suitable conditions. Enceladus has all the ingredients, but life needs building blocks for its infrastructure—such as nucleotides and amino acids. In 1952, seeking to test Darwin’s conception on the origin of life, student Miller and professor Urey at Chicago University performed a famous experiment inside a couple of laboratory flasks joined by glass tubes. In one they put water, representing Earth’s early ocean, topped with a mix of gases similar to those found in Earth’s nascent atmosphere. They heated the flask, and the resulting steam and gases naturally flew to the second flask where an electrical discharge simulated lightning. This closed cycle was repeated time and again for a single week instead of millions of years. When they analyzed the contents of the liquid pool, they found a rich gunk containing many complex molecules, including amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars. This was extraordinary. In a highly simplified primordial soup and ridiculously modest time frame, several organic compounds had formed spontaneously. This foundational experiment, along with considerable biological and geological evidence, lends support to the theory that life arose spontaneously through naturally occurring chemical reactions.

  Good. Good.

  That said, having yeast, flour, water, and heat does not guarantee a loaf of bread. One skeptic put it neatly: “the chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.” One formidable and potentially sobering fact is our ancestry. Genetics has conclusively shown that all living humans descend in an unbroken line from one woman (un)known as Mitochondrial Eve, who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in Africa.

  For those like mama making the sign of the cross in gratitude, our lineage doesn’t stop there.

  Right. You may not like it, but we are distant cousins with the fruit fly.

  Troublesome indeed.

  Around 60 percent of our and their genes are identical. If that’s not shocking enough, when scientists inserted a human gene associated with Parkinson’s disease into fruit flies, they displayed the same symptoms as those seen in humans with the disorder. Not only is their book of life written in the exact same language, but more than half of the chapters are exactly the same. Chimpanzees 98 percent—although I’ve heard that for Creationists the percentage could be far higher. Bananas 60 percent. This is simultaneously staggering and humbling. All life coming from a single primordial ancestor could be a warning that life happened because of an exceedingly improbable event and set of circumstances.

  I know who mama and babushka would have blamed for the miracle of life. You’ve been rambling enough. One last sweeping statement as I’m sinking fast into Morpheus.

  Is life an extremely rare occurrence or something fairly ordinary? Evidence points both ways, which means we don’t have the slightest idea. The probability could be 100 percent or 0 percent. This is worse than random, I’m afraid. Throwing … a coin in the air has a 50 percent … chance of landing heads … but the … tables may … turn … tomorrow.

  46 | A Glimpse

  A day later, September 9 2030. Main Mission day 6

  ABOVE TITAN

  Sophia, James, and Yi floated a few feet above the flight deck’s Observation Window, six miles above the autonomous vehicle called Grasshopper and 590 miles above Titan’s surface.

  The giant moon was bigger than Mercury. A greedy behemoth that gulped down 96 percent of the orbiting mass around the ringed planet during the Solar System’s formation, leaving 4 percent to distribute among all the other sixty-one moons. If it orbited the Sun instead of Saturn, we would rightfully call it a planet.

  Shackleton’s low path meant the spacecraft was dipping its toes in the gaseous tides of Titan’s tall, dense atmosphere. The slight, controlled deceleration would provide a critical orbital change for the rest of the mission. Space traveling is all about butterfly effects, thought Yi. A subtle nudge today amplified into a sweeping effect millions of miles later.

  A day ago, still at a distance, Titan looked to Yi like a yellowish billiard ball behind foggy glasses. Now, the embarrassment of riches below was entirely clouded to the three inquisitive pair of eyes by the thick, orange smog of its atmosphere. But it couldn’t conceal its shrouded surface from the bionic eyes of radar and infrared cameras. The opaque clouds became transparent to the radio waves and the infrared bands mapping the north polar region below them. Not even rivers or shallow parts of lakes and sea bottoms could hide from the radar.

  The cockpit’s main display was occupied with the live radar data feed. Sophia and James’ avid eyes flic
ked between the haze beyond the window and the display making it see-through. Yi’s avowed obsession with Titan mandated having virtual reality goggles on.

  When he donned the goggles, Yi flashed back to a bony 12-year-old barely clinging to his class’ average height in boarding school, lying down in his bunk bed during mid-morning recess, a worn Superman comic resting on his chest while surrendering to a new foreign sensation, by imagining all those uniformed girls with skinny legs marching in front of his X-ray vision. He also remembered what happened soon after, the dormitory door flinging open and the four bullies coming in for him. Yi was now drenched in another type of longing, the craving to have known Titan better. I’m like that prophet in the Christians’ Old Testament, Moses. The tragedy of only being allowed to watch the Promised Land from a distance—it was never possible though, he reminded himself. It was always in my dreams but never in our plans. This may be one of the main psychological costs of exploration—incurable longing.

  The synthetic aperture radar was simultaneously sending radio waves down and picking up the previous ones that had bounced back from Titan’s surface, using their slight difference in time of arrival to build a three-dimensional representation of the landscape below. The infrared images being generated were mounted on top of the rugged surface rendering.23

  The landscape below was both extraordinarily familiar and extraordinarily alien. Steep canyons plowing through jagged, snowy mountain ranges. Restless rivers discharging their volatile contents onto distant shorelines. Sahara-looking wind-sculpted swaths of dunes girding the equatorial region. Sprawling seas similar to the Aegean, invaded by archipelagos and convoluted peninsulas. Titan’s skin shaped by eons of chiseling by wind and rain. But for all its Earth-like meteorology and geology, this Mother Nature seemed infertile. Yi could see none of the conspicuousness of flora back on our planet. It felt like a time machine jumping past billions of years into the primitive Earth. Before or after it evolved into a life-bearing planet? How many decades will pass before we know?