Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  He scanned to his right for Sergei. He was a few hundred steps away, collecting more samples. The bloke never gives up. He could probably use a helping hand. Derya looked down at the rope still strapping him to the rig. Nah, he’s doing great. Me too.

  “Ruski, look up. See anything familiar?”

  It took longer for Sergei to make sense of the oneiric vision, but once he did it stayed with him. He still believed the whole mission boiled down to what would happen once the cryobot started its storied descent into the inky ocean depths beneath them. He still believed they could find life even if their geysers’ sampling showed no signs.

  And to think a few decades back the only place believed to have liquid water was Earth, Sergei reasoned. Nowadays, Earth keeps sliding down in the oceanworlds rankings. Just in the Saturn system there’s Titan and Enceladus, likely Dione and Rhea. Different possible solutions to the life equation—who knows, maybe all are inhabited.27

  An alarm rang in Derya’s helmet while a third of the visor was occupied by a frozen image … of water? There was also a sonar reading. Sonar? It’s not possible. Sonar is used by whales, submarines, and Waltzy Mole to detect objects through sound propagation—in water.

  “Sergei? Are you …?”

  For several seconds they remained baffled and clueless.

  “Move away!” Sergei’s voice rang inside Derya’s helmet. “The probe is coming back!”

  Derya looked down and froze, noticing the rope connecting him to the rig. Precious instants later, the adrenaline bolted his right hand forward. His perception was sharp and precise as he reached out his fingers for the carabiner. He frantically tried holding down the spring-loaded gate a few times before realizing his hand had landed on the wrong side. I’m as helpless as a leashed dog.

  The last thing he saw was the ground under him exploding into a jet of water.

  The geyser was so thick and high it darkened the night above Sergei, completely obscuring Dione’s searchlight. The savage gusher was soundless in the void of space, incongruous to an earthling as lightning without thunder.

  “Derya!”

  “Derya!”

  “Derya!”

  The alarms went silent. He only heard his breathing. The murderous silence pointed in one direction only.

  “Derya!” His voice resonated increasingly muffled and distant inside his head.

  “Derya!” he said again, now repeating it to himself. “Derya.”

  When it’s darkest, men see the stars. But the stars had vanished under a canopy of frozen mist.

  The neural command to his legs was lost somewhere in between, as if they had been severed from him.

  Derya is gone.

  He let his body fall back and he landed in slow motion on the ice. He felt nothing. He couldn’t think. He was depleted and hollow. There were no feelings, no sensations, just numbness. He laid there, inert, for what could have been hours or years. It no longer mattered.

  * * *

  26 Enceladus is the whitest object in the Solar System, but Dione and Rhea are not far behind. Both are whiter than freshly fallen snow, and ten and thirty Enceladus would fit inside the former and the latter. And both seemed to be soaking in oceans with as much or more liquid water as on Earth, splashing and churning beneath their thick shells. Dione’s water ocean may have been liquid throughout most of its history, as old as the Solar System’s, adding the vital element of time for life to evolve and differentiate.

  27 And, critically, each one independently from the other—a very different story from Earth and Mars. Meteoritic transfers are not only possible between the red and our blue planet, but have occurred repeatedly, as evidenced by the 118 confirmed Martian meteorites found so far on Earth. If Mars ever had life, it could have been imported from or exported to Earth via stowaway microbes free-riding on rocks, the theory known as panspermia. Experiments with bacterial spores exposed to space on the ISS showed they could survive for long periods of time, maybe thousands of years, if buried deep enough inside rocks. Perhaps the long quest to find Martians has failed miserably because they hid where nobody cared to look for them, inside each one of us. At their closest, Earth and Mars are 34 million miles away. Saturn and Earth? Nearly 750 million miles. But there may be an even more formidable barrier, the ice shells covering each of the water oceans hiding inside the four Saturnian moons.

  53 | Nature’s Sibling

  Moments later

  MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

  Google had opened the Moffett Airfield to the public. The public responded by flooding it. Route 101, the highway stretching from Los Angeles to California’s north end, had turned into a parking lot across exits 396 and 399, using three of the four lanes in each direction.

  Media and police helicopters hovered over the million-plus crowd covering both former military runways. Hangar One loomed in front and above them.

  Nitha and Belinda stood on a crane’s wide aerial platform five stories above the ground. Nitha’s speech was drawing to a close and she was about to pass the baton to Belinda, who was experiencing all the symptoms of stage fright: cardboard-dry mouth, cold chills, arrhythmia, and trembling hands. But for all the stress, she kept getting the same answer from inside. This is what I need to do. This is what I will do. She looked up to the left at another crane hanging the projection equipment ten stories high to minimize the image distortion. Behind them, Nitha’s face acquired Godzilla-like proportions framed using most of the hangar’s inward curving wall. Ahead, thousands of reporters were in front with everyone else behind. And that was quite literal. Under Nitha’s supervision, the concept of ‘Very Important People’ was dead in the water. Belinda smiled at the thought. Nitha—meritocracy’s poster child—sparing no ammunition in fighting against old boys’ networks or any form of preferential treatment. Today she had won. VIP members want to come? You’re welcome. Now mingle with everyone else.

  “—and with that, I hand the microphone to Belinda Egger.” Nitha patted her shoulder and gave her an unexpected, slightly awkward kiss on the cheek. Belinda needed no microphone adjustment, they were similar in build, both slight. “I love you too, Nitha.” Small gestures can go a long way. People watching, including those still suspecting government collusion, were reminded that this was a person, not an institution.

  She scanned the multitude, which seemed compact to her for a million souls. Her last long, deep breaths picked up a whiff of coastal redwood trees. The scent that perfumed the air throughout her third date with James. In Jimmy’s favorite place, Yosemite. That promise of an innocuous, recreational hike turned into a two-day epic, including a petrifying 1,000-foot rappel down to the valley floor. Dangling from a pinkie-thick rope, she had asked herself, Who is this man?

  Belinda blocked the crowds out and concentrated on a single person in the first row, which she conjured into a smiling James.

  Her right hand dove into the pocket for her written speech but found nothing. It fumbled luckless. It’s here. I checked three times—it was safely tucked here. But she panicked nonetheless. Her left hand plunged into the other. No longer trusting her sense of touch, she did a frantic visual confirmation. Behind Belinda, her blind scrabbling was magnified a hundred times to everyone, everywhere. Nothing. She instinctively looked at Nitha, gaping back at her. She looked down at her smiling James for some sort of salvation. The person, sensing something was awfully wrong, stared back in dread.

  “I … I have … as an astrobiologist …” The insecurity echoed back derisively. She stopped. And if I confess losing the aide-mémoire? Then what? No excuses, Dad would have said—he’s staring at me right now from his TV. She had prepared the speech for six straight hours. The information may be jumbled and coiled, but it’s all here in my head. All I need to do is find one of the ends. More time passed. The crowd moved uncomfortably. She finally acknowledged to herself that any attempt to retrieve the practiced speech was a lost cause.

  Time didn’t linger, but Belinda couldn’t speak until she had som
ething—anything—to say.

  She started to improvise, insecure and reticent.

  “When I was little, I lived in a castle … when I was in my teens, we returned to a house … I was baffled … the overgrown indoor garden where I hid from monsters and spied on gnomes had shrunk to a miserly square with a few naked shrubs and flowers … in time, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny faded into everyday reality … in my case, what kept the magic alive was The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, but especially the night sky … it ran counter to everything else. When the rest was turning gray, here was this something full of the supernatural, riddled with mysteries that if deciphered sprang into one hundred new ones … when I was 9, those twinkly lights hanging from the night sky suddenly became stars. I began counting them. Once I got to 2,000. I later learned just our Milky Way galaxy has four. Hundred. Billion stars. And almost all of them surrounded by planets. Can you even picture a number like that!? It is awe-inspiring, and it is profound, and it is mysterious, and it is adventure. Adventure like we can’t even begin to fathom … the Universe never ceases to amaze. I frequently surprise myself daydreaming, nowadays mostly about Jimmy, but the cosmos is never far behind. From the large—where a single teaspoon from a neutron star weighs a Mount Everest; to the small—where atoms are mostly empty space. If we could remove that space, the same teaspoon would contain all humans alive plus all that have ever lived … so when my time came to choose a line of study at university, I knew it must be something that explored the astonishing Universe. So, I picked biochemistry. When the time came for a PhD, astrobiology picked me. Studying the small in the big … which takes us to Enceladus. But to understand what may lurk in its ocean, we first need to understand ourselves.”

  She stopped to lubricate her sandy mouth with water. She knew the speech was starting to meander, but she did not dare tamper with her inspiration.

  “Because contrary to what you or I would like to think, we are not special. If we were made of rare elements, say polonium, einsteinium, platinum, and thorium, then we would be right to suspect we are exceptional until proved otherwise. But the six most abundant chemical elements in the Universe are hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, and nitrogen. Helium and neon are loners, unwilling to marry with anyone. Which leaves hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. Life on Earth? Well, 99 percent is made of those exact four. Someone could argue back that we barely look at the Universe through the night’s window. What truly matters is the environment. Life should assemble from the most readily available elements around it … not quite. Earth’s most abundant four are oxygen, silicon, aluminum, and iron. No, that someone could retort, I meant Earth’s oceans, the cradle of life. Leaving aside pure water, H2O, there’s sodium and chlorine, which combined make table salt, and then magnesium and sulfur. This is absolutely remarkable: humans are closer relatives to the Universe than to our own planet! From this we can derive two crucial consequences. First, life should be common in the Universe given how abundant its raw materials are. And second, extraterrestrial life should probably be made up of roughly the same elements. Now we have the tools to understand Enceladus’ critical importance in both the search for alien life and the quest to understand the origin of life on Earth: it has life’s four main chemical elements; it has liquid water; it has an energy source; it has hydrothermal vents. All the ingredients for life-as-we-know-it. And yesterday the cosmic doors finally flew open.”

  The multitude was perfectly still in their vigil. A tribe around a bonfire.

  “Yesterday, for the first time in history, we witnessed the fingerprints of intervention in another oceanworld. Note the word ‘we.’ It’s not false modesty. This wasn’t a prodigious intellectual leap. This is no general relativity. I am surprised—and yes, proud—that I somehow found the pattern before a computer or someone else did. But it was a matter of hours, so I can’t possibly claim ownership of the discovery. And to those rightfully wondering, how convenient that James’ wife was anointed the chosen one, I’ll put your objections at ease. Astrobiology is a small community. So small in fact you can put all of us in a single room. Indeed, we do just that a few times each year. If you additionally consider how many of those have dedicated a significant portion of their work to organosilicon compounds, it drops to a handful. My probability now has increased to something around 20 percent, quite achievable for a woman you see …”

  Clueless to whether five or thirty minutes had passed, Belinda decided to wrap it up for questions from the press and media.

  “Regarding what happened yesterday, we must be careful with the language that we use. We haven’t seen a microbe waving at us. We haven’t found alien life … yet. We have identified a pattern that seems to violate randomness. We have an indication of a strong anomaly. It’s likeliness, not certainty … having said that, the chance of this pattern happening spontaneously is, at least according to our current understanding of chemistry, extremely unlikely. Possible, yes. Probable, definitely not. Which leaves us with a bewildering number of questions and no answers. That’s why Waltzy Mole is so critical. I can’t stop imagining what the Mole will register as it drops to the ocean floor, and what will happen when it stares right at extraterrestrial hydrothermal vents. What will we find?”28

  * * *

  28 Later, during the Q&A. “Graeme Arnott from TVNZ in New Zealand. Could you explain the possibility of organosilicon life in layman terms?”

  “Great question, Graeme,” said Belinda. “I think even if heady and sciency, we all need to understand what was found, because only then can we comprehend the implications of what could happen in the coming days. We have indications not of carbon-based, not silicon-based, but carbon-silicon-based life … allow me to make a digression. Science is built by standing on the shoulders of each successive giant. After four centuries that’s one seriously tall construct. In the 18th century, you could become an expert in any scientific field by spending an afternoon at a library, if you could find one. Today, you need a PhD just to figure out what the important questions are. A scientist no longer has the luxury to know a little about a lot. Today one must commit to study a lot of a little … this can be treacherous and risky. You can inch your way in a subject for years or even decades before realizing it’s a cul-de-sac. When I picked organosilicon or carbon-silicon as a field of study, some colleagues warned me against it. Their logic was impeccable. This was a particularly low probability corner in astrobiology. In theory, organosilicon is even more promising than carbon as the scaffolding for the chemistry of life. But in practice, there’s a large roadblock and an enigma: silicon is all but ignored by life-as-we-know-it, even though it’s almost one hundred times more abundant than carbon on Earth. I picked it because I concentrated on the other part of the equation. If the reward for being right is huge, it can still make good sense to pick a low probability subject. Especially as a society, maybe less so as an individual … what happened yesterday seems to redeem carbon-silicon.”

  Belinda took another drink of water and continued. “What’s the allure of organosilicon? It’s a multidimensional answer, but I’ll give you maybe the most important example … the Book of Life, DNA, treads a high wire. It is written with four letters. Each one of those letters is a molecule formed by around fifteen atoms, of which four or five are carbon atoms that glue everything else together. If those carbon bonds had been too strong, life would never have evolved and we would still be unicellular bacteria. Why? Because evolution innovates by making very infrequent microscopic errors in DNA, which creates mutation. This is the tightrope.

  “Mutation can be good, but most times it’s bad. Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun penetrates the skin, the cell, the nucleus, and sometimes knocks-off or adds-in an atom from DNA. Cigarette smoke does the same in the DNA of lung cells. When this corrupts the genetic code you can get cancer, which is bad. But extremely rarely that missing or extra atom creates a slight modification that is beneficial. A variation that allows the organism to be superior to the
rest. Say a longer beak in a bird that allows it to reach the pollen of an elongated and otherwise inaccessible flower … over hundreds of millions of years and generations this has created the plant and animal kingdom cornucopia on Earth today. However, if those carbon bonds were too weak, the rate of mutation would be too fast and irremediably corrupt the genetic code within a single generation, possibly triggering extinction.

  “Enter silicon. Silicon is the direct ‘glue’ competitor of carbon, its structural analog: it can also bind up to four other atoms and its average bond strength is roughly the same, but is tougher or weaker depending on the other chemical element, its atom counterparty. A molecule using both carbon and silicon might get the best of both worlds. In fact, we artificially synthesize precisely these for pharmaceuticals, sealants, herbicides, and television screens, among other things. We have even coaxed living organisms to chemically bond carbon and silicon together … so what would organosilicon life look like? We are clueless, but immensely eager to hear nature speak. I know one thing though: let’s prepare to be bewildered for the rest of our lives. The advances we could make in molecular structure and biochemistry would change our world’s biology forever.”

  “Hi, Belinda. Tobias Simon from Deutsche Welle in Germany. I’m still lost as to why you decided to study organosilicon. The evidence was against you.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t,” said Belinda. “Silicon may represent 30 percent of the Earth’s crust, but early in the life of our planet it married to oxygen. That bond is very strong, lasting for millions of years. You want to test that love? Most grains of sand on Earth are made of those two, as are most rocks. This view, which I endorse, says that silicon wasn’t ignored by life. Silicon was forced to remain a bystander in that early world of experimental chemistry because it married too early. I call this the Original Sin, and it carries far-reaching ramifications. Finding life using something other than carbon as the fundamental Lego pieces exposes us to the possibility that maybe there’s another configuration that is fundamentally better than the one used by life on Earth, which would carry deep philosophical implications. Maybe our chemical composition is not the result of the optimal global configuration but a local optimum.