Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

Like lighting a firecracker, there was a noticeable delay between the moment when Sophia’s exhausted voice popped across the room and everyone burst into applause and hugs. Nitha’s own embraces felt like round twelve hugging in a boxing match. Everyone had run themselves into the ground over the last few days. They made it through the tumble dryer, she thought. Next stop, landing. Mission Control was piecemealing the problem. Nobody can ever steal this triumph from us—but it’s made inconsequential if we fail. And we have zero room for error: every domino is within toppling distance from the rest. For starters, the landing location was circumstantial, not engineered. The instant the decision to attempt touchdown was made, it was circumscribed to an area barely 0.002 percent of Titan’s surface. Meaning the area within reach for the Grasshopper, which wasn’t only the essential beacon to guide the landing but had also visually inspected the proposed touchdown spots over the last two days. Before the accident the quadcopter had been scouting the mountains near Kraken Mare. If Mission Control had not managed to move it to the coast in the days prior, there would have been no chance of success. And after exhausting its twelve-mile range it took three days to recharge its batteries, which gave a meager strip of coast to choose from. Within that, they had selected the flatter, most consolidated terrain.

  Nitha wished to jump in her car and cruise along Highway 101. It never failed to clear her mind. Driving struck her as the quintessential opposite to what they were going through, an obvious path forward requiring nothing beyond reflex decision-making. But that was a luxury beyond reach, so she settled on the women’s restroom outside Mission Control. She splashed her face and stared in the mirror. I’ve seen better hairstyles. There were bags under her eyes, dark enough to contrast with her olive skin. They weren’t just from overwork and lack of sleep, but the dragging physical pain of James’ loss. She hadn’t had time to mourn, which was perhaps better for her mental health. Going back to Mission Control, she glanced outside beyond the hangar’s giant clamshell doors. The sunlight strained her eyes and it took some time before she could resolve the runway in front and the distant Diablo Range mountains in the background. Last time I left the hangar … it’s been a week already? No, four nights. The coming challenges kept bouncing around her mind. Shack’s free fall is only that of a speeding bicycle. Even so, if it didn’t land upright it was over. If it did land upright, Titan’s low gravity and dense air make any standing object prone to toppling over by gusts of wind. And its dimensions, tall and skinny, are particularly vulnerable. Sophia and Yi would need to immediately attach the spaceship to the ground with improvised cables. And then we should all get into the habit of praying no freak weather hits during refueling, which given the dimensions of the fuel tank versus the beggarly gauge of the improvised hose will take anything from twelve to sixteen hours.

  When she opened the door to Mission Control, the smell of old pizza and sour milk assaulted her. Nitha Sharma, Fostering Great Work Environments Since 2026 ®. She half meant it. Assuming the landing is spot on, we gain access to the methane lottery. This was a gamble so uncertain that it wasn’t even possible to speculate on the odds. Not only were the overall chemical composition and physical properties of the lakes and seas unknown, they presumably varied from one to the next, possibly even from one shore to another.

  The physics of Titan’s hydrocarbon cycle, analogous to Earth’s water cycle, strongly suggested seas, lakes, and rivers mostly made of methane and ethane.34 But that doesn’t cut it. A campfire is an easygoing, broad-minded, indulged combustion. It eats almost anything. Plastic. Clothing. Gin. Shoes. The goat of the burning kingdom. Superior performance, high-precision rocket engines are more like pandas: exceedingly finicky. If Sophia and Yi found a liquid blend deviating just 15 percent from pure methane, engine combustion would suffer. A handful of percentage points above that and it would fail. And there could be contaminants like nitrogen or argon. What happens then is like tossing a can full of coins into the air.

  TITAN

  A loud, unsettling beep marked the last 1,000 feet. Shackleton was coming down fast. Much too fast, thought Yi. Remember, autonomous landing is not about leisure but extreme fuel efficiency. Throttling down would be fuel-costly and potentially fatal. Large rocket engines are very bad and inefficient at hovering.

  Beep 800 feet.

  Instead, the algorithm will make Shack hit zero velocity at exactly zero altitude. Or so we hope.

  Beep 700 feet.

  If we reach zero too low, Shack will crash and tip over—this thing is moving way too fast.

  Beep 600 feet.

  If we reach zero too high, it will crash as well. With his eyes focused on a screen showing a camera view pointed at the ground, it seemed to Yi the surface was much closer than 600 feet. Something has gone wrong.

  Beep 500 feet.

  We’ll crash! Maybe the landing legs will absorb the load and prevent it from tipping over.

  Beep 400 feet.

  He tensed his muscles, expecting the hard landing at any moment.

  Beep 300 feet.

  The ground kept getting closer but touchdown kept getting delayed. Then he saw the shadow.

  Beep 200 feet.

  He was seeing Shackleton’s shadow on the ground, and they were coming in at the wrong angle. We’re not going to make it!

  Beep one hundred feet.

  Yi shut his eyes, anticipating the impact. He felt a sudden lateral acceleration as the spaceship self-corrected by pivoting sideways, and opened his eyes just as the legs’ outline disappeared under Shackleton’s shadow. Instants later, the rocket kissed the ground, and right after a cracking noise boomed from outside the spacecraft. The upright, stationary rocket slanted a few degrees.

  “What was that? Sure as hell wasn’t splashing,” said Sophia.

  “Whatever it is, we’ve made it this far,” said Yi in a frail voice, despite his elation.

  Fight-or-flight hormones depleted right after shutdown and he experienced an exhaustion like he’d never felt before. Within minutes both had sunk into a stupor. Yi regained consciousness at some indeterminate time later, but the urgency to mobilize wasn’t strong enough. He convinced himself they needed to be well rested. Besides, until we do the methane test, it’s probability and not fact. If the news is bad, I’d rather wait to keep the hope alive, he thought, promptly falling back into a deep sleep.

  * * *

  33 This created a three-dimensional geometric shape in which mathematical tools first developed in the 1920s by the father of game theory, John von Neumann, were applied to find ultra-high-speed convex optimization to recalculate trajectory-to-target.

  34 The simplest carbon and hydrogen molecule is methane, CH4. Next is ethane, C2H6. Then propane C3H8. And butane C4H10. Further up the hydrocarbon ladder, C5H12 to C8H18 makes gasoline; C9H20 to C16H34 diesel, kerosene, and jet fuel; over sixteen carbon atoms makes anything from lubricating oil on the low end to asphalt on the upper end. Same two elements, dramatically differing properties and performance.

  69 | A Jules Verne World

  A day later, September 25 2030. Day 22

  Yi awoke with a bad hangover, a mind still impaired, and a terrible hunger. A bay of placid waters resembling the scales of goldfish greeted him past the Observation Window. The sky was a hazy orange with the brightness of an early twilight. It was as if he wore glasses with a penchant for reds and yellows. The Earth’s messages urging attention cut the surveying short. Glancing at the screens on top of their seats, he realized seven hours had passed since landing. Sophia was asleep.

  “Captain, Tweety. Come on. Nap time’s over. Every minute counts,” he said. She didn’t speak or open her eyes but did start moving.

  It took him a few minutes to gather strength, unbuckle, and step out of his seat. He experienced the startling gravity of Titan, one-seventh of Earth’s. Walking was awkward, replaced by hopping.

  By the time they read and listened to the messages from Earth, answered back, and fed and suited themselves, another two
hours had gone by.

  Getting out of Shackleton was comparatively a breeze. The airlock between the two airtight doors no longer required depressurization because the outside was no longer a vacuum. The atmosphere above us weighs 1.6 times that of sea level on Earth, he thought in wonder. If the average surface temperature wasn’t -290 degrees Fahrenheit and the air had some oxygen to make it breathable, he could have walked around in his underwear. Indeed, an Everest climber with his breathing mask and in his expedition down suit would survive for as long as his oxygen bottle allows him—assuming he didn’t stay still.

  The outside door opened to the world of Titan. Uncanny. This could very well be the Pacific coast of the Atacama Desert in Chile. An infant Sun stood timid and low on the horizon. The land of the setting Sun. The soupy cloud torrents that they survived high up in the skies were shrouded by murky air, while the first dozen miles above the surface were clear except for thin clouds slithering north in a hurry, which broke the spell for Yi. I have seen the future. It’s nearing from the south and isn’t pretty. No time to waste.

  A vertical ladder had mechanically unfolded from the door and ran seventy feet to the ground. He skipped clipping himself to the rail. Falling from up there would sprain an ankle at worst. He descended and landed on the ground by the side of one of the ship’s three massive landing legs. He waited for Sophia, inspecting the landing location in the meantime.

  “We landed on a slab of ice,” said a surprised Yi, while kneeling down and scraping off ice crystals from the surface.

  The ice strip, about 150 yards across, extended for miles in both directions, with land on one side and sea on the other. The material isn’t surprising but the location is. Over 95% of Titan is thought to be composed of water ice and rock.

  They walked around the ship to assess its tilt. Yi ‘walked’ by a mixture of striding and hopping, perfecting his technique with each step. The 14 percent of Earth’s gravity, similar to the Moon, felt totally different from the videos of Apollo astronauts. The air, instead of the vacuum of space, turned the experience into something similar to walking at the bottom of a swimming pool. Shackleton was a few degrees from dead vertical. One leg had pierced through the ice and sank to the bottom, past the hydrocarbon liquid.

  “Bad for stability, yes. But it left the sea exposed. Now we just need to submerge the hose and start refueling,” said Sophia.

  “Let me take a liquid sample to figure out whether we’re grounded here for life,” said Yi.

  “The leaning of the ship has left us really exposed to the wind. We need to anchor Shack with cables right away.”

  Yi was okay with that. I don’t mind it at all. Delaying the moment of truth, as long as they were doing something useful, was fine by him. Surely Sophia agreed, but he wouldn’t ask. He didn’t want to sound hopeful. Yi was terrified with the result because he had started to believe they might make it back to Earth after all.

  They spent close to three hours anchoring cables from mid-hull to the icy ground. They used the bolts that were intended for a potential Enceladus emergency rescue by the Dragon, now lost for good. Each bolt carried an explosive charge that drove it into rock-hard ice. A far cry from any peace of mind, but certainly an improvement.

  Right after finishing, instead of fishing for the liquid sample, Yi began inspecting the ice breach around the ship’s leg. His heart was pounding. “It’s not water ice, but some hydrocarbon ice mixed with nitrogen bubbles,” he told Sophia. “Water ice is less dense than liquid water, that’s why it floats back on Earth. But it’s denser than liquid methane so it would sink here. Did you know that methane freezes at a higher temperature than its liquid state? So, it also sinks in liquid methane, that’s where the nitrogen bubbles come in handy …”

  “I think …”

  “Yeah …” He inhaled deeply and stretched down his right arm while holding the trunk-wide landing leg with his left, dipping the test tube in the crack around Shackleton’s leg.

  They both stared at it, scarcely the size of a finger, while squatting. That fluid inside holds the key to salvation … or else. Giving the moment its proper importance, Yi looked at Sophia. She nodded hesitantly. He inserted it in the slot of the spectrometer, itself the size of his palm. The principle is simple: flashing a light through the fluid and splitting it at the other end into its color spectrum. Different atoms and molecules have different colors. After a short delay, a small screen flashed displaying the results.

  Yi’s head got dizzy and he sat down, crushed. Sophia grabbed the device to see for herself and soon sat as well, devastated. There was nothing to say. This was fundamental physics. There must be something wrong—No! Don’t you get it? There’s no ground for subjective interpretation. The reading on the screen was 4 percent ethane, 27 percent butane, and 69 percent methane. We needed over 80 percent methane. That’s it. This is our new home, and somewhere in its backyard is our tomb.

  “Let’s sample a few more times,” said Yi in an empty voice. Sophia nodded back.

  Back on board, Sophia kept racking her brain for a solution. We humans are inherent optimists, she thought. Give us an impossible bet in anything but name, with a one-in-one-hundred-million chance of winning, and we swarm to buy lottery tickets. But she was internalizing the vast difference between abysmal odds and knowing you’ve failed. We will load the fuel tank anyway and try to start the engines. Maybe miracles do exist …

  Dinner in Bacchus had the inevitability of the Last Supper.

  When Yi stood up to leave, Sophia asked, “Is there any chance we’re misinterpreting the results?” Yi shook his head languidly. “What if we sampled incorrectly, somehow?” she insisted. He stood there as if waiting for more suggestions.

  Out of nowhere an idea sparked in her head. The four readings had deviated a few percentage points from one another. She flipped from angst to agitation. “Yi. What if … what if—we must go down!”

  “What? Why?” said Yi, already carried away by unfounded optimism.

  “We skimmed! Don’t you see? What if there’s a butane film on top?”

  Sure enough, some forty minutes later, a belated refueling started.

  No time to waste doesn’t mean no wasted time, thought Yi. Their biological batteries were replenished but the spacesuits’ life support systems needed another 170 minutes.

  While waiting they heard the uplifting and moving hurrahs from Mission Control over the intercom, stripped of any science, engineering, or mathematics, but full of raw, infectious humanity. Nitha had great news: the propellant calculations, assuming full recovery of the lost fuel, allowed a rendezvous with Caird at the rings of Saturn before continuing home.

  Their side of Titan was a few hours from losing line of sight with Earth, which would make Shackleton incommunicado for a full week or until they exited Titan’s atmosphere. As a farewell, Nitha’s recorded voice made a heartfelt appeal “to get the hell out of there as soon as humanly possible.”35

  * * *

  35 Two hours before heading out, Sophia the commander was taken over by Sophia the biologist, as she gave Yi a crash course on the speculation of life on Titan.

  * * *

  Back to the basics of life on Earth. At a biological level, what do animals do? First, ingest organic material and inhale oxygen; later, at a cellular level, the organic material reacts with oxygen, giving us the necessary energy to survive. As waste product, we breathe out CO2. That’s about it. Animal metabolism in a nutshell.

  Plants? Ingest our CO2 and consume sunlight; photosynthesis gives them energy. As waste product, they breathe out oxygen.

  That fresh, intoxicating mountain air is pure waste product from algae and plants. Life is a circle: one organism’s waste is another’s food.

  Titan, instead, seems to be the land of the (freezing) free lunch. Methane is broken down by sunlight high in its atmosphere, that’s what creates its thick ochre haze. Food is made in the sky and falls back down, manna from heaven. If you are an organism on Titan, or give
n that Sophia and Yi are spoiling the equation, from Titan, it should be an easy, worry-free life.

  What would they eat? Probably something from which they can get as much energy as possible with the smallest possible effort. For instance, acetylene plus molecular hydrogen. Combine the two, C2H2+3H2, and get a nice energy kick and fart two methane molecules, 2CH4, as waste product.

  As opposed to on Earth, no need to humiliate anyone into inhaling your fumes for lunch. Instead, methane in gas form goes up to be executed by the Sun firing squad, photochemistry. The cycle then restarts. A simpler circle of life.

  And here comes the crux of the story: life on Earth changed our planet by producing lots of oxygen in the atmosphere. If life on Titan was widespread, it would reveal its presence by an anomalous depletion of acetylene and hydrogen at the surface, both on land and in the sea.

  This was the prediction astrobiologist Chris McKay made in a paper in 2005, published unintentionally on January 13, a day prior to Huygens historic landing on Titan.

  Nothing happened until 2010 when two independent studies were published. The first posing the mysterious disappearance of hydrogen near Titan’s surface. The second showing unexplained low levels of acetylene on the moon’s surface.

  * * *

  “And?” asked Yi, burning with curiosity.

  “And what?” replied Sophia.

  “And what happened?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “But both were perfectly consistent with the hypothesis …”

  “Chris McKay, who was my boss at NASA’s Ames Research Center, cautioned there could be other explanations; maybe some unidentified chemical process in action, or maybe flaws in our current models of material flow.”

  “I don’t buy that.”

  “If this was a claim about anything but this, maybe … maybe you could have publicized it as the leading hypothesis. But we are talking about the most important enigma in biology. The problem is syllogistic logic: ‘shit in, shit out.’ No data, no results … after Huygens stopped transmitting an hour after landing there wasn’t any additional information the Cassini mission could extract about Titan. You can’t do any of this data capture remotely, the precision required is too high … humanity would need to wait decades before something lands again on Titan …”