Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Now we need to scoop up some soil and scoop out some goo from the seabed and run the Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometer on board … if there’s alien life, it should show up in one or both,” Sophia couldn’t contain her excitement and was delighted at Yi’s search-for-Titanian-life infatuation. “What I’m saying is that we don’t need to see life to find life.”

  She marveled at how easily fortunes flip. Just a few hours ago …

  The lecture continued.

  * * *

  Finding life on Enceladus hadn’t eclipsed the implications of finding it on Titan. The scientific community is still full of water chauvinists: all the large-scale ongoing investigations of potential exoplanet candidates for life focus on the Goldilocks zone of orbits around a star, where it isn’t too hot for water oceans to boil nor too cold for them to freeze. Finding life on Titan’s surface would increase the chances of finding life across the galaxy by orders of magnitude. It’s much easier to find a world with liquid methane than one with liquid water. It would also mushroom the limits of biochemistry: impossible-to-imagine strangeness, exotic life forms indifferent to liquid water, dependent instead on the truly alien liquid methane environment.

  Life has no intrinsic timescale it should follow. Life on Earth has for the most part an hourly or daily metabolism—animals such as humans eat several times a day. Yet life forms living at very low temperatures in Antarctica or the Arctic have much slower metabolisms. And those temperatures are tropical compared to Titan. A single life form could exist for thousands or millions of years, its processes so lethargic it may be impossible to detect.

  Titan’s atmosphere is thought to mimic early Earth 3.5 billion years ago, before the oxygen build-up era. It is a planet-scale laboratory to study chemical reactions that may have led to life on Earth or that could be occurring on exoplanets around other stars.

  And this may be the most tantalizing prospect of Titanian life: finding a universal pathway toward the ingredients of life. Astronomers and the new generation of telescopes coming online could start searching for atmospheric chemistry that betrays the existence of life in other stars, tens or even hundreds of light-years away from us.

  70 | Hunting Life

  An hour later

  It was time to suit up. They walked down Shackleton’s central ladder from Bacchus to the cargo area, instead of gliding through as they had done for years. They found themselves quickly adapting to the mild, newfound gravity.

  Right before donning their helmets, Sophia restated each of their tasks.

  “Yi, you go sample the sea. Remember, at least six independent samples, fifty feet or more from one another. Three scraping the seabed, three from the liquid mass … I will go for the land samples. Then we switch.”

  “Again, why switch?”

  She grinned. “You’ve already made yourself a reputation around Titan … no, really, it would be imprudent, inexcusable not to do so.” And as Yi raised his helmet, she finished, “We are to be back on board no later than four hours and … seventeen minutes from now.”

  “I still can’t see why. We have eight hours of life support in the spacesuits.”

  “We are not risking getting out of here.”

  “The refueling will be finished in,” he looked at the clock on the wall, “eleven hours—I’m just saying, you’re welcome to relax the requirement at any time.”

  “Searching for life is secondary to saving our lives. I’m pretty sure Derya and Sergei would agree if they could … Yi, are we on the same page here?”

  He nodded passingly but she didn’t budge.

  “Yes, Commander. Understood,” Yi said.

  They stormed out for against-the-clock scientific scouting.

  The outside door opened to reveal Titan for the third time, unfolding a landscape of strangeness and majesty. Eight hours had gone by since his first glimpse yet the meek Sun had barely moved a step or two, still within pricking distance from a steep spire-crowned mountain outlined against the saffron orange horizon. Yi gazed at the sky. The clouds racing away from the south had thickened. He felt goosebumps on his arms and the hairs at his nape bristle.

  Once back on the ice, they walked in line toward the solid ground. This was mostly rocky, a grooved dark irregular surface with intricate veining. There were light-colored pebbled patches and others of dirty, grainy water ice. Yi stopped to absorb the surroundings. Half a mile of mainly flat coast quickly gave way to a forty-degree slope scattered with long tongues of debris, which itself gave way to a towering face with a summit plateau thousands of feet above the shore, dripping in golden, glinting streaks of either ice or liquid that looked like honey oozing out of a comb. Shackleton had landed at the edge of a horseshoe bay about three miles long, bounded on both sides by the mountain arms, tall stone ridges falling abruptly for hundreds of feet into the sea. Yi guessed that the only way to climb out of their geographic imprisonment by foot would be through the few ravines clinging to the incline.

  Something boomed like the snapping of grown trees, startling them. Yi swept his sight across the terrain—half expecting an alien on a downslope moving toward them—and thought he saw far away rocks crumble. They echoed for an unusually long time. It’s the high air density, he reasoned. The amplified sound waves travel much farther than on Earth.

  Sophia passed Yi and continued walking toward a boulder from whose top they would plan the scouting.

  That’s what’s unsettling me. It seems like a world made by aliens to imitate Earth, but designed by studying a single postcard. So extraordinarily similar yet so clearly foreign.36

  Sophia spotted the one distinctively alien thing a few dozen yards away.

  They approached the Grasshopper. Oh my! My champion, my knight. No peep or flashing, it looked as inert as the pebbles around it. Not the shiniest that armor of yours, my lord. About three feet in diameter, it looked like a futuristic unmanned drone on the front cover of a 1940s science fiction magazine, a boxy gray quadcopter with two propellers per arm and an ungainly dish antenna. But what it didn’t get in looks it got in performance: it was the only nuclear-powered drone in the Solar System. A thermoelectric generator converted the heat from decaying plutonium-238 into electricity. Nothing was wasted in the Grasshopper, the excess heat kept it at a balmy internal temperature of seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit. And barring a disabling malfunction it would remain operational for years, covering thousands of miles of terrain. Carrying an onboard laboratory and meteorological station, it would examine the surface up close and, in time, characterize Titan’s complex atmosphere, climate, and methane cycle. Perhaps even infer the existence of life indirectly. Unless an extraterrestrial gazelle gallops in front of its cameras. The engineers at Mission Control had pushed it to the brink in the days prior to launch and now it recharged its batteries for the next flight, unrushed.

  “May you have a long, prosperous life,” Yi kneeled to pat it. “What were the odds we would ever see it again, or more even, that it would save us? Zero. Yet here we stand.”

  They arrived by the base of the boulder, which seemed to have dislodged eons before from the wall towering above the bay. Its flat top had been bridged to the ground by a dark porous hydrocarbon snow, making for an easy climb. It gave a good perspective of the place.

  The waters within the bay were quiet but the rolling sea beyond wasn’t, in a way Sophia couldn’t quite make sense of. She strained her eyes. Aside from an island shoreline suggested in the far distance within shrouds of haze, the reddish ocean ruled most of the horizon. It didn’t seem to ripple yet its surface rolled and flexed. From here it resembles a Buddhist monk’s robe.

  “They look like a procession of slow-moving camel humps,” said Yi.

  Same as having stared vainly at a Magic Eye illusion, Yi’s cue allowed Sophia to see differently. “Are … are those …?”

  “Titanic waves.”

  “That just can’t be,” she said enthralled
, while looking at the giant, bell-shaped waves plodding right past the bay.

  “There’s this American novelist from the 19th century named Mark Twain—”

  “Every American knows Twain, Yi.”

  “Anyway, he said the only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible. See those rock columns standing in the sea? There, beyond the ridge that closes off the bay from the right-hand side?” Sophia nodded. “See how some waves submerge them? And they are probably a good fifty feet tall.”

  The brief she studied as they closed in on the moon mentioned waves on Titan can be about seven times taller and three times slower than on Earth. As common-sense-breaching and mind-altering as the view was, it complied.

  “Something’s not right,” said Yi. “They are … moving south? It doesn’t make sense. Look up.”

  She did. Dense clouds, which she hadn’t noticed until now, flowed north at a rapid clip. If the waves weren’t wind-induced, what was pulling them? While waiting for Yi to have a revelation, Sophia heard the wind’s humming for the first time. It was irregular and shy, as the mountain behind and bay in front were sheltering them from wind and waves.

  “It can only be the Throat. We’re less than thirty miles from it in a straight line,” Yi said.

  The brief also explained Kraken Mare was a giant sea split in two by the Throat of Kraken, a narrow channel dividing north from south. At eleven miles wide, it was almost identical to the Strait of Gibraltar dividing the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. With one fundamental difference: tides, the rise and fall of sea levels.

  On Earth, they are caused by the Moon’s gravitational pull. On Titan, they are caused by Saturn. Titan’s tides are hundreds of times stronger than Earth’s, flowing north and reversing south through the Throat each day.

  “Until today,” Yi sounded bewildered, “nobody knew how strong the currents were. We don’t either. But I can tell you that when the strong winds are hauling giant waves that the tides force to retreat backward … well, that’s incredible power.” Shackleton had landed on a bay that was part of the very peninsula that thirty miles away became the Throat’s western wall. “If we ever colonize Titan,” Yi continued, “we just identified a virtually unlimited source of 24/7 hydroelectric power.”

  For the next five minutes, they surveyed the area and selected sampling spots.

  “Unless something changes, we meet right here in sixty minutes and swap roles,” Sophia said.

  In each one’s visor, a timer started the countdown.

  Sophia headed up, Yi set off for the coast.

  * * *

  36 “Tweety—Commander, so you don’t think we’re contaminating Titan by being here?” Yi asked more to break the silence than anything, “It is what it is, but I wonder.”

  “No chance. If there’s Titanian life, ‘they’ can’t hurt us and we can’t hurt them. There’s a transparent but impenetrable wall between the two. It’s called temperature. See, even the hardiest of Earthly microbes completely stop their metabolic activity and reproduction capacity at -14 degrees Fahrenheit. Look at the upper-right corner of your visor. It’s -288 degrees. ‘They’ on the other hand would presumably be made of liquid methane or ethane, so the instant the temperature jumps a few dozen degrees they puff out of existence, vaporized … now that you say it, though, if you somehow fell inside that volcano you showed me and splashed right into the subsurface water ocean somewhere far under our feet, then yes. But I promise there’ll be no Journey to the Center of the Earth during this visit.”

  71 | The Kraken

  Minutes later

  Gingerly walking over thinning ice then crawling the last few feet, Yi got to the edge and stuck his chest out over the liquid. He gazed down. It had an orange-hued translucence, allowing his eyes to follow the seabed for maybe one hundred feet.

  He splashed his gloved palm against the liquid, which displaced more or less perfectly around the contour of his hand, followed by countless drops jumping out unimpeded and falling back down like rain. Amazing. The viscosity is half that of liquid water, at most, he thought. Liquid water loves round, smooth shapes. But this … It brought memories of oil sputtering as his mother dropped fresh pork chops into the frying pan. Low density and low viscosity explained why stirring his hand felt closer to flapping it energetically in the air than moving it in water. The friction drag is barely a fourth. This is outrageously fun!

  Tidal power shrank to irrelevance as he envisioned the scale of Titan’s fuel reserves. Just here, Kraken Mare, he thought while running his hand through the liquid, has tens of times all the known oil and natural gas reserves on our planet. For an unapologetic environmentalist like Yi, here was yet another measure of how upside-down this world was: if there isn’t indigenous life, warming up the atmosphere will not only be acceptable but advisable if we ever want to live here. And why wouldn’t we? Except for the temperature, this is hands down better than Mars. And this needn’t be a remote outpost, but one of our civilization’s strongholds. Here, fossil fuel gluttony and greed become virtues. If wars are ever fought to control resources around here, they will be for the missing portion of combustion: oxygen. Not oil but water wars, to get rid of the hydrogen and keep the oxygen.

  Yi extended his arm and scraped the sea bottom. In a minute he was done with the first sampling and continued crawling along the edge until he found another shallow bottom. Second sample is in the bag. He kept moving until he saw an odd shape buried in the seabed. He tried reaching but it was deeper here. The bottom seemed about waist-deep. Spacesuits are, by definition, waterproof. He sat over the edge and carefully let himself slide into the liquid.

  It all happened in an instant. Shit. His feet managed to touch the bottom but before he could even stand, his whole body was sucked out to sea. The pull from the current was so strong he briefly thought a creature was dragging him away from the shoreline. Shit, shit, shit. He frenetically tried to swim back but quickly realizing it was pointless, attempted to dive back to the surface instead. But the low liquid density made it impossible. He couldn’t make himself buoyant and couldn’t fling enough thin fluid to propel himself upward. He saw the liquid surface recede as he kept being sucked under.

  The adrenaline didn’t allow self-pity and instead he kept going back to Sophia. I need to tell her. He tried radio communication over and over but, same as in water, it didn’t work when submerged. I need to find a way to tell Sophia. If I don’t, she’ll search relentlessly and put the escape from Titan in jeopardy. He may have accidentally killed the entire crew through his stupidity. True idiots never learn. Swindled by sea currents for the second time in his life. He realized his terrible error was thinking the tide was strictly directional, from north to south. But when water is poured from a jug, it gets pulled from all directions, even if the final route is straight down.

  Both surface and bottom had disappeared from Yi’s view. It was pitch-black, which made him think he was deep. How deep? Over its 127 Titan flybys the Cassini mission was able to survey the second largest sea, Ligeia Mare, much better than Kraken Mare. Its radar detected the seafloor up to 560 feet below the liquid surface, yet in many places it was too deep to measure.

  He no longer screamed in terror. I’m the only one who can hear myself and I never liked my voice anyway. He wouldn’t drown, he would die submerged once the spacesuit’s life support system failed or ran out of juice. I’m floating in a strange liquid, in a strange place, pulled by a strange unseen force.

  You better not be messing around, Yi Meng, she told herself when, in fact, she implored he was.

  “Yi, over.” Sophia couldn’t repress the thought any longer. Something very wrong has happened.

  She scanned the landscape, panic-stricken, one more time. Everything looked unperturbed, indifferent to her plight.

  “Yi, over.” Her voice was now pleading and desperate.

  Calm down. He can’t have vanished. Maybe you’re dreaming. She searched for cues. The soft resting, a
lmost floating, of her butt on a rock reinforced the hope. I think I’m in a dream. She felt better because she was no longer certain of the disaster. But a fleeting thought of James is all it took for her sandcastle to crumble.

  Sophia abandoned the sampling equipment and raced to Shackleton in a frenzy. Once her feet touched the snow, she veered left and went to the locations they had singled out. After 200 yards she stopped, gasping for breath. Please help me. God, I’m lost. I need your help. Please guide me.

  The Grasshopper. She dashed back to Shackleton, desperation seizing her by the throat. Climbing the ladder, her limbs shook so badly it was hard to grab the next rung and even harder to keep her palms closed around it.

  She was committing a grave spacewalk sin by crying, but gravity assisted by causing the tears to run down her face.

  Once inside, she kept dodging a looming meltdown by cramming information into her mind. How do I wake up the Grasshopper?

  72 | Stranger in a Strange Land

  An hour later

  Yi regained consciousness. He was still submerged but a dark yellow glow now flickered above him. As the minutes went by, he saw the seabed once more, covered in jumbled ice blocks, rising to the right. Soon after he saw a fast-approaching underwater upslope in front, stroked it, and stopped moving.

  What’s this? Some sort of sludge? he thought. Yi tried moving his arms but they hardly budged. His chest was glued too. It’s like tar. It was worse than being fastened to a giant Velcro pad. It stuck like gum, the stubborn strands of ooze unwilling to let go. After a long, taxing fight, he managed to crawl up the slope and out of the sea onto oily but solid ground. His visor was splattered. He tried cleaning it with his gloved hand but made it worse. He then glanced at his spacesuit: practically no bright blue spots left outside of a muddy brown.