An Expert's Quick Guide to Planetary Travel

by Steve Matthew Benner

  To show how the day length can be very disorienting let me use an example. Say you are on Claggus 2. You wake up in the morning, have breakfast, and then take off for some site-seeing at the famous Blue Desert. Five hours later you’re hungry again and decide to have lunch, but you notice that it looks like dusk. Maybe you are really having dinner. A couple of hours later it is dark. Now, do you stay up all night, (about six hours), or do you take a nap? Of course, either way your “dinner” will be at breakfast time.

  For planets with days longer than 24 hours, you have the opposite problem. You could eat five or six meals during the day and be totally exhausted by sundown. Even more interesting are planets with multiple suns. There may be several sunrises and sunsets during whatever constitutes a day on this kind of world. Nighttime can be just a slightly darker time of day. Jet lag on Earth is nothing compared to planetary diurnal lag. Those of us that are experienced at this sort of thing have different techniques for dealing with the change. You cannot hope to adjust adequately, so usually I try to keep my normal sleeping and eating routine regardless of whether it is daylight or night. This puts my activities out of sync with the locals, and often leaves me waiting around for some establishment to open so I can eat, drink, and be merry. It also makes sleeping a major pain in the aft section. Plus you can miss out on some really nice parties that way.

  A very interesting situation occurs when the rotation of the planet is the same length of time as the local year. In this circumstance, one side of the planet faces the sun all the time. On these worlds, people tend to live in the twilight zone between dark and light because nobody appreciates all dark or all light. Of course, you can travel from one side to the other, depending on whether you want to sleep or stay up. The most disconcerting worlds are those that revolve in the opposite direction of Earth. It not only looks weird, but it will throw your sense of direction out of whack.

  To make things even more complicated, the axial title of the planet affects the length of day versus night. Earth's tilt is about 27 degrees, which means the days are slightly shorter or longer depending on whether the Earth is tilted away from the sun or toward it. On a planet with no tilt, the days are the same length no matter what time of the year it is. But, if the planet has a large tilt, then we have a whole new situation. A 90-degree tilt would place the sun directly overhead above one pole all day long in the summer with the opposite pole dark and all day over the other pole in the winter. Several planets have tilts of this magnitude, even one in our solar system, Uranus. So even if the day is around 24 hours long, the sun can end up just circling around in the sky and never setting or in the opposite season, never rising. As you can imagine, this not only screws up the day but makes for very strange seasons, which I will discuss later. The best policy on planets with major tilts is to find a season that has a diurnal cycle you can live with for your visit there. Or find a city near the equator, so you don't freeze or fry and can get some sleep. As this very short discourse points out, the day/night cycle may not be life threatening, but it can wreak havoc on your psyche, not to mention your social life.

  The time it takes to complete one orbit around the sun is what constitutes one year on Earth and is just over 365 days long. However, another planet can orbit its star in a considerably greater or shorter time period. The distance from the central star and the size of the star, along with various other gravitational factors, determine how long it takes to complete an orbit. A large bright star can have a planet with a very large orbit, and a local year can be equivalent to several Earth years. On Traylor 2, for example, someone that is 10 may be over 30 years old by Earth time standards. Conversely, for a smaller star the planet could be in a lower orbit and complete a revolution in a matter of a few months. I only mention this for informational purposes, as it should not have any effect upon your visit to a planet, except in terms of determining if someone is above legal age.

  Chapter 6: He Ain’t Heavy, It’s the Gravity

  Another potentially life-threatening item that the interstellar visitor must be aware of is that gravitational forces differ from planet to planet. The gravity of a planet is a function of its volume and density. A large, dense planet has the strongest gravitational pull, and a small, not so dense planet, has proportionately less. I have been to planets that have 30 percent more gravitational pull than Earth (Earth gravity is obviously the standard and is referred to as 1g). At first, it doesn’t seem so bad, but nothing enhances the enjoyment of a trip more than carrying around an extra 25 kilogram all day long. You are invariably hunched over and barely able to move by day’s end, whenever that may be (see above). It’s more comfortable to stand or sit straight up, but all that does is allow your spinal column to compress. Bending over often leads to a quick trip to the pavement, and getting up in the morning can be bad, regardless of which side of the bed you get up on. Usually after just one day in this kind of environment, all my muscles ache, despite my excellent physical condition (I just happen to be big boned). The discomfort factor is enough to keep my own trips to heavy gravity worlds to a minimum. An Earth person can’t tolerate more that about 60 percent above 1g for very long, so your stay to any planet with gravity above 1.2g should be short, or you risk back problems, flattened feet, heart problems, and damaged joints. I spent a week in traction after spending a day on Rigel 3.

  In contrast, it is very entertaining to watch a person from a planet with a high gravitational pull visit a world with much less. The visitor can feel like superman, and at first it seems like a lot of fun. Movement is very awkward and takes considerable time to master. You learn to travel by a combination of hopping and walking, which really makes you stick out from the locals. This type of locomotion leads to frequent crashes into buildings, people, tress, vehicles, etc. After a while, a person moving in this way can really get banged up, and the enjoyment will diminish inversely with blood loss. I personally get a kick out of watching the mayhem. Of course, I have had a few incidences of my own on low-gravity worlds. For example, there was the time on Xaltic 4 when I lost my balance and fell onto a moving vehicle, which propelled me over a railing and down an embankment. Luckily, I managed to crawl to a nearby hospital. I can look back on it now and laugh. Well, maybe laugh is not the right word. In any case, there are other drawbacks to spending time in low gravity environments, such as bone and muscle loss, motion sickness, and circulatory problems, but in general these are minor. Usually if the stay is short or the gravity difference not too great, the tourist will find a low-gravity planet very exciting, though probably painful.

  Chapter 7: Weather or Not?

  Weather is something that Earthlings already have a healthy respect for. If anyone has spent a winter in Russia or a summer in India, than they are familiar with some of the extremes that can be encountered on a trip to a new planet. There are planets that can do Earth one better in a number of categories. I have been to planets that make summer in India feel like a trip to the North Pole. I felt as though someone should have been basting me. As mentioned earlier, planets with large axial tilts can have months of no sun, which usually leads to very cold conditions (not to mention a vitamin D deficiency). They can also have months of too much sun, which leads to hot conditions and major sunburns. But temperature is only one aspect of weather that a traveler has to put up with. I have been to planets where it rains for 90 days out of 100. Everything is wet, and the humidity is always 100 percent. There's mildew everywhere, including on my body. Definitely not a good place to stay unless you has a fetish for wrinkled flesh. And, on some of these planets the rain can actually be dangerous, due to soluble chemicals in the atmosphere.

  Then there are planets that have strong, constant winds. I never realized how tiring it could be fighting the wind all day long, day after day. Windburn is a major concern, and your skin can turn to leather. Your hair looks like your head exploded, no matter what you do to keep it tied down. You end up eating or breathing in large quantities of native soil, which in turn can lea
d to gastrointestinal or pulmonary problems, and dehydration can be fatal. There are filtering systems available, but no matter how careful you are, everything tastes like dirt.

  Some of the more exciting planets can have unusual atmospheric conditions. I had to visit a planet where the air is perfect for the generation of static electricity. Lightening was a common occurrence even from innocuous-looking clouds. You could be talking to someone on a sunny day, there would be a bright flash and loud crackle, and the person you were talking to would be replaced by a pair of smoking shoes. Even without lightening, the static electricity was so bad, I began to feel like the god Jupiter with bolts of electricity flashing from my fingers. I now know what it is like to be a walking van de Graaff generator. I was afraid to touch anything, and kissing could be fatal. It also wreaks havoc on any electronics and makes the use of anything electrical life threatening. And it goes without saying that every day is a bad hair day.

  Some planets have elliptical orbits so that the distance from the sun is constantly changing. The amount of energy the planet receives is geometrically dependent on the distance from the star, so even a small change in distance can have a major effect. When the planet is nearest the sun or at nadir, then the temperature can be at its highest, and, at apogee, the weather can be coldest. The total population sometimes moves from one place to another to avoid the extremes in temperature, giving a new importance to the term summer home.

  When the factors of wind, temperature, rain, and lightening are combined with hurricanes that cover whole hemispheres, weather fronts containing hundreds of tornadoes, and some meteorological phenomena that have never been seen on Earth, you can get a good feel for the variety of weather available for the traveler. Remember to take an umbrella and an armored vehicle on your next trip.

  Chapter 8: Was That Mountain There a Moment Ago?

  The geology, topography, and general terrain features of a planet can be both an amazing thing to see or something to avoid. Earth is a relatively dormant planet when it comes to geological activities. Tectonic plate movement on Earth is measured in inches per year, whereas Servio 6 has continental plates that can move kilometers in a local year. Map making takes on a whole new expediency on this planet, with continents moving around the surface like flotsam and mountains rising like bread in an oven. Rising and receding water levels have the added potential to give you beachfront property one day and a desert venue the next. Even though our solar system does have its share of volcanoes, it is a wondrous thing to see an entire mountain range of active volcanoes, some of which make Olympus Mons look like a pimple. These volcanoes can belch out enough mephitic and noxious fumes, not to mention ash, to make anyone's stay somewhat trying. Earthquakes can be an hourly event and have magnitudes rarely seen on Earth. This type of planet is not ideal for colonization, except in terms of mineral extraction, and may not be the best place to spend your vacation, but it is unique and a great topic of conversation should you survive the experience.

  When it comes to terrain, there is again a variety for the asking: planets with no flat land and those with nothing but flat land; worlds with no dry land and those with no surface water: worlds that are covered in ice sheets kilometers thick and those that have no snow or ice at all; those with canyons that stretch from a pole to pole and worlds covered in thick forests or deserts. Whatever terrain feature a traveler can desire can usually be found, along with some surprises along the way.

  Chapter 10: It's Either a Cold or I'm Dying

  One problem space travelers are rarely aware of is the threat posed by microorganisms. To give you an idea, think of the book War of the Worlds. Put the traveler in the place of the Martians, done in by viruses. On the planet Earth, major epidemics resulted from initial contact with previously isolated peoples. For example, the discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century led to the extermination of 90% of the native population in the Western Hemisphere. Of course, medical knowledge has improved slightly since the fifteenth century, so people are more aware of the problems. However, this does not mean that problems do not exist or that they are minor. Many planetary colonies have been wiped out due to lack of proper precautions or overconfidence. Luckily, Earth is considered one of the most contagious planets for non-native humans to visit, so, if you are from Earth, you are more likely to be the giver than the receiver of a disease. When humans first started traveling to new planets, they were aware of the possibilities of coming in contact with viruses to which humans had never been exposed and thus had no resistance to. Trouble was, there was no way to tell which ones were dangerous and which were harmless without extensive testing. Native species of fauna were the major sources of harmful microorganisms because most of the known animal life is also carbon based. Because technology was at a premium during the early stages of colonization, the main method of testing was to wait and see if the colonists died.

  Most of the planets that have human habitation have had their most harmful microorganisms categorized and neutralized by immunization or extermination. But, there are a number of minor microorganisms that were not severe enough to spend the time to eradicate. These are the ones that cause colds, diarrhea, skin rashes, and other medical annoyances. Some of these can actually prove fatal, but you expect some minor inconveniences when traveling. I have to admit that I have been very lucky in my travels—though my very large medical kit may have more to do with it than luck. The funny thing is that, due to the large volume of inter-planetary travelers in the known galaxy, most of the more aggressive diseases have already run their course though the habitable worlds. People can catch diseases from planets they have never visited. If this is a major concern, then invite a doctor knowledgeable in inter-planetary diseases to accompany you on your trip. If this is not possible, then make the best of it and enjoy those times when you are not in the bathroom, hospital, or morgue.

  Chapter 11: You Can Buy Happiness!

  Someone once said, "Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop." I have tended to support this philosophy for most of my travels. For conspicuous consumers, there is a cornucopia of things that can be purchased on different worlds; things that can only be imagined on Earth. And, surprisingly, the purchased articles often turn out to actually be what the vendor said they were. The adage about "buyers beware" has been true since the first Australopithecine tried to sell his neighbor a rock, and the advent of technology has only served to make that adage even more relevant. A number of the more advanced, entrepreneurial worlds have begun to specialize in merchandise, so a traveler may want to search around for those planets that handle the type of excitement that is desired. No matter how strange, unusual, or perverse you may be, I am sure there is a planet out there for you.

  Chapter 12: Now Get Your Butt Out There

  Once a mole gets over the “joys” of traveling in weightlessness, such as uncontrolled retching, muscles atrophy, bone loss, gymnastic and embarrassing toilet operations, and messy food consumption, you arrive at a new planet with all the excitement and adventures that I have tried to outline in this writing. The wonders of planetary traveling far outweigh the petty inconveniences and occasional fatal incidents that sometimes mar an otherwise wondrous experience. With the clear conscience that comes from monetary gain, I can heartily recommend space travel to everyone. Enjoy!!