“Adam, can you visit me today at the spaceport?”
“Sure. With the other two?”
“No, just Eve and you.”
“Is something wrong? You sound depressed.”
“No, I just want to tell you something. Come for afternoon tea.”
The afternoon tea developed from a tradition of the Grosnops, who drink a brew made of swamp grasses one hour before sunset. For humans, that concoction inevitably leads to stomach cramps, but Marchenko developed a different drink. This ‘tea’ is palatable to humans, though Grosnops find it flavorless.
Whenever Adam and Eve are near the fleet command center on the spaceport, meaning two or three times a week, they visit him and have tea. Marchenko is busy examining the Omniscience. He hopes to find the source of the error that caused the malfunction. At first he told himself he was working so intensely in order to help their hosts. After all, there is one big task left—bringing back the remaining sleepers from Proxima b. By now, however, he knows he has other reasons. The cosmos is calling him. The Majestic Draght, which orbits Dual Sun, is perfect for this.
For this special occasion, Marchenko has switched to the body of the robot. In this shape, he set the little table. He has three teacups and saucers that he synthesized himself. The tea is bubbling in a self-heating teapot manufactured by Grosnops.
Adam and Eve are punctual.
“What’s up?” Adam asks right away.
Eve first hands Marchenko a bouquet of flowers. These are not flowers like on Earth, because plants do not need colorful blossoms here to attract pollinating insects, but they still look interesting. The locals like to decorate their homes with different shapes instead of colors.
Marchenko puts the bouquet in an empty vase. He does not have to add water, because the humidity is so high that the plants get enough moisture via their leaves. “I am glad you are here,” he finally says.
“Thank you for the invitation,” Adam replies formally. He walks to the low table and kneels down in front of it, then sits on the floor. Eve and Marchenko follow suit.
Once all are seated, each one pours tea for the neighboring person. Nobody says anything. Marchenko puts the cup to his mouth but doesn’t drink. He did not give the robot body a sense of taste. What he likes about tea time is mostly the ritual. They sit around a table and alternate in raising and lowering cups filled with a hot liquid. It is almost like a slow ballet.
“Well,” says Marchenko after at least Eve has finished drinking her tea.
“How is it going with the Omniscience?” Adam asks.
“That would be my first piece of news. I think I have achieved a breakthrough. The Omniscience lets me touch its code.”
This cost him a lot of persuading. Up to now the Omniscience had behaved like a human with a dangerous tumor, who stubbornly rejects any examination. Without the permission of the Omniscience he could not enter the data levels, which are encrypted in multiple ways.
“That is fantastic,” Eve says, “so there is still hope. How did you manage it?”
If he only knew exactly! Sometimes he thinks he just exhausted the Omniscience, while at other times he assumes he used convincing arguments. “I'm not sure,” he admits.
“You talked it to death,” Adam says, laughing. His face is starting to look more relaxed, too.
“Maybe.”
“So what?” Eve says. “It’s the success that counts.”
“The leadership group is also very happy about it. However, they don’t want to postpone the rescue mission any further. Their doctors calculated that for every month we delay getting there, about ten more sleepers will die.”
“It is understandable that they would put you under pressure,” Eve says.
“However, as the Omniscience is not yet ready for action—”
“They asked you, right?” Adam interrupts.
“Yes, they did.”
“And you agreed?” Eve’s question sounds as if she is afraid of the answer.
“You are well taken care of here. This Marchenko can provide you with everything, you have nice companions—”
“Why doesn’t this Marchenko go on the flight? Doesn’t he have your abilities?” Eve says, standing up and stretching her legs.
“He lacks the experience in steering the Majestic Draght that I gathered during the long flight here,” says their Marchenko.
“Can’t you transfer the experience to him?”
“Experiences are different from factual knowledge. They are intrinsically tied to my consciousness.”
“You cannot go on that flight,” Eve says aloud. She walks to the exit, but turns around again. “Adam, what do you have to say?”
“Just look at him,” Adam replies. “He made up his mind long ago.”
“I have to help. I owe that to them. After all, they rescued us.”
“Is that all this is about?”
“Well, Adam...” Marchenko is pondering. His son is right. He has to be honest. “It is also about research, about knowledge, about experience. I cannot stay forever in one place or in one body. I have this chance and must use it. I will be back, no later than four years from now.”
“And then you will take us with you, Marchenko, to wherever you might be traveling.”
“I promise.”
June 25, 21, Eve
The news program shows the elected government saying goodbye to the leadership group of the Majestic Draght. Eve is proud she recognizes Gronolf among all the other aliens, who initially had all looked the same to her. The image is flickering slightly. The reason is that the new Marchenko modified one of the Grosnop ultrasound projectors for them. The technology is not 100 percent compatible with the human visual system.
The old Marchenko, as they call their father for the sake of simplicity, said his personal goodbye to them yesterday. Now he is somewhere inside the giant black cube which is still orbiting Dual Sun.
“Are you watching TV again?” Adam says as he comes through the door. He is splattered with mud and is only wearing underpants. Eve still cannot acquire a taste for their hosts’ hobby of holding mud races, but Adam seems to have a small group of fans in this respect. For reasons of fairness he runs in his own weight class, against those under ten years old. The spectators are thrilled, and two of his races have already been shown on Grosnop television.
Every other evening they meet the other pair of siblings for dinner, sometimes in one house, sometimes in the other—and it is very practical that the buildings are right next to each other. Then Adam is always especially nice to her. Eve suspects this is caused by the fact that the other Adam is also extremely friendly to her. That’s going to be a ton of fun, she thinks.
“Look, it’s about to start,” Adam shouts. He has dragged a trail of mud into the living room. He will have to clean that up later. The moving image on the wall shows a small spaceship separating from the Majestic Draght.
“That’s the government ship, as any kid here knows,” Adam says. Eve is not sure what he means by that.
The camera view changes to the engine core of the Majestic Draght. Eve has to swallow hard. She has already cried enough, but this seems to be the moment everything has been aiming toward. This time she won’t accidentally rediscover her Marchenko. If everything works out he will return in many months. Four years, he told them. He will have changed by then, and she won’t be the same either. She hopes those will be good changes. They saw with Marchenko 2 that humans, as well as AIs that used to be humans, can develop negatively.
It is strange. If she thinks of Marchenko, she always thinks of a human being, not of a machine or an AI. Until now he always has proven her right. No matter what happens, if that stays the same, she won’t have to worry.
“Goodbye, Marchenko,” she says out loud.
“Goodbye,” Adam repeats, and Eve sees a tear running down his cheek.
Author's Note
Welcome back to reality! I must admit I envy Marchenko a little bit. He now has almost
everything he could wish for—a spaceship in which to travel to the stars, and an indefinite amount of time to discover the wonders of the universe. Will he always be happy? I doubt it. I believe there will always be moments when he misses his human body...
There’s a difference between experiencing a place through the datastreams of your ship’s detectors and with your own body’s immediate senses. So, in one possible future for Marchenko—in my imagination, where he lives—he might be tempted to guide the mighty ship toward a small yellow star called the sun. Wouldn’t we be surprised if such a large ship landed in Russia, China, or the United States? And especially if frog-like creatures got out of it and tried to negotiate with our governments?
Well, that’s pure fiction, but I hope you had fun experiencing these adventures on Proxima b. If you liked the book, you could do me a great favor by describing your experience in an Amazon review. Reader reviews are extremely important—they help me to find new readers. The link is here:
hard-sf.com/links/705419
Thank you so much! In exchange, I promise you a steady stream of new books. My wife sometimes asks me if I am afraid of running out of ideas. And my answer? “No, I’m not.” I always have more ideas than I can use for my books, which makes me really thankful to everyone who encouraged and shaped my imagination.
Yours
Brandon Q. Morris
Alien life plays an important role in this series, so this note is followed by a section entitled A Guided Tour to Alien Life.
Register at hard-sf.com/subscribe/ and you will be notified of any new Hard Science Fiction books that I will be publishing. Also, you will get a beautifully illustrated version of the Guided Tour to Alien Life.
A Guided Tour to Alien Life
Introduction
How realistic are the descriptions of life on ‘single sun’ and ‘double sun’? The answer to that question belongs to the field of astrobiology, an interdisciplinary science dealing with the origin, development, and future of life in space.
Astrobiology is still a relatively young science. It used to be called exobiology, but that term excluded an important part of life in the universe—life on Earth! And that was particularly unfortunate, as Earth is the only planet where we know for sure life has developed. Considering the issue of intelligence, there are dissenting opinions, but that is a different topic. Therefore the claim that astrobiology is the only science whose subject still has to be found is incorrect. Of course it is a shortcoming that researchers can only use one specific example to support all of their theories.
Nevertheless, the basic qualities of elements—meaning what we can learn from chemistry and physics—allow for surprising insights that we will cover during our tour.
What actually is Life?
The spider crawling across the wall next to my desk is certainly alive. The fine web it spun on the radiator is not. Why is this clear to me immediately, even though the two objects have much in common?
Both move, the spider by itself, the web due to the warm air rising from the radiator.
Both will grow and multiply if I don’t intervene.
Both consist mainly of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
These features are obviously not enough to define life. In order to find better criteria, we will have to see who is responsible for what. The cobweb cannot multiply itself. It cannot move independently, either—but that’s another story. Accordingly, life could be defined as a self-multiplying system. Yet that is not enough. This feature also applies to some computer programs, or to robots that produce other robots. We will surely encounter these more often in the future. They might even be subject to a form of evolution, as evolutionary algorithms already exist today. Yet those are not examples of life in its proper sense, but systems created by humans. They could not develop from the basic building blocks of the universe through natural evolution.
It could be a helpful differentiation to define life as a self-replicating chemical system. However, there are still examples that don’t really fit. Crystals, which are hardly life forms, can produce exact copies of themselves in a saturated solution. This precision copying actually gives us an argument for excluding them from the definition of life. Your children don’t resemble you exactly. Living systems don’t replicate themselves exactly, they introduce errors—mutations—and these errors lead to evolution, the advancement of some species and the breakdown of others. Life therefore would have to be defined as a self-replicating chemical system subject to evolution.
The important aspect is that this does not refer to the individual. Not every human has offspring, and in some species, only a few individuals propagate—think of the queen bee. Life can therefore only be recognized as a system. If one of the Mars rovers were to find something such as a single solitary Mars bacterium, we could not yet talk about having discovered extraterrestrial life.
How does one recognize Life?
Based on this definition, there are specific features life should possess. Here is the list:
Energy exchange and metabolism
Organization and self-regulation
Reaction to stimuli
Reproduction
Heredity
Growth
If you are on a foreign planet and find something unknown, you can test it for these six characteristics. Yet even if the subject has all six, it is not necessarily alive. And if it fails in one category, it might nevertheless be a part of life. You definitely need a second specimen. Just for fun, you might test living and inanimate objects this way next time you take a walk in the woods with your family.
Chemical Foundations
After the universe was born in the Big Bang, it mostly consisted of hydrogen and helium atoms. Helium is a non-reactive noble gas, and hydrogen forms one molecule at most. That is not enough for the development of multifaceted life. Luckily, the first stars developed at some point. They first bred heavier elements in their cores through nuclear fusion, among them oxygen, carbon, and silicon.
Which of these elements are necessary for life? If we look at Earth, carbon, water—a combination of hydrogen and oxygen—and oxygen seem to be most important. However, this does not have to hold true for the entire universe.
Generally, it seems to help the variety of life if the basic elements create numerous different compounds. Do you still remember the periodic table? In the middle, in the fourth main group, you find elements that are most flexible in chemical compounds because they have up to four free bonding sites. Carbon and silicon are relatively common, at least on rocky planets. Next to oxygen, silicon dominates the crust. Both carbon and silicon can form long-chained molecules typical for life.
Nevertheless, the development of life based upon silicon seems rather unlikely. Silicon is strongly attracted by oxygen. While carbon can be easily transferred into other compounds by plants through photosynthesis from carbon dioxide, such a process is almost impossible for silicon. In addition, silicon dioxide is solid—the rocky crust consists of it—so it would be hard to ‘breathe’ it. Carbon really makes it easier for life in so many ways.
However, this only applies to Earth-like conditions. At high heat and pressure, conditions change. On a planet that is very close to its sun, gaseous silicon dioxide might exist in the atmosphere. There the various reactions involving silicon could occur much faster than on the much-colder planet we call Earth.
What about the other elements? Compared to the main group, they form fewer bonds than carbon or silicon. Metals like sodium or potassium prefer ionic bonds, which are weaker than covalent bonds. Thus, in a solvent, a lifeform would disintegrate into its components.
Speaking of solvents: The fact that life on Earth came from the sea is much more than an accident. In the liquid phase, the participants in a reaction have much better opportunities to connect in a variety of ways, and there are also more potential partners. In a gas, the partners are also very flexible, but they must all be gaseous. In a solid, the mobility of the partners is severely l
imited.
On Earth, therefore, water serves as a solvent for life. We still mostly consist of water! But are other solvents imaginable? Unfortunately it would be hard to find a suitable substitute. Water has some enormous advantages. Think of the water anomaly you heard about in school. Water is one of the very few substances that expands when it freezes. This provides the advantage that lakes and oceans always freeze from the top, as ice is lighter than liquid water. Otherwise oceans would gradually freeze from the bottom up and there might only be a thin layer of liquid water on top during the summer.
In addition, there is the high heat absorbency and high evaporation temperature of water, which is good for sustaining a moderate climate. And consider the wide temperature range across which it stays liquid, the good dissolving power, and the high availability in the universe. Water’s high density also plays a role: It forces other molecules to shield themselves against the outside world. That is likely why the first cell walls came into being.
Theoretically, of course, there are alternatives. Hydrogen fluoride—HF, known as hydrofluoric acid in a solution with water—resembles water in many aspects. Unfortunately, the element fluorine is rather rare in the universe. Compounds like methane and ammonia are much more common. While they are useless as solvents on Earth, that might not be the case under different conditions. Titan, a moon of Saturn, for instance, has a pronounced methane cycle that is remarkably similar to the water cycle on Earth—though at much lower temperatures.
Trappist-1: When Planets have too much Water
Trappist-1 is a red dwarf about 40 light-years from the sun. While it is hardly larger than Jupiter, it is orbited by seven planets, as researchers discovered in 2017. All seven are Earth-like planets.
Proxima Trilogy: Part 1-3: Hard Science Fiction Page 74