Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  For months after you were killed, I would wake up in the morning, wondering how I was going to live. But we kept going—your absence, a you-shaped space, was almost as tangible as your presence had been. And now, nearly 12 years later, we celebrate in your name the arrival of our spacecraft on another world. A homemade, makeshift craft, constructed on the cheap with recycled materials by a bunch of scientists and scholars from the lowest rungs of a world in turmoil, headed to a planet that of all the nearby habitable worlds had the least chance of finding life.

  It was soon after the time of launch, over a decade ago, that our moment of fame got eclipsed. The world’s mega space agencies’ combined efforts found life on Europa. Suddenly ice algae were the thing. Six years ago the discovery of complex life on the water world of Gliese 1214b had the international press in a frenzy. Those of us who had dreamed up our space mission, and made of the dream a reality, were forgotten, and almost forgot ourselves. The wars and the global refugee crises took their toll. Now the first signals from our planet have catapulted us once more into public view, although some of the news reporting is critical. Why spend so much time and effort on a planet like Shikasta 464b, when the water worlds appear to be teeming with life? Yes, Shikasta 464b is a lot closer, about four light-years away, but it is a hell of fire and ice. A poor candidate for life—but we are dreamers. We want to think beyond boundaries, to find life as we don’t know it.

  You helped me see that I could be more than I’d imagined. You took my bitter memories of classmates laughing at my poor English, my ignorance, my secondhand clothes, and gave me, instead, Premchand and Ambedkar, Khusrau and Kalidasa. You taught me that a scientist could also be a poet.

  So we are making this recording, for you and for posterity.

  Sometimes, I practice a game I used to play when I was younger. I pretend to be an alien newly arrived on Earth, and I look at Delhi with new eyes. The dust-laden acacia trees outside the windows, the arid scrubland falling away, the ancient boulders of the Aravalli Hills upon which the squat brick buildings of the university perch like sleeping animals. In the room is the rattle of the air conditioner, the banks of computer monitors. That slender, dark woman in the immersphere—she is here, and she is not here. She is in this room, the modest control room for the mission, and she is four light-years away with her proxy self, the robot you and I named Avinash, or Avi for short. She is Avi. Despite the light delay time, she is there now, on that hellish world. The immer’s opacity clears, and I can see her face. For just a moment her eyes are alien, unfocused, as though she does not see me. What does she see? If I speak to her she will become the Kranti I know, but before that she is, for just that moment, a stranger.

  Kranti:

  I will describe the planet to you, because you will never see it through Avi’s eyes. It is a violent place. Imagine: a world so close to its sun that they face each other like dancing partners. That’s how Annie first described it to me, when her group found it. The light curve signature was subtle but it was there. Shikasta 464’s only known planet, a not-so-hot Jupiter, had a tiny sibling. Two Earth masses, a rocky world too close to its sun to be in the habitable zone. But between its burning dayside and the frozen night, there was the terminator, the boundary.

  Nobody actually believed we would get there. I say “we” but really I mean the spacecraft, the Rohith Vemula.

  How hard were those early years! Now we have our reward: the signals, first from the spacecraft, and then from Avi! I can see through his eyes, as you should have been doing right now. I know what he knows, even though the knowledge is more than four years old. My grandfather is in Bhubaneswar, celebrating with palm beer. He says that because I am a kind of famous person now, all will work out for our people. But I know and he knows it is not that simple.

  From faraway Arizona, Annie is looking at the pictures on her screen. The substellar side of the planet, always facing its dim red star, is all lava seas. But in the terminator, what you called the Twilight Zone, the temperatures are less extreme, and the terrain is solid rock. For this reason you and Chirag designed our proxy to be a small, flat climbing robot, with very short legs, There he is, up on the cliff face, like a crab.

  I am used to boundaries. Ever since my exile from my people’s ancestral home, I have lived in in-between places. Living on a boundary, you know you don’t belong anywhere, but it is also a place of so much possibility.

  Through Avi’s eyes, the planet’s terminator has become more and more familiar.

  Annie:

  For my people the number four is sacred—four directions, four holy mountains. It always felt right to me that this project began with the four of us on a rock, stargazing. We’re still figuring out what it means to be together again after all this time, without you.

  Let me begin with the old question: How do you know when something is alive?

  I grew up on the rez. Red dust and red rock, mesas and buttes against the widest sky you’ve ever seen. I grew up lying on boulders with my cousins, watching the constellations move across the sky, and the stars seemed close enough to touch. During the winter, when the snow still fell, we little ones would huddle inside the hogan, listening to our elders tell the stories of how Coyote placed the stars in the sky. My plump fingers would fumble as I tried to follow my grandmother’s hands deftly working the string patterns—with one flick of the wrist, one long pull, one constellation would turn into another. The cosmos was always a part of our lives; even in the hogan there was Mother Earth, Father Sky. Now we live in boxes like white people. My uncle is a retired professor and a medicine man. He says our rituals and ceremonies keep us reminded of these great truths, even in this terrible time for our people.

  Growing up, I thought I’d follow his footsteps—my Uncle Joe, the professor of Futures Studies at Diné University. But I took freshman geology to fulfill a science requirement, and ended up hooked. I remember the first time I realized that I could read the history of the Earth in the shapes and striations of the rocks, the mesas, and the canyons. I ended up going to the State University as a geology major, hoping to do something for the Navajo economy, which relied at that time on mining operations. I was naïve then. Luckily I got distracted by exoplanet atmospheres—late-night homework session, too much coffee, my boyfriend at the time—so here I am, planet hunter, all these years later, looking for biosignatures in exoplanets.

  I’ve been looking at the images and puzzling over a few things. After several thousand exoplanets, we still don’t really understand how planetary atmospheres originate. Earth is such a special case that it only tells us of one narrow band of possibilities. With the exception of the noble gases, nearly all the gases in our atmosphere are made by life. I’m thinking about my grandmother’s story of the holy wind—life is breath, breath is life, literally and in every other way.

  Shikasta 464b is too close to its star to do more than graze its habitable zone. Which is why it is last on everybody’s list for habitability. But my argument is that (a) the thin atmosphere (only 0.6 atm) is nevertheless more than what we’d expect of a planet that ought to have lost much of its atmosphere long ago, so what’s causing it to persist? Could be geology, could be life. And (b) the terminator between the magma pools of the dayside and the frozen desert of the nightside is actually relatively temperate in places, with temperatures that might allow for liquid water. There are trace amounts of water vapor in the upper atmosphere, but—let’s not get excited—likely not enough to create oxygen by photolysis—nah, if you want an oxygen atmosphere you have to look elsewhere. There is hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide, but that is hardly surprising on a world with active geology.

  So Kranti and I have been going back and forth about how we would actually know something is alive. We decided that since we both come from tribal cultures we should ask our elders the question. My Uncle Joe, who is a hatałii, says that life is a property arising from connectedness; the universe, being whole, is therefore alive. Don’t dissect things so much
, he says, professor and medicine man all at once. See the entirety of things first. It is only through the whole that the parts come into being. Kranti’s grandfather comes of a hill people of lush tropical forests—they call themselves the People of the Waters—and he says that rocks, stones, and mountains are alive, they are gods.

  Anyway, getting back to the point about the terminator—all those years ago some of us broached the idea that there are worlds where life is (a) different from what we recognize as life, (b) not widespread over the planet; in fact the planet might well have only a few habitable regions on it, and (c) it is theoretically possible to find pocket regions even in such inhospitable places as Shikasta 464b where some kind of life thrives, and (d) that life could well be complex life if the pocket habitats are (despite the name) deep enough, large enough, last long enough to have these forms of life evolve. Which is one reason I like red dwarfs—Shikasta 464 is a beauty, brighter and heavier than average, but still, a red dwarf: small, resilient, and very, very long-lived (as I, too, hope to be). Long-lived enough to up the possibility of life on one of its planets. I hope.

  Our little rock is quite a mystery. It shouldn’t have as much atmosphere as it does, tenuous though it is. Considering how close it is to its star, the solar wind ought to have stripped much of it away. Plus the frozen antistellar side is so cold that some of the gases in the atmosphere should have rained out as snow. So why so much atmosphere? Perhaps outgassing—Shikasta b is a happening place, lots of active geological processes churning up the surface—but our models don’t give us the numbers we need. So—life?

  I like it when we are surprised by the universe.

  Chirag:

  It began from a single discussion in a certain university in Delhi. The four of us—Annie, Kranti, myself, and you—talked all night.

  You were witness to the great shaking-up of civilization in the 2020s—the wars and civil strife, the wave upon wave of refugees fleeing the boggy, unstable tundras, the unbearable heat of the tropics. You saw the anoxic dead zones of the ocean—you hung the “I can’t breathe” banners over the bodies of the refugees floating among the silvery carcasses of dead fish, the photograph that made you briefly famous. From the shaking of the world arose little groups that came together the way sand gathers in the nodes of a banging drum: fiery intellectuals and dispossessed tribals, starving farmers and failed businessmen. We saw it grow —little groups around the world, islets of resistance, birthplaces of alternate visions, some of which became the solidarity circles from which our dreams emerged. We witnessed the collapse of things as we knew them, saw the great world-machine sink to its steel-and-chromium knees, threatening to drag us all down with it. We saw the paradox of life carrying on through the mayhem, in the big cities and small towns, even as our peoples fought the killing machines all around the globe—the small rituals of breakfast on the table, sleepovers for one’s children, bringing your lover chocolates on her birthday.

  It was a mad idea, in the midst of all this, to dream up a crowdfunded cheap space program, to send an experimental robot as explorer on another world. So many friends left us in outrage, accusing us of turning our backs on the real struggles. Those of us who remained launched the worldwide solidarity circles, the crowdfunding. Dissent was the spice and oil that moved us forward. The circles formed offshoots, generated ripples of their own, they birthed art movements, films, new university departments, even the growth of independent city-states around the globe, as long-existing boundaries wavered and re-formed. Then, during the spacecraft’s journey, we scattered, were lost, some claimed by strife, others by the sweeping pandemics of the last decade. It is a miracle then that some of us have been able to return to the project, now that the signals are coming in thick and fast.

  But of the four of us who first talked the whole thing into being, that night on the boulder under the unusually clear Delhi sky—only you have not come back. You gave yourself to this perhaps more than any of us, and then you were taken down, flung back into the earth from which you rose. I can still see your hands caressing the chassis that was to be Avi, muttering your strange AI spells, the grin lighting up your face as the robot came alive. You had no defense against the pain the world inflicted on us—you were Annie’s uncle dying of radiation poisoning in the Navajo desert, you were Kranti’s younger cousin shot by the police, you were my newborn sister laid outside a school in the hope that someone could feed her. Ultimately they came for you, and you knew in that moment what it was to be all the peoples of the world who have lived in hell. Each time I think of what you must have gone through, I die with you and for you, and I live for you, again and again.

  I live for what the four of us represent. We are the idea of the destruction of caste, class, and race come alive. Together we are walking alternate paradigms, irrefutable counterarguments to the propaganda of the powerful, to the way of life that is accepted as the norm. We live in dangerous times, and because people like us threaten the established order, we are dangerous, and therefore in danger. I don’t really know who the men are who guard us, but it is part of S.R.’s promise to me. S.R. approached me himself with the offer of protection for our project. Accepting it made me feel uncomfortable because his god is Money. Money, he says, is what will set Dalits free, and indeed it has freed him. So much that he can walk the streets (that’s a euphemism for his armored car) surrounded by bodyguards and impunity. I am grateful for his protection, and for his support, although we only took a small fraction of what he offered. But his is not the kind of freedom I seek. I am uncomfortable around power, I suppose. Or maybe I am more of an idealist than I admit to Kranti and Annie.

  You see, I remember what it was like when I was a child. Before we came to Delhi, my mother cleaned houses in Patna. She always pushed me to go to school, and she would ask me to repeat my lessons to her in the evenings, so she could learn to read too. I remember her repeating the letters after me, and sometimes she would be so tired, she would fall asleep before I had finished. Once when I came home crying because the teacher had pushed me to the back of the class for being a Dalit—she told me why she had named me Chirag. I remember her eyes burning in her face, saying, in the darkness of my life, you are the light. What use is suffering if it doesn’t make you stronger? Much later I came across the poetry of Om Prakash Valmiki, who could have been speaking in my mother’s voice. Here’s how I translated his words for Annie.

  That wound

  Of the hammer-blow

  On the rock

  Births sparks

  That night in Delhi, we started thinking about how we would explore space, and why. We were in a climate funk—the West Antarctic ice shelf had collapsed faster than predicted. Sea walls had been breached in Miami and Mumbai and Boston; fish were swimming in the streets of Kolkata. We’d thought to escape from grim reality by going to a movie, but they showed one from the tweens that pissed us off, called Interstellar. Lying on the cooling rock, you said, suddenly: “Trash, burn and leave. Yeah, I’m going to be a space colonizer now. That’s my motto. Having fucked up the only world we have, I’m going into space to fuck up a few more.” You laughed, bitterly, and started singing “Trash, burn and leave” to the tune of some pop number I don’t even remember. “Shut up,” said Kranti and Annie together. “Or at least sing in tune,” I said. We laughed, drank a little more, and wept a little too. That was the start of one of those passionate discussions you have in college that goes on all night: How would we—those on the other side of colonization—do it differently? We couldn’t have known then that the answer to the question would take our whole lives.

  We look for life on other worlds because we want to deepen what we mean by human, what we mean by Earthling. As our own atmospheric and oceanic oxygen levels fall and species go extinct like candles winking out, year after year, we want to bring attention to the wonder that is life, here and elsewhere. It is an extension of our empathy, our biophilia. Build your approach, your business model, your way of thinking around th
at paradigm, and you’ve already built in respect for every human regardless of race or class or caste, connection between all life, and an enhancement of the collective human spirit. Back in the early years of the twenty-first century, one of my people—Rohith Vemula—was driven to sacrifice his life for a vision of a better world. I had suffered from depression for some of my college years, and in the days following that first late-night conversation, I reread what he had written before he died, how he’d wanted to go to the stars. It felt as though he was speaking to me across time and history, urging me to live and dream, reminding me who I was, “a glorious thing made of stardust.” I can live for this, I told myself that night.

  Now I wish I could tell him: Brother, you did it! You took us to the stars.

  Kranti:

  I’ve been spending more and more time exploring Shikasta b. Chirag tells me that it is not wise to spend so much time immersed. But I can’t help it. When I am in the immersphere, I feel all relaxed, all tension goes away. I explore the Twilight Zone in Avi’s little body, sampling data. It is becoming a place to me. Every night we look at the images, locate features on a grid, and name things.

  Here’s the description Annie posted on our Citizen Science website:

  Shikasta b’s sky is clear and filled with stars. Looking sunward, the star Shikasta 464 is a dull red sphere, bathing the planet with its inadequate light. Most of its radiation is in the infrared. Avi is standing at the eastern edge of the terminator, atop a cliff some 10 kilometers high. The view of the dayside is spectacular. Here the ground falls away in sheer vertical walls down to a redly glowing plain, where large pools of magma hundreds of kilometers across are connected by lava rivers. Near the cooler terminator region the surface lava in the pools crusts over, and enormous bubbles of noxious gases break through it at irregular intervals, popping like firecrackers that would be louder if the planet had much of an atmosphere. Fine droplets of molten rock rain down from these explosions. Behind Avi the top of the levee is a cracked and fissured plain, dark and shadowed, with a few odd rock formations. On the nightside the images beamed from our orbiting satellite show a frozen terrain cut through by fissures and canyons on a much larger scale. Perhaps deep in the cracks tidal friction from the interior warms the place enough for life to have a tenuous hold. We don’t know yet. But the terminator between the two extremes is our best bet.