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Travelers of Space
[Adventures in Science Fiction 03]
Ed by Martin Greenburg
No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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CONTENTS
Articles
FOREWORD MARTIN GREENBERG
INTRODUCTION WILLY LEY
PREFACE TO DICTIONARY SAMUEL ANTHONY PEEBLES
SCIENCE FICTION DICTIONARY
Fiction
THE ROCKETEERS HAVE SHAGGY EARS KEITH BENNETT
CHRISTMAS TREE CHRISTOPHER YOUD
THE FORGIVENESS OF TENCHU TAEN F. A. KUMMER, JR.
EPISODE ON DHEE MINOR HARRY WALTON
THE SHAPE OF THINGS RAY BRADBURY
COLUMBUS WAS A DOPE LYLE MONROE
ATTITUDE HAL CLEMENT
THE IONIAN CYCLE WILLIAM TENN
TROUBLE ON TANTALUS P. SCHUYLER MILLER
PLACET IS A CRAZY PLACE FREDRIC BROWN
ACTION ON AZURA ROBERTSON OSBORNE
THE RULL A. E. VAN VOGT
THE DOUBLE-DYED VILLAINS POUL ANDERSON
BUREAU OF SLICK TRICKS H. B. FYFE
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Foreword
T
he night sky has always filled mankind with wonder. Since the first time the mind of man began to reflect upon those sparkling lights dancing in the blackness above his head he has had an uneasy awe concerning them. History has recorded most of his speculations, but his curiosity has never been satisfied.
Now mankind is on the verge of space travel. The time is fast approaching when the questions about our neighboring planets and stars will no longer be of mere academic interest. The answers, one by one, will soon be forthcoming. Man no longer can cling to his detached viewpoint; as he builds his first space ship he must ask himself: What will I find?
As members of the human race, each of us, not alone the scientists who represent us, must face up to this question with all seriousness.
Anticipating the future, this third volume in our Adventures in Science Fiction series considers what we will find on other worlds. Before us stretches an infinity of unexplored territory. Surely there are other life forms which will be met. And from the outset we will be confronted with all sorts of problems.
In this book the authors tell us how science fiction visualizes life on the alien worlds of the universe. Willy Ley, in his introduction, presents the scientific analysis of what we can expect. And Edd Cartier, from the artist’s tangible point of view, develops a few of the physiological possibilities.
Besides the fascinating problem of meeting new life forms, there are other, at least equally important problems. The space men will be hampered by public indifference and insufficient knowledge. New techniques in medicine and environmental adaptation will be needed. The science of psychology, still so imperfect, will have to embrace whole new alien races and cultures. A new generation of pioneers will develop to settle the outer planets and asteroids of our own solar system. From such advanced posts, expansion will continue to new frontiers spread out in the more distant star systems.
As man progresses outward, earth will hear many an adventurous tale of strange worlds and stranger life cycles. And with each tale will come the remarkable exploits of men—our own fellow earthmen who will, as our representatives, be carrying our own culture and civilization into those far-distant corners of galaxy and universe.
Travelers of Space is that imaginative report of mankind probing, probing deeper into the night sky. This is the story of life on other worlds as it might well be in the future.
Martin Greenberg
I wish to thank Samuel A. Peeples for his wonderful preface to the dictionary and for his generous assistance in its compilation, Willy Ley for his excellent introduction, and David A. Kyle for his invaluable help in bringing to print this anthology, Travelers of Space.
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Introduction: Other Life Than Ours
BY WILLY LEY
MEPHISTO:
From water, earth and air unfolding,
A thousand germs break forth and grow,
In dry, and wet, and warm, and chilly;
And had I not the Flame reserved, why, really,
Ther’s nothing special of my own to show!
(Goethe: Faust, I.)
I
n 1686 there appeared a book which was the first of a long line of works specifically concerned with life on other worlds. Its author was a French mathematician by the name of Bernard de Fontenelle and the title of the book was entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, or Discourses on the Plurality of Worlds.
In the preface to the book de Fontenelle explained his attitude by writing: “I have chosen that part of Philosophy which is most likely to excite curiosity; for what can more concern us than to know how this world which we inhabit is made; and whether there be any other worlds like it, which are also inhabited as this is?”
That this curiosity was shared by many others is fully evidenced by the success of the book. The Discourses became an immediate best-seller in the French original as well as in several translations; they also lasted for about one and a half centuries. And in their wake appeared a steady trickle of similar books, at the rate of about one a year.
Reading de Fontenelle’s Discourses now one cannot help but feel that life was simpler in his day. The astronomical facts he had to keep in mind and which he presented to the general reading public consisted in the main of a knowledge of the relative distances of the major planets as seen from the sun. Mercury was closest, then Venus, then Earth, after that Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were still unknown. So were the true distances,—de Fontenelle did know that Mars was farther from the sun than earth but could not name a figure. As for the planets themselves nothing was known but their approximate sizes and one could gain an idea of their surface temperatures from the knowledge of their comparative distances from the sun. With only these few facts to hem him in, de Fontenelle could freely speak of the inhabitants of Mercury as exuberant damn fools and hotheads, of the inhabitants of Venus as amorous flirts, of those of Jupiter as learned philosophers and of those of Saturn as phlegmatic slowpokes who, because of the extreme cold, preferred to sit in one place all their lives.
As the years went on philosophy of that kind had to become more and more cautious. Just as every session of Congress complicates the legal picture by adding a number of new laws, so every successive generation of astronomers added a new set of discoveries. Most of them were discouraging, even though they added two new major planets at the outskirts of the solar system (Uranus and Neptune) and later on several thousand small, tiny and minute planetoids, mostly between Mars and Jupiter.
But the “inhabitants” were killed off, gradually and inexorably. First the selenites of the moon had to go when it was established that the moon had neither air nor water, at least not in detectable amounts. Then Mercury was recognized to be a world which always turns one side to the sun, with the result that the sunward hemisphere became hot enough to melt tin and lead while the far hemisphere was cold enough to freeze oxygen and nitrogen. Then Jupiter was supposed to be still mostly molten lava (the same thought was expressed, more tentatively, with regard to Saturn) while Uranus and Neptune were declared frozen stiff. That left Venus, Mars and the moons of Jupiter as possible places for inhabitants. But then actual measurements showed that Jupiter was colder than Antarctica and better telescopes proved that its four large moons were atmosphere-less like our own.
To condense knowledge, argument and deduction to the minimum: at pre
sent we can hope for life (as distinct from “inhabitants”) only on Venus and Mars. The trinity Venus-Earth-Mars comprises the temperature range in which life is possible, the coldest areas of Venus probably corresponding to our equator, the warmest areas of Mars corresponding to our sub-arctic. You will have noticed that I said “probably” in one case and did not do so in the other. The reason is that nobody has ever succeeded in seeing the surface of Venus. We know practically nothing about that planet. But we do know Mars, and by now most astronomers are agreed that the seasonal changes of coloration of Mars are actually due to plant life of some sort, presumably our plant life in high latitudes and at high altitudes.
In our solar system, therefore, there is life on Earth and on Mars, with Venus as a probability.
But just a moment, I hear quite a number of people complain, aren’t you too conservative by far about a hidden assumption at this point? The temperature range of these three planets may comprise the temperature range for carbon life, life based like that of earth on large and complex carbon molecules. How about life based on a different kind of chemistry? Hence bound to a different temperature range?
Of course my statement was based on carbon life, oxygen-breathing and using H2O as the body fluid. As for other types of life, based on a different chemistry, one has the choice of assuming that it either is impossible or else that we don’t know enough chemistry to visualize it. The one which is most obvious to a chemist as a possibility is silicon life, based on silicon instead of carbon. True, chemists have succeeded in making the silicon equivalents of alcohol, of formic acid and of chloroform and more recently silicon compounds have become industrially important. But when it comes to life processes there are some additional points to watch. For example: we carbon-type oxygen breathers exhale a compound consisting of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms, COa. That happens to be a gas and getting rid of it is easy. But the silicon equivalent is Si02, silica, an exceedingly hard substance. One could imagine that it may flake off the skin or be fashioned into skeleton and armor; but the physical characteristics of Si02 are not the only shortcoming. Silicon does not combine well with hydrogen and if it does the compound breaks down at once if free oxygen is present. And whether silicon can form the long and complicated chains which are so characteristic for carbon is at least doubtful.
If it is difficult to imagine (or even calculate) the chemistry of silicon life it is completely impossible to go that far even when another element is picked as the presumed basis for living molecules. Maybe we simply don’t know enough chemistry yet, but until we do we’ll just have to restrict our thinking to carbon life.
Not as if carbon life were not adaptable enough by itself. The plants which eke out a life at 12,000 feet above sea level in a rarefied atmosphere under a wide range of temperature changes are carbon life. So are the plants growing in salt water with practically no temperature change 600 feet below the surface. The fish which lives in the small supply of bad water in weed-choked puddles in the middle of Death Valley is carbon life. And so is the fish which skims over the bottom mud of the oceans 6000 feet down. The arctic fox which keeps its blood not only liquid but warm in an environment consisting largely of ice and snow, and the desert fox which keeps its blood liquid under the heat and dryness of the African desert are not only both mammals, they are closely related to each other.
Carbon life itself can go through an enormous temperature range; there are algae in the hot springs of Yellowstone Park which live in water rather close to the boiling point. On the other hand there are insects in Alaska which are most active when the temperature is at the freezing point of water. If you hold them in your hand you kill them, because your hand is far too warm for them. There are earthly plants and animals which would do well on (imaginary) planets that would look at first glance as if they could not possibly support life for any one of half a dozen mutually exclusive reasons. And we don’t even have to mention certain types of bacteria on earth, like those which do not like free oxygen, or those which thrive when the surroundings are “poisoned” by methane or hydrogen sulphide.
Here a side question comes in. Supposing there is only the admittedly adaptable carbon life. And supposing there are planets which can support such life. Can we assume that there is life on a planet merely because the planet can support life?
This, of course, is a difficult question, but most of the scientists who have thought about such problems will be willing to make that assumption. Condensing knowledge, argument and deduction once more to the possible minimum your choice lies between the two ideas of spontaneous generation and panspermy. Each has its difficulties.
As regards spontaneous generation whole generations of scientists have worked hard to prove that it does not take place. If you sterilize a wound properly no infection will take place because the bacteria do not originate in the wound—no matter how messy it may look to the layman—but have to come from elsewhere where they originated from other bacteria. And you can have the nicest nutrient solution for animalcules imaginable,—if you sterilize it properly no animalcules will appear in it. The counter-argument is, of course, that since we have life on earth it must have originated at some time.
The search for a way out of this dilemma between established medical fact on the one hand and theoretical necessity on the other seems to have boiled down to a somewhat surprising realization. Namely: one of the main conditions for spontaneous generation is that it has not yet taken place! The meaning of this sentence is this: it has been experimentally established that ultra-violet radiation (from the sun) will work small chemical miracles in a mixture of water, carbon dioxide and ammonia, as “anorganic” a mixture as one can imagine. Under the action of ultra-violet light “organic” substances are formed, including sugars and compounds which look as if they were building blocks of the proteins. You can, then, given only a sun which throws off ultra-violet, and a planet with water, carbon-dioxide and ammonia, imagine whole lakes filled with a soup of sugars and protein building blocks in all stages of complexity. If we had this now anywhere it would decay almost immediately, because the existing micro-organisms would go to work on it. If you don’t have any micro-organisms yet they will, after a necessary time interval, be built up by this very process.
But the thought that micro-organisms may come from elsewhere— out of cosmic space in this case—is permissible too. It was especially the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius who developed this idea and who coined the word panspermy. Arrhenius combined the established facts that the light from a star exerts pressure against gravitation if the body involved is small enough, that bacterial spores can withstand the conditions in empty space for very long periods, and, finally, that bacterial spores are of the “right size” to ride light pressure and he postulated that all space is filled with dormant spores. They will fall upon all planets continuously and if conditions are good and suitable for their development they will develop.
Put the two sides of the argument together and you get the conclusion that spontaneous generation really had to take place only once. That, if that place was earth, our planet has left a long wake of life seeds in the cosmos, ready to germinate elsewhere. I may add here that there are some scientists right now who find it easiest to explain the flare-up of sudden and “new” epidemics by believing in microscopic invasions from space.
There is still one other problem to be investigated. All right, either spontaneous generation or panspermy will cause life on a planet. And because of the observed adaptability even of carbon life alone these “infested” planets can be quite dissimilar, even though they will have to be within a certain temperature range, have water and at least carbon dioxide in their atmosphere, put there, presumably, by volcanic action. (If there is carbon dioxide, the processes of photosynthesis in which most plants excel will produce free oxygen soon enough.)
But are there other planets?
All through the nineteenth century this question simply did not exist. There were two theories of plan
et formation around, one by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the other by the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace; usually they were lumped together as the Kant-Laplace Theory. But both (and their combination) stated that a sun would produce planets as a matter of course. Then, around the year 1900, a few scientists began to wonder about the validity of these two theories and found that they had to be given up. Several other ideas were substituted. One operated with a glancing blow of two passing stars. Another decided that a close approach was good enough to cause enormous tidal waves on both and that it did not need actual contact. A third, hard pressed by some difficulties in the other concepts, insisted that it had to be an encounter between a single star and a binary or double-star. And as this went on there seemed to emerge an unavoidable consequence. Star encounters, because of the enormous distances involved, had to be rare. An encounter, at just the right distance and the proper velocity, between a single star and a binary had to be even rarer. Possibly it had taken place only once. If so, there could be only two suns with planets in the whole galaxy: our own and the “other” which had caused our planets and naturally secured a few of its own in the process.
The exposition of all this ended with the statement that Homo sapiens was completely alone on a lofty pinnacle, for the compelling reason that there were no other pinnacles.
Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03] Page 1
