Expedition To A Self-Heating Guest

[daniel rey m.]

…conceived about two years ago and proposed in January, but whose background goes back at least 8 years. The starting point was coming across an old collection of essays by Harlow Shapley (Beyond the Observatory, Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y., 1967), the astronomer who discovered we're off-center in the galaxy.

In the one titled "Life Among the Dwarfs" he imagines "Brobdingnagian planets" (cp. Gulliver's Travels), with 50 times the mass of Jupiter. He claims that on something this size "the heat of gravitational compression would provide a warm surface". Even if they are "detached", "independent" bodies, no longer attached to the parent star and roving aimlessly in interstellar space, they can provide the adequate environment for life of some kind in what for us would be utter darkness.

Life there "would be strange indeed. The necessary energy would come mainly from deep within and would appear at the surface mostly as radiation in the radio section of the electromagnetic spectrum. There would be no abundant violet-to-red light, and the sense organs functioning as eyes in life forms would need to be tuned to radio waves."

Some years later I came across the following passage (A l' écoute des planètes, Jacques Bergier, Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris?, c. 1968): "An eye sensitive to radio waves that could furnish clear images ought to be at least as big as a bus." It appeared like Shapley should've talked to a biologist before writing that essay.

However, a short note on "transformation optics", a yet to be developed technology, written by John Pendry (described as "a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, and part of the team that designed the first practical metamaterial 'invisibility cloak' ") and included in Part Two of the report "50 Ideas To Change Science" published in the "New Scientist" magazine (16/10/10), makes one go back to the idea about radiowave eyes. The full text of the note follows.

"Keeping electrons on track is easy: they obediently confine themselves to metal wires as thin as a few nanometres across. Photons are more of a problem. The thinnest optical fibres are micrometres in diameter, making the optical equivalent of a computer chip, for instance, a distant prospect.

"Transformation optics could remedy that, providing a route for light to flow like water around obstacles, and be focused down to points far smaller than the light's wavelength [my emphasis]. The secret lies in imagining light rays and their attendant electric and magnetic fields as if they were embedded in a rubber sheet. By pulling and stretching the sheet, they can be directed as desired. The distortion of the sheet tells us the electric and magnetic properties that a medium with the right transmission characteristics will have.

"Such designed media have come to be known as metamaterials. They can be used, for example, to make cloaks that guide radiation smoothly around an object, rendering it invisible to our eyes, or to gather light over a large area and concentrate it down to the nanoscale onto a light-sensitive molecule or quantum dot. Transformation optics will bring us a new control of electromagnetism, with photons as biddable as electrons."

If humans can do it, surely Nature did it a long time ago, somewhere, and radio vision no longer sounds like an outrageous notion.

Sadly, planetary science and theories on stellar evolution evolved and now the following consensus has been achieved: the boundary between planets and brown dwarfs is 13 Jovian masses, and that between the latter and stars is about 75 such masses (one fourteenth the mass of the Sun). The first limit is where deuterium fusion starts, and at the second one the fusion of common hydrogen, and then you have a bright object.

So, if they finally got it right, Shapley's Brobs are actually smoldering brown dwarfs. (The limit for stars would be 60 solar masses, which is the mass of the largest known stars, but there are hypothetical bodies beyond the pale called "supermassive stars".)

Since 1998 there's been spectroscopic evidence for the existence of many of those unattached things. They seem to have from five to ten Jovian masses. There could be great numbers of them in all galaxies. (In that case, couldn't they account for the missing mass they call "dark matter"?)

Happily, the story doesn't have to end there. If Shapley was mistaken about the size range of planets, who is to say he wasn't also mistaken about the size of "self-warming" ones? That's why my project ought to be examined rather than so rudely rejected by mainstream astronautics, as it was at the beginning of the present year.

We couldn't possibly go around in a spaceship looking for one or send a robotic mission, at least not yet. It would have to involve a wandering planet coming our way. Funnily, after years of searching for signs of ET life, all of a sudden it could fall on our collective lap, and we had better be ready for it. If we miss the chance then we'll have to wait thousands or millions of years for the next one.

The project, then, is urgent, but not for the 46 nat'l. and int'l. space agencies (or similar entities) that got my proposal.

The matter bears some relation to Rich'd. A. Murray's Nemesis Theory as well as to the theory about how the Moon came to be. The former has to do with mass extinctions involving the occasional visit of a partner of the Sun, called Nemesis --they would be part of a binary system-- the latter also tells about a hefty visitor, and additionally an impact. (As it goes through the Oort Cloud, Nemesis throws big rocks at us.) Why can't Nemesis be dragging around a life-bearing planet of its own, too? That planet might be the same object that hit the Earth and thus gave us eventually a moon.

…or the same one that hit the North Pole, which would be why there's no landmass there, and tilted the Earth. As far as I can see, this is a brand-new theory. Call it the Empty Pole & Tilt Theory. I've come across no explanation for the fact that there is a continent at the opposite pole, but only water everywhere, frozen or otherwise, up in the north. Why the missing mass, the lopsidedness?

I won't apologize for taking up so much space…nearly three pages of it. In controversial matters, if you're not teutonically thorough then misunderstandings will follow. Maybe that's why the project was ignored: the message was too short and hastily written. I'm not taking any chances this time.