Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [55]
The energy put out by B1257+12 is about 4.7 times that of the Sun. But, unlike the Sun, most of this is not in visible light, but in a fierce hurricane of electrically charged particles. Suppose that these particles impinge on the planets and heat them. Then, even a planet at 1 AU would have a surface around 280 Celsius degrees above the normal boiling point of water, greater than the temperature of Venus.
These dark and broiling planets do not seem hospitable for life. But there may be others, farther from B1257+12, that are. (Hints of at least one cooler, outer world in the B1257+12 system exist.) Of course, we don’t even know that such worlds would retain their atmospheres; perhaps any atmospheres were stripped away in the supernova explosion, if they date back that far. But we do seem to be detecting a recognizable planetary system. Many more are likely to become known in coming decades, around ordinary Sun-like stars as well as white dwarfs, pulsars, and other end states of stellar evolution.
Eventually, we will have a list of planetary systems—each perhaps with terrestrials and Jovians and maybe new classes of planets. We will examine these worlds, spectroscopically and in other ways. We will be searching for new Earths and other life.
ON NONE OF THE WORLDS in the outer Solar System did Voyager find signs of life, much less intelligence. There was organic matter galore—the stuff of life, the premonitions of life, perhaps—but as far as we could see, no life. There was no oxygen in their atmospheres, and no gases profoundly out of chemical equilibrium, as methane is in the Earth’s oxygen. Many of the worlds were painted with subtle colors, but none with such distinctive, sharp absorption features as chlorophyll provides over much of the Earth’s surface. On very few worlds was Voyager able to resolve details as small as a kilometer across. By this standard, it would not have detected even our own technical civilization had it been transplanted to the outer Solar System. But for what it’s worth, we found no regular patterning, no geometrization, no passion for small circles, triangles, squares, or rectangles. There were no constellations of steady points of light on the night hemispheres. There were no signs of a technical civilization reworking the surface of any of these worlds.
The Jovian planets are prolific broadcasters of radio waves—generated in part by the abundant trapped and beamed charged particles in their magnetic fields, in part by lightning, and in part by their hot interiors. But none of this emission has the character of intelligent life—or so it seems to the experts in the field.
Of course our thinking may be too narrow. We may be missing something. For example, there is a little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Titan, which puts its nitrogen/methane atmosphere out of chemical equilibrium. I think the CO2 is provided by the steady pitter-patter of comets falling into Titan’s atmosphere—but maybe not. Maybe there’s something on the surface unaccountably generating CO2 in the face of all that methane.
The surfaces of Miranda and Triton are unlike anything else we know. There are vast chevron-shaped landforms and crisscrossing straight lines that even sober planetary geologists once mischievously described as “highways.” We think we (barely) understand these landforms in terms of faults and collisions, but of course we might be wrong.
The surface stains of organic matter—sometimes, as on Triton, delicately hued—are attributed to charged particles producing chemical reactions in simple hydrocarbon ices, generating more complex