Space Coordinates

Space Coordinates

The gas giant globe they were now orbiting, the third they had scanned in search of an ancient geological formation in the origin of the Cloud, was not the one they sought.

The navigator studied the set of coordinates, as the captain and the Earth conferred quietly. As he begun to enter the coordinates, however, his index finger betrayed him and missed one digit. Just a slight error in typing into a pad registered in his unconsciousness before he could read the mistake.

Dancing couple and Coordinates. Illustration: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

His brain automatically paused and told him to look again at was he was doing. He saw the error immediately, but also noted that the coordinates were not exactly wrong, they were simply farther down on the list of their intended targets.

Anxious for this to be over? – he teased his one mind, but the longer he stared at the coordinates he had entered, the more something in his stomach tickled.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

The Saturn (Rain)

The Saturn

The Orpheus I spacecraft encountered the Saturn system and uncovered a host of wonders concerning the planet, its intricate ring system, its swarm of attendant satellites. Perhaps, most interesting of these was Titan, known to have an atmosphere rather like that of the primitive Earth, a dense haze layer composed of complex organic molecules, and perhaps a surface ocean of liquid hydrocarbons. A range of observations was made of rings of debris surrounding the Saturn.

These structures might be in the process of coagulating into new planetary systems, and suggest that planets might be overwhelmingly abundant among the stars of the Milky Was galaxy. In fact, life was found unexpectedly nibbling on sulfur compounds in very high temperature vents on the Earth’s ocean floor and many evidence has accumulated suggesting that comets are periodically sprayed into the inner solar system, triggering the extinction of many species on Earth.

Saturn. Image in public domain.

Great regions of intergalactic space have been uncovered that seemingly are depleted in galaxies. New and important components of the universe bearing on the question of its ultimate fate have been suggested.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George)

A Delight of Science

A Delight of Science

The present epoch is a major crossroads for our civilization and perhaps for our species.

But whatever road we take, our fate is indissolubly bound up with science, as it is essential as a matter of simple survival for us to understand science. In addition, science is a delight: Our evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding – those who understand are more likely to survive.

One of the great virtues of a book is that it is easy for the reader to return repeatedly to obscure passages. Let’s say that there is much more freedom for the author in choosing the range and depth of topics for a chapter in a book than for the procrustean forty and so minutes of a commercial television program.

Delight of Science, image by Elena

Any book goes more deeply into many topics than does the television series. Besides only a few of the hundreds of full color excellent illustrations from the series and you-tube version can be accommodated in this edition, but all illustrations necessary to understand the text are obviously included.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George.)

Saturn Jars

Saturn Jars

Audry had worked with many scientists during his years in the Air Force and with NASA. She was accustomed to competing philosophies because scientists and military usually were at odds.

The scientists were more competitive than Olympic athletes. They never traded information willingly (if at all) and regarded each other with the warmth of professional assassins. The situation was particularly tense just prior to rotation.

To test their skills, many years ago her colleagues and she prepared chambers that simulated the Saturn’s environment as it was then known, inoculated them with terrestrial micro-organisms and waited to see if anybody survived.

Such chambers were called, of course, Saturn Jars. The Saturn Jars cycled the temperatures within a typical range from a little above the freezing point around noon to about -80 degrees Celsius befor down, in an anoxic atmosphere composed chiefly of C02 and N2.

Just a jar. Photo by Elena

Ultraviolet lamps reproduced the fierce solar flux. No liquid water was present except for very thin films wetting individual sand grains. Some microbes froze to death after the first night and were never heard from again. Others gasped and perished from lack of oxygen. Some died of thirst, and some were fried by the ultraviolet light.

But there were always a fair number of varieties of terrestrial microbes that did not need oxygen; that temporarily closed up shop when the temperatures dropped too low ; that hid from the ultraviolet light under pebbles or thin layers of sand.

In other experiments, when small quantities of liquid water were present, the microbes actually grew. If terrestrial microbes can survive the alien environment, how much better Saturn microbes, if they exist, must do on Saturn. But first, we must get there.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

Exploration of the Cosmos

Exploration of the Cosmos

A few million years ago there were no human beings on the Earth. But who will be here a few million years hence? If we survive, out time will be famous for two reasons: because this is the epoch in which the Humans began their journey to the stars; and that at this dangerous moment of technological adolescence we managed to avoid self-destruction.

If we survive and continue to the planets and the stars, our chauvinisms will be shaken further, as we gain a cosmic perspective. We will invest our energies in an enterprise devoted not to death but to life: the expansion of our understanding of our planet and its inhabitants and the search for life elsewhere.

We will also recognize that our explorations can be carried out only on behalf of all the people of the Earth. Till now, we have made a preliminary reconnaissance of twenty or so worlds, among them all the planets visible to the naked eye, all those wandering nocturnal lights that stirred our ancestors toward understanding and ecstasy. To do much more, we must reinvest interests vested in preparations for war – in fact they can relatively easy be reinvested in the exploration of the Cosmos.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

We have always been space travelers : The Earth travels some 2,5 million kilometers every day around the Sun: eight times faster than that around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy; and, perhaps, twice faster still as the Milky Way falls towards the Virgo cluster of galaxies. Photo : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Future of Our Species

Future of Our Species

National boundaries are not evident when we view our Earth from space. Fanatical, religious, ethnic, national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our tiny planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

Travel is broadening, but hypnotized by mutual mistrust, almost never concerned for the future of our species, the nation prepare for death. We have guns in our hands and because what we are doing is so horrifying, we tend not to think of it much. But what we do not consider, we are unlikely to put right.

Every thinking person fears war, but many countries plan for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse. Will we ever understand that we are mad? What must happen to our world that we could tell ourselves : Enough is enough?

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

What does the future reserve for our species? Illustration: Elena

Signs of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Signs of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

There are not yet any obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and this situation makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours always rush implacably, headlong, toward self-destruction.

There are many worlds on which life has never arisen and there are worlds that have been charred and ruined by catastrophes of cosmic proportions. We, on Earths, are fortunate: the welfare of our civilisation and our species is in our hands and we are still alive are powerful.

If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be? If we don’t speak for Earth, who will? Indeed, the human species in undertaking a great venture that if successful will be as important as the descent from the trees or colonisation of the land.

A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this Earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars (H.G.Wells, The Discovery of the Future, Nature 65, 326. 1902). Illustration: Copyright © Megan Jorgensen

Today we are tentatively, haltingly breaking the shackles of Earth – metaphorically, of course, in confronting and taming the admonitions of those more primitive brains within us; physically, in listening for the messages from the stars and voyaging to the planets (the two enterprises are linked indissolubly and each is a necessary condition for the other).

Unfortunately, for the time being our energies are directed far more toward war. Which aspects of our nature will prevail in uncertain, particularly when our vision and understanding and prospects are bound exclusively to one small part of our planet. But we must understand the up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George)

Non-Corporeal Species

Non-Corporeal Species

The opportunity to investigate a non-corporeal species is one non scientist with a passion for xenobiology can resist. A fact that this species can communicate with humanoids is an obvious bonus. At least these life-forms can watch us. They may not be interested in making contact, but these unwelcome visitors may plan an attack on the Earth.

They can provoke chemical imbalances consistent with vasoconstriction – which means pain.

Anyway, we don’t need to be telepathes to know that these non-corporeal species are out there and they are watching us. If our gut is telling us we’re in danger, we should do something about it. Unfortunately, when something other than our overactive imagination confirms the suspicion, it will be too late and we’ll be engaged in fighting we are not prepared to face.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

Peachy Fuschia, non-corporeal species which can impersonate any personage. As seen in the picture, image: Copyright © Elena

Energy Field

Energy Field

Apart from indicating the presence of water, computer was incapable of providing a molecular or submolecular analysis. It seemed that the same energy field that kept the water in the cloud as it moved through space also effectively shielded it from deep scan. Without knowing more about the actual state of the mass, the computer was having a hard time predicting the effects of the numerous hypothetical deterrents, the NASA scientists were trying to simulate.

They had begun to toy with the idea of attempting to reach the cloud before it moved closer to the Earth and before its configuration shifted due to the solar gravity. The situation didn’t seem grim, the humans just wished to provide more data for the computer to chew on, but apart from mere scientific interest for a number of new theoretical premises, there were still no concerns.

The destruction of the humanity became evident only in a couple of months.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

Energy Field. Illustration by Elena

Children of the Cosmos

Children of the Cosmos

The Cosmos may be densily populated with intelligent beings. But we have held the peculiar notion that a society or a person that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow bizarre or strange. Is a creature to be distrusted or even loathed. Think for instance of the negative connotations of words like Alien or Outlandish. And yet the cultures of each of our civilisations merely represent different ways of being human.

An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and our societies, would find our differences trivial compared to the similarities.

The Darwinian lesson is very clear: there will be no humans elsewhere. Only here, on the Earth. Only on our small planet. In fact, we are as rare as well as an endangered species. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies you will not find another.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

 A pretty, green eyed pixie (or fairy) – fantasy art. Image: Copyright © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Bizarre Species

An extraterrestrial visitor visiting the Earth and looking at the differences among human beings and their societies would find those difference trivial compared to the similarities between them. However, we, the Earthlings, have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed.

Think for instance of the negative connotations of words like Alien or Outlandish. And yet the cultures of each of our civilisations merely represent different ways of being human.

Think than of Cosmos which is populated with many intelligent beings. Everyone of them is very different, because the Darwinian lesson is very clear: there will be no humans elsewhere.

Only here, on the Earth. Only on this small planet there are Humans. In fact, we are as rare as well as an endangered species.

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. The Sun warms us and feeds us and permits us to see. It fecundated the Earth. It is powerful beyond human experience.

Think of the Sun’s heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer’s day; think how dangerous it is to gaze at the Sun directly. From 150 million kilometers away, we recognize its power. What would we feel on its seething self-luminous surface, or immersed in its heart of nuclear fire?

Birds greet the sunrise with an audible ecstasy. Even some one-celled organisms know to swim to the light. Our ancestors worshiped the Sun, and they were far from foolish. The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The Aztec word for god was Teotl, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called the Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean.

And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe.

If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies you will not find another. Image: © Megan Jorgensen.

Footprints and Cosmos

Footprints and Cosmos

Footprints are very evocative as they show where others have gone before.

The Laetoli hominid footprints, discovered in 1977, are fossilized imprints of our earliest ancestors, preserved in volcanic tuff. These footprints are 3,6 million years old, ear are almost indistinguishable from a human footprint.

When Neil Armstrong trod on the surface of the Moon, images of his footprints were instantly recognized as symbols of humankind’s first tentative steps into the Cosmos.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

We have always left our footprints. Illustration: Elena

The Mist

The Mist

The mist was already heavy enough to drive the ships away, but not so heavy that going through was unpleasant for most of the satellites, but the loss of power ruined most of experiments. Some of the stations working for months to create a microbe that could neutralise about a dozen of different toxic-waste molecules were completely destroyed though and the most complex toxin-devouring microbe ever engineered by man had vanished in a power outrage originated from the Mist (the term Cloud wasn’t sill in use). The incident was worthy of headlines in tabloids around the world, but nobody still didn’t seen what was coming.

Common men, preoccupied with banal concerns, saw events as merely happening willy-nilly. The visionary could sense the stirring of distant events long before they crossed the horizon…

However some of the scientists were prepared to drive the last nail into world’s economic coffin, and the Chinese, Russians, Yanks, Argentinean and everyone else were taking pokes at each other. A team of scientists in a few laboratories, using data gleaned by satellites and transmitted in code directly to Huston, were already testing a microbe capable of neutralizing this toxic water molecules. Caught inside the mist, the humans positively heard a rumble.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

Cosmos Induced Climate Change

Cosmos-Induced Climate Change

“Meanwhile cosmos-induced climate change has already turned out to be much more severe than any but a few scientists predicted. Africa’s major coastal cities, from Cairo to Lagos, have been partially or completely flooded, displacing tens of millions of people. China is almost totally inundated. If it wasn’t for billion-dollar flood defenses, the whole Europe would be an archipelago. And so on.

Though the latest rain had yet to come, the sea level had already raised dozens of meters. In the coastal reshaping that resulted, the islands of Java and Sumatra disappeared with part of Southeast Asia to form a great chain of is islands and much of Indonesia had simply vanished. Similarly Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea were being transformed in into a long collar of tiny rocks.

In this unique, temporary geography, there were places where the Asian landmass became a vast sea separated from other parts by some rolling hills which had been mountains only a couple of months earlier.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

Confucius said, Those who say it cannot be done need to get out of the way of the people who are doing it. Photo © : Megan Jorgensen (ElenaB)

Wind and Dust

Wind and Dust

Wind and dust came out of the west like a red wall. Dried plants were shattered. Even the scattered, stately trees were shaken, branches ripped away. People were wrenched from their home, utterly terrified.

The first few raindrops, landing like bullets, heralded an immense downpour. The rain was so heavy it even began to erode the rock-hard surfaces of the ancient termite mounds. There was nothing to absorb the water, no grass to consolidate the loose soil. Within minutes water was running down every dried-out gully and streambed. A great muddy wave came cascading into the quarry. The water seethed around the roots of the trees, turbulent, tinged red by mud.

But the rain dissipated as quickly as it had begun. The clouds cleared, racing deeper into the heart of the continent. The flood quickly subsided, sinking into the parched sand.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George)

The world covered in dust. Photo by Elena

Destruction of Jupiter

Destruction of Jupiter

It was possible to predict radio bursts from Jupiter with better reliability than weather forecasts on Earth, but computing the position of the cosmic cloud. Deep below the atmosphere the weight of the overlying layers of water produced pressures much higher than any found before in the solar system. Pressures so great, that electrons were squeezed of hydrogen atoms, producing a remarkable substance, liquid metallic hydrogen – a physical state that has never been achieved on Earth.

There was some hope that the metal would be a superconductor and stop the cosmic water from advancing toward the Sun. But in the interior of Jupiter, where the pressures were about five million times the atmospheric pressure at the surface of the Earth, the dark sloshing ocean of metallic hydrogen emerged. In the very core of Jupiter a lump of rock and iron, hidden in a pressure vise at the center of the largest planet, exploded.

People on the Earth observed in awe ad Jupiter and its satellites ceased to exist.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George).

Fantasy Dawn. What imaginary sunrise might look like… Image: Copyright © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The Io Satellite

The Io Satellite

The electrical currents in the liquid metal interior of Jupiter might be the source of that enormous impact, the largest so far in the solar system, and of its associated belt of trapped protons and electrons. The charged particles were ejected by the Cloud from the surface of the planet, captured and accelerated by the solar wind and projected back. Vast number of them were trapped far about the cloud and were condemned to bounce from pole to pole until by chance they encountered some high-altitude atmospheric molecules and were removed from the radiation belt.

The Io satellite moved in an orbit close to Jupiter, thus it entered through the midst of this intense radiation, creating millions of cascades of water particles which in turn generated violent bursts of oceans of energy. The immense columns of water influenced as well eruptive processes on the surface of Jupiter. The destruction of the biggest planet begun.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George)

Jupiter destruction Io satellite. A world full of fantasy. As can be seen from the picture, image: Copyright © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Space Gas

Space Gas

The sun, in its endless swimming around the Galaxy, was now passing through a wisp of interstellar water gas, a wisp mighty enough to span light years. Human astronomers had not seen this coming. The water bubble was first found to sail within Mars’ orbit in fact at its nearest to Earth, it came to within less than a quarter of the closest approach of Mars and Earth. It was the vanguard of a mighty bubble blown in the water gas by an ancient supernova explosion, and at its heart was a region where stars were being built.

The new sky was spectacular, full of incredibly nice stars seen through billions of bright water lenses.

Space Gas. Artwork by Elena

We all know that the first few hundred asteroids the astronomers discovered had orbited in their orderly belt between Mars and Jupiter, comfortably far from Earth. These space rocks had been a curiosity, nothing but a theoretical challenge to students of the origins of the solar system. Later, more asteroids were found that actually crossed the orbit of Earth, making them candidates for eventual collision with the planet.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George)

Hierarchy of Universes

Hierarchy of Universes

There exists a strange idea. This conjecture is one of the most haunting and evocative in religion and science. Well, this idea in entirely undemonstrated and it may never be proved. But it stirs the blood.

There is, according to this concept, an infinite hierarchy of universes, so that an elementary particle, such as an electron, in our universe would, if penetrated, reveal itself to be an entire closed universe.

Within this new world, organized into the local equivalent of galaxies, are an immense number of much tinier elementary particles. Every one of them are universes at the next level and son on forever. We deal here with an infinite downward universes within universes, an endless regression. And upward as well. Thus our familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, continents and houses, billiard tables and pretty ladies in red, would be a single elementary particle in the next universe up, the very first step of another infinite regress (or progress, it depends, of course).

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George.)

Our Universe is very strange. Photo by Elena.

Nebula is Visible

Nebula is Visible

The NASA had begun its own analysis of the cloud the moment the nebula had become visible on sensors. Part of this was pure curiosity and part of it a desire to find a way to eliminate any threat the cloud might pose.

The computer told the scientists that the energy field that composed the external shell of the cloud was electromagnetic, but, at the frequencies displayed, should not have been capable of holding the enormous quantities of water gas within it in the presence of the high gravimetric fields created by the cloud’s motion through space. What was even more troubling was that the shell obviously did perform this function more than adequately.

An animated multicolored bird reappearing in the early morning sky. Image: Copyright © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The experts were now being forced to rethink those doubts.

The atmosphere within the giant sphere (more than 3 light-years long) obviously maintained hundreds of thousands of billions of tons of water present within it. Clearly, this water was in gas form, but the mechanism by which the cloud formed this infinite ocean, was unknown.

The men wished there was a way to get a closer look at the phenomenon without venturing out into space.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George.)

Cosmological Mysteries and Beer

Cosmological Mysteries and Beer

Our ancestors imagined a quaint, tidy, small universe. They were eager to understand the world in which the dominant forces were gods like Anu, Shamash or Ea, but had not quite stumbled upon the method.

In ancient times, humans played an important if not the central role. We were intimately bound up with the nature. In everyday speech and custom, the most mundane happening were connected with the grandest cosmic events. Well, even the treatment of toothache with third-rate beer was tied to the deepest cosmological mysteries.

Universe and its mysteries. Illustration by Elena

A charming example is an incantation against the worm which the Assyrians of 1000 B.C. imagined to cause toothaches. The chant begins with the origins of the Universe and ends with the cure for toothache:

After Anu had created the heaven,

After the Heavens had created the earth,

And the Earth had created the rivers,

And the rivers had created the brooks and canals,

And the canals had created the morass and swamps,

And the morass had created the worm.

The Worm went and cried before Shamash, weeping,

His tears flowing before Ea: –

“What will you give me for my food,

What will you give me for my drink?

“I will give you the dried fig

And scented wood, and the apricot.

“What are these to me? The dried fig and the apricot!

Lift me up, and among the teeth

And the gums let me dwell…

So I can devour the blood of the tooth and destroy their strength.

Then I can build a door within their roots.

You must say: “O Worm! May Ea smite thee with the might of his hand!”

Do the following:

Mix second-grade beer and oil together.

Repeat the incantation three times and put the mixture upon the tooth.

(Incantation of Sa-kil-bir, Sumerian & Cthulhu Mythos its translation is unknown).

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George.)