Hey, another long absence. You can imagine why I might not have been feeling like writing anything the last month. Anything I could have written all March would have been too depressing, even for me. The new war affects all of us, but me more personally, as I have a lot of family in the hot zone, and this conflict touches on issues that I grew up hearing about. All I’ll say now is that I hope this blunder makes all of us reflect on how we approach the rest of the world and on the nature of our alliances, now that we’re feeling the economic effects. (And I say “our” like I or any other regular citizen is really a part of that decision in any meaningful way. Again, hopefully that will change very soon.)
In the meantime, there’s at least one thing my country is doing that I’m pretty happy about, and that’s the Artemis program, the new American push to land on the Moon again, ultimately with the purpose of establishing a base there. Of course, this isn’t totally exploration and science for their own sake — considering the world political situation, it looks more like a race with China, which is also making big plans for its own space program including lunar activity. But that tug of war will probably never end.
A view of Uranus from the surface of its moon Miranda. The planet’s dark rings are usually only visible by their shadow on the upper cloud layer of its atmosphere.
To deal with the fact that I might be living during the end times, I went to Steam last week and got a few games during the latest Steam sale. One of these is less a game and far more a simulator, though, and one of the most impressive simulators around. Space Engine depicts not just the entire solar system in full detail but also the rest of the galaxy and even galaxies beyond our own, in places I’m confident saying we’ll never reach even with the most sci-fi bullshit physics-destroying technology imaginable.
However, I have a problem: the only fear I have that I think you could call a phobia. The first time I used Google Earth many years ago, I got freaked out. I think it has something to do with the combination of having control over the view while looking at photorealistic maps, especially over large bodies of water, and the same applies to planets and other astronomical bodies. It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t feel it, probably in just the same way it’s hard for people with agoraphobia to explain. Just an overwhelming sensation.
Titan, its parent Saturn in the lower left in partial shadow, with a few more inner moons visible in the background. The view from the surface is just a thick orange haze.
While I believe the vast majority of the universe in Space Engine is procedurally generated, that’s fine with me — obviously, you can’t fill out whole galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars entirely with stuff that actually exists. However, that’s part of why I’m staying here in the solar system right now, with the worlds I know and that I hope we’ll know more about soon. Titan above in the Saturnian system and Europa in the Jovian are both the targets of future probes given their unique properties that might suggest life or even a future for humanity even past Mars. In fact, a few of these sites have serious advantages over Mars, though this is all entirely speculative for now. Extreme temperatures (usually on the cold side, but see Venus), radiation, and low gravity are all serious problems for any future human ventures to live in space full-time. Which is partly why I’m happy about the Artemis program: if you’re going to try to build a city on Mars, several months from Earth, you may as well start with training wheels on just a few days away on the Moon.
Daytime on Europa. Standing on the surrealistically flat surface of this ice ball even in a pressure suit would kill you in hours from the intensity of Jupiter’s magnetic belt. All the potentially good stuff in Europa is under its ice shell in its theorized global water ocean.
As I continued flying around the solar system, I started to lose that irritating fear. Not wholly: Jupiter and Saturn in particular are still too much for me to get close enough to fly around in their cloud layers, so I can’t say how accurately their upper atmospheres are depicted, and I haven’t returned to Earth yet. But now I can at least stand on planets and moons I can never hope to visit during my life. Space Engine is a truly impressive simulation, a must-own next to whichever Universe Sandbox sequel those guys are on — play Space Engine for the views and Universe Sandbox for the physics as I understand it. As a kid who really wanted to be an astronaut and an adult who still thinks about space quite a bit, it helps.
One more view, this time from Triton, the one moon of Neptune that isn’t shaped like a potato. Triton is in a wonky orbit counter to all Neptune’s other moons, a sign it’s actually a captured planet, and astronomers believe it will move close enough to Neptune in a few billion years that it will be torn apart and form a serious Saturn-style ring system. It’s a nice view in the meantime, though.
All this brings me to the other reason I’ve been away: I’ve started a novel. For the very first time, I’m writing a story that feels living after years of off-and-on horrendously failed attempts. Don’t know how good it will be, but I feel pretty determined to get this shit done, so if you want to read some science fiction about variously deluded, depressed, angry, and drunk people, stick around. Now I just need a good pen name, unless I decide to just lay it all out here after 13 years. Probably not, but it’s nothing personal.
P.S. more shots from Space Engine. I don’t have anything else to write about right now.
Jupiter from Io, its innermost major moon. Europa is totally unlivable unless you somehow drill through that ice — water and ice make for excellent shielding for radiation. Io is way more fucked for human habitation, essentially impossible given an even worse radiation situation. Combine that with Io’s many active volcanoes and you have maybe the worst piece of real estate in the entire solar system, worst meaning you die within hours at the very longest.
Shame, because this is a nice view of Jupiter, and standing here on the surface of a moon (or let’s call these moons what they really are, planets in their own rights) speeding up time and watching it going through its cycles, crescent to full, helped get me past that astrophobia or whatever the hell it is. Even as a crescent, the king of planets is recognizable by the Great Red Spot. This is also a good place to note that in most of these cases, just as with our own Moon, these satellites are tidally locked to their planets, a function of their low densities and masses relative to their parents. Just imagine these planets hanging in the same place in these respective skies forever.
A lot further out, here’s Callisto, the outermost major moon of the fifth planet. Callisto sits far enough outside Jupiter’s magnetic belt that radiation isn’t much of a problem. This seems like the place to be if we ever get out this far, but when Mars is still unimaginably far off in terms of human visitation that’s a long shot. Maybe in a couple more centuries if we don’t explode ourselves.
I’ve been sticking to the outer system lately. There’s plenty interesting about the inner system, where we live, but there’s a lot more crazy shit scientifically speaking beyond the asteroid belt in my opinion. And I couldn’t write this post properly without featuring Saturn’s ring system, seen here from the surface of Mimas, the famous “Death Star moon” and innermost major moon of the planet.
Saturn’s rings are razor-thin for their vast size and are kept in place partly by several inner minor moons, a few of which you can see in the above screenshot, the points of light at the outer edge of the rings. These moons aren’t large enough to be rounded under their own gravity and look variously like giant potatoes and dumplings.
Finally, to repeat a dumb joke: the Sun shining on Uranus, captured here in crescent form from its closest satellite Cordelia, one of the seventh planet’s many moons named after Shakespeare characters, though I don’t remember this one. Out here, the Sun radiates barely any of the light or warmth we get on Earth — it’s just a very bright star nearby.
I guess I’ve gotten over my phobia well enough by now. I’ll never be out here anyway, not unless there’s an afterlife that features some kind of soul universe exploration mode. But I doubt I’d ever be able to handle that kind of intensity.
Everything is bad for you 