Bewilderment

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THAT NIGHT WE WENT TO FALASHA, a planet so dark we were lucky to find it. It wandered in empty space, an orphan without a sun. It had its own star once, but got ejected during its home system’s troubled youth. “When I was in school, no one even mentioned them,” I told him. “Now we think rogue planets might even outnumber stars.”

We watched Falasha drift through interstellar emptiness, in timeless night and temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero.

Why did we come here, Dad? It’s the deadest place in the universe.

“That’s what science thought, too, when I was your age.”

Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.

I pointed out the thick greenhouse atmosphere and the hot, radiating core. I showed him how the tidal friction from a large moon bent and pinched the planet, further warming it. We touched down on Falasha’s surface. Nice! my excited son said.

“Above the melting point of water.”

In the middle of empty space! But no sun. No plants. No photosynthesis. No nothing.

“Life can eat all kinds of things,” I reminded him. “And only one of those is light.”

We went to the bottom of Falasha’s oceans, into their volcanic seams. We aimed our headlamps into the deepest trenches, and he gasped. Creatures everywhere: white crabs and clams, purple tube worms and living draperies. Everything fed on the heat and chemistry oozing from hydrothermal vents.

He couldn’t get enough. He watched as microbes and worms and crustaceans learned new tricks, fed on themselves, and spread their nutrients across seafloors into the surrounding waters. Whole periods went by, eras, even eons. The oceans of Falasha filled with forms, all kinds of outrageous designs, swimming and evading and outmaneuvering.

“We should call it a day,” I said.

But he wanted to keep watching. The vents spewed and cooled. The currents of the waters shifted. Small upheavals and local catastrophes favored the cagey. Sessile barnacles turned into free swimmers, and swimmers developed the power to predict. Pilgrim adventurers colonized new places.

My son was hypnotized. What will happen in a billion more years?

“We’ll have to come back and see.”

We rose from the pitch-black planet. It shrank beneath us, and in no time it was invisible again.

How on Earth did we ever discover this place?

And that’s where the story turned surreal. A lineage of slow, weak, naked, awkward creatures on a far luckier planet had lasted through several near-extinctions and held on long enough to discover that gravity bent light, everywhere in the universe. For no good reason and at insane expense, we’d built an instrument able to see the tiniest bend in starlight made by this small body, from scores of light-years away.

Get out, my son said. You’re making that up.

And we were, we Earthlings. Making it up as we went along, then proving it for all the universe to see.