Bewilderment

-

THEY SHARE A LOT, ASTRONOMY AND CHILDHOOD. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.

For a dozen years, my job made me feel like a child. I sat behind the computer in my office looking at data sets from telescopes and toying with formulas that could describe them. I roamed the halls in search of minds who might want to come out and play. I lay in bed with a canary-yellow legal pad and a black fine liner, re-creating the journeys to Cygnus A or through the Large Magellanic Cloud or around the Tadpole Galaxy, trips I’d once made in pulp novels. This time around, none of the indigenous inhabitants spoke English or practiced telepathy or floated parasitically through the frozen vacuum or linked together in hive minds to enact their master plans. All they did was metabolize and respire. But in my infant discipline, that was magic enough.

I made worlds by the thousands. I simulated their surfaces and cores and living atmospheres. I surveyed the ratios of telltale gases that might accumulate, depending on a planet’s evolving inhabitants. I tweaked each simulation to match plausible metabolic scenarios, then incubated the parameters for hours on a supercomputer. Out popped Gaian melodies, unfolding in time. The result was a catalog of ecosystems and the biosignatures that would reveal them. When the space-borne telescope that all my models waited for launched at last, we’d already have spectral fingerprints on file to match to any imaginable perpetrator of the crime of life.

Some of my colleagues thought I was wasting my time. What’s the use of simulating so many worlds, many of which might not even exist? What’s the use of preparing targets beyond the ability of current instruments to detect? To which I always answered: What’s the use of childhood? I was sure that the Earthlike Planet Seeker that hundreds of colleagues and I lobbied for would come along before the end of the decade and seed my models with real data. And from those seeds, the wildest conclusions would grow.

Much of existence presents itself in one of three flavors: none, one, or infinite. One-offs were everywhere, at every step of the story. We knew of only one kind of life, arising once on one world, in one liquid medium, using one form of energy storage and one genetic code. But my worlds didn’t need to be like Earth. Their versions of life didn’t require surface water or Goldilocks zones or even carbon for their core element. I tried to free myself from bias and assume nothing, the way a child worked, as if our single instance proved the possibilities were endless.

I made hot planets with massive wet atmospheres where life lived in the plumes of aerosol geysers. I blanketed rogue planets under thick layers of greenhouse gases and filled them with creatures who survived by joining hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia. I sank rock-dwelling endoliths in deep fissures and gave them carbon monoxide to metabolize. I made worlds of liquid methane where biofilms feasted on hydrogen sulfide that rained down in banquets from the toxic skies.

And all my simulated atmospheres waited for the day when the long-gestated, long-delayed space-borne telescopes would lift off and come online, blowing our little one-off Rare Earth wide open. That day would be for our species like the one when the eye doctor fitted my vain wife with her first pair of long-overdue glasses, ones that made her shout out loud with joy at being able to see her child from all the way across a room.