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.Then tragedy struck.I still cannot understand it.It is a thingutterly beyond my comprehension.I do not believe it can be of thisuniverse, yet this universe, by definition, constitutes all that there is.The Monolith is a transcendent mystery, which would be wonderful ifit had involved anybody s brood other than my own.This is what happened.Over many tedious circadian cycles I hadassembled a most marvellous bed of decaying organics, ready for theimplantation phase of my squablets nurture.I painstakingly scrapedaway the patches of rampant polyliths that disfigured the serenity of thelocale.Though I say it myself (and I am not one for self-aggrandisement) it was the most perfect carrion-midden ever preparedby a doting caretaker in the history of the universe.And then barelya cycle before implantation was due disaster struck.I was rearrangingfronds of putrescent geloids to bring my masterwork even closer to thepinnacle of protectiveness when without warning, with a reality thatwas total and brutal something indescribably awful caused the entireslush-marsh to shudder.Then some ghastly thing poked up from themarsh, right through the middle of my carrion-midden, ruining mylife s work.At first, I thought it some rapidly growing species ofpolylith.But as the sediment settled and the sheer weirdness of thething began to impress itself on my vision, I saw that it was all of onepiece not poly, but mono.The Monolith is still there.Occasionally, parts of it move.What itis, I do not know.Perhaps its most inexplicable feature is its markings,which scholars braver than I have since delineated by the light of theirown protuberances.I record them here for your enlightenment, in thehope that someone cleverer than I might decipher their meaning:33EXPEDITIONEUROPANASA WHAT DOES A MARTIAN LOOK LIKE?SF aficionados will understand immediately what was going on in thissad but instructive story.Anyone who has not grown up with the genremay find it all a bit puzzling, and at least some of our friends andacquaintances have confessed that they didn t have the foggiest ideawhat it was about.That s understandable, and not our fault: if you hadno idea what a six-gun or a rustler was, you d have troubleunderstanding a cowboy story.It is the last three words that give the game away.Up to that point,even a hardened SF fan would still be puzzled by the strange setting, anunbounded but finite world sandwiched between molten rock aboveand ice below.It would, perhaps, remind them of one of Farmer spocket universes.But NASA EUROPA EXPEDITION reveals all.Why is it upside down? We re coming to that.Of course, it only gives the game away if you have the right item inyour personal scientific database.Hard SF is constructed on thecommon ground of such items, and its devotees file them away in theirheads in the same way that a fan of westerns files away Colt 45,branding-iron, and saloon.This particular database item concernsEuropa, one of Jupiter s four main satellites.That giant world has atleast 38 others, at the most recent count, but when Galileo was gazingthrough his telescope he could see only four: Io, Europa, Ganymede,and Callisto.When NASA s Voyager probes passed through the Joviansystem in 1979, humanity was treated to some of the most spectacularimages of distant worlds that it had ever seen.Io was a planet ofsulphur, with dozens of active volcanoes, looking especially in colour-enhanced photographs like a huge pizza.Europa was an enigmaticpale blue ball upon which the deity had doodled millions of red-brownlines, some thick, some thin.Ganymede was dominated by theconcentric rings of a gigantic, ancient impact.And Callisto was darkand brooding, with craters everywhere, like our own Moon yetdifferent.Europa, it quickly became clear, has a surface made of ice.Ordinaryice, frozen water, not something more exotic like dry ice, frozen carbondioxide.And it looks like it s relatively thin ice, which has cracked andshifted over the aeons.It may be only a few miles thick, it may be 60miles (100km) thick, but compared to Europa s diameter it s prettythin.The brownish-red doodles are cracks in the ice where material of34 THE INVISIBLE BOOKa different colour has welled up.Ice is exciting because it signals thepresence of water, which (the natural default assumption of mostscientists) is essential for life.On the other hand, it occurs here in frozenform, which (again, according to conventional wisdom) is not at allsuitable for life.And ice was what everyone expected, because previousEarth-based observations made it likely, and because ice is a prettycommon substance.Chemically, all you need to make ice is hydrogen which is by far the most common element in the universe, amountingto about 94 per cent of all matter and oxygen, which makes up about0.1 per cent.Physically, what you need is cold, and there s plenty of thatgoing if you don t get too close to stars.So Europa, Ganymede, andCallisto seemed to be ordinary, typical satellites, with very little goingfor them in terms of astrobiological interest.Since 1995, though, when the Galileo spacecraft visited the Joviansystem, there has been a dramatic shift in opinion about Europa as apotential abode for life.The possibility was first raised about 1983, butthe habitable zone enthusiasts pooh-poohed it.This was, perhaps, thefirst specific scientific discovery to reveal the ever-widening gapbetween astrobiology and xenoscience [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Then tragedy struck.I still cannot understand it.It is a thingutterly beyond my comprehension.I do not believe it can be of thisuniverse, yet this universe, by definition, constitutes all that there is.The Monolith is a transcendent mystery, which would be wonderful ifit had involved anybody s brood other than my own.This is what happened.Over many tedious circadian cycles I hadassembled a most marvellous bed of decaying organics, ready for theimplantation phase of my squablets nurture.I painstakingly scrapedaway the patches of rampant polyliths that disfigured the serenity of thelocale.Though I say it myself (and I am not one for self-aggrandisement) it was the most perfect carrion-midden ever preparedby a doting caretaker in the history of the universe.And then barelya cycle before implantation was due disaster struck.I was rearrangingfronds of putrescent geloids to bring my masterwork even closer to thepinnacle of protectiveness when without warning, with a reality thatwas total and brutal something indescribably awful caused the entireslush-marsh to shudder.Then some ghastly thing poked up from themarsh, right through the middle of my carrion-midden, ruining mylife s work.At first, I thought it some rapidly growing species ofpolylith.But as the sediment settled and the sheer weirdness of thething began to impress itself on my vision, I saw that it was all of onepiece not poly, but mono.The Monolith is still there.Occasionally, parts of it move.What itis, I do not know.Perhaps its most inexplicable feature is its markings,which scholars braver than I have since delineated by the light of theirown protuberances.I record them here for your enlightenment, in thehope that someone cleverer than I might decipher their meaning:33EXPEDITIONEUROPANASA WHAT DOES A MARTIAN LOOK LIKE?SF aficionados will understand immediately what was going on in thissad but instructive story.Anyone who has not grown up with the genremay find it all a bit puzzling, and at least some of our friends andacquaintances have confessed that they didn t have the foggiest ideawhat it was about.That s understandable, and not our fault: if you hadno idea what a six-gun or a rustler was, you d have troubleunderstanding a cowboy story.It is the last three words that give the game away.Up to that point,even a hardened SF fan would still be puzzled by the strange setting, anunbounded but finite world sandwiched between molten rock aboveand ice below.It would, perhaps, remind them of one of Farmer spocket universes.But NASA EUROPA EXPEDITION reveals all.Why is it upside down? We re coming to that.Of course, it only gives the game away if you have the right item inyour personal scientific database.Hard SF is constructed on thecommon ground of such items, and its devotees file them away in theirheads in the same way that a fan of westerns files away Colt 45,branding-iron, and saloon.This particular database item concernsEuropa, one of Jupiter s four main satellites.That giant world has atleast 38 others, at the most recent count, but when Galileo was gazingthrough his telescope he could see only four: Io, Europa, Ganymede,and Callisto.When NASA s Voyager probes passed through the Joviansystem in 1979, humanity was treated to some of the most spectacularimages of distant worlds that it had ever seen.Io was a planet ofsulphur, with dozens of active volcanoes, looking especially in colour-enhanced photographs like a huge pizza.Europa was an enigmaticpale blue ball upon which the deity had doodled millions of red-brownlines, some thick, some thin.Ganymede was dominated by theconcentric rings of a gigantic, ancient impact.And Callisto was darkand brooding, with craters everywhere, like our own Moon yetdifferent.Europa, it quickly became clear, has a surface made of ice.Ordinaryice, frozen water, not something more exotic like dry ice, frozen carbondioxide.And it looks like it s relatively thin ice, which has cracked andshifted over the aeons.It may be only a few miles thick, it may be 60miles (100km) thick, but compared to Europa s diameter it s prettythin.The brownish-red doodles are cracks in the ice where material of34 THE INVISIBLE BOOKa different colour has welled up.Ice is exciting because it signals thepresence of water, which (the natural default assumption of mostscientists) is essential for life.On the other hand, it occurs here in frozenform, which (again, according to conventional wisdom) is not at allsuitable for life.And ice was what everyone expected, because previousEarth-based observations made it likely, and because ice is a prettycommon substance.Chemically, all you need to make ice is hydrogen which is by far the most common element in the universe, amountingto about 94 per cent of all matter and oxygen, which makes up about0.1 per cent.Physically, what you need is cold, and there s plenty of thatgoing if you don t get too close to stars.So Europa, Ganymede, andCallisto seemed to be ordinary, typical satellites, with very little goingfor them in terms of astrobiological interest.Since 1995, though, when the Galileo spacecraft visited the Joviansystem, there has been a dramatic shift in opinion about Europa as apotential abode for life.The possibility was first raised about 1983, butthe habitable zone enthusiasts pooh-poohed it.This was, perhaps, thefirst specific scientific discovery to reveal the ever-widening gapbetween astrobiology and xenoscience [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]