Give this Wikipedian a Cookie.

One of my Top Ten Favorite Wikipedia Articles is "Hypothetical types of biochemistry". While I do think that the fact that our ecosystem is based on carbon, water, and oxygen gas is pretty strong evidence that life elsewhere in the universe will be similar, I do not think it wise to treat this as a guarantee.

I've heard the term "silicon-based life" brought up before, and I've seen aliens that require methane and/or ammonia in sci-fi before.

On that last note...


"Ammonia World" by Ittiz - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ammonia_World.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Ammonia_World.jpg

This picture is half the reason why this is one of my favorite Wikipedia articles. LOOK AT IT. It looks like Earth, only palette-swapped. Now I'm not going to just say that when you write your sci-fi planets you should palette-swap and call it a day; if you watched NatGeo's Extraterrestrial, which I linked to in my previous post, recall that both Aurelia and Blue Moon were predominantly blue planets like our own. But this guy/gal gives a clear and concise rationale for why it looks the way it does if you scroll down to read the image description:

-Dissolved alkali metals producing rust-brown oceans
-Oxides of nitrogen producing a reddish-orange atmosphere.
-Colder climate means the plants are black to absorb more light (an idea that's had some scientific evidence for a number of years now).

This is exactly the kind of thing I've been talking about. A world where life thrives but profoundly different than our own, at least in appearance. This is a world I can believe could exist. According to the Wikipedia article, ammonia is liquid "between −78 °C (195 K) and −33 °C (240 K)". That's a pretty narrow range- but that's just at standard Earth atmospheric pressure. Increase the pressure to 60 atmospheres, and "ammonia melts at −77 °C (196 K) and boils at 98 °C (371 K)". That's a pretty wide range. Maybe then the plants wouldn't have to be black.

I'd love to don a spacesuit and visit a world like this, and see how its ecosystem has thrived in an ammonia-rich environment.

So Ittiz, whoever you are, if you're reading this, I salute you and your creativity mixed with attention to scientific detail.

(A planet like this needs a good name though. Unfortunately I can't think of one appropriate to ammonia oceans and black plants.)

Put the Science into Science Fiction.

I am a geek.

I have identified myself as a geek, a nerd, since middle school. In high school I devoured Star Wars novels. In college I loved Star Trek.

One thing I've always had a particular fascination with, is the setting of sci-fi.


Image source: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/image/42

Alien planets.

In Star Wars I saw a desert planet, a jungle moon of a massive red gas giant, an ice planet, a forest moon. The idea of a galaxy full of planets to explore gripped me and has never let go.

But over time, something began to get my attention.

In sci-fi, I wasn't quite exploring new worlds. I was seeing the same worlds, over and over again. A desert planet. An ice planet. A water planet. An Earth-like planet. Over and over again.

I certainly understand why it's done. Special effects cost money. It's easier to film in New Mexico, or Norway, or British Columbia, than to spend months designing a weird planet, rendering it in CGI, then having the actors...act...in front of a greenscreen. All for the background, which the audience may or may not be paying attention to. Many sci-fi novels aren't much better. In a lot of those, you're lucky if the environment of a planet gets described at all, and when they do, they're often those same planets we've visited time and time again.

Now let's be clear: I love my sci-fi. But I'm not such a rabid fanboy that I will argue to the death with anybody who says anything negative at all about Star Wars. You can be passionate about something and still acknowledge its flaws, and wish those flaws could be improved upon. And I do wish.

But occasionally, I get my wish.

Sometimes writers go that extra mile and build a world the likes of which we've never seen. And it is awesome.

Why is this such a big deal?

Because we're finding these worlds in real life. We're finding hundreds of planets around other stars. Don't believe me? Hop over here and take a look. I've been visiting NASA's PlanetQuest site for about a decade, and it's been a truly unique experience watching the number of planets we know about grow over the years, thanks in large part to the Kepler mission.




Image source: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/image/124

I'm not just interested in sci-fi planets. I'm interested in the real ones. Or, to put it another way,

If/when we find life on another planet, what will it be like?!

Probably not like British Columbia. It could be, but with all the species diversity on our own planet, I find it rather ridiculous to assume that alien life forms will resemble Earth life forms more than superficially. They could have green plants, and they could even have trees, but we shouldn't take that as a given.

This isn't some nerds-only "wouldn't it be cool if?" scenario. This is a question that may very well be answered, perhaps, God willing, even in our lifetime.

But I can't wait. I have to speculate. And sci-fi provides a lot of that. but sometimes not enough. That's why I'm here. To talk about the truly alien worlds in sci-fi.

To get into the mindset, I'm going to recommend two links.

First, watch this. I would be willing to bet National Geographic will provide you two planets that are just as fascinating (perhaps more so), than all the combined worlds in your favorite sci-fi franchise. If I'm wrong, I want to hear about this franchise!

The other is this. Pull up the Locations tab and just peruse the Star Wars Databank for a while. After bashing Star Wars in the first paragraphs (which I'm sure have gone viral by now...) I feel obligated to make it up to the movies that, along with Legos and the Nintendo Game Boy, shaped my childhood so much. I'll come back to Star Wars some other time; I've given you enough to absorb for now!

Enjoy!