Tuesday 28 May 2019

In The Future On Titan

When the Sun expands, as it does in The Time Machine, the inner planets will be destroyed but the outer satellites, including Titan, which has ice and complex chemistry, will be warmed. Poul Anderson's Twilight World, Epilogue, describes the far future terraforming of Ganymede but could there be another series set in an even further future about intelligent beings that have naturally evolved on Titan and that know nothing of any earlier periods of the Solar System?

Olaf Stapledon's Neptunians, who had re-evolved from animality, learned of earlier Venerian and Terrestrial humanities by mental time travel but let us make the conservative assumption that this means of knowledge is not accessible to our future Titanians!

Poul Anderson wrote that one of the aims of his Polesotechnic League series was to:

"...explore a few of the possible facets of this endlessly marvelous universe..."
-Poul Anderson, AFTERWORD IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 679-680 AT p. 680.

Imagining unusual environments for intelligence must count as part of such a project and, indeed, Anderson imagines life on a neutron star (see the 4th Jump) and in the vacuum near a black hole.

OK: Wells, Stapledon and Anderson in one post and it is nearly midnight. I am out of here.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

We see our Sun beginning to expand and "roast" Earth in the last part of GENESIS and far more so in Anderson's not quite a story "In Memoriam" (which I could call a thought experiment or meditation).

And the strange plasma beings who evolved in high energy and radiation of "Kyrie" was certainly a very unusual environment.

Sean