shrunken aquamarine oceans;
sharp brown blots of continents;
a few olive clouds;
dust storms;
no ice or snow;
livid, gleaming salt beds;
a day as long as a month;
core radioactives long spent;
no crustal movements;
dead seas, crusted wastes and brine marshes;
much atmosphere lost to heat and solar wind;
no longer a strong magnetic field;
greenhouse effect;
soaring temperatures;
sparse vegetation;
bitterly cold nights and inferno days;
ruined cities;
a regular radio signal from the surface;
a solar-powered broadcasting satellite, pitted by micrometeoroids;
no sign of current inhabitants.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And "In Memoriam," which is a combination of both a story and an essay, we see a chilling description of the scientifically likely and remote fate of our Earth. And a lot like what we see on Pandora.
Alerion, in THE STAR FOX, is plainly on the same path, albeit it's still a habitable planet.
Sean
Anderson does a good job on planetary ecologies, too.
Back when Darwin was coming up with evolution through natural selection, it was often regarded as an alternative to "catastrophism" -- evolution being a slow random process proceeding smoothly through time, rather than by abrupt outside interventions.
It turns out that Darwinian evolution works in a framework that often includes catastrophe -- the dinosaur-killer asteroid, for example, came fairly close to wiping out life on earth. Photosynthesis shut down for some time, there was runaway warming after that, and for thousands of years post-impact the vegetation was dominated by things like fungi and ferns.
Likewise, at one point earlier Earth froze right down to the equator, "Snowball Earth". This may have happened more than once.
Venus started out as a near-twin of Earth, with water oceans and a temperature possibly cooler than Earth today -- the sun gave less radiated energy then, and there was a complex balance between sunlight, reflective clouds. It may have had life.
What seems to have happened is a really massive set of shield volcanoes, like the Deccan Traps or the similar formations in Siberia, but bigger. The carbon dioxide output went up, the oceans boiled and further heated the planet, and it went -- almost literally -- to Hell.
Poul catches this combination of catastrophe and life's adaptability very well; the way it's lower, less specialized forms which survive the mass extinctions, for example.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Catastrophes plus Darwinian selection adaptability was how life was formed and shaped on Earth? I can buy that! And all the more REASON for mankind to get off this rock and begin colonizing other worlds.
As for Venus, Poul Anderson early's story "The Big Rain" gives us thoughts on how we might terraform and colonize that planet. And Jerry Pournelle's essay "The Big Rain" (in A STEP FARTHER OUT) goes into detail on how we might terraform that all too hellish planet.
Sean
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