Starry eyed

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/08/2016 (2793 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Outside the cities, outside an urban shawl of electrified light, the jewel of the Prairies is a canopy of star-spattered night.

For powerful telescopes, the ideal observation point for the cosmos is the top of a mountain, where the atmosphere exerts less distortion on incoming starlight. For the human eye, I think, the Prairies are just as fine: the heavens spread out unimpeded between horizons, a nightly dance enacted in a vast open sky.

To think, our next great hope for a vacation home was hanging there the whole time.

The news broke on Wednesday, to much excitement among astronomers. An international team of scientists confirmed there is a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our own. Much about the planet is unknown, except this: it could exist in a “habitable zone,” which is to say, there could be liquid water.

Other than that possibility, Proxima Centauri B (it may need a more jazzy nickname in the future) is no stand-in for Earth. Its year lasts just over 11 of our days, as it whips around a looming red sun. The planet may be tidally locked: one side is stalled in a perpetual sunset, the other in a 4.85-billion-year dark.

Still, the discovery is thrilling. “No one will ever find a closer alien world than this,” science journalist Rebecca Boyle wrote, in a richly detailed piece for The Atlantic. “This is it… In a way, the first discovery of a possibly habitable planet in our backyard is also a final discovery. In the hunt for our cosmic neighbours, this planet is as good as it gets.”

Sometimes you walk down your street and, with a jolt, realize you’ve never really seen the apartment on the corner; you’ve walked past it countless times, but its shape never really registered. This is sort of like that, amplified by the fact that the street in this case is 40 trillion kilometres long, and it takes light over four years to clear it.

Already, there are plans to send probes. The first of them will weigh about a gram, and could venture forth by the middle of the century. A child born today might live to see images of the planet’s surface. If it should prove inviting, their descendants — in an uncertain future time — might puzzle out how we could reach it ourselves.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb was blunt. A habitable planet around Proxima Centauri, he told The Associated Press, would be “the most natural location to where our civilization could aspire to move after the sun will die, five billion years from now.”

This view gives me pause, partly because it seems so optimistic. So far, homo sapiens has existed about 200,000 years, a blip of planetary time. In just the last century, we’ve proven uniquely adept at discovering innovative new ways of devouring our own life-support systems; we’ve stockpiled weapons capable of flatly destroying them.

At this rate, a reasonable projection is that our civilization won’t live long enough to worry about how to decamp from its dying star. Not to sound dark, it’s just that if any species lasts long enough to orchestrate a planetary evacuation, it probably won’t be our own. (Personally, I’d put my bets on the crows: they’re keeping an eye on us.)

Still, the dream of the cosmos hangs large in the night. It’s familiar. The new dream of Proxima Centauri B is one of open potential. It is, more specifically, a dream about terra nullius, nobody’s territory. The uninhabited land, open and ready, on which to stake claims and amass resources that are elsewhere exhausted.

It’s the same dream that moved colonial boats across Earth’s oceans, cutting a notably exclusive definition of what defines a “civilization.” That principle generally bestowed enormous wealth on the exploring nations, at the expense of those who had lived on the land for untold generations. We still live with its effects.

If there is life on Proxima Centauri B — even just bacterial clusters working their own slow journey forward — and if they do ever receive visitors from the next star down the street, well, I wish them the best. And I hope humans prove to be better guests in this far-distant future than we have throughout our very recent past.

Still, if there is a chance that the planet is habitable, there is also a chance it is uninhabited. There’s a chance that the primordial soup from which life grew on Earth never got bubbling on our intriguing neighbour. If human boots ever touch down there, millennia from now, perhaps they will be the first things to intentionally move on its surface.

What will come then? What will come after? Will we vow to do better by our new home than we did on our own? Will we have learned, by then, that a habitable planet itself is a precious and fragile vessel? So far, a thousand photos and videos of a great blue gem hanging lonely in space do not seem to have fully imparted this lesson.

To reach the stars, we will need time. To get that time, we will need to learn to be gentler. To respect the dream of Proxima Centauri B, perhaps we must start by getting our own house in order. It’s the only one we’ve got for now, and for the most certain parts of our future.

Out on the Prairies, outside the city light, imagination plays out galactic adventures against the night sky. Once the mind has had time to wander, the smell of the grass and the dampness in the soil calls it back.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca