"How we conceive of distant worlds is important. After all, we want to be scientifically accurate even as we deal with subjects that fire the public imagination. Thinking about planets in the habitable zones of other suns invariably makes us think of ‘Earth 2.0' and the prospect of green and blue planets filled with life. But each situation will be different, which is part of the great fascination of this quest. Billions and billions of worlds, each of them sui generis.
Science fiction has offered us glimpses of many worlds tantalizingly like the Earth but in some major respect different. Here, for example, is a prose description of a planet circling the star 82 Eridani, as envisioned by Stephen Baxter in his 2011 novel Ark. We are looking at it from the starship that has taken a band of colonists/refugees from a drowning Earth to what could be their new home:
A big strip of land stretching north to south across the equator was "the Belt," a kind of elderly Norway with deep-cut fjords incising thousands of kilometers of coastline. The northern half of the Belt was currently ice-free, but its southern half, stretching into the realm of shadow, was icebound, and snow patches reached as far north as the equator. Sprawling across a good portion of the eastern hemisphere was the roughly circular continent they called "the Frisbee," a mass of rust red broken by the intense blue of lakes and lined by eroded mountains. Its center was dominated by a huge structure, a mountain with a base hundreds of kilometers across, and a fractured caldera at the top. The mount was so like Olympus Mons on Mars that giving it the same name had been unavoidable, and it so dominated the overall profile of the continent, giving it an immense but shallow bulge, that the nickname "Frisbee" was a good fit. Then, to the west of the Belt, an archipelago sprawled, a widespread group of islands, some as large as Britain or New Zealand, that they called "the Scatter." There was one more continent at the south pole, currently plunged in darkness and buried under hundreds of meters of winter snow, called "the Cap." The world ocean itself had no name yet; the seas could be named when they were ready to go sailing on them…"
Full article here.
centauri-dreams.org
Amicalement
Armand
struggles to complete his SISI truck force.
