Living on Rogue Planets

Most planets are gravity-bound to a star. But there are many that are not. Known as rogue planets, or free-floating planets, they inhabit the region's between the stars, bound only to the gravity of the galaxy as a whole. Such worlds are dark and cold, and it would seem at first thought that they would be unsuitable as a destination for colonisation.

But indigenous life could evolve even there, which means that humans could survive there, too.

A rogue, or free-floating, planet with a small moon

Rogue planets could be of any type, from gas giants to small Earth-sized world's of Rock and ice, and it would be those smaller planets that would be of most interest. If a thick enough layer of water ice were present, a subsurface ocean, like those found on some of the moon's of Jupiter and Saturn, would be a strong possibility, kept warm by geothermal vents in the rocky core. The nutrients flushed out could provide a stable environment suitable for simple life to form. And it could provide an environment to sustain and feed a human colony.

A view of a nebula from the surface of a rogue planet

Another type of rogue world, blanketed in a thick hydrogen atmosphere, could also be suitable for colonisation. In such a cold environment such an atmosphere could be sustained on a relatively small rocky planet, and the insulating effect of the gas would keep the surface temperature above the freezing point of water. This would allow lakes and oceans to form. If the planet remained in this state for long enough it is entirely possible for life to evolve, once again fed by the nutrients of volcanic activity from the core.

Of course, such a thick atmosphere would create surface pressures that would be difficult for human colonists to deal with, and the perpetual darkness would present it's own issues. Power generation would need to nuclear, and eventually geothermal. There would be psychological issues, too. Humans evolved in a sun-drenched environment. Such an environment could be simulated, though, and the experience would be no different to that experienced on a generation ship on its centuries-long voyage between stars.

Colonists arrive on a hydrogen 'blanketed' rogue planet

Now that we've established that colonisation is possible on such worlds,  another question arises: why would we want to do it? Such dark, cold and remote planets seem to offer little that is desirable as a place to live. They seem positively undesirable.

But when we consider them with regards to the survival of our species such remoteness becomes highly desirable indeed. And this is why:

• Rogue planets are generally a light-year or more away from the nearest stars, greatly reducing the chances of being hit by lethal solar events.
• Without the debris of rock and ice associated with solar systems, the risk of a catastrophic impact is almost completely removed.
• An advanced and predatory extra-terrestrial civilisation is more likely to overlook, or even not notice, such planets, offering humans a higher chance of surviving should such a civilisation ever become aware of our existence on Earth.

Intelligent extra-terrestrials examining data on their latest discovery: Earth...

Transporting a colony to a rogue planet is the main hurdle to overcome. It would be hard to justify sending a large ship of colonists that would then have to decelerate deep in interstellar space and become trapped in the gravity well of such a planet. But when large generation ships do eventually leave to colonise worlds around other stars, it would be relatively easy to incorporate smaller ships into the design that would be despatched enroute. With just a couple of hundred carefully chosen occupants a viable colony could be established.

Such colonies, as hard as they probably would be to build, may well become the most sustainable and successful, having overcome some of the most extreme challenges possible.

Indeed, such colonies, and the skills that they would learn, may well be the only way to ensure the continuation of our species beyond the general heat death of the universe.

Nuclear Propulsion - Why Aren't We Using It?

We need to establish a permanent human presence beyond Earth. But it's not easy with the expense and slow nature of our current space flight capabilities using chemical rockets, and of course their poor payload capabilities. But there is a method of propulsion that we could develop with today's technology, one that has the strong potential to allow us to colonise our solar system in decades rather than centuries. That is, of course, nuclear propulsion.

Why has it not already been developed?

The idea of using atomic bombs as a means of propelling spacecraft is an old one, first put forward in 1946 by Stanislaw Ulam. He proposed using small nuclear explosions to accelerate a spaceship, an idea that underwent serious study in the late 1950s under the name of Project Orion. It's a remarkably simple idea: a rapid series of detonations behind a protective pusher plate would accelerate the spacecraft, with shock absorbers evening out the acceleration effect on the crew.

Design for a modern Project Orion spacecraft, with a close-up of the crew section

If one-gee acceleration was achieve the crew would experience normal Earth gravity. Ideally, such acceleration would be maintained until the mid point of the journey, after which the spacecraft would be turned and decelerated at the same rate.  This would provide the equivalent of normal gravity for the crew for the entire trip, eliminating the negative health effects of zero gravity.

Such constant acceleration would make interplanetary travel within our solar-system incredibly swift. When Mars is at its closest point to Earth, only 65 million miles away, it would take just two days for the acceleration and deceleration phases at one gee. For Jupiter and Pluto it would take about 6 and 11 days respectively. Those are phenomenally short journey times, all quite achievable with technology available to us now.

A Project Orion spacecraft leaving Earth orbit, and arriving at Mars two days later

The use of such a large amount of nuclear detonations means that launching from the surface of a planet is not feasible - the radioactive fallout produced would be unacceptable in all locations, and the electromagnetic pulses would damage sensitive electronics in line of sight with the launch. Such a spacecraft would have to be constructed in orbit and their nuclear detonation drive activated only when a safe distance from Earth had been achieved.

Project Orion had such incredible potential, but the political will was not there, mainly due to concerns about fallout, and that, incredibly, no one in the US government at the time could see a point to having such a massive launch capability. The project died in the early 1960s, with the US government no doubt wanting to put all it's investment into getting a man on the Moon. To have such an incredible lack of vision is quite astounding.

That was not the last of such projects.  A decade later the British Interplanetary Society conducted a study under the name of Project Daedalus. The propulsion system studied was a fusion rocket, which would detonate hundreds of pellets of a deuterium/helium-3 mix.  Helium-3 is rare on Earth, but fortunately it is relatively abundant on the Moon making that location the ideal one for constructing and launching such a vehicle.

A Project Daedalus two-stage interstellar spacecraft

The project focused solely on designing an unmanned interstellar spacecraft that could reach its destination star system, Barnard's Star, within a human lifetime. The design, a two stage system, has the potential to reach a velocity of up to 12 percent the speed of light. Unfortunately this project has remained nothing more than a paper study.

It's disappointing that no spacecraft with a nuclear propulsion system has yet been built.  Even a recent project started in 2009, and named Project Icarus, had aims only to design an interstellar spacecraft for a potential mission in the coming centuries, and to motivate scientists in designing such things.  There are no concrete plans to build even a test system for launch.

A Project Icarus design concept for an interstellar spacecraft

Other means of rapid space travel, such as antimatter warp drives, are likely to remain in the realms of fiction for centuries, even forever. We should get over our moral objections and fears of all things nuclear. We should embrace the raw power and efficiency of such a means of propulsion, and get building and launching such spacecraft now. It may well be the only technical means by which we can ensure the continuation of our species.

If we do that, then within a century or two we could have flourishing colonies and economies on our solar-system's planets, moons and asteroids. With the vast resources that would then be at hand it would only be a matter of century or two more before our first interstellar colonies are established.

We need to just get on with it.

We Must Live on the Moon

Colonising the Moon is an essential first step on our journey to the stars. With its low gravity, lack of atmosphere, and the raw materials for creating fuel, oxygen and water, is the ideal location for the construction and launch of interplanetary spacecraft. With more and more proposals for manned Moon bases appearing, and with Russia and Europe keen to be partners in such a venture, it seems more likely than ever that it will happen.

The best location for a permanently occupied settlement would be the south pole. The presence of water ice in the permanent darkness of the 12 mile wide Shackleton crater would provide life-sustaining resources for centuries or more.

Shackleton crater, on the Moon's south pole

And on the crater's rim there is almost permanent sunlight, the ideal location for arrays of solar panels to be erected, providing a continuous supply of energy. The lunar north pole offers similar benefits.

A lunar habitat, 'printed' by robots using Moon dust and a binding agent - ESA

From those polar locations manned missions to Mars and the outer solar system could be more easily launched. Crews for such missions, born and brought up in such a low gravity environment, would be ideally suited to the environments on the outer planets' moons, and the larger asteroids. Indeed, despite the ethical and moral questions that would arise, it is highly desirable start a breeding human colony in such a low gravity environment as soon as possible so that such crews are available. The crew would not only be physically adapted to their environment, but mentally adapted, too.  They would be used to living in confined environments, and they would not miss the wide open spaces of Earth, or its comforts.

Another great benefit would be found on the far side of the Moon. It is the ideal place to build observatories that are shielded from the radio emissions of Earth, and a great place to monitor the activities of our future distant colonies.

Radio Observatory on the Moon's far side

And, of course, the far side of the moon, beyond site of Earth-bound observatories, is home to what seem to be some extra-terrestrial artifacts, the most notable of which appears to be a huge spaceship, one that was apparently visited during the secret Apollo 20 mission. Such artifacts need to be explored in great detail.

Huge alien spaceship on the Moon's far side

There is the potential to gain valuable knowledge about the technology used to reach our solar-system, and to start a reverse-engineering effort that could save us centuries in the development of interstellar propulsion, life-support and even artificial gravity systems.

The Moon is easily accessible - just a few days travel away. It has great natural resources. We have the technology available now to build colonies there, and have had for decades.

We should already have a thriving population permanently based on the Moon, something like in the image below.

A large Moon colony, something we could already have achieved

Those that had been born into such a colony would already have started preparations to colonise Mars.

President Nixon made a major mistake in the 1972 by backing the space shuttle over the then proposed manned mission to Mars, which would have seen humans walk on the red planet by the mid 1980s. What he should have done was back further manned exploration of the Moon first, with the goal of setting up a permanent base by the late 1970s, from which the manned exploration of deeper space could be more easily achieved. It is from there that the manned Mars mission should have been launched in the 1980s. The shortsightedness and ignorance of many at the heights of political power is quite astonishing when all the missed opportunities are considered.

No more time can be wasted.  A serious and major international effort to colonise the polar regions of the Moon must begin immediately, with the exploration and exploitation of the possible far side extra-terrestrial artifacts and technology, and launch facilities for manned Mars missions, the priority.

Existing Human Off-World Colonies

It's often said that we need to establish human colonies far beyond the confines of Earth if we are to survive as a species. It takes no more than a moment's thought by most people to come to that conclusion.

But what if such colonies already exist?

There are examples throughout ancient human history where civilisations appear to have ceased to function quite abruptly, but the collapse of the Maya civilisation is the most high profile example. After more than two-thousand years of existence all of their cities and temples were abandoned, and all over a period of just a century between 800 and 900 AD.

There is still no definite explanation as to why such an advanced culture, that excelled at agriculture, writing, art, mathematics, and calendar making, and that constructed such astonishing cities, ended so abruptly. Where did such a large population suddenly go? There is no evidence of mass graves or of an exodus across land, or sea.

A Maya civilisation artifact showing what looks like an astronaut,
a spaceship intercepting a comet, another spaceship, and a planet
in the background with its atmosphere depicted by the outer ring.

But there is evidence to suggest that they went up.

Where they went after leaving Earth is a question that is unlikely to be answered for a long time. And they may still be traveling. If the vessel they were taken to was a large but slow generation ship, the descendants of the original Maya that were evacuated will still be living in a specially created environment that is a close facsimile of their ancestors' Earthbound home. They will be living out their lives as you read this, cocooned in a huge rotating cylindrical star-ship with little knowledge of their ultimate destination, ignorant of the planet orbiting a distant star that will one day become the home of their descendants. Indeed, they may not even know that they are on an interstellar journey, which would be the preferable state of mind for the cruise phase generations of such journeys - a state of planned ignorance that would negate any feelings of envy for those that would eventually make planet fall in the far future.

But why would extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth want to take an entire human civilisation and transplant it on to a different planet? It's a colossal undertaking, no matter how advanced the visitors are.

The Maya civilisation is not the only one to have had likely contact with extra-terrestrials. Their forerunners, the Olmec, left artifacts that present compelling evidence of contact with such visitors. It seems that the visitors were present on Earth for a millenia or more, or at least we're making regular visits.

Like the Maya, the Olmec decline was dramatic, suggesting they too were evacuated. An extensive research programme is needed to confirm that the Maya and Olmec were indeed taken away from Earth, and to answer the question as to why it was done.  Whatever the reason, it is comforting to think that as I write this it is quite likely that there is at least one human civilisation living away from our planet. Earth will one day be unable to sustain life of any kind and such off-world colonies, however they come about, will at least give our species a little insurance against extinction.

Utimately though, we do not want to be reliant on extra-terrestrial visitors to help us. We must develop the means to visit and colonise other planets ourselves.  That should be the primary goal of all first-world nations.

Nuclear Attack on Mars

Recently I've been reading about the evidence that a nuclear attack occurred on Mars. And it looks like its intention was to wipe out an intelligent civilisation on the planet.

According to Dr John Brandenburg, a plasma physicist, there is strong evidence to suggest that there were at least two nuclear explosions on the planet's northern hemisphere. The Martian surface is covered in a thin layer of radioactive material, including uranium, thorium and radioactive potassium, which radiates from those northern locations. His research is based on observations made by NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

Location of nuclear explosions on Mars

Dr Brandenburg's book on this subject, titled 'Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre' was published earlier this year.  I have yet to read it, but the ideas reportedly put forward in it are fascinating and I've put the book at the top of my 'must read' list.

The attack is said to have wiped out all intelligent life on Mars, which was likely, Dr Brandenburg says, to have advanced to the level of the ancient Egyptian civilisation on Earth. But why would the attacker deem such a relatively primitive civilisation a threat?  It would have been no where near the point of developing weapons of mass destruction or spaceflight capabilities. I think it's more likely that the civilisation on Mars had become very advanced, and quite likely had exceeded our own level quite significantly. It was at that point, as Martians began to send spacecraft to worlds beyond their own, that the attackers felt it was time to put an end to the Martians' ambitions.

Ancient Martians:  It's likely their civilisation was far more advanced than illustrated here

In February this year I wrote about the huge and unexplained high altitude clouds in the Martian atmosphere in my article titled 'Heavy Industry on Mars'. I speculated that such clouds may be evidence of an evacuation effort by the last surviving Martians, who had been living in vast underground facilities ever since the surface became uninhabitable. It now seems likely that they were forced underground not by natural events, but by unnatural ones.  This reinforces the need for us to prepare adequate underground shelters while we are still tied to Earth (see my article titled 'Millions Living Underground').

Perhaps the nuclear attack on Mars offers up the first evidence to prove one of the explanations of the Fermi Paradox. The reason we can't detect evidence of intelligent life in the universe is that there is a very advanced civilisation out there that is 'silencing' any other civilisation that develops to a point that could threaten them.

If Mars was indeed attacked with the intention of wiping out its civilisation, those that launched the attack may still be out there, and may well have Earth in their sights. As we extend our civilisation beyond the Earth we need to tread carefully. It's likely we are being watched, and whoever is watching may not like what they see.

Earth being 'silenced' by an extra-terrestrial nuclear attack

I'll leave you with this: there is also evidence of an ancient nuclear war on Earth many thousands of years ago. Read this highly compelling article for more detail. And then read this. It's all thought-provoking stuff.

Atomic weapons in use in ancient India

Maybe we are not the first advanced technological civilisation on Earth. Could the use of atomic weapons long ago on our planet have been an attack by the same extra-terrestrials that attacked Mars? Were humans in the process of setting up colonies away from Earth thousands of years ago when they were cruelly murdered for their efforts?

If true, there are questions that need to be answered:

1. Which planet was attacked first: Mars or Earth?
2. As an advanced civilisation has developed once again on Earth, is another attack imminent?
3. Is the evidence of former human colonies beyond Earth still out there?

Whatever the answers, steps should be taken to hide our presence in the universe.

Exploring Ocean Worlds

The news that NASA looks likely to be given the funding it needs for missions to explore the ice moons and their underground oceans is very welcome indeed, and long overdue. It demonstrates that the US government is taking research into potential off-world colonies and the search for extra-terrestrial life seriously. And so it should.

The space agency will be directed to start an 'Ocean Worlds Exploration Programme', starting with a mission in the early part of the next decade to send a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. Known as the 'Europa Clipper', its primary aim will be to gather more information on its subsurface ocean during repeated close flybys, often as close as 25 kilometres from the moon's surface.

Europa Clipper

The mission could even include a lander. This will be followed by missions to explore that ocean, and possibly look at the oceans beneath the surface of other moons, such as Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus. Such mission are an essential part of mankind's ultimate aim: to survive beyond the lifespan of the Earth itself.

As well as the ice moon missions, the budget proposal includes funding for the 'Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope', which will be able to directly image exo planets. Such a prospect is tremendously exciting and would further progress the search for life-bearing planets beyond the solar system, essential if we are to one day colonise planets orbiting other stars.

Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope

We need many more missions like this if we are to learn how to survive beyond the confines of Earth. Hopefully this is just the start of a new wave of exploration and research.

Millions Living Underground

The only way for our species to avoid extinction is to leave Earth and establish self-sustaining colonies on other worlds. Very few people would disagree with that. But such an endeavour is proving to be almost impossible for the world's governments to get to grips with. The only projects making any progress are private enterprises focusing exclusive on Mars, most notably Mars One. But the funding for such projects to actually achieve their aims is uncertain at best.

The economic and political turmoil in the world is unlikely to diminish for many decades, if not centuries, which will make make governments unlikely to commit to or cooperate on any off-world colonisation efforts. This puts the continuation of human civilisation at considerable risk. The next best thing, and something governments may well consider, would be to create places on Earth where humans could survive global catastrophes. There are some examples of this, mostly created during the cold war. The USA, Soviet Union and China created some quite significant underground shelters. But those would protect just a few thousand people for a few months.

What is needed are facilities around the world that could protect millions of people for decades, or longer.  Such facilities would need to be deep underground, deep enough to survive even a very close and large asteroid strike, and have no reliance on resupply from the surface.

No matter how large and well designed such a facility is, it could never be permanent.  The Earth will still become utterly uninhabitable one day. The humans living there would have to continue researching and planning their eventual evacuation of of the planet. To facilitate this a level of high-technology would need to be maintained. This technology must include the ability for large and regular space launches. Having to live in such an enclosed environment, with the knowledge that the surface is most likely uninhabitable, would focus the minds of scientists and engineers (and probably the entire population, including the government) on the goal of leaving the Earth.

There's an interesting short story on this subject, called 'Under Pindar', about a massive secret cavern deep beneath London. The background to the story can be read here.

The entrance to a suspected lava tube on the moon

The very act of designing and constructing such subsurface habitats would lead to advances in knowledge and skills that would be very useful when we do come to colonise planets and moons in our solar-system and beyond. The ability to build well-protected underground habitats would be preferred to surface habitats on airless worlds such as most moons, and planets with thin atmospheres such as Mars. Utilising natural underground chambers, such as lava tubes, would save excavation time. There is evidence to suggest that such lava tubes do indeed exist on the moon and Mars, and that due to the low gravity they may be very large indeed, some being tens of metres or more in diameter. There is even a likelihood that channels up to a kilometre in diameter may be possible. The potential for spacious habitats in such locations is tremendous.

An interesting study on the potential of lunar lava tubes can be read here.

Perhaps digging should be our first instinct, before we aim outwards?