Page 42 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Pluripotentates

“Let me get something out of the way for the scientific purists,”
began Brad Razeberry. “The human desire, keenly felt as the
biosphere of our planet is rendered uninhabitable, to travel to and
colonize another Earth-like planet is not going away, despite the
almost certain impossibility of interstellar travel. That means for
me, as a writer, that I can more easily get my readers to suspend
disbelief with such a premise than, say, starting with a mad scientist
threatening to collapse the universe with a super vacuum pump. So
my story begins with a spaceship having landed on one of those
rare ‘Goldilocks’ worlds—not too hot, not too cold; breathable
atmosphere, potable water, friable soil. This may be well into the
future, but I will not portray the humans as any different from
contemporary Americans. Maybe they went through one of those
magical wormholes, like Alice through the looking glass.”
“Well, down they come, landing in a likely spot to set up shop,
and sending forth people skilled in various sciences on exploratory
missions. The reports come back slowly to the ship’s command for
integration into a report to be sent back home with a simple
conclusion: suitable for H. sapiens or not. Obviously, given the
preliminary remote sensing leading the ship to the planet in the first
place, the great hope among the officers and crew is that the new
world will pass all the tests and be open for a land rush, like the
Oklahoma Territory. To compress the action into one highly
dramatic scene, I will set the action in an onboard conference room
where the exploratory reports come in to the impatient leadership.”
“First, the geologists. They point to the high pyroclastic content
of the first few meters of crust as evidence the planet undergoes
frequent and powerful volcanic eruptions. The mineral content of
that effluvia, once it cools and begins to disintegrate, provides a rich
environment for the various life forms observed in the terrain
surrounding the ship. A core sample confirms the regularity of such
explosive upwelling, a frequency far greater than experienced on the
home planet once an atmosphere had formed and life began.”

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