Blog entry supplemental ten: Life in the Alpha system and other implausibilities
Apologies for taking an absolute age to blog again… I have been busy writing, honestly; and the fourth novel of the Lights in the sky series, The leftover girl is nearly complete. One more chapter (the 22nd) needs to be written, with the working title, Kansas.
The chapter will bring my protagonist Tata to the end of her quest and will (hopefully) tie up most of the loose plot ends into a nice bundle… However, I’ve decided to leave some things unexplained about the nature of the new community our heroine finds herself in; firstly, because I haven’t decided how much I want to reveal (or indeed if it is all revealable!), and secondly, because it gives room for a sequel! There are a number of new developments in this chapter that would merit further investigation, and (you guessed it!), I can’t bear to leave the world of LITS just yet!
The presenting reason for this blog entry is again something I picked up from the scientific press, namely the recent discovery of two new exoplanets orbiting Tau Ceti, the second nearest Earth-like star to our own…
Both of these exoplanets (designated Tau Ceti e and f), life just within the habitable zone that surrounds their star (the so-called Goldilocks zone where liquid water is a possibility). It’s important to point out that the likelihood of life having got a foothold on either is fairly remote, as the nearer planet (e) would probably be too hot, and the one further out (f), rather too cold! Add to that the fact that they both lie within the massive debris disc that surrounds Tau Ceti, and this would rather be like Earth being at the heart of Sol’s Asteroid Belt, and subject to constant bombardment from asteroids, comets etc…
Nevertheless, it got me thinking and I decided to revisit the various articles on Alpha Centauri and recheck my facts! The results were encouraging. As I mentioned earlier, Proxima Centauri (sometimes referred to Alpha Centauri C!), has recently been identified as possessing a possible candidate for the fabled Earth-like planet! Had I been in possession of this information when I started the series I would probably have made Prox the location of my world. However Alpha Centauri A and B aren’t out of the race just yet! Theoretically, either or both could harbour the elusive new Earth, although nothing has been found as yet!
The main stumbling block to this appears to be the fact that the two stars are in a binary relationship, and the resultant tidal gravitational forces would have made the accretion of the mass of debris needed form a planet orbiting either of them very difficult (but not impossible!).
However (in my defense) I’d like to stress that Lights in the sky is a work of fiction, and my Alpha system is an imaginary realm. It is also worth pointing out that later in the series there are revelations that account for differences between the Alpha system of the series, and the one that we see in the night sky!
The other heartening thing I gleaned from the articles that I read was confirmation that the development of light sail propulsion systems (boosted initially by lasers, as in my series), would bring the travel time between systems down to decades rather than millennia…
Until next time
CE Stevens August 2017