science catching up?

efforts by nature
to follow the
old solar system script

Keep watch for the signs, readers! All news and views welcome. Email Zendexor at heritageofdreams@aol.com.

2026 May 22nd:

EARTH'S DEEP INTERIOR-SCAPE

That great early Arthur C Clarke story, The Fires Within (Startling Stories, September 1949) recently put me in mind of an article I encountered years back somewhere in my collection of science magazines. It discussed some fascinating findings about structures at the core-mantle boundary. Ha! thought I, and rummaged to find the magazine; then I looked online to see if there had been more recent follow-ups, and as might be expected, the answer is yes (see the image right here).

structure at the core boundary - from Cambridge University dept of Earth sciences

To begin with, the Clark story:
The first part of it narrates the discovery via sonar of a regular grid about fifteen miles down inside the Earth; a grid which can only be artificial, and therefore evidence of a civilization of intelligent beings made of compressed or degenerate matter and living at a temperate high enough to melt rock and at a pressure of thousands of atmospheres.
The tale's final scene shifts the viewpoint to that of the compressed-matter beings themselves. The reader learns that, reacting to the sonar waves that we sent down, they then discovered us - though previously they had not believed our "Shadow World" zone to be habitable:

"What a pity it was," I mused, "that our emergence destroyed them so completely. They were a clever race, and we might have learned a lot from them."
"I don't think we can be blamed," said Karn. "We never really believed that anything could exist under those awful conditions of near-vacuum, and almost absolute zero. It couldn't be helped..."

Then comes the final twist, with the suspicion that the chain of discovery may contain a further link:

...I thought of the thousands of miles of rock lying below the great city of Callastheon, growing hotter and denser all the way to the Earth's unknown core...
"It may be our turn next."

This implied sequel could be based on - what sort of creature? Perhaps not neutronium life as in Forward's Dragon's Egg or Clement's Proof, but still, might one find denser grades of compressed or degenerate matter, organized into living forms at the Core itself?
Although scientists would, I'm sure, dismiss any such notion, I nevertheless find a remarkable echo of the idea in Inner Earth Revealed by Shawna Vogel (Earth, April 1995, p42-9), which discusses findings from seismic tomography:

...What exists at the intersection of the core and mantle may be a strange, inverted landscape that in many ways resembles the landscape at the surface of the Earth. It is not a meeting of land and sky, but it is a meeting all the same. This deep terrain is subject to all the same processes of weathering and chemical interaction that take place at the surface. Everything from erosion to leaching to iron rainstorms is possible - perhaps much more.

Reflect upon those last three words. And on the fact that the article focuses on just that kind of depth which the thinker at the end of Clarke's tale is starting to worry about.
If you read the factual article you won't find any direct congruence with the sf, but I suspect that, like me, you'll feel an echoing accompaniment from a long way off; and this distant parallelism, this analogy between disparate environments, is quite sufficient to provide food for thought - considering that, after all, intelligent awareness ranging across huge contrasts between different life-bearing conditions is what The Fires Within is all about.

2025 November 11th:

LOWELL'S MARS-STREAKS IMAGED!

I was astounded when I saw the following while leafing back through the March 2004 issue of Sky & Telescope. Just take a look at this trio of pics:

This is from the article The Canals of Mars Revisited, by Thomas A Dobbins and William Sheehan. Small wonder that Percival Lowell - if his eyesight ever matched Dobbins' webcam image - remained convinced of the canals! I can almost credit them myself, like the protagonist in J M Greer's Out of the Chattering Planet is eventually brought to believe.
See the History of Hopes page for Ben Bova's comments in an article of 1963, in which he remarks, categorically, that the canals have been photographed.
He does go on to say that there is still no agreement among astronomers that the photographs show actual artificially-constructed canals; many observers insist that the camera is merely linking up a string of images that exist in a more-or-less straight line. This argument is akin to the old claim that the canals were optical illusions; now it is the camera, presumably, that is seeing things that are not really there.
That ironical last sentence turns out to have been - despite its irony - true. The camera was hinting at stuff that wasn't there! Which goes to show that, according to the visual evidence shown then, one might have been excused for hoping otherwise.
Anyhow, that's one occasion on which Nature seemed fleetingly to echo our romantic dreams. It was a try.

Uranus from Miranda by Mark A Garlick

2023 May 16th:

LIFE MAY EXIST ON URANIAN MOONS

Recently I read an article in the Daily Telegraph - "Aliens could be hiding on four moons of Uranus" - which reported some conclusion reached among scientists at JPL who had re-examined the Voyager 2 probe results.

Their findings suggest that (to quote from the article):

...Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon, could all hold vast oceans, dozens of miles deep, beneath their icy crusts.

Crucially, the moons appear to have enough inner heat to stop the water from freezing, giving hope that alien life could be thriving 1.7 billion miles from Earth.

The oceans also appear to contain salts and ammonia which would act as an anti-freeze, helping to keep the liquid in a watery state...

Interestingly, it appears that these moons' inner heat cannot be fully explained by tidal forces which warm the interiors of Jovian and Saturnian satellites, since Uranus isn't big enough to have that effect.

Well, what are we OSS fans to make of all this? Being fed crumbs is better than nothing. But it's still a far cry from the Wollheim classic, The Man From Ariel.

By the way the above illustration, the beautiful Mirandan moonscape, is here because I couldn't resist it, though I know that Miranda wasn't included in the article's possible life-sites. Still, who knows? The evidently violent origin of that moon might have kick-started some biota; or at any rate one might use that as an excuse in fiction... A flimsy excuse is still an excuse.

2018 November 26th:

CANDIDATE FOR MARTIAN MOSS

From Dylan Jeninga:

...I was reading an old NPR article, and it discussed the Mysterious Black Blotches of Mars, as I'm calling them. Weird, spidery black shapes that appear on the sunward side of some dunes in the spring and grow all summer, until they vanish in the winter. The next spring, they appear in the same spots around 70% of the time.

Now, the commonly proposed, though uninvestigated, hypothesis is that these blotches are formed by outgassing CO2 that spits up basaltic dust with it. But a group of Hungarian scientists also suggested that they might be some kind of photosynthetic lifeforms, which I thought you might appreciate (I know I did). If true, it would turn out OSS predictions of Martian moss weren't so far off the mark.

Reply from Zendexor:

This is somewhat better than micro-organisms! I suppose those little wrinkles in the surface are lesser dunes, which helps give an idea of the scale.

The discovery of Martian moss, or the equivalent, would immediately lead to the next question: if there's moss, what else could there be?

The more I look at that picture, the harder I find it to believe in a non-organic explanation... Much more convincing, to me, than the "Face" in Cydonia ever was. What do our other readers think, I wonder?

Let's all keep our fingers crossed.