What would you do for fun on another planet? Go ballooning in Venus’ atmosphere? Explore the caves of Hyperion? Hike all the way around Mercury? Ride a toboggan down the slopes of Pluto’s ice mountains? Or just watch the clouds roll by on Mars?
All those adventures, and more, are offered in a new book titled “Daydreaming in the Solar System.” But the authors don’t stop at daydreaming: York University planetary scientist John E. Moores and astrophysicist Jesse Rogerson also explain why the adventures they describe would be like nothing on Earth.
In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Moores says the idea behind the book was to tell “a little story that is really, really true to what the science is, and then give the reader an idea of what science there is that actually enables that story to take place.”
Trips to other worlds have been the stuff of science fiction for more than a century — going back to Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” and continuing today with shows like “For All Mankind.” But most of those tales are told from the perspective of intrepid explorers who have to deal with life-threatening dramas.
In contrast, most of the stories in “Daydreaming in the Solar System” have to do with space travelers having fun, or handling the day-to-day challenges of living in an otherworldly locale.
“Often you’re visiting a place for the very first time, and of course it’s an amazing, awe-inspiring place, but you’re also very concerned about not dying,” Moores said. “So, we wanted to take that away — that bit of danger — so that people dive into the environment. Everywhere we went, we needed the right combination of an interesting activity, an interesting environment.”
John E. Moores and Jesse Rogerson tell tales of interplanetary adventures. (Credits: John E. Moores and York University)
Moores and Rogerson also use a second-person perspective. You’re the one riding a submarine through the hidden seas of Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. You’re the one spelunking on Hyperion, a spongy Saturnian moon that appears to contain 40% empty space.
The end of each chapter takes a deeper dive into the peculiarities of each extraterrestrial environment. For example, riding a balloon around Venus makes sense because the surroundings at an altitude of 30 to 40 miles are similar to Earth’s when it comes to temperature and atmospheric pressure. In contrast, the surface of Venus is hellishly hot.
Ballooning on Venus is much more than a daydream. More than a decade ago, NASA engineers came up with a concept that called for sending habitable airships into the Venusian atmosphere. More recently, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been looking into a mission that would use robotic balloons to study the clouds of Venus.
Similarly, the idea of sending mini-subs through Europa’s subsurface ocean is being considered as a follow-up to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. A robotic submarine has also been proposed for exploring Titan’s hydrocarbon seas — although NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan, which relies on a rotorcraft, will be taking precedence.
The authors don’t shy away from the important issues: In one chapter, they describe in depth how to brew a delicious cup of coffee on Titan — and then explain why you could conceivably put on a pair of mechanical wings and flap your way through the Saturnian moon’s dense atmosphere after your morning cup of joe.
Will humans ever be able to experience the adventures described in the book? “I hope so,” Moores says.
“One thing that our publisher pointed out when we submitted our final manuscript, which wasn’t actually intentional, was that they felt that the book was actually very optimistic and very hopeful — just the framing of it, that you could imagine the future in a way that actually allows these things to happen,” he says. “So many other works are a little bit apocalyptic right now.”
Cosmic Log Used Book Club
Moores says that several of the chapters in “Daydreaming in the Solar System” play off earlier books about traveling to other worlds.
One chapter pays tribute to Kim Stanley Robinson’s tales of Mars exploration. “He’s got a short story where a number of astronauts climb up Olympus Mons, whereas we rappel down into Valles Marineris, which you can do a lot faster,” Moores says.
Another chapter, about skydiving through Jupiter’s clouds, serves as a nod to Dan Simmons, who writes science fiction and horror tales. “He has a scene in one of his books with someone falling into a gas giant,” Moores says. “It turns out, at least for the gas giants in our solar system, you don’t have as much time as he allows, unfortunately.”
Yet another chapter, which is set on an asteroid called Bennu, drew its inspiration from “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In that book, the Little Prince tends a red rose on his home world — an asteroid called B-612.
“The chapter where we go to Bennu is really framed after ‘The Little Prince’ … and we use some of their framing in there, when the prince goes and visits other asteroids,” Moores says. “And in fact, the goal of the gardening exercise [on Bennu] is to grow a red rose.”
“The Little Prince” serves as the latest selection for the Cosmic Log Book Club because of that connection — and because the book also inspired the name of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit group that aims to raise awareness about the potential perils posed by asteroids.
For more than 20 years, the CLUB Club has highlighted books with cosmic themes that have been around long enough to show up at your local library or secondhand book shop. “The Little Prince,” which was published in 1943, certainly qualifies on that score.
My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.
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