Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Uninhabitable zone

This week marks the welcome return to Futures of Ian Stewart. Uninhabitable zone takes a fresh look at what it means to be an extremophile. Ian is a mathematician and a writer of both popular science and science fiction. You can keep up-to-date with his activities at his website and by following him on Twitter. Ian is no stranger to Futures having previously provided stories about the economics of the afterlife, time travel, the dangers of simulating history, travels to alien worlds, the power of the mind and (with Jack Cohen) the Monolith. Here, Ian kindly takes time out of his busy schedule to reveal what inspired him to write his latest Futures tale. As usual, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Uninhabitable zone

I’ve never been comfortable with the prevalent idea that Earth is the perfect habitat for life, that it may be the only inhabited planet in a Universe with gazillions of planets, not to mention exomoons, that life must be based on water, carbon, DNA and proteins, and that the only places where life could possibly occur are planets orbiting in the badly misnamed ‘habitable zone’ of a main sequence star.

Life adapts to its environment, so what’s needed is an environment that allows sufficiently complex processes to occur. They don’t have to happen the way they do here, or on the timescale they do here, or using the same ingredients that they do here. With a little imagination, endless exotic forms of quasi-life can at least be conceived. Some of them might even exist.

Fortunately, astrobiologists are now starting to come to similar conclusions, and are increasingly exploring more exotic possibilities, such as life in Europa’s oceans, or on a super-Earth. I played around with the basic idea of this tale for several years. It started when I read Edward E. Smith’s Spacehounds of IPC, in which aliens living on an icy world (Titan, as it happens) are astonished to see a human, whose veins are filled with molten ice, welding even hotter liquid metal without any special protection.

Astrobiologists call cold-loving organisms extremophiles. I hate that word. It assumes we’re normal and everything else is extreme. It lumps bacteria that live under ice in the Antarctic with ones that live in boiling pools in Yellowstone Park, for heaven’s sake. Each type of organism is perfectly comfortable in its own environment; in fact, it would die if moved to a significantly different one. To the Yellowstone bacteria, we are extremophiles.

And the same goes for cold-loving organisms, who would consider Pluto habitable, and Earth to be an overheated wasteland of toxic oxygen and its poisonous dihydride… liquid rock.

After that, the story wrote itself. It’s coincidence that it’s come out just after New Horizons visited Pluto. And found mountains of water ice — solid rock.

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