Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Spectroscopic data suggest that these disks are churning and that matter is falling in on the central stars—perhaps from comets formed in the disk, deflected by the unseen planets, and evaporating as they approach too close to the local sun.

Because planets are small and shine by reflected light, they tend to be washed out in the glare of the local sun. Nevertheless, many efforts are now under way to find fully formed planets around nearby stars—by detecting a faint brief dimming of starlight as a dark planet interposes itself between the star and the observer on Earth; or by sensing a faint wobble in the motion of the star as it’s tugged first one way and then another by an otherwise invisible orbiting companion. Spaceborne techniques will be much more sensitive. A Jovian planet going around a nearby star is about a billion times fainter than its sun; nevertheless, a new generation of ground-based telescopes that can compensate for the twinkling in the Earth’s atmosphere may soon be able to detect such planets in only a few hours’ observing time. A terrestrial planet of a neighboring star is a hundred times fainter still; but it now seems that comparatively inexpensive spacecraft, above the Earth’s atmosphere, might be able to detect other Earths. None of these searches has succeeded yet, but we are clearly on the verge of being able to detect at least Jupiter-sized planets around the nearest stars—if there are any to be found.

A most important and serendipitous recent discovery is of a bona fide planetary system around an unlikely star, some 1,300 light-years away, found by a most unexpected technique: The pulsar designated B1257+12 is a rapidly rotating neutron star, an unbelievably dense sun, the remnant of a massive star that suffered a supernova explosion. It spins, at a rate measured to impressive precision, once every 0.0062185319388187 seconds. This pulsar is pushing 10,000 rpm.

Charged particles trapped in its intense magnetic field generate radio waves that are cast across the Earth, about 160 flickers a second. Small but discernible changes in the flash rate were tentatively interpreted by Alexander Wolszczan, now at Pennsylvania State University, in 1991—as a tiny reflex motion of the pulsar in response to the presence of planets. In 1994 the predicted mutual gravitational interactions of these planets were confirmed by Wolszczan from a study of timing residuals at the microsecond level over the intervening years. The evidence that these are truly new planets and not starquakes on the neutron star surface (or something) is now overwhelming—or, as Wolszczan put it, “irrefutable”; a new solar system is “unambiguously identified.” Unlike all the other techniques, the pulsar timing method makes close-in terrestrial planets comparatively easy and more distant Jovian planets comparatively difficult to detect.

Planet C, some 2.8 times more massive than the Earth, orbits the pulsar every 98 days at a distance of 0.47 astronomical units[16] (AU); Planet B, with about 3.4 Earth masses, has a 67-Earth-day year at 0.36 AU. A smaller world, Planet A, still closer to the star, with about 0.015 Earth masses, is at 0.19 AU. Crudely speaking, Planet B is roughly at the distance of Mercury from our Sun; Planet C is midway between the distances of Mercury and Venus; and interior to both of them is Planet A, roughly the mass of the Moon at about half Mercury’s distance from our Sun. Whether these planets are the remnants of an earlier planetary system that somehow survived the supernova explosion that produced the pulsar, or whether they formed from the resulting circumstellar accretion disk subsequent to the supernova explosion, we do not know. But in either case, we have now learned that there are other Earths.

The energy put out by B1257+12 is about 4.7 times that of gun. But, unlike the Sun, most of this is not in visible light, but in a fierce hurricane of electrically charged particles. Suppose that these particles impinge on the planets and heat them. Then, even a planet at 1 AU would have a surface around 280 Celsius degrees above the normal boiling point of water, greater than the temperature of Venus.

These dark and broiling planets do not seem hospitable for life. But there may be others, farther from B1257+12, that are. (Hints of at least one cooler, outer world in the B1257+12 system exist.) Of course, we don’t even know that such worlds would retain their atmospheres; perhaps any atmospheres were stripped away in the supernova explosion, if they date back that far. But we do seem to be detecting a recognizable planetary system. Many more are likely to become known in coming decades, around ordinary Sun-like stars as well as white dwarfs, pulsars, and other end states of stellar evolution.

Eventually, we will have a list of planetary systems—each perhaps with terrestrials and Jovians and maybe new classes of planets. We will examine these worlds, spectroscopically and in other ways. We will be searching for new Earths and other life.

On none of the worlds in the outer Solar System did Voyager find signs of life, much less intelligence. There was organic Matter galore—the stuff of life, the premonitions of life, perhaps but as far as we could see, no life. There was no oxygen in their atmospheres, and no gases profoundly out of chemical equilibrium, as methane is in the Earth’s oxygen. Many of the worlds were painted with subtle colors, but none with such distinctive, sharp absorption features as chlorophyll provides over much of the Earth’s surface. On very few worlds was Voyager able to resolve details as small as a kilometer across. By this standard, it would not have detected even our own technical civilization had it been transplanted to the outer Solar System. But for what it’s worth, we found no regular patterning, no geometrization, no passion for small circles, triangles, squares, or rectangles. There were no constellations of steady points of light on the night hemispheres. There were no signs of a technical civilization reworking the surface of any of these worlds.

The Jovian planets are prolific broadcasters of radio waves—generated in part by the abundant trapped and beamed charged particles in their magnetic fields, in part by lightning, and in part by their hot interiors. But none of this emission has the character of intelligent life—or so it seems to the experts in the field.

Of course our thinking may be too narrow. We may be missing something. For example, there is a little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Titan, which puts its nitrogen/methane atmosphere out of chemical equilibrium. I think the CO2 is provided by the steady pitter-patter of comets falling into Titan’s atmosphere—but maybe not. Maybe there’s something on the surface unaccountably generating CO2 in the face of all that methane.

The surfaces of Miranda and Triton are unlike anything else we know. There are vast chevron-shaped landforms and crisscrossing straight lines that even sober planetary geologists once mischievously described as “highways.” We think we (barely) understand these landforms in terms of faults and collisions, but of course we might be wrong.

The surface stains of organic matter—sometimes, as on Triton, delicately hued—are attributed to charged particles producing chemical reactions in simple hydrocarbon ices, generating more complex organic materials, and all this having nothing to do with the intermediation of life. But of course we might be wrong.

The complex pattern of radio static, bursts, and whistles that we receive from all four Jovian planets seems, in a general way, explicable by plasma physics and thermal emission. (Much of the detail is not yet well understood.) But of course we might be wrong.

We have found nothing on dozens of worlds so clear and striking as the signs of life found by the Galileo spacecraft in its passages by the Earth. Life is a hypothesis of last resort. You invoke it only when there’s no other way to explain what you see. If I had to judge, I would say that there’s no life on any of the worlds we’ve studied, except of course our own. But I might be wrong, and, right or wrong, my judgment is necessarily confined to this Solar System. Perhaps on some new mission we’ll find something different, something striking, something wholly inexplicable with the ordinary tools of planetary science—and tremulously, cautiously, we will inch toward a biological explanation. However, for now nothing requires that we go down such a path. So far, the only life in the Solar System is that which comes from Earth. In the Uranus and Neptune systems, the only sign of life has been Voyager itself.

As we identify the planets of other stars, as we find other worlds of roughly the size and mass of the Earth, we will scrutinize them for life. A dense oxygen atmosphere may be detectable even on a world we’ve never imaged. As for the Earth, that may by itself be a sign of life. An oxygen atmosphere with appreciable quantities of methane would almost certainly be a sign of life, as would modulated radio emission. Someday, from observations of our planetary system or another, the news of life elsewhere may be announced over the morning coffee.

The Voyager spacecraft are bound for the stars. They are on escape trajectories from the Solar System, barreling along at almost a million miles a day. The gravitational fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have flung them at such high speeds that they have broken the bonds that once tied them to the Sun.

Have they left the Solar System yet? The answer depends very much on how you define the boundary of the Sun’s realm. If it’s the orbit of the outermost good-sized planet, then the Voyager